Monthly Archives: May 2015

Coal and climate change: a death sentence for the Great Barrier Reef

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Back in 1999, I made an upsetting discovery.

By comparing the temperature tolerance of reef-building corals with the projected effects of rising carbon dioxide levels, I found that the oceans would soon grow too warm for corals to bear, meaning that coral-dominated systems like the Great Barrier Reef would disappear within 30-40 years.

Much as I tried to find a mistake in my reasoning and calculations, the numbers kept telling me that one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems would disappear in my lifetime.

As my study drew active discussion and debate, I desperately hoped that it was wrong and that the world had more time to solve the problem of climate change. Now, 16 years later, my conclusions have been confirmed and the message, if anything, have become even more pessimistic.

Sea surface temperatures have increased rapidly by 0.85C from 1880 to 2012. In tropical regions, these changes have driven the destabilisation of the ancient symbiosis between corals and the brown micro-algae (dinoflagellates) that live inside them – a relationship that has driven the success of coral reefs for hundreds of millions of years.

As temperatures rise, the dinoflagellates are damaged and are discarded, causing bleaching and leaving corals at increased risk of starvation, disease, and death. Meanwhile, ocean waters are acidifying at a rate that is unparallelled in at least the past 65 million years, potentially hampering the ability of coral reefs to maintain themselves through the all-important process of calcification.

The consequences of these changes threaten to ripple up through one of the most complex ecosystems on the planet, affecting thousands of organisms from sponges to seabirds.

In the process, they reduce the reef’s resilience to destructive events such as cyclones and non-climate-related human activities, fundamentally altering the food web and affecting opportunities for humans and industry.

Threat to the reef … and our hip pockets

It is important to appreciate that these concerns are not the mutterings of a few scientists. The threat of climate change to coral reefs like the Great Barrier Reef is part of a major scientific consensus set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as by federal government bodies such as the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

There is no credible alternative prognosis that has survived the peer-reviewed process of science.

Without wanting to sound too dramatic, the realisation that coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef are about to be thumped by rapidly warming oceans should have had us on our feet. Even if you don’t like or understand coral reefs, the dollars should have spoken to you.

If we lose Great Barrier Reef, we lose a large part of the A$5 billion to A$6 billion it earns from tourism and fisheries, and with that many of the 60,000-plus jobs that this amazing ecosystem provides to Australia. If we look after the reef and don’t destroy it for short-term gains, we stand to reap those benefits, year after year, far into the future.

There is growing international concern that the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef is in danger of being damaged irreparably. With 50% of the corals gone, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has been pressuring the Australian and Queensland governments to increase their commitment to reversing the deteriorating health of the Reef.

Later this year, the committee will decide whether to add the reef to its official ‘in danger’ list – a prospect that has already been extensively debated on The Conversation.

The situation has prompted the state and Federal governments to unveil a long-term sustainability plan for safeguarding the Great Barrier Reef until 2050, with input from reviews by the Australian Academy of Science and others.

While many elements of the plan are commendable it has also been criticised for its lack of firm, measurable targets, and adequate discussion of the implications of climate change.

Climate caution, or business as usual?

While the Reef 2050 plan does mention climate change as the predominant threat to the reef, it fails to link the problem to Australia’s plans to grow the coal trade, and to ship coal through enlarged ports on the Queensland coast. The reef plan only mentions coal in the context of local-scale impacts such as coal dust and port development.

The plan briefly mentions Australia’s intention to cut greenhouse emissions by 5% on 2000 levels by 2020. But there is no mention of the billions of tonnes (gigatonnes) of carbon dioxide that will be released when Queensland’s coal is dug up, sold, and burned by other countries.

The spectre of coal ships traversing the Great Barrier Reef couldn’t be more laden with symbolism. Coal extracted from the Queensland landscape, if burned along with other fossil fuel reserves, will ensure the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.

With only 500-800 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide left in the global carbon budget, beyond which we will push the climate into a dangerous state, the emissions from even a single mine can play a significant role.

The Carmichael mine in the Galilee basin, for example, will pump out 4.49 gigatonnes during its lifetime. Given that the world’s reserves of fossil fuels are estimated to be capable of generating 2,500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, business-as-usual is easily capable of destroying the reef (pushing the added carbon dioxide well beyond the 500-800-gigatonne budget), along with many other ecosystems too.

On the other hand, the negotiations over Australia’s greenhouse emissions are clearly separate from the deliberations of the World Heritage Committee. While it is almost certainly true that continual failure to act on climate change will mean the death of the Great Barrier Reef and every other coral reef, the question of how to curb emissions is obviously best handled by the United Nations’ climate negotiations framework, which is convening this year’s crucial Paris COP21 talks.

Yet one could also argue that Australia should stand up as a nation and help lead the world away from this current dangerous climate trajectory.

After all, if we know that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is extremely dangerous for the Great Barrier Reef, why would Australia deliberately put such a national treasure and economic powerhouse at risk by helping dig up even more carbon to burn from the Queensland landscape?

If Australia is truly committed to preserving the Great Barrier Reef, it faces a tough choice: re-examine the current plans for unrestricted coal exports, taking proper account and responsibility for the resulting greenhouse emissions, or watch the reef die.

Surely we as Australians have more foresight and chutzpah than to let that happen!

 

 

The Conversation

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is Director, Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. It is the first in our series examining in depth the various threats to the Great Barrier Reef.

 






Pressing ahead with Trident, only the UK hasn’t noticed: it’s time to get rid of nuclear weapons

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For the past three weeks the Nuclear Non Proliferation treaty (NPT) review conference has held at the UN in New York.

It the most important conference of the year so far, but has received minimal media coverage.

With just two days to go, let us hope the British media can at last give attention to this conference – and the political nuclear fallout that will arise from the belligerently bigoted determination of the nuclear weapons powers to retain their self-awarded right to proliferate nuclear weapons.

This is taking place through so-called ‘modernization’, while they simultaneously berate and bully all other states to refrain from seeking their own nuclear weapons.

South Africa was arguably the most robust in excoriating the self-appointed nuclear weapons bullies – UK, US, Russia, France and China – for their arrogant, insane and multi-myopic determination to retain their vainglorious status as international atomic pariahs.

‘Who gives the nuclear weapons States the right to use these weapons to annihilate all of us?’

As South Africa’s disarmament Ambassador Abdul Minty, told the NPT meeting on 13th May:

” … what does this then mean for the commitments made by many leaders to eliminate nuclear weapons? We should instead be saying that despite these calls, we have failed in our supreme responsibility to all of humanity, which all of us hold.

“If we seek to remove ‘under any circumstances’, then the question is why do those that have them still want to assert their right to use them under some circumstances.

“We therefore ask, under what circumstances do they still want to use them? What kind of threats do they want to counter? We are all part of the same world and so we have a right to ask these questions.

“The wider question then becomes, who gives the nuclear weapons States (NWS) the right to use these weapons to annihilate all of us – simply because their perceptions may be wrong, or they may be reacting to perceived threats, which do not exist to the magnitude that they assess?”

He later added: “Why is it that only the security of the five requires nuclear weapons, whilst no one else needs nuclear weapons for their security? If the truth is that no one’s security needs nuclear weapons, then all of our security is enhanced by getting rid of nuclear weapons.”

Kerry: ‘This defies all reason’

And here are the words of US Secretary of State John Kerry in his address to the 190-member state NPT Review Conference when it opened at the UN on 27th April.

“For over 45 years, the NPT has embodied our shared vision of a world without nuclear weapons …. it is only by seeking common ground and reinforcing shared interests that we will succeed in realizing a world free of nuclear dangers …

“When I was a young man, fresh out of college and newly minted in the Navy, I was sent to train at the Nuclear Chemical Biological warfare school. And I learned in graphic detail about what nuclear war would look like, about the damage that weapons of mass destruction can inflict.

“I learned about throw weights and circles of probable damage. And I learned about radiation – not just the immediate harm, but the long-term trauma that it can cause. And when I considered the huge number of nuclear weapons that we were living with back then – late 1960s – I was left with only one conclusion: This defies all reason.”

On the next day, the United States Government released new information about the size of the US nuclear weapons stockpile. as Hans M. Kristensen, a senior analyst for the respected Federation of American Scientists, explained in a recent blog posting.

US has dismantled 10,251 warheads over 20 years

Kerry updated the Department of Defense nuclear stockpile history by declaring that the stockpile as of September 2014 included 4,717 nuclear warheads, ie a reduction of 87 warheads since September 2013, when the DOD stockpile had included 4,804 warheads. This reveals a total reduction of about 500 warheads retired since President Obama took office in January 2009.

Kerry also revealed for the first time the official number of retired nuclear warheads in line for dismantlement. As of September 2014, the United States had approximately 2,500 additional warheads that have been retired – but which are still relatively intact and deployable – and awaiting dismantlement.

Moreover, Kerry also unveiled that the Obama administration “will seek to accelerate the dismantlement of retired nuclear warheads by 20%” adding “Over the last 20 years alone, we have dismantled 10,251 warheads.”

Big news! But the press are silent

Despite the US’s simultaneous nuclear weapons modernization programme, this adds up to an important unilateral diplomatic gesture by Britain’s closest political ally – which also provides the UK with its nuclear missiles, warhead designs and calibrations, and nuclear safety R&D support for Trident.

It is a very important piece of international news. But not one word of it has appeared in the British print or broadcast media, as a range of key political issues has been deliberated and debated in the 2015 General Election Campaign. Only Twitter has done this diplomatic development justice.

What does that say about the news values of the British media, which instead has swamped viewers, listeners and readers with hours and pages of political trivia and tittle tattle for weeks?

The issue of Trident has only been discussed in the media as part of the mischief-making over whether the Scottish National Party (SNP), which opposes Trident and wants it dismantled, would cosy-up to Labour in a post-election political pact.

Publicly, the main political (biggest) parties have given the impression they all want to replace Trident with a vastly expensive nuclear weapon of mass destruction: it would cost £100 billion over its operational lifetime.

Labour’s departed leader Ed Miliband asserted in the BBC Question Time TV leaders’ debate with the audience in Leeds “I’m not going to give in to SNP demands around Trident!”

Despite well-informed dissent, the Trident steamroller rolls on

Later that night, former Conservative Defence Secretary Michael Portillo slammed the notion of Trident replacement, when appearing on BBC’s This Week asserting:

“A former defence secretary and some Generals [this week] wrote a letter demanding the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons programme. You’re probably familiar with these men who are worried about their own virility and buy large sports cars, and this I think is a case in point.

“Our independent nuclear deterrent is not independent and doesn’t constitute a deterrent against anybody that we regard as an enemy. It is a waste of money and it is a diversion of funds that might otherwise be spent on perfectly useful and usable weapons and troops. But some people have not caught up with this reality.”

Moreover, in a Parliamentary debate on 20 January on the Trident WMD programme the current Tory defence secretary  Michael Fallon told MPs: “we also share the vision of a world that is without nuclear weapons, achieved through multilateral disarmament.”

Now surely if we are remotely serious about nuclear disarmament, multilateral or otherwise, the time to begin the process is now – before we commit countless billions to Trident replacement?

So long as BAE shares are on the up, who cares?

So why have these issues been ignored by the mainstream media? In whose interests is this, beyond a smooth run to making huge profits from the taxpayer by arms sales company BAE Systems, who would build the replacement submarines for Trident?

True to form, the day after the Tory the victory, BAE’s share value soared. For the City, immoral nuclear weapons are massive profit makers.

The one story that has played out in the media this week are the revelations by whistle-blowing nuclear submariner William McNeilly that the security of the UK’s Trident missiles is non-existent, that the equipment does not work, and that the whole enterprise represents major existential threat to the UK.

Still newspaper are reuctant to draw the obvious conclusion – that the UK’s entire nuclear weapons system should be closed down as soon as practically possible. But so long as shareholders are getting rich, why spoil the party?

 

 

Dr David Lowry is former director of the European Proliferation Information Centre (EPIC).

 






Pressing ahead with Trident, only the UK hasn’t noticed: it’s time to get rid of nuclear weapons

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For the past three weeks the Nuclear Non Proliferation treaty (NPT) review conference has held at the UN in New York.

It the most important conference of the year so far, but has received minimal media coverage.

With just two days to go, let us hope the British media can at last give attention to this conference – and the political nuclear fallout that will arise from the belligerently bigoted determination of the nuclear weapons powers to retain their self-awarded right to proliferate nuclear weapons.

This is taking place through so-called ‘modernization’, while they simultaneously berate and bully all other states to refrain from seeking their own nuclear weapons.

South Africa was arguably the most robust in excoriating the self-appointed nuclear weapons bullies – UK, US, Russia, France and China – for their arrogant, insane and multi-myopic determination to retain their vainglorious status as international atomic pariahs.

‘Who gives the nuclear weapons States the right to use these weapons to annihilate all of us?’

As South Africa’s disarmament Ambassador Abdul Minty, told the NPT meeting on 13th May:

” … what does this then mean for the commitments made by many leaders to eliminate nuclear weapons? We should instead be saying that despite these calls, we have failed in our supreme responsibility to all of humanity, which all of us hold.

“If we seek to remove ‘under any circumstances’, then the question is why do those that have them still want to assert their right to use them under some circumstances.

“We therefore ask, under what circumstances do they still want to use them? What kind of threats do they want to counter? We are all part of the same world and so we have a right to ask these questions.

“The wider question then becomes, who gives the nuclear weapons States (NWS) the right to use these weapons to annihilate all of us – simply because their perceptions may be wrong, or they may be reacting to perceived threats, which do not exist to the magnitude that they assess?”

He later added: “Why is it that only the security of the five requires nuclear weapons, whilst no one else needs nuclear weapons for their security? If the truth is that no one’s security needs nuclear weapons, then all of our security is enhanced by getting rid of nuclear weapons.”

Kerry: ‘This defies all reason’

And here are the words of US Secretary of State John Kerry in his address to the 190-member state NPT Review Conference when it opened at the UN on 27th April.

“For over 45 years, the NPT has embodied our shared vision of a world without nuclear weapons …. it is only by seeking common ground and reinforcing shared interests that we will succeed in realizing a world free of nuclear dangers …

“When I was a young man, fresh out of college and newly minted in the Navy, I was sent to train at the Nuclear Chemical Biological warfare school. And I learned in graphic detail about what nuclear war would look like, about the damage that weapons of mass destruction can inflict.

“I learned about throw weights and circles of probable damage. And I learned about radiation – not just the immediate harm, but the long-term trauma that it can cause. And when I considered the huge number of nuclear weapons that we were living with back then – late 1960s – I was left with only one conclusion: This defies all reason.”

On the next day, the United States Government released new information about the size of the US nuclear weapons stockpile. as Hans M. Kristensen, a senior analyst for the respected Federation of American Scientists, explained in a recent blog posting.

US has dismantled 10,251 warheads over 20 years

Kerry updated the Department of Defense nuclear stockpile history by declaring that the stockpile as of September 2014 included 4,717 nuclear warheads, ie a reduction of 87 warheads since September 2013, when the DOD stockpile had included 4,804 warheads. This reveals a total reduction of about 500 warheads retired since President Obama took office in January 2009.

Kerry also revealed for the first time the official number of retired nuclear warheads in line for dismantlement. As of September 2014, the United States had approximately 2,500 additional warheads that have been retired – but which are still relatively intact and deployable – and awaiting dismantlement.

Moreover, Kerry also unveiled that the Obama administration “will seek to accelerate the dismantlement of retired nuclear warheads by 20%” adding “Over the last 20 years alone, we have dismantled 10,251 warheads.”

Big news! But the press are silent

Despite the US’s simultaneous nuclear weapons modernization programme, this adds up to an important unilateral diplomatic gesture by Britain’s closest political ally – which also provides the UK with its nuclear missiles, warhead designs and calibrations, and nuclear safety R&D support for Trident.

It is a very important piece of international news. But not one word of it has appeared in the British print or broadcast media, as a range of key political issues has been deliberated and debated in the 2015 General Election Campaign. Only Twitter has done this diplomatic development justice.

What does that say about the news values of the British media, which instead has swamped viewers, listeners and readers with hours and pages of political trivia and tittle tattle for weeks?

The issue of Trident has only been discussed in the media as part of the mischief-making over whether the Scottish National Party (SNP), which opposes Trident and wants it dismantled, would cosy-up to Labour in a post-election political pact.

Publicly, the main political (biggest) parties have given the impression they all want to replace Trident with a vastly expensive nuclear weapon of mass destruction: it would cost £100 billion over its operational lifetime.

Labour’s departed leader Ed Miliband asserted in the BBC Question Time TV leaders’ debate with the audience in Leeds “I’m not going to give in to SNP demands around Trident!”

Despite well-informed dissent, the Trident steamroller rolls on

Later that night, former Conservative Defence Secretary Michael Portillo slammed the notion of Trident replacement, when appearing on BBC’s This Week asserting:

“A former defence secretary and some Generals [this week] wrote a letter demanding the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons programme. You’re probably familiar with these men who are worried about their own virility and buy large sports cars, and this I think is a case in point.

“Our independent nuclear deterrent is not independent and doesn’t constitute a deterrent against anybody that we regard as an enemy. It is a waste of money and it is a diversion of funds that might otherwise be spent on perfectly useful and usable weapons and troops. But some people have not caught up with this reality.”

Moreover, in a Parliamentary debate on 20 January on the Trident WMD programme the current Tory defence secretary  Michael Fallon told MPs: “we also share the vision of a world that is without nuclear weapons, achieved through multilateral disarmament.”

Now surely if we are remotely serious about nuclear disarmament, multilateral or otherwise, the time to begin the process is now – before we commit countless billions to Trident replacement?

So long as BAE shares are on the up, who cares?

So why have these issues been ignored by the mainstream media? In whose interests is this, beyond a smooth run to making huge profits from the taxpayer by arms sales company BAE Systems, who would build the replacement submarines for Trident?

True to form, the day after the Tory the victory, BAE’s share value soared. For the City, immoral nuclear weapons are massive profit makers.

The one story that has played out in the media this week are the revelations by whistle-blowing nuclear submariner William McNeilly that the security of the UK’s Trident missiles is non-existent, that the equipment does not work, and that the whole enterprise represents major existential threat to the UK.

Still newspaper are reuctant to draw the obvious conclusion – that the UK’s entire nuclear weapons system should be closed down as soon as practically possible. But so long as shareholders are getting rich, why spoil the party?

 

 

Dr David Lowry is former director of the European Proliferation Information Centre (EPIC).

 






India: unlawful Pepsi plant wins police protection

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In an extraordinary development, PepsiCo’s bottling plant in India has sought – and will receive – police protection for water being trucked in to the disputed plant located in a water-stressed area.

The Pepsi beverage manufacturing plant will also receive police protection for vehicles leaving the factory with finished Pepsi products.

The bottling plant, located in the village of Suriyur in the state of Tamil Nadu in south India, and has been the target of a community-led campaign to shut down the plant.

Local residents and farmers claim there have been water shortages of increasing severity in the area ever since the plant began operations in 2011.

The plant is run by an Indian company, L.A. Bottlers, and operates under a contract with the US-based PepsiCo to manufacture only Pepsi beverages in the plant.

Operating illegally since March 2014

L.A. Bottlers has been in trouble since early last year, as its state Pollution Control Board’s permit for ground water abstraction expired on 31st March 2014 and has not been renewed.

The company also lacks the required land conversion permit which would allow it to operate as an industry in an agricultural area.

The community stepped up its protests against the bottling plant earlier this year, and 47 people were arrested on 26th January India’s Republic Day, during a protest in the town of Tiruchirapalli (Trichy), the district’s headquarters.

The next day L.A. Bottlers applied for an order for police protection from the Madras High Court. The order was approved and delivered to the panchayat (village council) president on 7th May.

On January 29, local authorities responded to the growing protests by sealing the bore wells which provided the plant with groundwater to meet all its production needs, and the bottling plant has not operated since.

But now L.A. Bottlers is seeking to resume production, trucking in water from outside the immediate area. The company also has a case pending before the High Court where it is appealing to be allowed to operate – in spite of its failure to obtain the two permits required by law.

Sharp drops in groundwater levels blamed on Pepsi plant

But local leaders have resolved not to ever allow the company to recommence its operations. Farmers in the area have experienced sharp drops in groundwater levels, dried-up wells, extra expenditures to deepen existing wells and loss of income as a result of reduced crop production due to water shortages.

“Pepsi’s bottling plant has drained the water away from the farmers in the area, and there is a lot of suffering as a result”, said Vinothraj Seshan of Thanneer Iyakkam, a group at the forefront of the protests.

“It is outrageous that a private company like Pepsi will receive police protection to bring in water for profit while depriving the surrounding community of water, which is essential to sustain life. If anything, it is the public that deserves protection from such a destructive bottling company”, he continued.

The campaign has approached various state government authorizes, including the state Pollution Control Board, to reject L.A. Bottlers’ licence applications in Suriyur because of the serious water shortages in the area.

“If you feel you need police protection to bring in water and to protect your products in a water-stressed area, clearly you are not welcome, and it is better to shut down and leave”, said Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center, an international campaigning group working with the communities in Suriyur to close the bottling plant.

“It is incumbent upon PepsiCo to ensure that all its franchisees and co-packers – who earn profits for PepsiCo’s shareholders – must also adhere to all the rules and regulations of the land. PepsiCo has failed in this regard”

To assuage the growing criticism of beverage companies in India operating in water stressed areas, PepsiCo has made outrageous claims that it has a “positive water balance” in India, a claim strongly disputed by the India Resource Center because the claim is unfounded after scrutiny.

The campaign is calling on New York based PepsiCo to immediately cancel its contract with L.A. Bottlers.

 

 

More information: IndiaResource.org

 

 






Stopping the corporate power grab – it’s not all just about TTIP

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The corporate drive for free trade is once more facing critical public scrutiny, and in the rush to oppose TTIP we mustn’t lose sight of the broader context in which the deal is being negotiated.

Europe has finally woken up. Public opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has put trade agreements back on the political agenda.

At least as citizens of the world’s most powerful trade bloc, we can fight TTIP in the knowledge that our politicians have the power to stop it.

But in numerous African, Asian and Latin American countries, dozens of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are being negotiated with a much less equal playing field, and less opportunity for the public to stop the corporate power grab.

Powerful states ‘divide and rule’ the weak to bypass WTO

Sold on the premise that they incentivise much-needed investment into poorer countries, BITs actually give foreign (often western) investors huge new powers over the economies of those countries, forcing liberalisation onto them in the process.

They allow richer countries to bypass the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which, despite a serious lack of democratic accountability, still requires the consent of member states. This allows southern countries to club together to defeat proposals. That’s why talks at the WTO have been effectively stalled since the late 1990s.

By negotiating separate deals with individual countries, rich countries have managed to get some of what they want by picking off countries one by one. So, since the 1990s, deals such as the UK-Colombia BIT, or the myriad EU Economic Partnership Agreements with African countries, have been multiplying at a dizzying rate.

Back in 1991, there were just 400 BITs in force worldwide, now there are over 2,500. And unlike the EU negotiations over TTIP, southern countries struggle to negotiate any wiggle room for themselves within the one-size-fits-all prescription of blanket liberalisation.

Corporate courts provide one-way justice

Take the infamous investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system that allows companies to take countries to arbitration for making legitimate policy decisions that happen to reduce corporate profits.

So far, much of the debate around these ‘corporate courts’ has concentrated on the possible consequences here in the EU if TTIP is concluded. But these corporate courts are already allowing corporations to hound less powerful countries for taking action to protect their people.

Argentina is one of the most targeted counties, being sued at least 16 times under the US-Argentina Bilateral Investment Treaty. Most of these cases involve energy companies trying to claim ‘compensation’ as a result of Argentina’s decision to freeze electricity and water prices during the financial collapse of 2001-2.

The US has not been sued once under the same treaty. Ecuador has a similar treaty with the US and has been sued 20 times under it.

Bilateral treaties have also been used by the company Veolia to try and sue Egypt for introducing a minimum wage (France-Egypt BIT) and by Philip Morris to stop Uruguay introducing health warning on cigarette packaging (Uruguay-Switzerland BIT).

It’s true that multilateral treaties can also include this ‘corporate court’ system – for example, the Energy Charter Treaty or the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the US. But bilateral treaties make up the vast majority of ISDS cases.

Imposing harsh regimes on services and intellectual property

ISDS isn’t the only problem. These deals often involve southern countries recognising harsher intellectual property regimes designed to help big pharmaceutical corporations. They also tend to impose greater market liberalisation, affording access to multinational corporations but yielding few benefits in return.

In theory, both sides have equal rights, so a Tanzanian company will have the same right to access the EU market as the EU multinational does to access the Tanzanian market. But how many Tanzanian investors are there in the UK?

Things are also hotting up on the multilateral front too. Negotiations on the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) have been steadily progressing without any public scrutiny. TiSA could be even more damaging than TTIP for public services in the 23 countries (including the EU as one country) that are taking part. It is likely to make it all but impossible for countries to bring privatised services back under public control.

And then there’s TTIP’s Asian cousin, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which poses many of the same threats that TTIP does to Europe. The TPP is a key reason that Democrats have been challenging President Obama’s ‘fast track’ trade negotiating authority.

Resistance is growing

There is a fightback under way. Ecuador is currently conducting the world’s first ‘trade audit’, examining the impact of bilateral trade agreements on its sovereignty, people and environment, with a view to cancelling agreements that have been detrimental

South Africa is also reviewing some trade agreements, as is Indonesia. Brazil and India still refuse to sign up to ISDS clauses in their trade deals. Australia is resisting the ISDS clauses in the TPP, as revealed by Wikileaks.

Beating TTIP will give a huge boost to these international campaigns, but we also need to be prepared to offer solidarity to other countries. Currently, the UK is one of the world’s most prolific users of BITs, with 104 deals in force globally.

The UK government is currently negotiating a handful of BITs, including one with Ethiopia which could give UK corporations more power over Ethiopia’s agricultural sector.

Currently the Ethiopian Government is evicting indigenous tribes from their land to make way for huge agricultural projects, for example in the Omo Valley – where an area several times greater than France is being stolen for corporate farming. Any backtracking on the policy could result in the country being sued by investors.

Fifteen years ago, protests against the WTO talks were central to the so-called anti-globalisation movement. Those talks were correctly seen as a corporate power grab.

The corporations are back again. It’s time for us to join up globally again and take to the streets to defeat them.

 

 

Alex Scrivener is policy officer at Global Justice Now.

This article was taken from the second issue of Global Justice Now’s Ninety Nine magazine. Some additional reporting by The Ecologist.

 

 






As Chipotle goes GMO-free, Monsanto’s worst fear is coming true

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The decision of the Chipotle restaurant chain to make its product lines GMO-free is not most people’s idea of a world-historic event. Especially since Chipotle, by US standards, is not a huge operation.

A clear sign that the move is significant, however, is that Chipotle’s decision was met with a tidal-wave of establishment media abuse.

Despite the company’s clear and rational explanation of its move, Chipotle has been called irresponsible, anti-science, irrational, and much more by the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and many others.

A business deciding to give consumers what they want was surely never so contentious.

The media lynching of Chipotle has an explanation that is important to the future of GMOs. The cause of it is that there has long been an incipient crack in the solid public front that the food industry has presented on the GMO issue.

GMOs are essential to agrobusiness – but not to consumer-facing brands

The crack originates from the fact that while agribusiness sees GMOs as central to their business future, the brand-oriented and customer-sensitive ends of the food supply chain do not.

The brands who sell to the public, such as Nestle, Coca-Cola, Kraft, etc, are therefore much less committed to GMOs. They have gone along with their use, probably because they wish to maintain good relations with agribusiness, who are their allies and their suppliers. Possibly also they see a potential for novel products in a GMO future.

However, over the last five years, as the reputation of GMOs has come under increasing pressure in the US, the cost to food brands of ignoring the growing consumer demand for GMO-free products has increased. They might not say so in public, but the sellers of top brands have little incentive to take the flack for selling GMOs.

From this perspective, the significance of the Chipotle move becomes clear. If Chipotle can gain market share and prestige, or charge higher prices, from selling non-GMO products and give (especially young) consumers what they want, it puts traditional vendors of fast and processed food products in an invidious position.

Who’s next? Kraft? MacDonalds?

Kraft and MacDonalds, and their traditional rivals can hardly be left on the sidelines selling outmoded products to a shrinking market. They will not last long. MacDonald’s already appears to be in trouble, and it too sees the solution as moving to more up-market and healthier products.

For these much bigger players, a race to match Chipotle and get GMOs out of their product lines, is a strong possibility. That may not be so easy, in the short term, but for agribusiness titans who have backed GMOs, like Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta; a race to be GMO-free is the ultimate nightmare scenario.

Until Chipotle’s announcement, such considerations were all behind the scenes. But all of a sudden this split has spilled out into the food media.

On 8th May NY-based Hain Celestial, which describes itself as “a leading natural and organic food and personal care products company in North America and Europe” told The Food Navigator: “We sell organic products … gluten-free products and … natural products. [But] where the big, big demand is, is GMO-free … “

He added that 99% of the company’s products already contain no GMOs, 500 have been formally verified as GMO-free, another 650 are undergoing verification, and many more are in the pipeline.

According to the article, unlike Heinz, Kraft, and many others, Hain Celestial is actively seeking to meet this demand. Within the food industry, important decisions, for and against GMOs, are taking place.

Significantly, Chipotle is also working to take its GMO-free policy a stage further by sourcing only beef from pure grass-fed herds – and thus avoiding the GMO corn and soya based animal feeds that most cattle are fattened up on.

Herbicide residues – why the pressure to remove GMOs will grow

The other factor in all this turmoil is that the GMO technology wheel has not stopped turning. New GMO products are coming on stream that will likely make crop biotechnology even less popular than it is now. This will further ramp up the pressure on brands and stores to go GMO-free. There are several contributory factors.

The first issue follows from the recent US approvals of GMO crops resistant to the herbicides 2,4-D and Dicamba. These traits are billed as replacements for Roundup-resistant traits whose effectiveness has declined due to the spread of weeds resistant to Roundup (Glyphosate).

The causes of the problem, however, lie in the technology itself. The introduction of Roundup-resistant traits in corn and soybeans led to increasing Roundup use by farmers (Benbrook 2012).

Increasing Roundup use led to weed resistance, which led to further Roundup use, as farmers increased applications and dosages. This translated into escalated ecological damage and increasing residue levels in food. Roundup is now found in GMO soybeans intended for food use at levels that even Monsanto used to call “extreme“ (Bøhn et al. 2014).

The two new herbicide-resistance traits are set to recapitulate this same story of increasing agrochemical use. But they will also amplify it significantly.

A trajectory of ever-more herbicide on GMO crops

The specifics are worth considering. First, the spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba on the newer herbicide-resistant crops will not eliminate the need for Roundup, whose use will not decline (see Figure).

That is because, unlike Roundup, neither 2,4-D nor Dicamba are broad-spectrum herbicides. They will have to be sprayed together with Roundup, or with each other (or all of them together) to kill all weeds. This vital fact has not been widely appreciated.

Confirmation comes from the companies themselves. Monsanto is stacking (i.e. combining) Dicamba resistance with Roundup resistance in its Xtend crops and Dow is stacking 2,4-D resistance with Roundup resistance in its Enlist range. Notably, resistance to other herbicides, such as glufosinate, are being stacked in all these GMO crops too.

The second issue is that the combined spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba and Roundup, will only temporarily ease the weed resistance issues faced by farmers. In the medium and longer terms, they will compound the problems. That is because new herbicide-resistant weeds will surely evolve.

In fact, Dicamba-resistant and 2,4-D-resistant weeds already exist. Their spread, and the evolution of new ones, can be guaranteed (Mortensen et al 2012). This will bring greater profits for herbicide manufacturers, but it will also bring greater PR problems for GMOs and the food industry.

GMO soybeans and corn will likely soon have “extreme levels” of at least three different herbicides, all of them with dubious safety records (Schinasi and Leon 2014).

The first time round, Monsanto and Syngenta’s PR snow-jobs successfully obscured this, not just from the general public, but even within agronomy. But it is unlikely they will be able to do so a second time. 2,4-D and Dicamba-resistant GMOs are thus a PR disaster waiting to happen.

A pipeline full of problems: risk and perception

The longer term problem for GMOs is that, despite extravagant claims, their product pipeline is not bulging with promising ideas. Mostly, it is more of the same: herbicide resistance and insect resistance.

The most revolutionary and innovative part of that pipeline is a technology and not a trait. Many products in the GMO pipeline are made using RNA interference technologies that rely on double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs).

dsRNA is a technology with two problems. One is that products made with it (such as the ‘Arctic’ apple, the ‘Innate’ potato, and Monsanto’s ‘Vistive Gold’ soybeans) are unproven in the field. Like its vanguard, a Brazilian virus-resistant bean, they may never work under actual farming conditions.

But if they do work, there is a clear problem with their safety which is explained in detail here (PDF).

In outline, the problem is this: the long dsRNA molecules needed for RNA interference were rejected long ago as being too hazardous for routine medical use (Anonymous, 1969). The scientific literature even calls them “toxins”, as in a 1969 paper in Nature by Absher & Stinebring (see references).

As further evidence of this, long dsRNAs are now used in medicine to cause autoimmune disorders in mice, in order to study these disorders (Okada et al 2005).

The Absher and Stinebring paper comes from a body of research built up many years ago, but its essential findings have been confirmed and extended by more modern research. We now know why dsRNAs cause harm.

They trigger destructive anti-viral defence pathways in mammals and other vertebrates and there is a field of specialist research devoted to showing precisely how this damages individual cells, whole tissues, and results in auto-immune disease in mice (Karpala et al. 2005).

The conclusion therefore, is that dsRNAs that are apparently indistinguishable from those produced in, for example, the Arctic apple and Monsanto’s Vistive Gold Soybean, have strong negative effects on vertebrate animals (but not plants). These vertebrate effects are found even at low doses.

Have they forgotten that humans are ‘vertebrate animals’?

Consumers are vertebrate animals. They may not appreciate the thought that their healthy fats and forever apples also contain proven toxins. And on a business front, consumer brands will not relish defending dsRNA technology once they understand the reality. They may not wish to find themselves defending the indefensible.

The bottom line is this. Either dsRNAs will sicken or kill people, or, they will give opponents of biotechnology plenty of ammunition. The scientific evidence, as it currently stands, suggests they will do both. dsRNAs, therefore, are a potentially huge liability.

The last pipeline problem stems from the first two. The agbiotech industry has long held out the prospect of ‘consumer benefits’ from GMOs. Consumer benefits (in the case of food) are most likely to be health benefits (improved nutrition, altered fat composition, etc).

The problem is that the demographic of health-conscious consumers no doubt overlaps significantly with the demographic of those most wary of GMOs. Show a consumer a ‘healthy GMO’ and they are likely to show you an oxymoron.

The likely health market in the US for customers willing to pay more for a GMO has probably evaporated in the last few years as GMOs have become a hot public issue.

The end-game for GMOs?

The traditional chemical industry approach to such a problem is a familiar repertoire of intimidation and public relations. Fifty years ago, the chemical industry outwitted and outmanoeuvered environmentalists after the death of Rachel Carson (see the books Toxic Sludge is Good for You and Trust Us We’re Experts).

But that was before email, open access scientific publication, and the internet. Monsanto and its allies have steadily lost ground in a world of peer-to-peer communication. GMOs have become a liability, despite their best efforts.

The historic situation is this: in any country, public acceptance of GMOs has always been based on lack of awareness of their existence. Once that ignorance evaporates and the scientific and social realities start to be discussed, ignorance cannot be reinstated. From then on the situation moves into a different, and much more difficult phase for the defenders of GMOs.

Nevertheless, in the US, those defenders have not yet given up. Anyone who keeps up with GMOs in the media knows that the public is being subjected to an unrelenting and concerted global blitzkrieg.

Pro-GMO advocates and paid-for journalists, presumably financed by the life-science industry, sometimes fronted by non-profits such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are being given acres of prominent space to make their case.

Liberal media outlets such as the New York Times, the National Geographic, the New Yorker, Grist magazine, the Observer newspaper, and any others who will have them (which is most) have been deployed to spread its memes. Cornell University has meanwhile received a $5.6 million grant by the Gates Foundation to “depolarize” negative GMO publicity.

The anti-GMO movement is only growing in strength and numbers

But so far there is little sign that the growth of anti-GMO sentiment in Monsanto’s home (US) market can be halted. The decision by Chipotle is certainly not an indication of faith that it can.

For Monsanto and GMOs the situation suddenly looks ominous. Chipotle may well represent the beginnings of a market swing of historic proportions. GMOs may be relegated to cattle-feed status, or even oblivion, in the USA. And if GMOs fail in the US, they are likely to fail elsewhere.

GMO roll-outs in other countries have relied on three things: the deep pockets of agribusinesses based in the United States, their political connections, and the notion that GMOs represent ‘progress’.

If those three disappear in the United States, the power to force open foreign markets will disappear too. The GMO era might suddenly be over.

 

 

Dr Jonathan Latham is editor of Independent Science News.

This article was originally published in Independent Science News under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

Endnote: The report by Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson on RNA interference and dsRNAs in GMO crops is downloadable from here. Accompanying Tables are here.

References

Anonymous (1969) Interferon inducers with side effects. Nature 223: 666-667.

Bøhn, T., Cuhra, M., Traavik, T., Sanden, M., Fagan, J. and Primicerio, R. 2014. Compositional differences in soybeans on the market: Glyphosate accumulates in Roundup Ready GM soybeans. Food Chemistry 153: 207-215.

Absher M., and Stinebring W. (1969) Toxic properties of a synthetic double-stranded RNA. Nature 223: 715-717. Not available online.

Okada C., Akbar S.M.F., Horiike N., and Onji M. (2005) Early development of primary biliary cirrhosis in female C57BL/6 mice because of poly I:C administration. Liver International 25: 595-603.

Karpala A.J., Doran T.J., and Bean A.G.D. (2005) Immune responses to dsRNA: Implications for gene silencing technologies. Immunology and cell biology 83: 211-216.

Mortensen, David A., J. Franklin Egan, Bruce D. Maxwell, Matthew R. Ryan and Richard G. Smith (2012) Navigating a Critical Juncture for Sustainable Weed Management. BioScience 62: 75-84.

Schinasi L and Maria E. Leon ME (2014) Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and Occupational Exposure to Agricultural Pesticide Chemical Groups and Active Ingredients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 11: 4449-4527.

 






Accidents, waste and weapons: nuclear power isn’t worth the risks

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The case for expanding nuclear energy is based on myths about its status, greenhouse gas emissions, proliferation, accidents, wastes and economics. Let’s take each in turn.

Status

Nuclear is not, and has never been, a major energy force. Global annual nuclear energy generation peaked in 2006. Meanwhile its percentage contribution to global electricity generation has declined from its historic peak in 1993 of 17% to about 10% today.

The only countries with significant growth are China, India, Russia and South Korea. In the rest of the world, retirements of ageing reactors are likely to outweigh new builds.

Greenhouse emissions

Nuclear advocates are fond of claiming that nuclear energy has negligible greenhouse gas emissions and hence must play an important role in mitigating climate change. However, the greenhouse case for new nuclear power stations is flawed.

In a study published in 2008, nuclear physicist and nuclear energy supporter Manfred Lenzen compared life-cycle emissions from several types of power station.

For nuclear energy based on mining high-grade uranium ore, he found average emissions of 60 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity generation, compared with 10-20 g per kWh for wind and 500-600 g per kWh for gas. Now comes the part that most nuclear proponents try to ignore.

The world has, at most, a few decades of high-grade uranium ore reserves left. As ore grades inevitably decline, more diesel fuel is needed to mine and mill the uranium, and so the resulting CO2 emissions rise.

Lenzen calculated the life-cycle emissions of a nuclear power station running on low-grade uranium ore to be 131 g per kWh. This is unacceptable in terms of climate science, especially given that Lenzen’s assumptions favoured nuclear energy.

Mining in remote locations will be one of the last industries to transition to low-carbon fuels, so new nuclear reactors will inevitably become significant greenhouse gas emitters over their lifetimes.

The next generation of reactors

Some generation IV reactors are potentially lower in life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, but these are not yet commercially available.

All are likely to be even more expensive than conventional reactors. The fast breeder reactor is even more complex, dangerous, expensive and conducive to weapons proliferation than conventional nuclear reactors. Despite several decades of expensive pilot and demonstration plants, fast breeders have not been successfully commercialised, and may never be.

Advocates try to justify the integral fast reactor and the thorium reactor on the fallacious grounds that they cannot be used to produce nuclear weapons explosives. However, if not operated according to the rules, the integral fast reactor can actually make it easier to extract weapons-grade plutonium and hence make bombs.

To be useful as a nuclear fuel, thorium must first be converted to uranium-233, which can be fissioned either in a nuclear reactor or an atomic bomb, as the United States has demonstrated.

The small modular reactor (SMR) has been a dream of the nuclear industry for decades, amid hopes that future mass production could make its electricity cheaper than from existing large reactors.

However, offsetting this is the economy of scale of large reactors. The Union of Concerned Scientists, which is not anti-nuclear, has serious safety and security concerns about SMRs.

Weapons proliferation

Nuclear proponents dismiss the danger that civil nuclear energy will drive the development of nuclear weapons, by saying that the nuclear industry is now under strong international oversight.

This ignores the harsh reality that India, Pakistan, North Korea and South Africa have all used civil nuclear energy to help build their nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Iran, Libya, South Korea and Taiwan all used civil nuclear energy to cloak their commencement of nuclear weapons programs, although fortunately all except Iran have now discontinued them.

Thus nuclear energy contributes to the number of countries with nuclear weapons, or the capacity to build them, and hence increases the probability of nuclear war.

Accidents

Analyses of the damage done by major nuclear accidents, such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, should properly consider not just the short-term deaths from acute radiation syndrome, but also the cancers that appear over the ensuring decades, and which represent the major contribution to death and disabilities from these incidents.

Estimates of future Chernobyl deaths by reputable impartial authors range from 16,000 by the International Centre for Research on Cancer, to 93,000 by an international group of medical researchers.

Four years after Fukushima, the plant is still leaking radiation, while a reported 120,000 people remain displaced and Japanese taxpayers face a bill that could run to hundreds of billions of dollars.

Economics

Proponents often cherry-pick highly optimistic projections of the future cost of nuclear energy. However, past and present experience suggests that such projections have little basis in reality.

Apart from the Generation IV reactors, which are not commercially available and hence cannot be costed credibly, all of the much-touted current (Generation III+) power reactors under construction (none is operating) are behind schedule and over budget.

In Finland, Olkiluoto-3 is nearly a decade behind schedule and nearly three times its budgeted cost; in France, Flamanville-3 is five years behind schedule and double budgeted cost; in Georgia, USA, Vogtle is three years behind schedule and about US$700 million over budget.

Britain’s proposed Hinkley Point C will receive a guaranteed inflation-linked price for electricity over 35 years, starting at about £92.50 per megawatt hour ($144) – double the typical wholesale price of electricity in the UK.

It will also receive a loan guarantee of about £10 billion ($155 billion) and insurance backed by the British taxpayer. It’s doubtful whether any nuclear power station has ever been built without huge subsidies.

Nuclear waste vs renewable energy

High-level nuclear wastes will have to be safeguarded for 100,000 years or more, far exceeding the lifetime of any human institution.

Meanwhile, Denmark is moving to 100% renewable electricity by 2035, and Germany to at least 80% by 2050. Two German states are already at 100% net renewable energy and South Australia is nudging 40%.

In Australia, hourly computer simulations of the National Electricity Market suggest that it too could be operated on 100% renewables, purely by scaling up commercially available technologies.

The variability of wind and solar power can be managed with mixes of different renewable energy technologies, at geographically dispersed locations to smooth out the supply. Why would we need to bother with nuclear?

 

 

Mark Diesendorf is Associate Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute of Environmental Studies, UNSW Australia.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. It forms part of The Conversation’s worldwide series on the Future of Nuclear. You can read the rest of the series here.

 

The Conversation

 






Stopping the corporate power grab – it’s not all just about TTIP

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The corporate drive for free trade is once more facing critical public scrutiny, and in the rush to oppose TTIP we mustn’t lose sight of the broader context in which the deal is being negotiated.

Europe has finally woken up. Public opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has put trade agreements back on the political agenda.

At least as citizens of the world’s most powerful trade bloc, we can fight TTIP in the knowledge that our politicians have the power to stop it.

But in numerous African, Asian and Latin American countries, dozens of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are being negotiated with a much less equal playing field, and less opportunity for the public to stop the corporate power grab.

Powerful states ‘divide and rule’ the weak to bypass WTO

Sold on the premise that they incentivise much-needed investment into poorer countries, BITs actually give foreign (often western) investors huge new powers over the economies of those countries, forcing liberalisation onto them in the process.

They allow richer countries to bypass the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which, despite a serious lack of democratic accountability, still requires the consent of member states. This allows southern countries to club together to defeat proposals. That’s why talks at the WTO have been effectively stalled since the late 1990s.

By negotiating separate deals with individual countries, rich countries have managed to get some of what they want by picking off countries one by one. So, since the 1990s, deals such as the UK-Colombia BIT, or the myriad EU Economic Partnership Agreements with African countries, have been multiplying at a dizzying rate.

Back in 1991, there were just 400 BITs in force worldwide, now there are over 2,500. And unlike the EU negotiations over TTIP, southern countries struggle to negotiate any wiggle room for themselves within the one-size-fits-all prescription of blanket liberalisation.

Corporate courts provide one-way justice

Take the infamous investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system that allows companies to take countries to arbitration for making legitimate policy decisions that happen to reduce corporate profits.

So far, much of the debate around these ‘corporate courts’ has concentrated on the possible consequences here in the EU if TTIP is concluded. But these corporate courts are already allowing corporations to hound less powerful countries for taking action to protect their people.

Argentina is one of the most targeted counties, being sued at least 16 times under the US-Argentina Bilateral Investment Treaty. Most of these cases involve energy companies trying to claim ‘compensation’ as a result of Argentina’s decision to freeze electricity and water prices during the financial collapse of 2001-2.

The US has not been sued once under the same treaty. Ecuador has a similar treaty with the US and has been sued 20 times under it.

Bilateral treaties have also been used by the company Veolia to try and sue Egypt for introducing a minimum wage (France-Egypt BIT) and by Philip Morris to stop Uruguay introducing health warning on cigarette packaging (Uruguay-Switzerland BIT).

It’s true that multilateral treaties can also include this ‘corporate court’ system – for example, the Energy Charter Treaty or the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the US. But bilateral treaties make up the vast majority of ISDS cases.

Imposing harsh regimes on services and intellectual property

ISDS isn’t the only problem. These deals often involve southern countries recognising harsher intellectual property regimes designed to help big pharmaceutical corporations. They also tend to impose greater market liberalisation, affording access to multinational corporations but yielding few benefits in return.

In theory, both sides have equal rights, so a Tanzanian company will have the same right to access the EU market as the EU multinational does to access the Tanzanian market. But how many Tanzanian investors are there in the UK?

Things are also hotting up on the multilateral front too. Negotiations on the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) have been steadily progressing without any public scrutiny. TiSA could be even more damaging than TTIP for public services in the 23 countries (including the EU as one country) that are taking part. It is likely to make it all but impossible for countries to bring privatised services back under public control.

And then there’s TTIP’s Asian cousin, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which poses many of the same threats that TTIP does to Europe. The TPP is a key reason that Democrats have been challenging President Obama’s ‘fast track’ trade negotiating authority.

Resistance is growing

There is a fightback under way. Ecuador is currently conducting the world’s first ‘trade audit’, examining the impact of bilateral trade agreements on its sovereignty, people and environment, with a view to cancelling agreements that have been detrimental

South Africa is also reviewing some trade agreements, as is Indonesia. Brazil and India still refuse to sign up to ISDS clauses in their trade deals. Australia is resisting the ISDS clauses in the TPP, as revealed by Wikileaks.policy officer at Global Justice Now.

Beating TTIP will give a huge boost to these international campaigns, but we also need to be prepared to offer solidarity to other countries. Currently, the UK is one of the world’s most prolific users of BITs, with 104 deals in force globally.

The UK government is currently negotiating a handful of BITs, including one with Ethiopia which could give UK corporations more power over Ethiopia’s agricultural sector.

Currently the Ethiopian Government is evicting indigenous tribes from their land to make way for huge agricultural projects, for example in the Omo Valley – where an area several times greater than France is being stolen for corporate farming. Any backtracking on the policy could result in the country being sued by investors.

Fifteen years ago, protests against the WTO talks were central to the so-called anti-globalisation movement. Those talks were correctly seen as a corporate power grab.

The corporations are back again. It’s time for us to join up globally again and take to the streets to defeat them.

 

 

Alex Scrivener is policy officer at Global Justice Now.

This article was taken from the second issue of Global Justice Now’s Ninety Nine magazine. Some additional reporting by The Ecologist.

 

 






As Chipotle goes GMO-free, Monsanto’s worst fear is coming true

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The decision of the Chipotle restaurant chain to make its product lines GMO-free is not most people’s idea of a world-historic event. Especially since Chipotle, by US standards, is not a huge operation.

A clear sign that the move is significant, however, is that Chipotle’s decision was met with a tidal-wave of establishment media abuse.

Despite the company’s clear and rational explanation of its move, Chipotle has been called irresponsible, anti-science, irrational, and much more by the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and many others.

A business deciding to give consumers what they want was surely never so contentious.

The media lynching of Chipotle has an explanation that is important to the future of GMOs. The cause of it is that there has long been an incipient crack in the solid public front that the food industry has presented on the GMO issue.

GMOs are essential to agrobusiness – but not to consumer-facing brands

The crack originates from the fact that while agribusiness sees GMOs as central to their business future, the brand-oriented and customer-sensitive ends of the food supply chain do not.

The brands who sell to the public, such as Nestle, Coca-Cola, Kraft, etc, are therefore much less committed to GMOs. They have gone along with their use, probably because they wish to maintain good relations with agribusiness, who are their allies and their suppliers. Possibly also they see a potential for novel products in a GMO future.

However, over the last five years, as the reputation of GMOs has come under increasing pressure in the US, the cost to food brands of ignoring the growing consumer demand for GMO-free products has increased. They might not say so in public, but the sellers of top brands have little incentive to take the flack for selling GMOs.

From this perspective, the significance of the Chipotle move becomes clear. If Chipotle can gain market share and prestige, or charge higher prices, from selling non-GMO products and give (especially young) consumers what they want, it puts traditional vendors of fast and processed food products in an invidious position.

Who’s next? Kraft? MacDonalds?

Kraft and MacDonalds, and their traditional rivals can hardly be left on the sidelines selling outmoded products to a shrinking market. They will not last long. MacDonald’s already appears to be in trouble, and it too sees the solution as moving to more up-market and healthier products.

For these much bigger players, a race to match Chipotle and get GMOs out of their product lines, is a strong possibility. That may not be so easy, in the short term, but for agribusiness titans who have backed GMOs, like Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta; a race to be GMO-free is the ultimate nightmare scenario.

Until Chipotle’s announcement, such considerations were all behind the scenes. But all of a sudden this split has spilled out into the food media.

On 8th May NY-based Hain Celestial, which describes itself as “a leading natural and organic food and personal care products company in North America and Europe” told The Food Navigator: “We sell organic products … gluten-free products and … natural products. [But] where the big, big demand is, is GMO-free … “

He added that 99% of the company’s products already contain no GMOs, 500 have been formally verified as GMO-free, another 650 are undergoing verification, and many more are in the pipeline.

According to the article, unlike Heinz, Kraft, and many others, Hain Celestial is actively seeking to meet this demand. Within the food industry, important decisions, for and against GMOs, are taking place.

Significantly, Chipotle is also working to take its GMO-free policy a stage further by sourcing only beef from pure grass-fed herds – and thus avoiding the GMO corn and soya based animal feeds that most cattle are fattened up on.

Herbicide residues – why the pressure to remove GMOs will grow

The other factor in all this turmoil is that the GMO technology wheel has not stopped turning. New GMO products are coming on stream that will likely make crop biotechnology even less popular than it is now. This will further ramp up the pressure on brands and stores to go GMO-free. There are several contributory factors.

The first issue follows from the recent US approvals of GMO crops resistant to the herbicides 2,4-D and Dicamba. These traits are billed as replacements for Roundup-resistant traits whose effectiveness has declined due to the spread of weeds resistant to Roundup (Glyphosate).

The causes of the problem, however, lie in the technology itself. The introduction of Roundup-resistant traits in corn and soybeans led to increasing Roundup use by farmers (Benbrook 2012).

Increasing Roundup use led to weed resistance, which led to further Roundup use, as farmers increased applications and dosages. This translated into escalated ecological damage and increasing residue levels in food. Roundup is now found in GMO soybeans intended for food use at levels that even Monsanto used to call “extreme“ (Bøhn et al. 2014).

The two new herbicide-resistance traits are set to recapitulate this same story of increasing agrochemical use. But they will also amplify it significantly.

A trajectory of ever-more herbicide on GMO crops

The specifics are worth considering. First, the spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba on the newer herbicide-resistant crops will not eliminate the need for Roundup, whose use will not decline (see Figure).

That is because, unlike Roundup, neither 2,4-D nor Dicamba are broad-spectrum herbicides. They will have to be sprayed together with Roundup, or with each other (or all of them together) to kill all weeds. This vital fact has not been widely appreciated.

Confirmation comes from the companies themselves. Monsanto is stacking (i.e. combining) Dicamba resistance with Roundup resistance in its Xtend crops and Dow is stacking 2,4-D resistance with Roundup resistance in its Enlist range. Notably, resistance to other herbicides, such as glufosinate, are being stacked in all these GMO crops too.

The second issue is that the combined spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba and Roundup, will only temporarily ease the weed resistance issues faced by farmers. In the medium and longer terms, they will compound the problems. That is because new herbicide-resistant weeds will surely evolve.

In fact, Dicamba-resistant and 2,4-D-resistant weeds already exist. Their spread, and the evolution of new ones, can be guaranteed (Mortensen et al 2012). This will bring greater profits for herbicide manufacturers, but it will also bring greater PR problems for GMOs and the food industry.

GMO soybeans and corn will likely soon have “extreme levels” of at least three different herbicides, all of them with dubious safety records (Schinasi and Leon 2014).

The first time round, Monsanto and Syngenta’s PR snow-jobs successfully obscured this, not just from the general public, but even within agronomy. But it is unlikely they will be able to do so a second time. 2,4-D and Dicamba-resistant GMOs are thus a PR disaster waiting to happen.

A pipeline full of problems: risk and perception

The longer term problem for GMOs is that, despite extravagant claims, their product pipeline is not bulging with promising ideas. Mostly, it is more of the same: herbicide resistance and insect resistance.

The most revolutionary and innovative part of that pipeline is a technology and not a trait. Many products in the GMO pipeline are made using RNA interference technologies that rely on double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs).

dsRNA is a technology with two problems. One is that products made with it (such as the ‘Arctic’ apple, the ‘Innate’ potato, and Monsanto’s ‘Vistive Gold’ soybeans) are unproven in the field. Like its vanguard, a Brazilian virus-resistant bean, they may never work under actual farming conditions.

But if they do work, there is a clear problem with their safety which is explained in detail here (PDF).

In outline, the problem is this: the long dsRNA molecules needed for RNA interference were rejected long ago as being too hazardous for routine medical use (Anonymous, 1969). The scientific literature even calls them “toxins”, as in a 1969 paper in Nature by Absher & Stinebring (see references).

As further evidence of this, long dsRNAs are now used in medicine to cause autoimmune disorders in mice, in order to study these disorders (Okada et al 2005).

The Absher and Stinebring paper comes from a body of research built up many years ago, but its essential findings have been confirmed and extended by more modern research. We now know why dsRNAs cause harm.

They trigger destructive anti-viral defence pathways in mammals and other vertebrates and there is a field of specialist research devoted to showing precisely how this damages individual cells, whole tissues, and results in auto-immune disease in mice (Karpala et al. 2005).

The conclusion therefore, is that dsRNAs that are apparently indistinguishable from those produced in, for example, the Arctic apple and Monsanto’s Vistive Gold Soybean, have strong negative effects on vertebrate animals (but not plants). These vertebrate effects are found even at low doses.

Have they forgotten that humans are ‘vertebrate animals’?

Consumers are vertebrate animals. They may not appreciate the thought that their healthy fats and forever apples also contain proven toxins. And on a business front, consumer brands will not relish defending dsRNA technology once they understand the reality. They may not wish to find themselves defending the indefensible.

The bottom line is this. Either dsRNAs will sicken or kill people, or, they will give opponents of biotechnology plenty of ammunition. The scientific evidence, as it currently stands, suggests they will do both. dsRNAs, therefore, are a potentially huge liability.

The last pipeline problem stems from the first two. The agbiotech industry has long held out the prospect of ‘consumer benefits’ from GMOs. Consumer benefits (in the case of food) are most likely to be health benefits (improved nutrition, altered fat composition, etc).

The problem is that the demographic of health-conscious consumers no doubt overlaps significantly with the demographic of those most wary of GMOs. Show a consumer a ‘healthy GMO’ and they are likely to show you an oxymoron.

The likely health market in the US for customers willing to pay more for a GMO has probably evaporated in the last few years as GMOs have become a hot public issue.

The end-game for GMOs?

The traditional chemical industry approach to such a problem is a familiar repertoire of intimidation and public relations. Fifty years ago, the chemical industry outwitted and outmanoeuvered environmentalists after the death of Rachel Carson (see the books Toxic Sludge is Good for You and Trust Us We’re Experts).

But that was before email, open access scientific publication, and the internet. Monsanto and its allies have steadily lost ground in a world of peer-to-peer communication. GMOs have become a liability, despite their best efforts.

The historic situation is this: in any country, public acceptance of GMOs has always been based on lack of awareness of their existence. Once that ignorance evaporates and the scientific and social realities start to be discussed, ignorance cannot be reinstated. From then on the situation moves into a different, and much more difficult phase for the defenders of GMOs.

Nevertheless, in the US, those defenders have not yet given up. Anyone who keeps up with GMOs in the media knows that the public is being subjected to an unrelenting and concerted global blitzkrieg.

Pro-GMO advocates and paid-for journalists, presumably financed by the life-science industry, sometimes fronted by non-profits such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are being given acres of prominent space to make their case.

Liberal media outlets such as the New York Times, the National Geographic, the New Yorker, Grist magazine, the Observer newspaper, and any others who will have them (which is most) have been deployed to spread its memes. Cornell University has meanwhile received a $5.6 million grant by the Gates Foundation to “depolarize” negative GMO publicity.

The anti-GMO movement is only growing in strength and numbers

But so far there is little sign that the growth of anti-GMO sentiment in Monsanto’s home (US) market can be halted. The decision by Chipotle is certainly not an indication of faith that it can.

For Monsanto and GMOs the situation suddenly looks ominous. Chipotle may well represent the beginnings of a market swing of historic proportions. GMOs may be relegated to cattle-feed status, or even oblivion, in the USA. And if GMOs fail in the US, they are likely to fail elsewhere.

GMO roll-outs in other countries have relied on three things: the deep pockets of agribusinesses based in the United States, their political connections, and the notion that GMOs represent ‘progress’.

If those three disappear in the United States, the power to force open foreign markets will disappear too. The GMO era might suddenly be over.

 

 

Dr Jonathan Latham is editor of Independent Science News.

This article was originally published in Independent Science News under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

Endnote: The report by Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson on RNA interference and dsRNAs in GMO crops is downloadable from here. Accompanying Tables are here.

References

Anonymous (1969) Interferon inducers with side effects. Nature 223: 666-667.

Bøhn, T., Cuhra, M., Traavik, T., Sanden, M., Fagan, J. and Primicerio, R. 2014. Compositional differences in soybeans on the market: Glyphosate accumulates in Roundup Ready GM soybeans. Food Chemistry 153: 207-215.

Absher M., and Stinebring W. (1969) Toxic properties of a synthetic double-stranded RNA. Nature 223: 715-717. Not available online.

Okada C., Akbar S.M.F., Horiike N., and Onji M. (2005) Early development of primary biliary cirrhosis in female C57BL/6 mice because of poly I:C administration. Liver International 25: 595-603.

Karpala A.J., Doran T.J., and Bean A.G.D. (2005) Immune responses to dsRNA: Implications for gene silencing technologies. Immunology and cell biology 83: 211-216.

Mortensen, David A., J. Franklin Egan, Bruce D. Maxwell, Matthew R. Ryan and Richard G. Smith (2012) Navigating a Critical Juncture for Sustainable Weed Management. BioScience 62: 75-84.

Schinasi L and Maria E. Leon ME (2014) Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and Occupational Exposure to Agricultural Pesticide Chemical Groups and Active Ingredients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 11: 4449-4527.

 






Accidents, waste and weapons: nuclear power isn’t worth the risks

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The case for expanding nuclear energy is based on myths about its status, greenhouse gas emissions, proliferation, accidents, wastes and economics. Let’s take each in turn.

Status

Nuclear is not, and has never been, a major energy force. Global annual nuclear energy generation peaked in 2006. Meanwhile its percentage contribution to global electricity generation has declined from its historic peak in 1993 of 17% to about 10% today.

The only countries with significant growth are China, India, Russia and South Korea. In the rest of the world, retirements of ageing reactors are likely to outweigh new builds.

Greenhouse emissions

Nuclear advocates are fond of claiming that nuclear energy has negligible greenhouse gas emissions and hence must play an important role in mitigating climate change. However, the greenhouse case for new nuclear power stations is flawed.

In a study published in 2008, nuclear physicist and nuclear energy supporter Manfred Lenzen compared life-cycle emissions from several types of power station.

For nuclear energy based on mining high-grade uranium ore, he found average emissions of 60 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity generation, compared with 10-20 g per kWh for wind and 500-600 g per kWh for gas. Now comes the part that most nuclear proponents try to ignore.

The world has, at most, a few decades of high-grade uranium ore reserves left. As ore grades inevitably decline, more diesel fuel is needed to mine and mill the uranium, and so the resulting CO2 emissions rise.

Lenzen calculated the life-cycle emissions of a nuclear power station running on low-grade uranium ore to be 131 g per kWh. This is unacceptable in terms of climate science, especially given that Lenzen’s assumptions favoured nuclear energy.

Mining in remote locations will be one of the last industries to transition to low-carbon fuels, so new nuclear reactors will inevitably become significant greenhouse gas emitters over their lifetimes.

The next generation of reactors

Some generation IV reactors are potentially lower in life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, but these are not yet commercially available.

All are likely to be even more expensive than conventional reactors. The fast breeder reactor is even more complex, dangerous, expensive and conducive to weapons proliferation than conventional nuclear reactors. Despite several decades of expensive pilot and demonstration plants, fast breeders have not been successfully commercialised, and may never be.

Advocates try to justify the integral fast reactor and the thorium reactor on the fallacious grounds that they cannot be used to produce nuclear weapons explosives. However, if not operated according to the rules, the integral fast reactor can actually make it easier to extract weapons-grade plutonium and hence make bombs.

To be useful as a nuclear fuel, thorium must first be converted to uranium-233, which can be fissioned either in a nuclear reactor or an atomic bomb, as the United States has demonstrated.

The small modular reactor (SMR) has been a dream of the nuclear industry for decades, amid hopes that future mass production could make its electricity cheaper than from existing large reactors.

However, offsetting this is the economy of scale of large reactors. The Union of Concerned Scientists, which is not anti-nuclear, has serious safety and security concerns about SMRs.

Weapons proliferation

Nuclear proponents dismiss the danger that civil nuclear energy will drive the development of nuclear weapons, by saying that the nuclear industry is now under strong international oversight.

This ignores the harsh reality that India, Pakistan, North Korea and South Africa have all used civil nuclear energy to help build their nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Iran, Libya, South Korea and Taiwan all used civil nuclear energy to cloak their commencement of nuclear weapons programs, although fortunately all except Iran have now discontinued them.

Thus nuclear energy contributes to the number of countries with nuclear weapons, or the capacity to build them, and hence increases the probability of nuclear war.

Accidents

Analyses of the damage done by major nuclear accidents, such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, should properly consider not just the short-term deaths from acute radiation syndrome, but also the cancers that appear over the ensuring decades, and which represent the major contribution to death and disabilities from these incidents.

Estimates of future Chernobyl deaths by reputable impartial authors range from 16,000 by the International Centre for Research on Cancer, to 93,000 by an international group of medical researchers.

Four years after Fukushima, the plant is still leaking radiation, while a reported 120,000 people remain displaced and Japanese taxpayers face a bill that could run to hundreds of billions of dollars.

Economics

Proponents often cherry-pick highly optimistic projections of the future cost of nuclear energy. However, past and present experience suggests that such projections have little basis in reality.

Apart from the Generation IV reactors, which are not commercially available and hence cannot be costed credibly, all of the much-touted current (Generation III+) power reactors under construction (none is operating) are behind schedule and over budget.

In Finland, Olkiluoto-3 is nearly a decade behind schedule and nearly three times its budgeted cost; in France, Flamanville-3 is five years behind schedule and double budgeted cost; in Georgia, USA, Vogtle is three years behind schedule and about US$700 million over budget.

Britain’s proposed Hinkley Point C will receive a guaranteed inflation-linked price for electricity over 35 years, starting at about £92.50 per megawatt hour ($144) – double the typical wholesale price of electricity in the UK.

It will also receive a loan guarantee of about £10 billion ($155 billion) and insurance backed by the British taxpayer. It’s doubtful whether any nuclear power station has ever been built without huge subsidies.

Nuclear waste vs renewable energy

High-level nuclear wastes will have to be safeguarded for 100,000 years or more, far exceeding the lifetime of any human institution.

Meanwhile, Denmark is moving to 100% renewable electricity by 2035, and Germany to at least 80% by 2050. Two German states are already at 100% net renewable energy and South Australia is nudging 40%.

In Australia, hourly computer simulations of the National Electricity Market suggest that it too could be operated on 100% renewables, purely by scaling up commercially available technologies.

The variability of wind and solar power can be managed with mixes of different renewable energy technologies, at geographically dispersed locations to smooth out the supply. Why would we need to bother with nuclear?

 

 

Mark Diesendorf is Associate Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute of Environmental Studies, UNSW Australia.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. It forms part of The Conversation’s worldwide series on the Future of Nuclear. You can read the rest of the series here.

 

The Conversation