Seven Montana landowners last week filed a legal challenge in state district court to the Carbon County Commission’s rejection of their petition for land use regulations to protect their private properties from the harmful effects of oil and gas drilling.

The landowners collectively seek to establish the ‘Silvertip Zoning District’ to cover nearly 3,000 acres of agricultural land north of Belfry, Montana.

Creation of the district is the first step to establish solid protections for land, air and water quality, giving landowners an essential voice in the development of oil and gas on their properties.

“State and federal laws don’t protect us from the worst impacts of oil and gas drilling”, said farmer Bonnie Martinell, one of the plaintiffs. “There are few requirements for protecting our water or how far drilling must be set back from residences. This means we have to take local action to protect our way of life and our livelihoods.”

‘A little bit of the Bakken’ comes to Yellowstone ecosystem

Although some oil and gas development has occurred in Carbon County for decades, the Silvertip landowners were pressed to take action in October 2013 after Energy Corporation of America’s (ECA) CEO John Mork announced plans to hydraulically fracture 50 wells along the Beartooth Front.

The area Carbon and Stillwater counties in Montana and forms the northeastern flank of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Mork boasted that ECA hoped to bring “a little bit of the Bakken“ to the Beartooths.

Montana law empowers landowners to initiate the development of zoning regulations for the protection of their land and community by petitioning their county commissioners to establish planning and zoning districts.

The Silvertip landowners have lobbied extensively before the Montana legislature and the state Board of Oil and Gas Conservation for protections from the adverse effects of inadequately regulated drilling. Those government bodies failed to take action.

In Montana, five bills were introduced during this state legislative session that would have enacted basic safeguards on oil and gas development, but all five were tabled in committee and are unlikely to receive a full vote in either house.

“We as landowners, ranchers and farmers have seen the destructive impacts of oil development in this area and we asked the County to let us safeguard our property and livelihoods by enacting these basic protections”, said Martinell.

“Citizen zoning is our only tool to protect our land and we are just trying to use that right given to us under state law.”

Farmers face toxic onslaught if fracking proceeds

Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit law firm, is representing the Silvertip landowners in their appeal. Energy Corporation of America is named as a defendant in the lawsuit along with the Carbon County Commissioners.

“Across the country, individuals and local governments are responding to the lack of state and federal leadership on the impacts of oil and gas development by demanding local control”, said Earthjustice Attorney Jenny Harbine. “This lawsuit is about allowing the Silvertip landowners to protect their land and their livelihoods when no one else will.”

Oil and gas drilling in shale formations such as the formation underlying Silvertip area is commonly accomplished through hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, which involves pumping millions of gallons of chemical-laced water and sand into the ground to release trapped oil and gas.

After the well is fractured, substantial quantities of this contaminated water-which contains high concentrations of salt, drilling chemicals, heavy metals, and radioactive material-returns to the surface where it is frequently stored in open containment ponds that pose substantial risks of leaks or failure.

As much as one-third of the contaminated water from the fracturing can remain underground after drilling is completed, threatening pollution of soil and groundwater. Numerous chemicals used in fracking are linked to serious human health problems, including respiratory distress, rashes, convulsions, organ damage, and cancer.

However, federal and Montana law provide only limited restrictions on the use of these dangerous chemicals and do not require pre-drilling notification to adjacent landowners or the public or mandate surface and ground water testing to detect contamination.

Although interest in large-scale oil and gas development in Carbon County has waned as oil prices dropped in recent months, Martinell said the zoning designation remains necessary to protect landowners when oil and gas development picks up again.

“Through this process, we’ve learned that developing regulations takes time and protections cannot be put in place over night. If we’re going to get this right, now is the time to act.”

More information: Read the legal document.

Principal source: Earth Justice.

Seven Montana landowners last week filed a legal challenge in state district court to the Carbon County Commission’s rejection of their petition for land use regulations to protect their private properties from the harmful effects of oil and gas drilling.

The landowners collectively seek to establish the ‘Silvertip Zoning District’ to cover nearly 3,000 acres of agricultural land north of Belfry, Montana.

Creation of the district is the first step to establish solid protections for land, air and water quality, giving landowners an essential voice in the development of oil and gas on their properties.

“State and federal laws don’t protect us from the worst impacts of oil and gas drilling”, said farmer Bonnie Martinell, one of the plaintiffs. “There are few requirements for protecting our water or how far drilling must be set back from residences. This means we have to take local action to protect our way of life and our livelihoods.”

‘A little bit of the Bakken’ comes to Yellowstone ecosystem

Although some oil and gas development has occurred in Carbon County for decades, the Silvertip landowners were pressed to take action in October 2013 after Energy Corporation of America’s (ECA) CEO John Mork announced plans to hydraulically fracture 50 wells along the Beartooth Front.

The area Carbon and Stillwater counties in Montana and forms the northeastern flank of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Mork boasted that ECA hoped to bring “a little bit of the Bakken“ to the Beartooths.

Montana law empowers landowners to initiate the development of zoning regulations for the protection of their land and community by petitioning their county commissioners to establish planning and zoning districts.

The Silvertip landowners have lobbied extensively before the Montana legislature and the state Board of Oil and Gas Conservation for protections from the adverse effects of inadequately regulated drilling. Those government bodies failed to take action.

In Montana, five bills were introduced during this state legislative session that would have enacted basic safeguards on oil and gas development, but all five were tabled in committee and are unlikely to receive a full vote in either house.

“We as landowners, ranchers and farmers have seen the destructive impacts of oil development in this area and we asked the County to let us safeguard our property and livelihoods by enacting these basic protections”, said Martinell.

“Citizen zoning is our only tool to protect our land and we are just trying to use that right given to us under state law.”

Farmers face toxic onslaught if fracking proceeds

Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit law firm, is representing the Silvertip landowners in their appeal. Energy Corporation of America is named as a defendant in the lawsuit along with the Carbon County Commissioners.

“Across the country, individuals and local governments are responding to the lack of state and federal leadership on the impacts of oil and gas development by demanding local control”, said Earthjustice Attorney Jenny Harbine. “This lawsuit is about allowing the Silvertip landowners to protect their land and their livelihoods when no one else will.”

Oil and gas drilling in shale formations such as the formation underlying Silvertip area is commonly accomplished through hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, which involves pumping millions of gallons of chemical-laced water and sand into the ground to release trapped oil and gas.

After the well is fractured, substantial quantities of this contaminated water-which contains high concentrations of salt, drilling chemicals, heavy metals, and radioactive material-returns to the surface where it is frequently stored in open containment ponds that pose substantial risks of leaks or failure.

As much as one-third of the contaminated water from the fracturing can remain underground after drilling is completed, threatening pollution of soil and groundwater. Numerous chemicals used in fracking are linked to serious human health problems, including respiratory distress, rashes, convulsions, organ damage, and cancer.

However, federal and Montana law provide only limited restrictions on the use of these dangerous chemicals and do not require pre-drilling notification to adjacent landowners or the public or mandate surface and ground water testing to detect contamination.

Although interest in large-scale oil and gas development in Carbon County has waned as oil prices dropped in recent months, Martinell said the zoning designation remains necessary to protect landowners when oil and gas development picks up again.

“Through this process, we’ve learned that developing regulations takes time and protections cannot be put in place over night. If we’re going to get this right, now is the time to act.”

More information: Read the legal document.

Principal source: Earth Justice.

Seven Montana landowners last week filed a legal challenge in state district court to the Carbon County Commission’s rejection of their petition for land use regulations to protect their private properties from the harmful effects of oil and gas drilling.

The landowners collectively seek to establish the ‘Silvertip Zoning District’ to cover nearly 3,000 acres of agricultural land north of Belfry, Montana.

Creation of the district is the first step to establish solid protections for land, air and water quality, giving landowners an essential voice in the development of oil and gas on their properties.

“State and federal laws don’t protect us from the worst impacts of oil and gas drilling”, said farmer Bonnie Martinell, one of the plaintiffs. “There are few requirements for protecting our water or how far drilling must be set back from residences. This means we have to take local action to protect our way of life and our livelihoods.”

‘A little bit of the Bakken’ comes to Yellowstone ecosystem

Although some oil and gas development has occurred in Carbon County for decades, the Silvertip landowners were pressed to take action in October 2013 after Energy Corporation of America’s (ECA) CEO John Mork announced plans to hydraulically fracture 50 wells along the Beartooth Front.

The area Carbon and Stillwater counties in Montana and forms the northeastern flank of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Mork boasted that ECA hoped to bring “a little bit of the Bakken“ to the Beartooths.

Montana law empowers landowners to initiate the development of zoning regulations for the protection of their land and community by petitioning their county commissioners to establish planning and zoning districts.

The Silvertip landowners have lobbied extensively before the Montana legislature and the state Board of Oil and Gas Conservation for protections from the adverse effects of inadequately regulated drilling. Those government bodies failed to take action.

In Montana, five bills were introduced during this state legislative session that would have enacted basic safeguards on oil and gas development, but all five were tabled in committee and are unlikely to receive a full vote in either house.

“We as landowners, ranchers and farmers have seen the destructive impacts of oil development in this area and we asked the County to let us safeguard our property and livelihoods by enacting these basic protections”, said Martinell.

“Citizen zoning is our only tool to protect our land and we are just trying to use that right given to us under state law.”

Farmers face toxic onslaught if fracking proceeds

Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit law firm, is representing the Silvertip landowners in their appeal. Energy Corporation of America is named as a defendant in the lawsuit along with the Carbon County Commissioners.

“Across the country, individuals and local governments are responding to the lack of state and federal leadership on the impacts of oil and gas development by demanding local control”, said Earthjustice Attorney Jenny Harbine. “This lawsuit is about allowing the Silvertip landowners to protect their land and their livelihoods when no one else will.”

Oil and gas drilling in shale formations such as the formation underlying Silvertip area is commonly accomplished through hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, which involves pumping millions of gallons of chemical-laced water and sand into the ground to release trapped oil and gas.

After the well is fractured, substantial quantities of this contaminated water-which contains high concentrations of salt, drilling chemicals, heavy metals, and radioactive material-returns to the surface where it is frequently stored in open containment ponds that pose substantial risks of leaks or failure.

As much as one-third of the contaminated water from the fracturing can remain underground after drilling is completed, threatening pollution of soil and groundwater. Numerous chemicals used in fracking are linked to serious human health problems, including respiratory distress, rashes, convulsions, organ damage, and cancer.

However, federal and Montana law provide only limited restrictions on the use of these dangerous chemicals and do not require pre-drilling notification to adjacent landowners or the public or mandate surface and ground water testing to detect contamination.

Although interest in large-scale oil and gas development in Carbon County has waned as oil prices dropped in recent months, Martinell said the zoning designation remains necessary to protect landowners when oil and gas development picks up again.

“Through this process, we’ve learned that developing regulations takes time and protections cannot be put in place over night. If we’re going to get this right, now is the time to act.”

More information: Read the legal document.

Principal source: Earth Justice.

Seven Montana landowners last week filed a legal challenge in state district court to the Carbon County Commission’s rejection of their petition for land use regulations to protect their private properties from the harmful effects of oil and gas drilling.

The landowners collectively seek to establish the ‘Silvertip Zoning District’ to cover nearly 3,000 acres of agricultural land north of Belfry, Montana.

Creation of the district is the first step to establish solid protections for land, air and water quality, giving landowners an essential voice in the development of oil and gas on their properties.

“State and federal laws don’t protect us from the worst impacts of oil and gas drilling”, said farmer Bonnie Martinell, one of the plaintiffs. “There are few requirements for protecting our water or how far drilling must be set back from residences. This means we have to take local action to protect our way of life and our livelihoods.”

‘A little bit of the Bakken’ comes to Yellowstone ecosystem

Although some oil and gas development has occurred in Carbon County for decades, the Silvertip landowners were pressed to take action in October 2013 after Energy Corporation of America’s (ECA) CEO John Mork announced plans to hydraulically fracture 50 wells along the Beartooth Front.

The area Carbon and Stillwater counties in Montana and forms the northeastern flank of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Mork boasted that ECA hoped to bring “a little bit of the Bakken“ to the Beartooths.

Montana law empowers landowners to initiate the development of zoning regulations for the protection of their land and community by petitioning their county commissioners to establish planning and zoning districts.

The Silvertip landowners have lobbied extensively before the Montana legislature and the state Board of Oil and Gas Conservation for protections from the adverse effects of inadequately regulated drilling. Those government bodies failed to take action.

In Montana, five bills were introduced during this state legislative session that would have enacted basic safeguards on oil and gas development, but all five were tabled in committee and are unlikely to receive a full vote in either house.

“We as landowners, ranchers and farmers have seen the destructive impacts of oil development in this area and we asked the County to let us safeguard our property and livelihoods by enacting these basic protections”, said Martinell.

“Citizen zoning is our only tool to protect our land and we are just trying to use that right given to us under state law.”

Farmers face toxic onslaught if fracking proceeds

Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit law firm, is representing the Silvertip landowners in their appeal. Energy Corporation of America is named as a defendant in the lawsuit along with the Carbon County Commissioners.

“Across the country, individuals and local governments are responding to the lack of state and federal leadership on the impacts of oil and gas development by demanding local control”, said Earthjustice Attorney Jenny Harbine. “This lawsuit is about allowing the Silvertip landowners to protect their land and their livelihoods when no one else will.”

Oil and gas drilling in shale formations such as the formation underlying Silvertip area is commonly accomplished through hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, which involves pumping millions of gallons of chemical-laced water and sand into the ground to release trapped oil and gas.

After the well is fractured, substantial quantities of this contaminated water-which contains high concentrations of salt, drilling chemicals, heavy metals, and radioactive material-returns to the surface where it is frequently stored in open containment ponds that pose substantial risks of leaks or failure.

As much as one-third of the contaminated water from the fracturing can remain underground after drilling is completed, threatening pollution of soil and groundwater. Numerous chemicals used in fracking are linked to serious human health problems, including respiratory distress, rashes, convulsions, organ damage, and cancer.

However, federal and Montana law provide only limited restrictions on the use of these dangerous chemicals and do not require pre-drilling notification to adjacent landowners or the public or mandate surface and ground water testing to detect contamination.

Although interest in large-scale oil and gas development in Carbon County has waned as oil prices dropped in recent months, Martinell said the zoning designation remains necessary to protect landowners when oil and gas development picks up again.

“Through this process, we’ve learned that developing regulations takes time and protections cannot be put in place over night. If we’re going to get this right, now is the time to act.”

More information: Read the legal document.

Principal source: Earth Justice.

Increases in gross domestic product (GDP) beyond a threshold of basic needs do not lead to further increases in well-being – this is widely supported by research. We also know that indefinite economic growth is impossible in a finite world.

Yet conventional economic growth driven by escalating material consumption remains a primary goal of government policy around the world.

If we want to see well-being and health improve, policies that promote a greener economy should be pursued. Redefining what we think of as prosperity, encouraging the consumption of green goods and services – and moving away from an emphasis on material consumption – could save governments money, as well as lead to better lives for its citizens.

GDP growth has brought with it substantial improvements on a number of fronts – from medical services to crime detection, better transport and housing and, increasingly, the adoption of renewable sources of energy.

This has helped average life expectancy to rise significantly and under-five mortality rates to fall. But well-being and life satisfaction seem to peak at low GDP, and do not increase as GDP grows.

As the graph shows (right), there is a sharp consumption cliff at low GDP, but after a threshold the affluent uplands bring no further increases in life satisfaction.

The growing costs of affluence

We wanted to understand why this is the case and work out how we can improve society’s health and well-being alongside GDP growth. Our findings were recently published in the International Journal of Environmental Health Research.

They show that material consumption brings with it unintended and costly side-effects. This means that growth that’s focused on improving health and well-being must be pursued, instead of just growth for its own sake.

The irony of increased GDP and living longer is that new health problems and associated costs have accompanied this. We have calculated the costs to health care systems and the economy that arise from modern lifestyles in the UK. (see table, right)

The direct cost of mental ill-health, dementias, obesity, physical inactivity, diabetes, loneliness and cardio-vascular disease (including strokes) is £60 billion each year. The full cost to the whole economy is approximately £180 billion annually (18.6% of GDP). The revenue expenditure of the 248 NHS Trusts in 2011-12 was £102 billion.

Clearly there are huge health savings to be made by reducing the prevalence of these conditions. Prevention is key, instead of waiting to treat conditions and diseases when they occur. This is something Britain’s chief medical officer has emphasised. She estimates that there is a 6-10% annual rate of return on investments made in early life interventions.

The policy dilemma – what’s right, or what’s expedient?

In affluent countries, some efforts have been made to shift individual behaviour toward greater well-being. But generally these have been limited in number, for example legislating for unleaded petrol and smoking bans. Or they only affect small subsets of the population – such as recommendations for regular physical activity and daily consumption of fruit and vegetables.

Policymakers face a dilemma: reducing material consumption to save the planet undermines an economy founded on continuing consumption. Yet continuing material consumption at current rates to sustain the economy is clearly costly and is destroying the planet.

Our research shows, however, that a substantial financial dividend could be released by a greener and healthier economy. Instead of encouraging material growth and consumption, we should consume in a way that is environmentally sustainable. This will not only benefit the planet, but our health and well-being too.

The UN Environment Programme defines a green economy as “resulting in human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities.” There are clear health and financial benefits to promoting this.

Encouraging environmentally sustainable consumption instead of all material consumption is an important aspect of creating a green economy. This centres on activities that produces greater well-being such as healthy food, regular engagement with nature, regular physical activity, the use of the power of thought and contemplation, enhancing social bonds and increasing attachment to possessions and places.

We know that social and physical environments can promote good health, and there is growing evidence showing that behaviour at the individual level can make significant contributions to well-being.

For example, regular physical activity such as walking pushes back the onset of dementia and volunteers live longer than non-volunteers. Loneliness has been calculated to be as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, while eating one more fruit or vegetable a day improves health.

It is now clear that health and social inequalities prevent many people from leading healthy lives. We now need to prioritise improving well-being for all members of society by encouraging healthy lifestyles, active travel, creating liveable environments for people to enjoy and increasing social capital for all. A greener economy is a better economy. It might help save the planet too.

Jules Pretty is Professor of Environment and Society and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Essex.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The US Export-Import Bank is on the verge of financing one of the world’s most destructive projects: India-based Adani Group’s massive Carmichael coal mine in Australia’s Galilee Basin.

The project also includes a new railway to carry the coal to a new export terminal at Abbots Point, Queensland, and a new sea ‘canal’ dredged through the Great Barrier Reef to allow the passage of coal freighters.

But a determined coalition of scientists, business owners, Australian elected officials, and civil society groups from the US and Australia have called ‘foul’ in a letter to US Export-Import Bank Chairman Fred Hochberg.

“The Adani coal project alone is expected to result in an estimated 7.6 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions over its lifetime”, the letter states. “Damage to the Great Barrier Reef has also resulted from reckless coastal industrial development, such as massive ports and liquefied natural gas complexes that have compelled UNESCO to consider classifying the reef as a ‘World Heritage in Danger‘.

“This includes two liquefied natural gas projects that received nearly five billion dollars in public financing from the Export Import Bank under your direction. In our view, this financing violates US law , as may US government financing for Adani’s coal export project.”

Friends of the Earth US President Erich Pica said: “Chairman Hochberg should refuse to provide financing to any project that would harm the precious Great Barrier Reef. To do otherwise would contradict President Obama’s call to protect this special place for his daughters and grandchildren and his State of the Union address, at which he called climate change the biggest threat to future generations.”

One mine – three countries’ CO₂

Aside from the immediate environmental destruction, the project would cause 128 million tons of carbon pollution annually – more than Sweden, Norway, and Denmark combined, contradicting the spirit of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan and recent climate progress both in the US and abroad.

A decision to finance the Carmichael project would also undermine US credibility on climate issues at home and abroad, including the including the US-China emissions reduction deal, a $3 billion commitment to the Green Climate Fund, and recent climate and clean energy progress in the President’s FY2016 budget.

And it would infuriate the generations of climate campaigners that were out protesting around the world last weekend on Global Divestment Day, organised by 350.org, which called on investors, pension funds, foundations and financial institutions everywhere to dump fossil fuels.

Three million tonnes of Barrier Reef seabed to be removed and dumped

If completed, coal will be mined and transported by rail to the coast, where it will be shipped overseas through ports expanded by dredging three million tonnes of seabed from the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef.

“The Great Barrier Reef is under considerable threat from a variety of stressors including climate change, crown of thorns sea stars, and runoff from land”, said Dr. Selina Ward, a prominent Queensland Reef scientist at the University of Queensland School of Biological Sciences.

“The Abbot Point port expansion would considerably exacerbate this pressure. This continuing industrialisation of the GBR coastline invites reef degradation, especially from the dredging of the ocean floor, the dumping of the dredge spoil and the enormous increase in carbon emissions from the proposed coal mines.”

The recent January 31 election in the State of Queensland saw the biggest swing against a first term government in Australia since 1955. Many Queenslanders rejected the sitting government due to its support for the Galilee Basin coal mines and associated port facilities and their impacts on the Great Barrier Reef.

The Greens achieved their highest ever Queensland election result, and Labor is now forming a government, after that party pledged to prevent any dredge spoil from being dumped in the World Heritage Area or nearby wetlands and to reverse the billions in tax breaks and tax dollar support the previous government promised Adani.

“Queenslanders clearly do not accept the government’s destruction of the Reef”, said Greens Senator Larissa Waters of Queensland. “The Queensland Government’s plans to industrialise the Reef threaten to destroy one of the most precious places on earth, through dredging, shipping and climate change.

“We call on the US Ex-Im Bank to reject any requests for financing of the Abbot Point expansion or associated rail and mine infrastructure. US taxpayer dollars should not be subsidising the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.”

And it’s an economic disaster too, conclude major banks

And while Ex-Im is considering backing the project, major financial institutions – including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Credit Agricole, and JPMorgan Chase – have publicly rejected the proposal.

They don’t like the fact that the project would jeopardize the Reef’s World Heritage status. But even more serious for potential financiers, reports show the project is not financially viable.

“The fact is that this disastrous project would damage a world treasure like the Great Barrier Reef while making our climate crisis even worse. The notion that Ex-Im would use American taxpayer dollars to support it is unconscionable”, said John Coequyt, director of the Sierra Club’s International Climate Program.

“If the Export-Import bank puts a single US dollar towards funding this project, it is literally financing the destruction of one of the great natural wonders of the world.”

Principal source: Friends of the Earth.

This week’s revelation that the Big Six energy companies are overcharging their most loyal and vulnerable customers by up to £234 a year is just the latest evidence of the failure energy privatisation has been in the UK.

Since 2010, our fuel bills have risen a staggering eight times faster than wages. Combined with falling incomes, the result is that a staggering seven million people in the UK are living in fuel poverty, and each winter an older person dies needlessly of cold every seven minutes.

Until recently, the claim that the big energy companies were simply passing on higher prices that they themselves were paying seemed to wash. But the pathetic price reductions they have offered in response to significant falls in wholesale gas and electricity prices have stretched this argument rather thin.

Neither cheap nor green

Then there’s the notion that we can either have cheap energy or go green – but with a pitiful 16% of our electricity being generated from renewable sources and the government desperately having to dangle juicy (and expensive) carrots in front of the energy companies to retain the necessary capacity of any sort, it seems the current system can’t deliver either.

Since pioneering privatisation in sectors such as energy and water during the Thatcher era, the UK has stayed firmly wedded to this particular course, with mainstream politicians of all stripes flailing and failing to come up with any plausible policy responses to the current energy crisis.

Their most radical suggestions so far are

• trying to create more competition – apparently we should be switching suppliers every couple of months, never mind the fact that the bureaucracy involved would actually increase costs; and
• a short-lived freeze on prices – itself an admission that privatisation has failed to lower prices.

That this is the best our political class can come up with only demonstrates the narrowness of their understanding, and the poverty of their imagination.

UK aid exporting a failed model – to the countries that can least afford it!

Even more scandalously, the UK is actually supporting further energy privatisation overseas. One of the main ways it does so is via the aid budget, which is currently funding energy privatisation projects in places like India and Sierra Leone.

The most extreme example is Nigeria, where around £100m of UK aid is being used to support a privatisation process the Department for International Development (DfID) itself describes as “far more ambitious than anything ever attempted in Africa”, and “seen by many as being so ambitious as to be unrealistic“.

The controversial DFID-funded programme, the Nigerian Infrastructure Advisory Facility, is even being implemented by Adam Smith International – the consultancy arm of the neoliberal ‘free market’ think tank the Adam Smith Institute.

With half of Nigerians lacking access to electricity despite the country’s enormous fossil fuel wealth, it was clear that change was needed. But so far privatisation only seems to have made things worse. It has led to major price rises in order to attract outside investors – but by last year the central bank had had to step in and bail out the newly privatised companies after investment flows dried up.

Rather than increasing the amount of electricity available, there has actually been a reduction in power generation due to the failure of the companies to keep their power stations running.

This is perhaps unsurprising when thousands of energy sector employees have been made redundant since the privatisation process started. As a result, blackouts have increased, and the federal government is spending around £2.5m a year on its own generators to keep its offices running.

It doesn’t work! So why do we keep on doing it?

It’s incredible that this failed approach to privatisation is still being rolled out when evidence from around the world shows that time and again, it fails to improve people’s access to energy, and leads to governments taking the risks while the companies pocket the profits.

Nigeria itself has been stung by energy privatisation in the past: since the late 1990s it has allowed power plants to be owned and operated by private companies, causing big losses for the state power company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

This is because PHCN had agreements to purchase the private power generators’ power, giving their electricity a higher priority than lower-cost state-owned power stations. Since then PHCN has been broken up into 17 successor companies and partially privatised.

On top of this, a deal between Enron and the Lagos government to set up a power plant and three diesel units on barges anchored off Lagos formed part of the fraud charges against Enron executives after they made a fake sale of their stake in the barges to Merrill Lynch, later making $12m from a side deal to repurchase them.

There is an alternative

The way in which the British government is wedded to this flawed privatisation model might make one think that there was no other way. But in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Around the world, there’s an increasing number of examples of energy being managed democratically, and doing a far better job of meeting people’s energy needs without trashing the planet.

These include German citizens voting to buy back their energy grids in order to deliver the green transition where private companies have failed, and systems that integrate co-operatives and publicly-owned utilities in places like Costa Rica and Nebraska.

These examples demonstrate that there is no stark choice between centralized state-owned monopolies like Britain’s old Central Electricity Generating Board, and for-profit corporate oligopoly. The alternative is smaller, locally accountable energy providers that are cooperatively owned, or publicly owned through local government and municipalities.

In fact, we should be up in arms that this is not happening absolutely everywhere: with one in five people globally still lacking access to electricity and the climate crisis already claiming victims, we can’t afford not to ditch these corporate controlled energy systems – and put fairer, more sustainable and democratic alternatives in their place.

Join: Global Justice Now are holding an Energy Justice Assembly at their conference in London tomorrow – Saturday 21st February.

Find out more about the campaign for a democratic rather than corporate-controlled energy system.

Take action: Give corporate-controlled energy the boot!

Christine Haigh is an energy justice campaigner at Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement). She has a degree in philosophy and physics, a master’s in food policy and has previously worked for Women’s Environmental Network and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. She is an activist who has worked on a range of economic justice issues, most recently housing in the UK.

This week’s revelation that the Big Six energy companies are overcharging their most loyal and vulnerable customers by up to £234 a year is just the latest evidence of the failure energy privatisation has been in the UK.

Since 2010, our fuel bills have risen a staggering eight times faster than wages. Combined with falling incomes, the result is that a staggering seven million people in the UK are living in fuel poverty, and each winter an older person dies needlessly of cold every seven minutes.

Until recently, the claim that the big energy companies were simply passing on higher prices that they themselves were paying seemed to wash. But the pathetic price reductions they have offered in response to significant falls in wholesale gas and electricity prices have stretched this argument rather thin.

Neither cheap nor green

Then there’s the notion that we can either have cheap energy or go green – but with a pitiful 16% of our electricity being generated from renewable sources and the government desperately having to dangle juicy (and expensive) carrots in front of the energy companies to retain the necessary capacity of any sort, it seems the current system can’t deliver either.

Since pioneering privatisation in sectors such as energy and water during the Thatcher era, the UK has stayed firmly wedded to this particular course, with mainstream politicians of all stripes flailing and failing to come up with any plausible policy responses to the current energy crisis.

Their most radical suggestions so far are

• trying to create more competition – apparently we should be switching suppliers every couple of months, never mind the fact that the bureaucracy involved would actually increase costs; and
• a short-lived freeze on prices – itself an admission that privatisation has failed to lower prices.

That this is the best our political class can come up with only demonstrates the narrowness of their understanding, and the poverty of their imagination.

UK aid exporting a failed model – to the countries that can least afford it!

Even more scandalously, the UK is actually supporting further energy privatisation overseas. One of the main ways it does so is via the aid budget, which is currently funding energy privatisation projects in places like India and Sierra Leone.

The most extreme example is Nigeria, where around £100m of UK aid is being used to support a privatisation process the Department for International Development (DfID) itself describes as “far more ambitious than anything ever attempted in Africa”, and “seen by many as being so ambitious as to be unrealistic“.

The controversial DFID-funded programme, the Nigerian Infrastructure Advisory Facility, is even being implemented by Adam Smith International – the consultancy arm of the neoliberal ‘free market’ think tank the Adam Smith Institute.

With half of Nigerians lacking access to electricity despite the country’s enormous fossil fuel wealth, it was clear that change was needed. But so far privatisation only seems to have made things worse. It has led to major price rises in order to attract outside investors – but by last year the central bank had had to step in and bail out the newly privatised companies after investment flows dried up.

Rather than increasing the amount of electricity available, there has actually been a reduction in power generation due to the failure of the companies to keep their power stations running.

This is perhaps unsurprising when thousands of energy sector employees have been made redundant since the privatisation process started. As a result, blackouts have increased, and the federal government is spending around £2.5m a year on its own generators to keep its offices running.

It doesn’t work! So why do we keep on doing it?

It’s incredible that this failed approach to privatisation is still being rolled out when evidence from around the world shows that time and again, it fails to improve people’s access to energy, and leads to governments taking the risks while the companies pocket the profits.

Nigeria itself has been stung by energy privatisation in the past: since the late 1990s it has allowed power plants to be owned and operated by private companies, causing big losses for the state power company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

This is because PHCN had agreements to purchase the private power generators’ power, giving their electricity a higher priority than lower-cost state-owned power stations. Since then PHCN has been broken up into 17 successor companies and partially privatised.

On top of this, a deal between Enron and the Lagos government to set up a power plant and three diesel units on barges anchored off Lagos formed part of the fraud charges against Enron executives after they made a fake sale of their stake in the barges to Merrill Lynch, later making $12m from a side deal to repurchase them.

There is an alternative

The way in which the British government is wedded to this flawed privatisation model might make one think that there was no other way. But in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Around the world, there’s an increasing number of examples of energy being managed democratically, and doing a far better job of meeting people’s energy needs without trashing the planet.

These include German citizens voting to buy back their energy grids in order to deliver the green transition where private companies have failed, and systems that integrate co-operatives and publicly-owned utilities in places like Costa Rica and Nebraska.

These examples demonstrate that there is no stark choice between centralized state-owned monopolies like Britain’s old Central Electricity Generating Board, and for-profit corporate oligopoly. The alternative is smaller, locally accountable energy providers that are cooperatively owned, or publicly owned through local government and municipalities.

In fact, we should be up in arms that this is not happening absolutely everywhere: with one in five people globally still lacking access to electricity and the climate crisis already claiming victims, we can’t afford not to ditch these corporate controlled energy systems – and put fairer, more sustainable and democratic alternatives in their place.

Join: Global Justice Now are holding an Energy Justice Assembly at their conference in London tomorrow – Saturday 21st February.

Find out more about the campaign for a democratic rather than corporate-controlled energy system.

Take action: Give corporate-controlled energy the boot!

Christine Haigh is an energy justice campaigner at Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement). She has a degree in philosophy and physics, a master’s in food policy and has previously worked for Women’s Environmental Network and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. She is an activist who has worked on a range of economic justice issues, most recently housing in the UK.

This week’s revelation that the Big Six energy companies are overcharging their most loyal and vulnerable customers by up to £234 a year is just the latest evidence of the failure energy privatisation has been in the UK.

Since 2010, our fuel bills have risen a staggering eight times faster than wages. Combined with falling incomes, the result is that a staggering seven million people in the UK are living in fuel poverty, and each winter an older person dies needlessly of cold every seven minutes.

Until recently, the claim that the big energy companies were simply passing on higher prices that they themselves were paying seemed to wash. But the pathetic price reductions they have offered in response to significant falls in wholesale gas and electricity prices have stretched this argument rather thin.

Neither cheap nor green

Then there’s the notion that we can either have cheap energy or go green – but with a pitiful 16% of our electricity being generated from renewable sources and the government desperately having to dangle juicy (and expensive) carrots in front of the energy companies to retain the necessary capacity of any sort, it seems the current system can’t deliver either.

Since pioneering privatisation in sectors such as energy and water during the Thatcher era, the UK has stayed firmly wedded to this particular course, with mainstream politicians of all stripes flailing and failing to come up with any plausible policy responses to the current energy crisis.

Their most radical suggestions so far are

• trying to create more competition – apparently we should be switching suppliers every couple of months, never mind the fact that the bureaucracy involved would actually increase costs; and
• a short-lived freeze on prices – itself an admission that privatisation has failed to lower prices.

That this is the best our political class can come up with only demonstrates the narrowness of their understanding, and the poverty of their imagination.

UK aid exporting a failed model – to the countries that can least afford it!

Even more scandalously, the UK is actually supporting further energy privatisation overseas. One of the main ways it does so is via the aid budget, which is currently funding energy privatisation projects in places like India and Sierra Leone.

The most extreme example is Nigeria, where around £100m of UK aid is being used to support a privatisation process the Department for International Development (DfID) itself describes as “far more ambitious than anything ever attempted in Africa”, and “seen by many as being so ambitious as to be unrealistic“.

The controversial DFID-funded programme, the Nigerian Infrastructure Advisory Facility, is even being implemented by Adam Smith International – the consultancy arm of the neoliberal ‘free market’ think tank the Adam Smith Institute.

With half of Nigerians lacking access to electricity despite the country’s enormous fossil fuel wealth, it was clear that change was needed. But so far privatisation only seems to have made things worse. It has led to major price rises in order to attract outside investors – but by last year the central bank had had to step in and bail out the newly privatised companies after investment flows dried up.

Rather than increasing the amount of electricity available, there has actually been a reduction in power generation due to the failure of the companies to keep their power stations running.

This is perhaps unsurprising when thousands of energy sector employees have been made redundant since the privatisation process started. As a result, blackouts have increased, and the federal government is spending around £2.5m a year on its own generators to keep its offices running.

It doesn’t work! So why do we keep on doing it?

It’s incredible that this failed approach to privatisation is still being rolled out when evidence from around the world shows that time and again, it fails to improve people’s access to energy, and leads to governments taking the risks while the companies pocket the profits.

Nigeria itself has been stung by energy privatisation in the past: since the late 1990s it has allowed power plants to be owned and operated by private companies, causing big losses for the state power company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

This is because PHCN had agreements to purchase the private power generators’ power, giving their electricity a higher priority than lower-cost state-owned power stations. Since then PHCN has been broken up into 17 successor companies and partially privatised.

On top of this, a deal between Enron and the Lagos government to set up a power plant and three diesel units on barges anchored off Lagos formed part of the fraud charges against Enron executives after they made a fake sale of their stake in the barges to Merrill Lynch, later making $12m from a side deal to repurchase them.

There is an alternative

The way in which the British government is wedded to this flawed privatisation model might make one think that there was no other way. But in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Around the world, there’s an increasing number of examples of energy being managed democratically, and doing a far better job of meeting people’s energy needs without trashing the planet.

These include German citizens voting to buy back their energy grids in order to deliver the green transition where private companies have failed, and systems that integrate co-operatives and publicly-owned utilities in places like Costa Rica and Nebraska.

These examples demonstrate that there is no stark choice between centralized state-owned monopolies like Britain’s old Central Electricity Generating Board, and for-profit corporate oligopoly. The alternative is smaller, locally accountable energy providers that are cooperatively owned, or publicly owned through local government and municipalities.

In fact, we should be up in arms that this is not happening absolutely everywhere: with one in five people globally still lacking access to electricity and the climate crisis already claiming victims, we can’t afford not to ditch these corporate controlled energy systems – and put fairer, more sustainable and democratic alternatives in their place.

Join: Global Justice Now are holding an Energy Justice Assembly at their conference in London tomorrow – Saturday 21st February.

Find out more about the campaign for a democratic rather than corporate-controlled energy system.

Take action: Give corporate-controlled energy the boot!

Christine Haigh is an energy justice campaigner at Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement). She has a degree in philosophy and physics, a master’s in food policy and has previously worked for Women’s Environmental Network and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. She is an activist who has worked on a range of economic justice issues, most recently housing in the UK.