Six Greenpeace volunteers have boarded Shell’s ‘Polar Pioneer’ oil rig as it made its way to drill in the Alaskan Arctic about 750 miles northwest of Hawaii.

As Shell threatens huge potential destruction from oil spills from its drilling, activists Aliyah, Jens, Johno, Miriam, Andreas and Zoe are aiming to show the world what Shell are up to – and are asking for your support!

“We made it! We’re on Shell’s platform. And we’re not alone”, wrote Aliyah Field, an American campaigner taking part in the protest. “Everyone can help turn this into a platform for people power!”

And Miriam Friedrich tweeted: “This is exhilarating! Almost like climbing a mountain for the first time.” (see photo)

The action follows the news that the US government has upheld Shell’s lease on oil and gas drilling rights in the Chukchi Sea, taking it – and other oil companies – are one step closer to drilling in the Arctic.

Last week the US government’s Department of the Interior issued a ‘record of decision‘ of the lease sale, a move that allows the authorities to deem Shell’s exploration plan for the sea off Alaska’s Arctic western coast as having been submitted.

Interior secretary Sally Jewell commented: “The Arctic is an important component of the Administration’s national energy strategy”. Obama’s government, she added, is committed to “a thoughtful and balanced approach” to exploiting oil and gas off the coast of Alaska.

The news followed a US Department of Energy report published earlier this week that urged the use of Arctic oil to take the place of oil from fracking, which it says is on the way out.

Further hurdles to overcome

Following the Interior Department’s decision, Shell now needs to secure the final go ahead on its plans to drill this summer in the Arctic from the US government’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).

There are also host of other barriers to overcome, including getting drilling permits and authorisations to ‘harass’ protected wildlife.

Despite this, Shell began moving its Arctic drilling rigs from Asian shipyards towards Seattle port, which it could plan to use as a launch pad for its drilling off the coast of Alaska – including the one that is now ‘under occupation’ by Greenpeace protestors.

Shell is the only oil giant that currently both has licences in the Chukchi Sea and intends to drill there this summer, after attempted exploratory drilling there in 2012. This comes as Shell’s contractor, Foss Maritime, looks likely to be engaged in a legal battle over using Seattle port.

A judge has recently agreed to hear the lawsuit brought by US environmental groups arguing that leasing the port terminal to Shell will be in contravention of the state’s environmental laws. A previous case brought by US green groups succeeded in delaying Shell’s Arctic drilling plans.

Shell’s Arctic drilling was suspended in early 2013 following the grounding of the Kulluk oil drilling rig but the firm couldn’t drill in 2014 as a result of a legal challenge over the figures for oil extraction BOEM’s environmental impact statement.

Odds on for a big spill during operational lifetime

The final environmental impact statement for drilling in the Chukchi Sea, published in February, quadrupled the original amount of oil expected to be produced.

It also upgraded its assessment of the risk of oil spills in the sea –  to at least a 75% chance of at least one large spill releasing over 1,000 barrels of oil in the sensitive marine and coastal environment over 77 years.

Scientists told Time that oil from Exxon Valdez oil spill, which happened 26 years ago, still lingers on Alaskan beaches.

Meanwhile, an engineering professor and expert on Deepwater Horizon, Robert Bea, warned the low oil price could increase the risk of environmental accidents in offshore drilling by forcing contractors to cut costs.

Cost-cutting only adds to the hazards

Major ocean drilling contractors have been put under pressure by the falling oil price, which has reduced demand for their rigs from oil giants such as Shell and BP – who are also squeezing their exploration costs.

Shell recently told investors that to “preserve Shell’s financial flexibility” there were opportunities to cut costs, including in their supply chain.

Two leading contractors  – Transocean, which is the world’s largest offshore drilling operator, and Noble Corp  – are providing the Noble Discoverer and the Polar Pioneer drilling rigs for Shell’s intended Arctic drilling forays off the coast of Alaska this summer.

Both of the firms have had previous safety issues. A US federal judge ruled that Transocean was 30% to blame for the negligence that caused the 2010 DeepWater Horizon oil spill, which was about 20 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez.

A White House oil commission concluded the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was caused partly by a series of cost-cutting decisions made by BP, Transocean and Halliburton.

Late last year Noble Corp – whose main client is Shell – paid $12.2 million to settle felony charges brought by the US government related to environmental and safety violations on vessels in the Arctic while working for Shell in 2012.

“This unique, sensitive and often challenging environment requires effective oversight to ensure all activities are conducted safely and responsibly,” Jewell said.

Climate change risk

The Arctic is estimated to hold 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30% of undiscovered gas.

A paper published in Nature early this year completely ruled out drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic if we are to stay within 2 degrees of global warming over pre-industrial levels – the internationally-agreed threshold for catastrophic climate change.

Following pressure from its shareholders, Shell has recently agreed to test whether its business model is compatible with limiting global warming to 2C.

But Shell has so far spent around $6 billion since 2005 with the view to exploiting Arctic oil – though the firm hasn’t managed to complete an Arctic exploration well in Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

And that’s how the Greenpeace volunteers want it to stay!

Action: ‘Send your support to volunteers on Shell’s oil rig!‘

Christine Ottery writes for Greenpeace Energydesk, where this article was first published.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

This article is an updated version of one originally published on Greenpeace Energydesk.

The Wilderness Society is celebrating with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance over striking a deal with the conservative elements in the state.

Trading away half a million acres of land to the energy industry for 1.5 million acres of wilderness seems good on paper, after all.

And after the Bundy Ranch fiasco in Nevada, rapprochement between the greens and the far right seems like exactly what the country needs. But not everybody is happy.

Local groups Utah Tar Sands Resistance and Peaceful Uprising are crying foul. “This is very much a sell out”, organizer Raphael Cordry told me over the phone. “It’s very disappointing.

“They’re trading the lives of the people of Utah and their health and wellbeing for some wilderness area, and the area that they’re trading is the place we’ve actually been protecting. They’ve been calling it a sacrifice zone, and we knew this, so it’s not a surprise.”

The Wilderness Society is shy about discussing the impacts of what the Wall Street Journal is calling ‘the Grand Bargain’. To Wilderness Society spokesperson Paul Spitler, “It’s pretty refreshing to see a new approach.”

“We have seen for the past twenty years that the Bureau of Land Management and School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration have been strategically swapping parcels of land that was originally checker boarded, so they trade off and make that a contiguous stretch of land.”

A sacrifice too far!

This spate of parcels is located in northeastern Utah at the Book Cliffs. With fir trees, bears, turkeys, elk, and deer, the land is by no means an empty wasteland. But that’s precisely what the energy industry intends to make it into with a tar sands operation that has been in the works for more than twenty years.

Even Jimmy Carter invested in oil shale at the end of his term, but the tar sands have been kept at bay through a mixture of timing, lawsuits, and activist engagement amounting to direct action. The high oil prices of recent years led to increased initiative to exploit the oil shale and tar sands in the region.

The region is located at the headwaters of the Colorado River. Lying 8,000 feet elevation, where the Green River and White River feed into the Colorado, the land forms a crucial watershed locale for the 30 million people who rely on the Colorado River – already highly stressed by drought – for their drinking water downstream.

As the drought-stricken states in the West, particularly Colorado and California, have begun to clash over access to water, problems of pollution are growing increasingly menacing.

In Alberta, where the 97,000 square kilometers of boreal forest ecosystem has been leased to active tar sands mining, the people who live downstream from the Athabasca River are getting cancer at extremely high rates, along with the animals who rely on the fresh water systems being destroyed by the extensive bitumen mining.

Much of the vital freshwater ecosystem has been reduced to what looks like a mixture of a vast industrial mountaintop removal site and a molten parking lot.

In nearby Vernal, Utah, increased infant mortality rates have already been documented in the region. The oil and gas drilling is leaking methane, such that now the air pollution in the rural area is equivalent to living in Los Angeles.

The light, noise, and water pollution next door to the sacrifice zone is also already intense in the tar sands region of Utah, before the main mining has even commenced.

“The wilderness areas will not be valuable if all the streams contain carcinogens”, Cordray told me. “When you’re out in the middle of nowhere you can hear every machine.”

Illegal permission to strip-mine tribal lands

The land in the sacrifice zone on the Book Cliffs is the land of the Ute people, and mining on their land is regulated by the EPA. The corporations involved in the tar sands are moving forward with strip mining the Ute’s land without the EPA’s proper permission. Instead, Utah is illegally allowing the corporations to allow strip mining on Native lands.

The Governor of Utah, an ultra-right climate denier, appoints the Utah Department of Water Quality and the Department of Environmental Quality. The Department of Water Quality issued a permit for strip mining the Ute’s lands without so much as a water discharge, claiming there is no water on the land at all, despite an abundance of evidenced spring water.

The legislature of Utah is also stacked with climate deniers, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) hosted their convention in the state in 2013 to improve efforts to transfer federal lands to private businesses.

US Oil Sands, the Canadian company doing the tar sands mining, is connected not only to ALEC, but to the euphemistically-named Institute for Clean and Secure Energy (ICSE), which operate in the University of Utah. The ICSE spends the money it gets from Chevron, among other energy sources, in the laboratory to make it cheaper to turn oil shale into gasoline.

Last year, Utah Tar Sands Resistance interrupted an annual confab at the University with the BLM head at the podium, revealing the extent of collusion occurring at the highest-level institutions in the region.

“The people involved will grind up every inch of the earth”, Cordray told me. “They don’t care.”

If the extreme right is ecstatic, be suspicious!

Salt Lake City is among the top cities with the worst air quality in the US today, with Kennecott copper mine, among other industrial players, choking the environment. State lands in Utah contain recently uncovered leaking wells leading to health problems, and the regulators have a tendency to look the other way, says Cordray:

“This is a party, and they don’t want it to get spoiled. They want to provide energy, and they ignore the health impacts.”

It’s not only the energy and mining industries chomping at the bit to pass the Grand Bargain. The ultra-conservative ranchers, who along with rejecting evolution also likely believe their cattle can chew on bitumen like the cud of the earth, are ecstatic – a surprise, given the amount of caterwauling they have made over the smallest partitions of wilderness in the past. Moab in 1979 comes immediately to mind.

Among these wealthier landowners boosting the Grand Bargain is San Juan County Commissioner, Phil Lyman, who obtained recent celebrity status after leading an ATV ride through protected Native archeological / traditional lands in the aftermath of the Bundy standoff.

Against the violent enemies of democracy

Lyman is from the old guard that includes Bundy and the late Dick Carver, former County Commissioner of Nevada’s Nye County and staunch Christian Identity believer who became famous for bulldozing an unpermitted mining road through a national forest with an armed posse calling itself the ‘Fourth of July Vigilantes’ back in ’94 at the dawning of the militia movement.

This crew is connected not only to the patriot, and militia movements, but the old John Birch Society and County Rights groups that came together with Wise Use – and, incidentally, the Posse Comitatus and Klan groups that converged with the Aryan Nations and Christian Identity groups – to terrorize environmentalists and conservationists throughout the late 1980s and 1990s.

According to David Helvarg in his important book, War Against the Greens, the Wise Use movement, astroturfed by big industry, helped boost the stature of white supremacist groups:

“While they may have felt they were controlling the agenda, by legitimizing and lending credibility to the Far Right these industries helped create and expand political space for the violent enemies of democracy.”

Right now, a terrible battle is brewing over the fate of the West, with a good amount of people funded and fueled by the Koch hatoraide wanting to transfer all federal lands to state hands. The goal of the right-wing populists of the Sagebrush Rebellion and Wise Use, whose legacy the current astroturfed movement inherits, is ultimately full privatization.

Transferring federal lands to either oil-and-gas leases or directly into state lands is remarkably close, if not a kind of recasting of that goal.

With the oil prices low right now, the ‘Grand Bargain’ looks like a real estate investment for oil companies speculating on prices. In other words, it’s a land grab, which is why the old guard of the ‘Wise Use’ movement and Sagebrush Rebellion is so excited to push the deal through Congress, where it is likely to be presented later this spring.

But Cordry is optimistic. “Since 2005, Peaceful Uprising and Utah Tar Sands Resistance and groups like them have staved off the tar sands”, Cordray tells me. “Now that the prices have dropped, we’re hoping to push US Oil Sands into bankruptcy.”

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire. 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). His most recent book Against the Fascist Creep is forthcoming through AK Press.

Action: Utah Tar Sands Resistance will be holding a peaceful vigil to observe what they are doing from May to October. Last year, 27 people were arrested in the area as hundreds converged to hold a vigil.

Find out more about how you can get involved in the struggle to protect the land, air, and water for future generations.

The Wilderness Society is celebrating with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance over striking a deal with the conservative elements in the state.

Trading away half a million acres of land to the energy industry for 1.5 million acres of wilderness seems good on paper, after all.

And after the Bundy Ranch fiasco in Nevada, rapprochement between the greens and the far right seems like exactly what the country needs. But not everybody is happy.

Local groups Utah Tar Sands Resistance and Peaceful Uprising are crying foul. “This is very much a sell out”, organizer Raphael Cordry told me over the phone. “It’s very disappointing.

“They’re trading the lives of the people of Utah and their health and wellbeing for some wilderness area, and the area that they’re trading is the place we’ve actually been protecting. They’ve been calling it a sacrifice zone, and we knew this, so it’s not a surprise.”

The Wilderness Society is shy about discussing the impacts of what the Wall Street Journal is calling ‘the Grand Bargain’. To Wilderness Society spokesperson Paul Spitler, “It’s pretty refreshing to see a new approach.”

“We have seen for the past twenty years that the Bureau of Land Management and School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration have been strategically swapping parcels of land that was originally checker boarded, so they trade off and make that a contiguous stretch of land.”

A sacrifice too far!

This spate of parcels is located in northeastern Utah at the Book Cliffs. With fir trees, bears, turkeys, elk, and deer, the land is by no means an empty wasteland. But that’s precisely what the energy industry intends to make it into with a tar sands operation that has been in the works for more than twenty years.

Even Jimmy Carter invested in oil shale at the end of his term, but the tar sands have been kept at bay through a mixture of timing, lawsuits, and activist engagement amounting to direct action. The high oil prices of recent years led to increased initiative to exploit the oil shale and tar sands in the region.

The region is located at the headwaters of the Colorado River. Lying 8,000 feet elevation, where the Green River and White River feed into the Colorado, the land forms a crucial watershed locale for the 30 million people who rely on the Colorado River – already highly stressed by drought – for their drinking water downstream.

As the drought-stricken states in the West, particularly Colorado and California, have begun to clash over access to water, problems of pollution are growing increasingly menacing.

In Alberta, where the 97,000 square kilometers of boreal forest ecosystem has been leased to active tar sands mining, the people who live downstream from the Athabasca River are getting cancer at extremely high rates, along with the animals who rely on the fresh water systems being destroyed by the extensive bitumen mining.

Much of the vital freshwater ecosystem has been reduced to what looks like a mixture of a vast industrial mountaintop removal site and a molten parking lot.

In nearby Vernal, Utah, increased infant mortality rates have already been documented in the region. The oil and gas drilling is leaking methane, such that now the air pollution in the rural area is equivalent to living in Los Angeles.

The light, noise, and water pollution next door to the sacrifice zone is also already intense in the tar sands region of Utah, before the main mining has even commenced.

“The wilderness areas will not be valuable if all the streams contain carcinogens”, Cordray told me. “When you’re out in the middle of nowhere you can hear every machine.”

Illegal permission to strip-mine tribal lands

The land in the sacrifice zone on the Book Cliffs is the land of the Ute people, and mining on their land is regulated by the EPA. The corporations involved in the tar sands are moving forward with strip mining the Ute’s land without the EPA’s proper permission. Instead, Utah is illegally allowing the corporations to allow strip mining on Native lands.

The Governor of Utah, an ultra-right climate denier, appoints the Utah Department of Water Quality and the Department of Environmental Quality. The Department of Water Quality issued a permit for strip mining the Ute’s lands without so much as a water discharge, claiming there is no water on the land at all, despite an abundance of evidenced spring water.

The legislature of Utah is also stacked with climate deniers, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) hosted their convention in the state in 2013 to improve efforts to transfer federal lands to private businesses.

US Oil Sands, the Canadian company doing the tar sands mining, is connected not only to ALEC, but to the euphemistically-named Institute for Clean and Secure Energy (ICSE), which operate in the University of Utah. The ICSE spends the money it gets from Chevron, among other energy sources, in the laboratory to make it cheaper to turn oil shale into gasoline.

Last year, Utah Tar Sands Resistance interrupted an annual confab at the University with the BLM head at the podium, revealing the extent of collusion occurring at the highest-level institutions in the region.

“The people involved will grind up every inch of the earth”, Cordray told me. “They don’t care.”

If the extreme right is ecstatic, be suspicious!

Salt Lake City is among the top cities with the worst air quality in the US today, with Kennecott copper mine, among other industrial players, choking the environment. State lands in Utah contain recently uncovered leaking wells leading to health problems, and the regulators have a tendency to look the other way, says Cordray:

“This is a party, and they don’t want it to get spoiled. They want to provide energy, and they ignore the health impacts.”

It’s not only the energy and mining industries chomping at the bit to pass the Grand Bargain. The ultra-conservative ranchers, who along with rejecting evolution also likely believe their cattle can chew on bitumen like the cud of the earth, are ecstatic – a surprise, given the amount of caterwauling they have made over the smallest partitions of wilderness in the past. Moab in 1979 comes immediately to mind.

Among these wealthier landowners boosting the Grand Bargain is San Juan County Commissioner, Phil Lyman, who obtained recent celebrity status after leading an ATV ride through protected Native archeological / traditional lands in the aftermath of the Bundy standoff.

Against the violent enemies of democracy

Lyman is from the old guard that includes Bundy and the late Dick Carver, former County Commissioner of Nevada’s Nye County and staunch Christian Identity believer who became famous for bulldozing an unpermitted mining road through a national forest with an armed posse calling itself the ‘Fourth of July Vigilantes’ back in ’94 at the dawning of the militia movement.

This crew is connected not only to the patriot, and militia movements, but the old John Birch Society and County Rights groups that came together with Wise Use – and, incidentally, the Posse Comitatus and Klan groups that converged with the Aryan Nations and Christian Identity groups – to terrorize environmentalists and conservationists throughout the late 1980s and 1990s.

According to David Helvarg in his important book, War Against the Greens, the Wise Use movement, astroturfed by big industry, helped boost the stature of white supremacist groups:

“While they may have felt they were controlling the agenda, by legitimizing and lending credibility to the Far Right these industries helped create and expand political space for the violent enemies of democracy.”

Right now, a terrible battle is brewing over the fate of the West, with a good amount of people funded and fueled by the Koch hatoraide wanting to transfer all federal lands to state hands. The goal of the right-wing populists of the Sagebrush Rebellion and Wise Use, whose legacy the current astroturfed movement inherits, is ultimately full privatization.

Transferring federal lands to either oil-and-gas leases or directly into state lands is remarkably close, if not a kind of recasting of that goal.

With the oil prices low right now, the ‘Grand Bargain’ looks like a real estate investment for oil companies speculating on prices. In other words, it’s a land grab, which is why the old guard of the ‘Wise Use’ movement and Sagebrush Rebellion is so excited to push the deal through Congress, where it is likely to be presented later this spring.

But Cordry is optimistic. “Since 2005, Peaceful Uprising and Utah Tar Sands Resistance and groups like them have staved off the tar sands”, Cordray tells me. “Now that the prices have dropped, we’re hoping to push US Oil Sands into bankruptcy.”

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire. 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). His most recent book Against the Fascist Creep is forthcoming through AK Press.

Action: Utah Tar Sands Resistance will be holding a peaceful vigil to observe what they are doing from May to October. Last year, 27 people were arrested in the area as hundreds converged to hold a vigil.

Find out more about how you can get involved in the struggle to protect the land, air, and water for future generations.

Brazil’s devastating drought could have the unexpected consequence of finally prompting one of the sunniest countries in the world to take solar power seriously.

The combination of an imminent energy crisis, as reservoir levels fall too low to generate power, and the appointment of a more open-minded Energy Minister promise a rapid change in the situation.

The drought, which has produced a crisis in the supply of water, has seen a dramatic drop in the levels of the reservoirs that supply dozens of hydroelectric dams in the southeast and centre west – Brazil’s industrial powerhouse and major population centre.

As Brazil now begins the seven-month dry period, when rain is traditionally sparse, the reservoirs in the drought-affected region could fall to as little as 10% of their capacity, which the new Mines and Energy Minister, Eduardo Braga, admits would be “catastrophic” for energy security.

Thermal power plants, such as coal-fired stations, also consume huge volumes of water as they generate electricity.

Solar power was ‘a fantasy’ – but no longer!

It means that plans to introduce solar energy into the energy mix are at last being considered as Brazil seeks alternatives to hydroelectric dams, on which it relies for up to 80% of its energy.

The current President, Dilma Rousseff, is embarking a huge new wave of mega-dam building in the Amazon, beginning with the highly controversial Belo Monte which is evicting 20,000 indigenous people in violation of their constitutional land rights.

The contribution of wind power, produced by onshore wind farms in the Northeast and South, has also begun to grow.

But solar energy, dubbed “a fantasy” by Rousseff just a few years ago, has so far been ignored. Only 400 homes in Brazil have photovoltaic (PV) panels installed on their roofs, because the cost is so prohibitive.

However, Braga has announced plans to turn dozens of hydroelectric dams in the southeast and centre west – which run the risk of becoming white elephants as the waters diminish – into solar energy farms.

Thousands of solar panels attached to buoys would be floated on the surface of the dwindling reservoirs to provide an alternative source of power.

Ministry officials have calculated they could add up to 15,000 megawatts (MW) of solar power capacity, which is greater than the maximum capacity of two of Brazil’s latest Amazon megadams – Jirau, on the Madeira river, and the controversial Belo Monte, on the Xingu.

Generating power, reducing evaporation

The solar panels would have the added advantage of reducing water evaporation while at the same time being cooled by the water, boosting their conversion efficiency.

Pilot projects are about to begin on two dams owned by state companies – Sobradinho, on the São Francisco river in Bahia, and Balbina, on the Uatumã river in the Amazon. If they are successful, the solar panels will be introduced into the dams in the southeast and centre west.

Brazil will not be the first country to experiment with floating solar power. Australia is trying it out with PV panels on the surface area of a wastewater treatment facility in Jamestown, South Australia. Their energy will power the plant.

Japan has also begun to build floating solar power plants, with a network of 30 sites each rated at 2MW, due to add 60MW of soalr capacity to the grid.

New solar incentives stimulate international ‘rush for the sun’

Tax breaks for the production of photovoltaic panels have been promised by Brazil’s Energy Minister, who also plans to introduce new rules to encourage the use of solar panels on buildings with large roof areas.

Two more auctions for solar power will be held this year. In the first such auction, held at the end of last year, 31 solar plants were chosen to provide a total capacity of 1,048 MW by 2017. The price was just under US$90 per MW – among the lowest in the world.

Factors that contributed to the low cost were the strong solar radiation factor in Brazil, and the fact that many solar parks would be installed in the same areas as wind farms, reducing the need to acquire land or build new transmission lines.

The 20-year contracts for energy supply involve investments of US$1.67 billion, and many foreign companies are already jostling to get a place in the Brazilian sun, in what promises to be a rapidly expanding market in a few years’ time.

Spanish, Canadian, American, Italian and Chinese companies already have a foot in the door. And as soon as the government and its development bank, the BNDES, come up with the promised tax breaks and incentives, the solar industry could take off.

Vast solar potential – 20 times greater than entire existing capacity!

At the moment, the total solar energy generated in Brazil is a piffling 15MW, much of it from new football stadium roofs installed for the 2014 football World Cup. But its vast solar energy potential, according to some sources, is equivalent to 20 times the total of all the present installed capacity of electrical energy.

While it waits to see if the solar experiment on the dams works, the government is hoping that energy consumption can be reduced by means of publicity campaigns and price increases.

The downturn in the economy, with little or no growth expected this year, will also help. It has also increased the use of thermal electric plants, powered by natural gas, coal and diesel oil to provide 30% – up from 20% – to the national grid.

These are expensive to run, powered by fossil fuels, and contribute to carbon emissions, and they could soon be consigned to history as solar energy becomes a regular part of Brazil’s energy mix.

Jan Rocha is a freelance journalist living in Brazil. A former correspondent there for the BBC World Service and The Guardian, she now writes for Climate News Network where this article was first published.

The unprecedented drought gripping California has deepened for the fourth consecutive year, having already set new records for the lowest annual precipitation levels on record. 2014 brought the highest calendar-year temperature for the state, while this February was the hottest on record and this January the driest.

A recent study conducted by Daniel Griffin and Kevin J. Anchukaitis found that the current episode “is the most severe drought in the last 1,200 years, with single year (2014) and accumulated moisture deficits worse than any previous continuous span of dry years.”

Last month (19th March) California Governor Jerry Brown announced a new bill, which he claims will provide $1 billion in drought-related spending, mostly on flood protection. The bill merely expedites funds already approved by California voters, and will do nothing to resolve the state’s dire water crisis.

The following Tuesday, the California State Water Resources Control Board intensified emergency legislation targeting residential “water wasters”, initially implemented last summer. The law imposes a $500 fine for offenses including excessive lawn watering.

Both measures leave untouched the giant agribusinesses and oil corporations that account for a majority of the state’s water usage and dominate the political system.

A dedicated servant of oil, gas and agribusiness

On the Sunday after Brown’s announcement, Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked Governor Brown whether “considering how much water … is used for fracking [hydraulic fracturing] … isn’t that alone enough reason to prohibit fracking or temporarily stop it?”

Brown sought to deflect the question, responding: “No, not at all. First of all, fracking in California has been going on for more than 50 years. It uses a fraction of the water of fracking on the East Coast for gas, particularly.”

Throughout his entire political career, dating back to the 1970s, Brown has been entirely beholden to Big Oil, while posturing as a defender of the environment. He has accepted at least $2 million in campaign contributions from oil corporations since 2006, including Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, Southern California Edison, Valero Energy, Tesoro Corp, Conoco Phillips and Aera Energy (owned jointly by Shell and ExxonMobil).

Most of these companies donated the maximum amount possible to Brown’s reelection campaign last November.

Earlier this year, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that, for years, state regulators knowingly allowed oil companies, mostly in the impoverished Central Valley, to pump their wastewater into groundwater aquifers that contained drinkable water.

Every year, the oil industry in California produces roughly 130 billion gallons of wastewater, as the state is the third-largest oil producer in the US. Kern County, home to most of California’s oil and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) wells, has the worst air quality of any county in the US, along with some of the highest rates of cancer and respiratory illness.

Climate change, a byproduct of the oil corporations’ unrelenting drive to accumulate profit, has played the most significant role in determining the length and severity of the ongoing drought, as well as the likelihood for future droughts.

LA Times: ‘all sectors must be water-rationed‘

On March 12, the leading bourgeois press outlet in the state, the Los Angeles Times, prominently featured an op-ed penned by NASA’s senior water scientist, Jay Famiglietti, titled “California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?”

Famiglietti begins the op-ed by stating that “Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing.” He proposes a water rationing scheme across “all of the state’s water sectors, from domestic and municipal through agricultural and industrial.”

Despite the calls by experts to place restrictions on business, last Tuesday the State Water Resources Control Board furthered emergency drought regulations that target solely consumers, leaving agribusiness untouched. Local water districts must restrict lawn watering to twice weekly, among other tepid reductions in consumers’ water usage.

The state will now place local water agencies under intense scrutiny, ensuring that they levy $500 daily fines against “water wasters” that were first enacted last summer. Over the past year, few fines were doled out locally, with one notable exception being Santa Cruz, which issued over $1.6 million in penalties against individual consumers. The cities of San Ramon and Dublin, both east of Oakland, issued $40,000 in combined fines.

Instead of adopting any sort of progressive policy to implement well-known, rational planning methods that would ensure the viability of California’s water supply for future generations, the existing political setup seeks to reduce the highly complex issue to merely punishing individual consumers.

Amid the human suffering, agribusiness keeps on pumping

The drought has already devastated thousands of working-class families, as an estimated 17,100 agricultural laborers lost their jobs during last year’s growing season alone, with that number expected to rise significantly this year.

The brunt of these job losses occurred in the agricultural heart of the state, the Central Valley, a stretch of land roughly 450 miles long, from Bakersfield in the south to Redding in the north, and between the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west.

Between the spring of 2013 and the spring of 2014, water levels in groundwater basins throughout the Central Valley fell by 50 feet or more, amid a race to drill ever-deeper and more expensive groundwater pumps.

In one of the Central Valley’s most productive agricultural regions, Tulare County, 874 well permits were issued in the first six months of 2014 alone, 44 more than the county issued in all of 2013.

In the process, hundreds of private wells across Tulare County dried up, leaving thousands of East Porterville’s working-class residents without water. The state’s only response to this dire crisis has been to provide limited amounts of bottled water to inhabitants, with no plans implemented to develop water infrastructure for residents.

Restrictions on agribusiness groundwater pumping – in 2040!

A package of three bills signed last September by Brown will implement the first-ever groundwater regulations in the state, but will have no effect until 2040, and even then will not require businesses to report how much water they pump individually.

Barring an end to the drought, which scientists have noted could become a decades-long ‘megadrought’, all remaining groundwater will have long disappeared by that time.

The legislation passed last Tuesday does nothing to curb groundwater usage by the agricultural giants, the only ones capable of shelling out upwards of $400,000 to drill the 2,000-foot (600-meter) pumps required to extract dwindling groundwater reserves.

Agriculture accounts for roughly 80% of California’s total water usage, while the remainder is used by urban industry and household consumers, with outdoor landscaping accounting for roughly half of total urban usage. Thus, at most the recent regulations will cause a 5% reduction in the state’s total water usage.

Who dares challenge a global agricultural power?

California produces over 99% of all almonds, pistachios, olives, walnuts, rice, plums, dates, figs, raisins, artichokes, kiwis, peaches and pomegranates grown in the US, and is also the leading producer of dozens of other food commodities. In recent decades, international demand has led to a large transition toward growing orchard and vineyard crops.

During the drought, many farmers have fallowed even more of their traditional vegetable crops, diverting water toward almond trees and other orchards, which take longer to mature and are thus a larger capital investment.

California currently grows roughly 80% of the world’s almond supply, in addition to 43% of all pistachios and 28% of all walnuts, and these cash crops are indispensable to maintaining profitability.

The ‘almond empire’ is centered in the San Joaquin Valley, home to the largest almond-growing monopoly in the world, Paramount Farming. Paramount’s owners, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, are closely connected to Governor Brown, as well as Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and other state politicians, and have influenced water policy in the state for decades.

This couple is the modern-day reincarnation of the most corrupt aspects of former Los Angeles Mayor Frederick Eaton and his associate Joseph Lippincott, immortalized in the character of Noah Cross, played by John Huston in the 1974 Roman Polanski classic Chinatown.

In addition to Paramount Farming, their holding company also owns Paramount Citrus and Paramount Farms, the world’s largest growers of citrus and pistachios.

Wall Street’s slice of the agribusiness pie

Financial interests, including New York-based retirement and investment fund TIAA-CREF and Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, a subsidiary of the insurance and financial services giant Manulife Financial, have recently joined the bumper crop frenzy, becoming some of the largest nut growers in California.

Despite the proven efficiency of drip irrigation for orchard and vineyard crops, 20.3% of all vineyard and 13.4% of all almond and pistachio crops in the state continue to be grown using flood irrigation methods.

Thus almond trees alone presently account for 10% of California’s total annual water usage, more than the combined domestic usage of the state’s 38.8 million inhabitants.

There are immense efficiencies to be gained through the statewide adoption of crop-specific irrigation methods and other efficiency improvements.

Yet any such rational reorganization is blocked by the interests of the US financial oligarchy, which, controlling the entire political system, will not abide any impingement on its profits.

Evan Blake is a journalist with World Socialist Website – WSWS.

This article was originally published by World Socialist Web Site.

I suppose it was predictable – but it was nonetheless remarkable to see, played out live on the nation’s TV screens.

Last night, a new politics for Britain was born as three women, the party leaders of the SNP, the Greens and Plaid Cymry, coalesced around a common progressive political agenda – and emerged the clear winners.

Since Tony Blair’s takeover of the Labour Party, and its re-invention as neoliberal ‘New Labour’, progressive politics in the UK has been effectively suppressed by the ‘three party’ system, enforced by our ever-vigilant right-wing media and the ‘first past the post’ electoral system.

Tories, Labour, Lib-Dems and now UKIP as well are united in their fundamental world view: of a Britain run in the interests of finance capital, corporations, ‘1%-er’ wealthy individuals and the wider US-led neoliberal world order.

This is the Britain of austerity, needless military interventions around the world, nuclear weapons, ‘extreme’ fossil fuels, nuclear power, corporate welfarism, NHS privatization, aggressive support of ‘free trade’: a Britain that throws endless volumes of taxpayers funds at maintaining unjust economic structures – while ordinary people are left to pick up the meager crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.

A huge yearning finds its voice

But last night, something happened. Three strong, confident, female, and intensely human voices of opposition to ‘mainstream politics’ spoke out on equal terms to the ‘grey four’, setting out a positive new agenda of a Britain for people.

They were at one in their desire for an end to the madhouse economics of austerity – whose real purpose is to effect a deep rebalancing of power in Britain away from people and the power of their labour, to capital, finance capital in particular, and those that control it.

They were united in opposing the madness of spending £100 billion on nuclear weapons with the renewal of our Trident missile system, while schools, hospitals and social care services are left crumbling and underfunded.

They shared a vision of a greener Britain, taking a lead on climate change, opposing fracking and other forms of extreme fossil energy, controlling the profiteering Big Six energy companies, and supporting a wider environmentalism and sustainable prosperity.

They expressed a new form of inclusive nationalism, in which we can be proud of being English, Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish, but welcome outsiders and maintain compassion for refugees and migrants – challenging head on Nigel Farage’s anti-foreigner tirades.

And so a new political coalition formed before our eyes, and a new national political force with a positive vision of the future for Britain and all who dwell in her.

And now, the election

Of course our enthusiasm must be tempered by a sense of reality, especially with the election taking place a little over a month from now.

Nicola Sturgeon appears to be leading the SNP to a dramatic victory in Scotland, and her performance last night has only increased her chances of a near sweeping of the board of Scotland’s 59 Parliamentary seats.

Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood – a wholly new political figure to many watching last night’s broadcast, also has much to celebrate. Her party currently holds just three out of Wales’s 40 MPs, and that’s a number that appears certain to increase thanks to her impressive role in the debate.

And in England the Green Party, led by the highly capable Natalie Bennett, is set to gain its highest-ever number of votes in a general election – and retain Caroline Lucas’s Brighton seat, perhaps win a second in Bristol West, and others too, for example in Norwich.

But that will never add up to a governing coalition – at least not this time around. There is only one possible leader for a progressive government: the Labour Party’s Ed Miliband. And he too had a good night last night – scoring some palpable hits on David Cameron over the NHS. But most importantly he held his own, overcoming the negative expectations that have been heaped upon him.

This creates a quandary for progressive voters – who to support in any particular consituency, each with its own unique electoral landscape? Vote Labour or Lib Dem to keep out the Tories? Vote Tory to keep out UKIP?

For myself, I agree with what Natalie Bennett said last night – that this is a time to vote for what you believe in. And if you believe in a greener, fairer, more equal and inclusive Britain, that now has to mean for the Greens, the SNP or Plaid Cymru – especially where they have a reasonable prospect of winning, but also where they do not.

Because your vote is not a way of electing your MP, and the government that will rule us. It’s also a way to express your political beliefs, state the kind of future you want for Britain and its consitutent nations, and build up a progressive politics not just in this election, but in elections to come.

A vote for what you believe in never wasted.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

At the final climax of one of the great gritty dramas of British Cinema, Get Carter, the anti-hero chases the villain to a lonely beach location where coal waste is being dumped into the sea. That was the tip site for Black Hall Colliery in County Durham – and both the pit and the dumping equipment has long since gone.

Over the thirty years since dumping stopped the coastline has recovered, and the whole length of that coastline is now promoted as a recreational area. The beaches of the north-east coast of England, once a metaphor for the dirty industrialism of Britain’s heavy industries – which Mike Hodges 1971 gangster film evoked – are clean.

Now there’s a new threat to this coastline, and the coast of the Firth of Forth in Scotland, from the latest iteration of the coal mining industry: ‘underground coal gasification‘ (UCG).

However, you might not see it called that.

In a move similar to the PR-inspired renaming of Windscale to Sellafield (as part of the Thatcher Government’s promotion of new nuclear plants), today you’re as likely to see UCG referred to as ‘deep gas winning’ – perhaps to avoid any similar reference the previous environmental disasters in its recent history.

Massive unconventional coal resources

For the last couple of years the environment movement has been busy with ‘fracking’ and its ecological woes. At the same time, quietly, and with no public discussion, the Government has been putting in place a system of licences and financial assistance to kick-start a UCG industry in Britain.

There’s an awful lot of coal underground – potentially trillions of tonnes under the North Sea – which are out of reach of conventional deep mining techniques. The ‘unconventional’ techniques of UCG allow access to this coal by drilling boreholes, gasifying the coal in-situ underground, and then bringing a mixture of gases – called ‘syngas‘ – to the surface.

Syngas is made up primarily of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane, and a whole range of other (often toxic) hydrocarbons and inorganic compounds, similar to the town gas produced in Britain from the early 1800s until the 1970s, which gave rise to some of the most problematic contaminated land sites in the country.

But the syngas from UCG isn’t suitable for supply via the gas mains of today. For that reason the gas would be burnt directly at the well head to produce heat and electricity, or it could be supplied to large industrial energy users.

Don’t confuse this process with integrated gasification, or the more polluting synthetic gas plants – UCG is something wholly different. Most fundamentally, while similar chemical process use steel pressure vessels to contain the reaction, UCG is essentially carried out in the open environment, albeit deep underground.

For that reason the toxic by-products of the process can move freely in the environment, back towards the surface, made buoyant by the heat liberated from the process.

UCG’s polluting past history

Irrespective of the risks, due to the potential resource which might be harvested, UCG is an attractive technology for economic pundits. What has confounded their optimism is that while various companies and governments have tried to get UCG working for over 80 years, most have ending in failure.

There are two small plants, in Uzbekistan and South Africa, but thus far they have not transparently report the impacts of their operations.

Trials in Britain during the 1950s, then the USA during the 1970s, then Europe during the 1990s, and most recently Australia during the 2000s, were abandoned – usually leaving behind a contaminated environment.

In the USA the trials caused varying levels of pollution and environmental contamination. The sites were declared ‘superfund’ zones to pay for their clean-up.

More recently all three test plants in Australia have shut due to concerns about environmental pollution, or the ability to safely decommission the site once operations ceased.

In Queensland the plant operators have been, or currently are in court facing prosecution for the pollution they have created. Linc Energy have also allegedly exposed workers to dangerous substances, and leaked documents claim irreversible damage to the environment.

Within the last few weeks it appears – following the discovery of high levels of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulphide (components of UCG syngas) – that the Linc Energy site may have polluted the ground with toxic gases over a wide area.

The Queensland state government has declared a ‘no dig’ exclusion zone over 320 square kilometres of land to protect the public from the risk of exposure to the gas.

Now UCG is set to return to Britain

The return of UCG was ushered in under New Labour, and has been expanded by the Con-Dem government. From the end of the 1990s the Department of Trade and Industry had commissioned various reports on UCG, and its potential in the UK (note – in that last link, figure 2.5 on page 19 has a map of the ‘best’ areas for UCG development).

While there have been various abortive start-up companies formed in recent years, many of whom were issued UCG licences, today there are two leading players in the UK UCG industry:

Cluff Natural Resources, founded by Algy Cluff, Conservative Party supporter and former owner of The Spectator, is probably the most well financed – with the most advanced development project.

Cluff has a number of existing UCG licences granted by the Coal Authority, and has had new licences or license extensions granted this week.

In February Cluff signed a memorandum of understanding with the oilfield services company Halliburton to develop their licences. And they recently had a new share issue to fund the environmental and planning consultants required to submit the development applications required for their project.

Cluff initially plans to develop a pilot plant in Fife, beneath the Firth of Forth – despite vocal local concerns. Although Scotland has a fracking moratorium, as I outlined in a previous Ecologist article this does not apply to UCG developments.

Five Quarter – mining the public purse

The other major player in Britain’s nascent UCG industry is Five Quarter Energy – who have UCG licences along the north east coast and the Firth of Forth, and in Liverpool Bay.

From public accountability perspective, I think Five Quarter are the more interesting of the two.

While Cluff are a traditional ‘big money’ company, cultivating Algy Cluff’s connections to the City, Five Quarter have used their connections to get both grants and loan guarantees from the UK and European governments to fund their work.

The company also has strong connections to Newcastle University – which, given their science backgrounds, might make you believe that those involved ‘should know better’.

For example, one of the company’s directors, Robert Hull, is a recently appointed member of Newcastle University’s Council – but perhaps more significantly he’s a former European Commission mandarin.

It may be that his experience is paying off for the company. In 2012 the Department for Business put Five Quarter forward for an EU regional growth fund award – for which they received £15 million in 2013.

The Treasury guarantees their risky loan

That’s not the most significant issue of finance, however.

Under the Infrastructure (Financial Assistance) Act 2012 the Government is going to issue up to £40 billion in loan guarantees for ‘significant infrastructure projects’.

A large wad of that ‘theoretical’ cash is supporting the construction of a new nuclear plant at Hinckley Point, but a proportion is going to other projects around Britain.

Certain projects under this scheme have ‘pre-qualified’. For example, Ineos, wannabe developer of shale gas in Scotland, is getting a loan guarantee to build an ethane importation facility. And just above Ineos on that list of the ‘pre-qualified’ projects you’ll find:

“Five-Quarter Energy plant to process unconventional gas extracted from below the North Sea to create low-cost energy for British manufacturing and new jobs in the north-east of England.”

The actual figure for the guarantee has not been disclosed.

Without any debate, the public are guaranteeing Five Quarter’s loans to build its pilot plant – which they had hoped to begin building last year.

Given that the main political parties are all promising, at varying levels, to continue austerity economics after next election, the ‘pork barrel’ politics of guaranteeing such risky loans will offend many.

Professional people who ‘should know better’

In climate campaign circles there is a growing concern about ‘frackademics‘ – academics who assist the work of energy companies to aid fossil fuel extraction.

Another of Five Quarter’s directors is Paul Younger. He was a professor at Newcastle University who moved to Glasgow University in 2012 – and latterly opposed their decision to divest the University’s funds from fossil fuel investments.

He was also on the Scottish Government’s panel looking at the safety of shale gas in 2014, he’s a non-executive director of Algy Cluff’s geothermal company, and most recently stated that the SNP “fabricated” the reasons to support a ban on fracking.

He also co-authored a recent paper critical of the Government’s ‘traffic light’ system – recommended by the Royal Society in their 2012 report – to control the earthquakes caused by fracking.

The other former Newcastle academic on Five Quarter’s board is Dermot Roddy. Before joining Newcastle University as a professor of energy he ran the (recently closed) Petroplus refinery on Teeside.

When asked about ‘other environmental impacts’ during an interview, the only thing he talked about was the need for a “carbon management plan” – he said nothing about UCG’s challenging history of environmental contamination.

The other director of note is Mark Oddy. He’s the energy director of one of Five Quarter’s significant shareholders, the Buccleuch Group – the finance and property company chaired by the Duke of Buccleuch – who is also the UK’s largest private landowner, with interests in fracking in Scotland.

Objecting to the public’s expressions of concern

The chairman and CEO of Five Quarter is Harry Bradbury, a former high-flying professor of geology at Yale University who went on to become a consultant for companies such as Booz Allen Hamilton and AT Kearney.

Bradbury recently hit out at a petition run by 38 Degrees, stating in an interview that

“The wording of this petition is misinformed and scientifically inaccurate. It is scientific nonsense, high on emotion and absent of facts … It is alarmist. The petition makes unsubstantiated claims which have no bearing on the objectives or programme for Five-Quarter.”

Bradbury may have been justifiably nervous at the time. Reportedly Five Quarter is negotiating with investors at the moment to secure the cash to start their project.

However, you cannot objectively look at the history of UCG around the world, in particular the last decade in Australia, and believe that the process presents negligible hazards. The very fact that the chemical reaction takes place unconfined, within the natural environment, creates an inherent risk of serious environmental pollution.

I should note, Cluff has stated their their project in the Firth of Forth poses a “negligible risk“.

Which leads me to pose the question, which is more hazardous?: the UCG process itself? Or highly qualified individuals who should know about these inherent risks, and yet chose to ignore them in public, and rail against those who sough to raise them as a point of public debate?

National Audit Office: ‘We do not have full confidence … ‘

The text of the 38 Degrees petition concludes, “We don’t want our coastlines to die”. That is a highly apposite observation in relation to this region’s coastline.

A 1979 investigation of the impacts of waste disposal along the north east coast – carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) – found the dumping of spoil and ash significantly damaged the local ecology of the North Sea. Additionally, much of that dumping took place unlawfully, over an area three times greater than had originally been permitted by the Government.

The truth behind the north east’s once dirty beaches? It wasn’t just harming the environment and local amenity – those in power were allowing it to do so outside of the law.

Today the Government is once more promoting an energy technology involving coal extraction which, if the results in the USA and Australia are a guide, risks contaminating the ecosystems of the North Sea once more. Yes, Five Quarter intend to bury the carbon. The question is, what will be the fate of all the other toxins that their process will generate?

And what is equally maddening is that the public are now, and as likely as not, will continue to pay for this to happen – and quite possibly to clean up the mess afterwards.

We have paid for Five Quarter’s grants through taxes. If, or given past experience, when Five Quarter’s test project goes wrong, a company with a small capitalisation is highly likely to liquidate itself. That being the case, the creditors will come calling for their money to the guarantor of Five Quarter’s loans – the UK Treasury.

A review of the infrastructure loans guarantee scheme was carried out for Parliament by the National Audit Office. Their recent report concluded that the Treasury does not consider the overall value for money of projects, and went on to state:

“We do not have full confidence in the reliability or completeness of market benchmarks used to measure actual risks to taxpayers.”

In the end, this is ecocide!

In reality though, what we’re talking about with UCG is some more visceral than mere financial risk – because ‘extreme energy’ isn’t just about excess pollution compared to our past energy sources.

Extreme energy requires extreme, high risk finance; and perhaps more importantly a political and regulatory process which turns a blind eye to those risks – as in the case of the historic dumping along the north east coast.

Like fracking, UCG is an ecocidal project: one which has clear potential for environmentally damaging outcomes. Yet those who should know better – for reasons of political, professional of financial expediency – recklessly choose to play down or ignore those hazards.

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental consultant, investigator, author and lecturer, and maintains the Free Range Activism Website (FRAW).

A fully referenced version of this article is available on FRAW.