There are several things that many of us fear will be in a long list our grandchildren draw up of ‘how could you possibly have let that happen’?

Cooking the planet with fossil fuels and presiding over a massive extinction of our fellow creatures will, I am sure, be there.

So will be our squandering an incredible class of life-saving medicines, antibiotics, unless we act fast to save them.

The first finding of MRSA in retail pork is a clarion call for more urgent action. New research supported by the Medical Research Council and the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics, carried out at Cambridge University by Dr Mark Holmes, found that two samples of pig meat out of 52 bought from English supermarkets were positive for MRSA. One sausage sample had two different MRSA strains, and a third strain was found in pork mince.

Genetic analysis (whole-genome sequencing) of the bacteria showed that the three MRSA were of livestock-origin and of a type called ST-398. This study indicates that consumers eating pork twice a week may be exposed to MRSA every three months. MRSA may now spread throughout the English pig herd, posing a significant risk of human exposure to these resistant bacteria.

As Dr Holmes warned, “this does suggest that MRSA is established in our pig farms and provides a possible route of transmission from livestock, through those in direct contact with pigs, into the wider population.”

In addition, a Guardian investigation with the Ecologist Film Unit has revealed Livestock-associated MRSA CC398 in pork products sold in Sainsbury’s, Asda, the Co-operative and Tesco. Out of 100 samples, nine samples (eight Danish and one Irish) – tested positive for CC398. As the Guardian reported,

“Two thirds of Denmark’s pig farms are currently infected with CC398, where it is spreading rapidly: 648 people were infected with CC398 in 2013; in 2014, 1,271 people contracted the bug. Of those infected two people died as a result of the infection, and many suffered serious blood poisoning.”

The direct result of over-use of antibiotics on farms

The emergence and spread in animals of antibiotic-resistant bacteria like MRSA is linked to overuse of antibiotic in farming. Animals are often given antibiotics routinely even when no disease has been diagnosed, creating favourable conditions for the survival of resistant bacteria which then can be passed to humans.

The terrifying prospect of a world without antibiotics is foreseen by experts from World Health Organisation’s Director-General Dr Margaret Chan to the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies. All agree that we are hurtling towards a major human health crisis – on the brink of destroying one of the biggest achievements in human medicine: our ability to treat human infections.

90 years ago, three years before Alexander Fleming’s ground-breaking discovery of penicillin, five women out of every 1,000 died in childbirth. Skin infections proved fatal for one out of nine people, and the death rate for pneumonia was 30%. Most of us have benefitted from using antibiotics, and some of us, me included, owe them our lives.

When infection set in after a major operation I had over forty years ago, I had to be pumped (literally) full of first one and then another antibiotic for all of one night, until the drugs did their work, and the infection receded.

What seems unthinkable to those of us alive today is that without effective antibiotics many major operations – like Caesarean births at the start of life or hip replacements towards the end – would be either extremely risky or even impossible.

Mass medication on the farm – cheaper than good hygiene

The saddest thing is that this is being brought about mainly by our own stupidity – we use and abuse these drugs with abandon and in doing so we systematically undermine the ability of antibiotics to do their job.

Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria, extremely adaptable organisms, evolve to survive antibiotics, and the drugs stop working. Each dose of antibiotics provides an opportunity for resistant bacteria to thrive, while their susceptible companions are killed off.

In the public debate, the focus so far has been on antibiotic misuse in hospitals and GP surgeries. This is only part of the picture, accounting for around 55% of total antibiotic use in the UK. Coming in at a close second, with around 40%, is the staggeringly high use of antibiotics on farm animals, particularly intensively farmed pigs and poultry.

Immense quantities of antibiotics are used by the world’s farmers, often unnecessarily and routinely. Mass medication is widely practiced, particularly in pig and poultry production, even when no disease has been diagnosed in any of the animals.

This is in part due to the post-war growth of intensive livestock production. Here, antibiotics are needed to compensate for typically over-crowded conditions, where disease outbreaks are more commonplace and harder to control. Antibiotics are used as a pharmaceutical crutch – exemplified by the practice of routinely dosing animals through medicated feed or water, which accounts for 85% of farm use in the UK.

Disease is anticipated, expected even, and antibiotics are used to allow animals to stave off disease in disease-inducing conditions. The justification is that consumers want meat, and lots of it, and as cheap as possible. Farmers need to turn a profit and maximise output.

Routine farm use is officially ‘unacceptable’ – but no plans to act

But on-farm antibiotic use is coming at a huge cost. Increasing evidence shows that overuse in farming is contributing to resistance in life-threatening human infections. Resistant bacteria in livestock can be passed on through direct contact, consumption of animal products, or the environment.

Farm use of antibiotics is now a major source of resistant human infections such as Campylobacter and Salmonella, E.coli and livestock-associated MRSA. Farmers are even allowed to use emergency antibiotics, critically important in human medicine, the last resort when other antibiotics fail. While medical use of these drugs has declined in recent years in the UK, farm use has increased steadily since 2000.

Some EU countries have ambitious targets to cut antibiotic use on farms, but not the UK. Here antibiotic use in pigs and poultry is at least 3.5 times higher per unit of livestock than in the Netherlands. The UK Government’s Five Year Antimicrobial Strategy states that routine use of antibiotics to treat animals is not acceptable, but doesn’t set targets for reducing farm use, despite including tough targets for human use.

Routine, mass-medication in farming must be banned, except for where disease is diagnosed in some animals. Targets must be set to cut use of the crucial emergency antibiotics. The Government must gather data on the human health impacts of antibiotic resistance that originates in farm animals.

Netherlands shows it can be done – 98% cut in MRSA antibiotics

Livestock farmers, retailers and consumers all have a part to play. Antibiotics must not be used as an insurance policy for low-welfare, intensive farming practices. Farming must focus on disease prevention through good husbandry and hygiene. Organic farmers are only allowed to use antibiotics on animals that are sick. Food retailers must insist that the farmers that supply them drastically cut their use of antibiotics.

More expensive ham, chicken or eggs is a small price to pay to keep these amazing drugs available to treat life-threatening infections in people, for us and future generations. We all need to take a good look at what we eat and what we buy.

Countries like the Netherlands – where farm use of the antibiotics most strongly associated with MRSA has been cut by 98% resulting in a fall in the number of human cases of livestock-associated MRSA – show that decisive action can reverse resistance.

The Alliance to Save our Antibiotics (formed by Compassion in World Farming, the Soil Association and Sustain, and funded by the Coller Foundation) is calling for restrictions on the use of the critically important, emergency antibiotics – no modern cephalosporins to be used in pig, poultry and dairy farming, and no fluoroquinolones used in poultry.

Farmers must phase out routine prophylactic use of antibiotics, and mass medication of animals in their feed or drinking water where no disease has been diagnosed in any of the animals in the group being treated must be banned.

Follow our campaign on twitter – #SaveABX – and call on retailers to address antibiotics in their supply chains: @ASOAntibiotics

Peter Melchett is Policy Director, Soil Association, for the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics.

Nuclear power was promised as an energy source that would be too cheap to meter. It is now too expensive to generate.

If we were planning a nuclear policy from scratch, would we choose to do a deal with two French companies, one of which is bankrupt, while the other, Électricité de France, has a debt of €33 billion?

Would we also collaborate with a country with a dreadful human rights record – China, whose national investment department is coming into the arrangement – and with Saudi Arabia, with its atrocious record on human rights, where people are executed on the street?

We are left with the dregs of investment from throughout the world-fragile and tainted. The sensible money deserted Hinkley Point years ago. Centrica had an investment of £200 million, and it abandoned it and ran away, because it saw the project as a basket case.

Still, nuclear power has wide support in the House of Commons, from almost all parties except the Scottish National Party [and the Greens]. I hope that the new Minister, Andrea Leadsom, whom I welcome to her new work, can apply her distinguished forensic skills to taking a fresh look at the situation.

The public has been ‘protected’ from the truth of Fukushima

Many people are gravely disturbed by the prospect of new nuclear power. That is particularly so among Treasury civil servants. We are in an extraordinary situation, where there is still public support in spite of Fukushima.

One of the main reasons for that is that the British public were ‘protected’ by a skilled public relations operation from knowing the terrible cost of Fukushima – between $100 billion and $250 billion. Radiation is still leaking four years after the event, and tens of thousands of people cannot return to their homes.

Other populations were not protected from knowing about Fukushima by an obedient press. However, former lobbyists for nuclear power appeared as independent witnesses, such as Malcolm Grimston, who was on television every day during the Fukushima events, praising the explosions of hydrogen as something of benefit.

There is ludicrous PR spin, to the extent that this week two different people from a public relations agency that works for nuclear power rang me up and offered to write my speech for me. They inquired who the Chair would be, as if that might be important. Those are lobbyists and spinners, presenting a favourable case for nuclear power.

‘Not enough electricity to light a bicycle lamp’

Hinkley Point B is a European Pressurised Reactor. There are some under construction in Finland, France and China. Not one of them has produced enough electricity to light a bicycle lamp. They are all in serious trouble, so why do we continue with our belief in Hinkley Point C?

The EPR in Finland was due to generate electricity in 2009. There has been a series of delays, problems and cost overruns, which have themselves now overrun, and the bill is €4 billion greater than anticipated. The possible opening date has been moved year after year and is now set at 2016, at a cost of €8.3 billion. However, other problems have come up.

There is another station under construction at Flamanville. It was due to be completed at a cost of €3.3 billion and now has an overrun of nearly €5 billion. There is a serious problem at Flamanville which will affect all the reactors – the carbon level in the steel for the pressure vessel is too high. That means that the steel is brittle and could crack open, with catastrophic results.

That affects the planned reactors in China, Finland, France and of course at Hinkley Point. It is a catastrophic problem and will mean a major delay. There is no way of reconstituting that steel.

Hinckley C: ‘a deal at any price’

The way the deal was done is almost unbelievable. We agreed under pressure, because there were Government promises and political pressure, to do a deal at almost any price to justify Hinkley Point C. We struck a deal for £92.50 per MWh. That is twice the going rate for electricity now, and we said that we would guarantee that deal for 35 years.

That was two years ago. Since then, the price of energy throughout the world has gone down a great deal, because of shale gas and the drop in the price of oil. The price we agreed was ludicrous at the time – far too generous.

The head of INEOS, the company in Grangemouth, has struck a deal since then with the same company – Électricité de France – for less than half that price. The country was ripped off, and we cannot seem to get out of it. We must do something about the strike price that we agreed.

In the world as a whole, nuclear powered energy generation peaked in 2006. Since then it has been in decline. It has gone down by 10% in Europe. Most energy consultants say that the total cost of the project is indefensible.

We omit something from our calculations of historical costs and pretend that nuclear is cheap, when we forget about the cost of waste. In fact we do not know what the cost of the waste from Sellafield is. We are still adding up the bill.

The latest estimate for clearing up Sellafield – just one site – is £53 billion. It is thought that the figure will exceed £100 billion eventually. When those costs are added to the historical costs of nuclear power it will not be found to be competitive any more.

Also, we now have alternatives. We are not in a situation where nothing else is available. The world has moved towards renewables, including the clean renewables, to a far greater extent.

The Government are to be congratulated on having put forward a package and the money for tidal lagoons in the Severn estuary. An enormous tide of water sweeps up that estuary twice a day. That is vast untapped energy – British, free, eternal and entirely predictable. The technology involved is simple and has been working successfully in France for 50 years, producing the cheapest electricity in the world.

Whatever happened to the LibDems’ ‘Say No to Nuclear?’

It is a curious thing, but the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the previous Parliament had an impeccable record on energy some years ago, when he launched the Liberal Democrat energy policy under the heading ‘Say No to Nuclear’, saying that “a new generation of nuclear power stations will cost taxpayers and consumers tens of billions of pounds.”

That is absolutely right. He went on: “In addition to posing safety and environmental risks, nuclear power will only be possible with vast taxpayer subsidies or a rigged market”.

That was the man who, when the red boxes and chauffeur-driven car arrived, changed his mind altogether and did a terrible financial deal to get Hinkley Point on the road. We will be paying for that for many years.

The cost of Hinkley Point has been estimated as an additional £200 a year for every consumer in Britain. That is billions of pounds in subsidy over 35 years. The Government have guaranteed £16 billion in subsidy for a technology that has not been proved to work and is not working anywhere. Almost any alternative is better than pressing on with Hinkley Point.

There are older nuclear designs that we could use, but we are heading into a technological jam where there will be difficulties. We are proposing to invest tens of billions in a system that has not been proved to be effective, and has certainly never proved to be economic.

There have been many problems at Flamanville, near Cherbourg, which are not limited to the pressure vessel. There have also been problems with the valves and the whole cooling system, following a warning in April from the French nuclear safety regulator about an excessive amount of carbon in the reactor vessel.

That is not a journalist causing trouble but the head of the French nuclear industry talking about a potential disaster in the making.

The certainty of nuclear disaster

What is likely to happen in future? There is a nuclear disaster almost every 10 to 15 years, due to various causes. The result of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima has been great fear among the population.

That is what happened in Germany, which felt the full force of the truth about Fukushima and sensibly cancelled its whole nuclear programme. Germany is now going into solar power and many other alternatives that are available to us. Tidal power is not available to Germany, but we have that great opportunity ahead.

There will almost certainly be problems in future. Some hazards today were unknown in the past. I recall going to an exhibition called ‘Atoms for Peace’ as a young boy in 1948, when we believed that nuclear would be the answer, but experience has taught us otherwise.

The possible accidents range from simple mechanical errors, such as not having enough carbon in the steel, to the simple human errors that happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Technical faults also occur, but the greatest risk we now face is terrorism.

Older nuclear power stations were not built to withstand terrorist attacks by drones and all the means by which people could attack them. Anyone living anywhere near a nuclear power station must be in a state of anxiety about that possibility, because of the accidents and disasters we have seen.

Fukushima was built to withstand a tsunami, but it could not withstand the tsunami and earthquake that came together. Any of these natural disasters are possible. We have not had a tsunami for some time along the Severn estuary, but we had one in 1607 when part of the area that I represent and the area where Hinkley Point now stands was flooded by a tsunami that came up the Bristol Channel.

It is believed to have come from underwater activity out in the deep ocean, so a tsunami is unlikely but possible there. We cannot guard against it. Why on earth risk a catastrophic accident when alternatives are available?

Civil servants – speak your concerns in public!

I am encouraged to see reports that many civil servants in the Treasury are deeply unhappy about the financial situation of nuclear power. There was a story that if Labour had been elected, it would have turned its back on nuclear power. I believe that to be true.

There have been reports in The Times and elsewhere – authoritative reports from serious journalists – that groups in the Treasury are saying that it will be a terrible mistake and a financial catastrophe if we go ahead. May I say to those civil servants that it is their job to speak publicly?

We know now what happened in Scotland during the referendum debate, when Sir Nicholas Macpherson decided to leak – to publish – a report of his advice to the Chancellor. His reason for doing so was that he thought the likely effects of Scottish independence would be catastrophic for the country and for Scotland.

He justified that leak, which was almost unprecedented among senior civil servants, on the basis that it was in the national interest. He was supported by the head of the civil service, Sir Jeremy Heywood, and condemned by a Committee of this House.

Look at the past; look, for example, the commercial advantages of the steam-generating heavy water reactor, which produced nothing and was useless, but cost £200 million. That was many years ago. There was also the decision to treat Concorde as a commercial venture that would succeed.

There were civil servants who quite rightly opposed those, but the ethos of the civil service is the unimportance of being right. The careers of civil servants who go along with the ministerial folly of the day prosper, while the careers of those who are right in the long term wither.

It is different now. There is some heroism in civil servants speaking truth to power and saying to their masters, “This should not go on. There are alternatives. The time has gone for nuclear power.”

Civil servants who know the new ethos in the civil service should regard it as their patriotic duty to speak truth, not only to power but to the nation, by saying that the time for nuclear power is over.

Paul Flynn is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Newport West since the 1987 general election.

This article is based on the speech he gave in Westminster Hall on 17th June. See the Hansard transcript for the original version and ensuing debate with energy minister Andrea Leadsom.

What makes Pope Francis and his 183-page encyclical so radical isn’t just his call to urgently tackle climate change.

It’s the fact he openly and unashamedly goes against the grain of dominant social, economic and environment policies.

While the Argentina-born pope is a very humble person whose vision is of a “poor church for the poor“, he seems increasingly determined to play a central role on the world stage.

Untainted by the realities of government and the greed of big business, he is perhaps the only major figure who can legitimately confront the world’s economic and political elites in the way he has.

However his radical message potentially puts him on a confrontation course with global powerbrokers and leaders of national governments, international institutions and multinational corporations.

The backlash has begun even before the encyclical has been officially published. US presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a Catholic, feels the pope should stay out of the climate debate, joining other Republicans, fossil fuel lobbyists and climate denier think-tanks in seeking to discredit Pope Francis’s intervention.

What makes the pope so radical?

There a several meanings of the word ‘radical’ that can be applied to the Pope and in particular his forthcoming encyclical.

First, radical can be understood as going back to the roots (from Latin radix, root). The majority of Catholics live in the Global South; in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Francis is the first pope from the Global South, and naming himself in honour of Saint Francis of Assisi, “a man of poverty and peace who loved nature and animals“, signalled to the world a commitment to going back to the roots of human existence.

The pope knows the plight of the majority world. Before he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was a priest in the vast, poor neighbourhoods, the villas miserias or slums, of Argentina’s capital.

Improving the lives of slum dwellers and addressing climate change is, for Pope Francis, one and the same thing. Both require tackling the structural, root causes of inequality, injustice, poverty and environmental degradation. For example, his encyclical says:

“Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drink- able water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights.” (p. 23)

Challenging the logic of the market and consumerism

This stands in stark contrast to, for example, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, the world’s largest food and bottled water company, who thinks water is a normal commodity with a market value, and not a human right. Nestlé is far from unusual. Its stance is backed up by the official water privatisation policies of the World Bank, IMF and other international institutions.

In fact, the encyclical is a radical – for a pope and international leader, unprecedented – attack on the logic of the market and consumerism, which has been expanded into all spheres of life. For example,

Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism … leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power.” (p. 149-150)

The pope rejects market fundamentalism, instead arguing that “the market alone does not ensure human development and social inclusion.”

In the same way, he warns us of the brave new world of carbon markets such as the EU Emissions Trading System and the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism, which have been created to reduce the world’s carbon emissions:

“The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.” (p. 126)

The pope’s right. The same criticisms of carbon markets have been made by myself and others.

Will he make any difference?

Pope Francis has already angered conservative Catholics in the US by clearly stating in the draft (p.20) that “Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”

While the pope is not a politician – or maybe precisely because he is not one – he commands high moral and ethical authority that goes beyond traditional partisan lines. His encyclical speaks truth to power, and he might be the only person with both the clout and the desire to meaningfully deliver a message like this:

“Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change. However, many of these symptoms indicate that such effects will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption.

“There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy.” (p.21)

The bosses of Shell, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies will not like this message, as it threatens their fundamental business model, and it also stands in contrast to the underwhelming ambitions of the G7 leaders who recently pledged to phase out fossil fuels only by 2100.

The time for bold, radical action on the environment as well as poverty eradication has come. This seems to be Pope Francis’ message: “The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty.” (p.128)

We need to think beyond the current, taken-for-granted logic that believes only markets and consumerism can solve the world’s social and environmental problems. The pope himself believes the situation is so grave that only a new, “true world political authority” will be able to address these problems.

Steffen Böhm is Professor in Management and Sustainability, and Director, Essex Sustainability Institute at University of Essex.

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

Nuclear power was promised as an energy source that would be too cheap to meter. It is now too expensive to generate.

If we were planning a nuclear policy from scratch, would we choose to do a deal with two French companies, one of which is bankrupt, while the other, Électricité de France, has a debt of €33 billion?

Would we also collaborate with a country with a dreadful human rights record – China, whose national investment department is coming into the arrangement – and with Saudi Arabia, with its atrocious record on human rights, where people are executed on the street?

We are left with the dregs of investment from throughout the world-fragile and tainted. The sensible money deserted Hinkley Point years ago. Centrica had an investment of £200 million, and it abandoned it and ran away, because it saw the project as a basket case.

Still, nuclear power has wide support in the House of Commons, from almost all parties except the Scottish National Party [and the Greens]. I hope that the new Minister, Andrea Leadsom, whom I welcome to her new work, can apply her distinguished forensic skills to taking a fresh look at the situation.

The public has been ‘protected’ from the truth of Fukushima

Many people are gravely disturbed by the prospect of new nuclear power. That is particularly so among Treasury civil servants. We are in an extraordinary situation, where there is still public support in spite of Fukushima.

One of the main reasons for that is that the British public were ‘protected’ by a skilled public relations operation from knowing the terrible cost of Fukushima – between $100 billion and $250 billion. Radiation is still leaking four years after the event, and tens of thousands of people cannot return to their homes.

Other populations were not protected from knowing about Fukushima by an obedient press. However, former lobbyists for nuclear power appeared as independent witnesses, such as Malcolm Grimston, who was on television every day during the Fukushima events, praising the explosions of hydrogen as something of benefit.

There is ludicrous PR spin, to the extent that this week two different people from a public relations agency that works for nuclear power rang me up and offered to write my speech for me. They inquired who the Chair would be, as if that might be important. Those are lobbyists and spinners, presenting a favourable case for nuclear power.

‘Not enough electricity to light a bicycle lamp’

Hinkley Point B is a European Pressurised Reactor. There are some under construction in Finland, France and China. Not one of them has produced enough electricity to light a bicycle lamp. They are all in serious trouble, so why do we continue with our belief in Hinkley Point C?

The EPR in Finland was due to generate electricity in 2009. There has been a series of delays, problems and cost overruns, which have themselves now overrun, and the bill is €4 billion greater than anticipated. The possible opening date has been moved year after year and is now set at 2016, at a cost of €8.3 billion. However, other problems have come up.

There is another station under construction at Flamanville. It was due to be completed at a cost of €3.3 billion and now has an overrun of nearly €5 billion. There is a serious problem at Flamanville which will affect all the reactors – the carbon level in the steel for the pressure vessel is too high. That means that the steel is brittle and could crack open, with catastrophic results.

That affects the planned reactors in China, Finland, France and of course at Hinkley Point. It is a catastrophic problem and will mean a major delay. There is no way of reconstituting that steel.

Hinckley C: ‘a deal at any price’

The way the deal was done is almost unbelievable. We agreed under pressure, because there were Government promises and political pressure, to do a deal at almost any price to justify Hinkley Point C. We struck a deal for £92.50 per MWh. That is twice the going rate for electricity now, and we said that we would guarantee that deal for 35 years.

That was two years ago. Since then, the price of energy throughout the world has gone down a great deal, because of shale gas and the drop in the price of oil. The price we agreed was ludicrous at the time – far too generous.

The head of INEOS, the company in Grangemouth, has struck a deal since then with the same company – Électricité de France – for less than half that price. The country was ripped off, and we cannot seem to get out of it. We must do something about the strike price that we agreed.

In the world as a whole, nuclear powered energy generation peaked in 2006. Since then it has been in decline. It has gone down by 10% in Europe. Most energy consultants say that the total cost of the project is indefensible.

We omit something from our calculations of historical costs and pretend that nuclear is cheap, when we forget about the cost of waste. In fact we do not know what the cost of the waste from Sellafield is. We are still adding up the bill.

The latest estimate for clearing up Sellafield – just one site – is £53 billion. It is thought that the figure will exceed £100 billion eventually. When those costs are added to the historical costs of nuclear power it will not be found to be competitive any more.

Also, we now have alternatives. We are not in a situation where nothing else is available. The world has moved towards renewables, including the clean renewables, to a far greater extent.

The Government are to be congratulated on having put forward a package and the money for tidal lagoons in the Severn estuary. An enormous tide of water sweeps up that estuary twice a day. That is vast untapped energy – British, free, eternal and entirely predictable. The technology involved is simple and has been working successfully in France for 50 years, producing the cheapest electricity in the world.

Whatever happened to the LibDems’ ‘Say No to Nuclear?’

It is a curious thing, but the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the previous Parliament had an impeccable record on energy some years ago, when he launched the Liberal Democrat energy policy under the heading ‘Say No to Nuclear’, saying that “a new generation of nuclear power stations will cost taxpayers and consumers tens of billions of pounds.”

That is absolutely right. He went on: “In addition to posing safety and environmental risks, nuclear power will only be possible with vast taxpayer subsidies or a rigged market”.

That was the man who, when the red boxes and chauffeur-driven car arrived, changed his mind altogether and did a terrible financial deal to get Hinkley Point on the road. We will be paying for that for many years.

The cost of Hinkley Point has been estimated as an additional £200 a year for every consumer in Britain. That is billions of pounds in subsidy over 35 years. The Government have guaranteed £16 billion in subsidy for a technology that has not been proved to work and is not working anywhere. Almost any alternative is better than pressing on with Hinkley Point.

There are older nuclear designs that we could use, but we are heading into a technological jam where there will be difficulties. We are proposing to invest tens of billions in a system that has not been proved to be effective, and has certainly never proved to be economic.

There have been many problems at Flamanville, near Cherbourg, which are not limited to the pressure vessel. There have also been problems with the valves and the whole cooling system, following a warning in April from the French nuclear safety regulator about an excessive amount of carbon in the reactor vessel.

That is not a journalist causing trouble but the head of the French nuclear industry talking about a potential disaster in the making.

The certainty of nuclear disaster

What is likely to happen in future? There is a nuclear disaster almost every 10 to 15 years, due to various causes. The result of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima has been great fear among the population.

That is what happened in Germany, which felt the full force of the truth about Fukushima and sensibly cancelled its whole nuclear programme. Germany is now going into solar power and many other alternatives that are available to us. Tidal power is not available to Germany, but we have that great opportunity ahead.

There will almost certainly be problems in future. Some hazards today were unknown in the past. I recall going to an exhibition called ‘Atoms for Peace’ as a young boy in 1948, when we believed that nuclear would be the answer, but experience has taught us otherwise.

The possible accidents range from simple mechanical errors, such as not having enough carbon in the steel, to the simple human errors that happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Technical faults also occur, but the greatest risk we now face is terrorism.

Older nuclear power stations were not built to withstand terrorist attacks by drones and all the means by which people could attack them. Anyone living anywhere near a nuclear power station must be in a state of anxiety about that possibility, because of the accidents and disasters we have seen.

Fukushima was built to withstand a tsunami, but it could not withstand the tsunami and earthquake that came together. Any of these natural disasters are possible. We have not had a tsunami for some time along the Severn estuary, but we had one in 1607 when part of the area that I represent and the area where Hinkley Point now stands was flooded by a tsunami that came up the Bristol Channel.

It is believed to have come from underwater activity out in the deep ocean, so a tsunami is unlikely but possible there. We cannot guard against it. Why on earth risk a catastrophic accident when alternatives are available?

Civil servants – speak your concerns in public!

I am encouraged to see reports that many civil servants in the Treasury are deeply unhappy about the financial situation of nuclear power. There was a story that if Labour had been elected, it would have turned its back on nuclear power. I believe that to be true.

There have been reports in The Times and elsewhere – authoritative reports from serious journalists – that groups in the Treasury are saying that it will be a terrible mistake and a financial catastrophe if we go ahead. May I say to those civil servants that it is their job to speak publicly?

We know now what happened in Scotland during the referendum debate, when Sir Nicholas Macpherson decided to leak – to publish – a report of his advice to the Chancellor. His reason for doing so was that he thought the likely effects of Scottish independence would be catastrophic for the country and for Scotland.

He justified that leak, which was almost unprecedented among senior civil servants, on the basis that it was in the national interest. He was supported by the head of the civil service, Sir Jeremy Heywood, and condemned by a Committee of this House.

Look at the past; look, for example, the commercial advantages of the steam-generating heavy water reactor, which produced nothing and was useless, but cost £200 million. That was many years ago. There was also the decision to treat Concorde as a commercial venture that would succeed.

There were civil servants who quite rightly opposed those, but the ethos of the civil service is the unimportance of being right. The careers of civil servants who go along with the ministerial folly of the day prosper, while the careers of those who are right in the long term wither.

It is different now. There is some heroism in civil servants speaking truth to power and saying to their masters, “This should not go on. There are alternatives. The time has gone for nuclear power.”

Civil servants who know the new ethos in the civil service should regard it as their patriotic duty to speak truth, not only to power but to the nation, by saying that the time for nuclear power is over.

Paul Flynn is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Newport West since the 1987 general election.

This article is based on the speech he gave in Westminster Hall on 17th June. See the Hansard transcript for the original version and ensuing debate with energy minister Andrea Leadsom.

What makes Pope Francis and his 183-page encyclical so radical isn’t just his call to urgently tackle climate change.

It’s the fact he openly and unashamedly goes against the grain of dominant social, economic and environment policies.

While the Argentina-born pope is a very humble person whose vision is of a “poor church for the poor“, he seems increasingly determined to play a central role on the world stage.

Untainted by the realities of government and the greed of big business, he is perhaps the only major figure who can legitimately confront the world’s economic and political elites in the way he has.

However his radical message potentially puts him on a confrontation course with global powerbrokers and leaders of national governments, international institutions and multinational corporations.

The backlash has begun even before the encyclical has been officially published. US presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a Catholic, feels the pope should stay out of the climate debate, joining other Republicans, fossil fuel lobbyists and climate denier think-tanks in seeking to discredit Pope Francis’s intervention.

What makes the pope so radical?

There a several meanings of the word ‘radical’ that can be applied to the Pope and in particular his forthcoming encyclical.

First, radical can be understood as going back to the roots (from Latin radix, root). The majority of Catholics live in the Global South; in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Francis is the first pope from the Global South, and naming himself in honour of Saint Francis of Assisi, “a man of poverty and peace who loved nature and animals“, signalled to the world a commitment to going back to the roots of human existence.

The pope knows the plight of the majority world. Before he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was a priest in the vast, poor neighbourhoods, the villas miserias or slums, of Argentina’s capital.

Improving the lives of slum dwellers and addressing climate change is, for Pope Francis, one and the same thing. Both require tackling the structural, root causes of inequality, injustice, poverty and environmental degradation. For example, his encyclical says:

“Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drink- able water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights.” (p. 23)

Challenging the logic of the market and consumerism

This stands in stark contrast to, for example, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, the world’s largest food and bottled water company, who thinks water is a normal commodity with a market value, and not a human right. Nestlé is far from unusual. Its stance is backed up by the official water privatisation policies of the World Bank, IMF and other international institutions.

In fact, the encyclical is a radical – for a pope and international leader, unprecedented – attack on the logic of the market and consumerism, which has been expanded into all spheres of life. For example,

Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism … leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power.” (p. 149-150)

The pope rejects market fundamentalism, instead arguing that “the market alone does not ensure human development and social inclusion.”

In the same way, he warns us of the brave new world of carbon markets such as the EU Emissions Trading System and the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism, which have been created to reduce the world’s carbon emissions:

“The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.” (p. 126)

The pope’s right. The same criticisms of carbon markets have been made by myself and others.

Will he make any difference?

Pope Francis has already angered conservative Catholics in the US by clearly stating in the draft (p.20) that “Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”

While the pope is not a politician – or maybe precisely because he is not one – he commands high moral and ethical authority that goes beyond traditional partisan lines. His encyclical speaks truth to power, and he might be the only person with both the clout and the desire to meaningfully deliver a message like this:

“Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change. However, many of these symptoms indicate that such effects will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption.

“There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy.” (p.21)

The bosses of Shell, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies will not like this message, as it threatens their fundamental business model, and it also stands in contrast to the underwhelming ambitions of the G7 leaders who recently pledged to phase out fossil fuels only by 2100.

The time for bold, radical action on the environment as well as poverty eradication has come. This seems to be Pope Francis’ message: “The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty.” (p.128)

We need to think beyond the current, taken-for-granted logic that believes only markets and consumerism can solve the world’s social and environmental problems. The pope himself believes the situation is so grave that only a new, “true world political authority” will be able to address these problems.

Steffen Böhm is Professor in Management and Sustainability, and Director, Essex Sustainability Institute at University of Essex.

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

Caroline Lucas has today issued a striking public call for a new politics of unity among ‘progressives’ – among those, that is, who seek at minimum to rein in the excesses of neoliberal ‘business as usual’, Tory-style.

Caroline opens her article by praising Jeremy Corbyn, one of the Labour leadership contenders – and one whose view chime with the Greens on nuclear missiles, climate change and austerity. I second that praise. But let’s be honest. Corbyn’s chances of winning the leadership election are slim.

But many Labour voters, members, candidates and Parliamentarians – and by no means just those who support Corbyn – share much in common with Greens. And it’s crucial that all of us interested in implementing a genuine political alternative work together, whatever leader Labour elects.

Because the alternative is grim: it’s the risk that the awful moment when we saw the exit poll on the night of 7th May will be repeated again in 2020. And again, in 2025.

Constituency boundary changes in progress only make such outcomes all the more probable. The Telegraph told it straight when it reported senior Tories as saying: “Redrawing constituency boundaries to lock Labour out of power for a decades is at the top of the agenda for the new Conservative government.”

We desperately need electoral reform – but how to get it?

The 2015 General Election resulted in a radically distorted electoral map of Britain, and a majority Government lacking a solid democratic mandate, voted for by under a quarter of the electorate.

It’s now clear to anyone with a sense of justice that this country must abandon its antiquated electoral system and adopt a system of proportional representation. Especially promising is the ‘Additional Member System’ employed in the Greater London Assembly, which preserves the constituency link while ensuring overall proportionality of outcome.

The question that Caroline addresses in her Guardian piece is how we can make such electoral reform becomes a practical political possibility. For the next five years, we will be governed by the most reactionary beneficiaries of the current undemocratic system – and they won’t change it.

Like Caroline, I believe the time has come to consider a bold step. ‘Progressive’ parties need to discuss an informal electoral pact to avoid fragmenting the vote in winnable seats, if we are to elect a Parliament in 2020 that would have a progressive majority for democratic change.

Important testing-grounds are coming up: the London Mayoral election in 2016, for example, and the 2017 County Council elections – which are likely to result, if there are no pacts, in radically distorted ‘one-party-state’ outcomes. Both could serve as test runs for the 2020 general election.

Key to this is that the five ‘progressive parties’ should seek, regionally or nationally, to assist local parties to win ‘quid pro quos’ if some candidates are prepared to stand down for the greater good. If, for example, Green candidates are willing to stand down in Labour’s favour in some seats, then the compliment needs to be repaid, in a few others.

It won’t be plain sailing! But we must still try

The first criticism is that such a pact is unlikely to be able to be formed. Labour may cling, as it has in the past, to the idea of an all-out victory, the dream of an overall majority – and see the Greens, SNP and Plaid as enemies not allies.

Others may question whether Labour and the LibDems should even qualify as a ‘progressive’ parties, given that they fought the last election on pro-Trident, pro-austerity, neoliberal political platforms that put ‘clear grey water’ between them and the Greens, Plaid and SNP.

But if the logic of the position that Caroline and I are defending is strong, as I think it is, then we ought at least to try, and we certainly won’t succeed unless we try!

And there are historical precedents, that were no doubt similarly disparaged as pipe-dreams when they were first floated. The most striking such precedent is the 1906 pact with the Liberals that in effect enabled Labour to get into Parliament in the first place in numbers.

A more recent precedent is the little-known ‘non-aggression pact’ between Labour and LibDems which in 1997 was responsible for the scale of the destruction of the Conservatives, and in particular of the largely successful ‘decapitation strategy’ that they put into effect.

The unofficial pact, which involved Labour and Libdems not campaigning in each others’ target seats, received little attention in the mainstream press, but here is a rare mention of it in the Independent.

Others may ask, why exclude UKIP? Of course we should make common-cause with the ‘Kippers in relation to the undemocratic outcome of the 2015 General Election, and Greens have been doing that. But I believe a pact must involve a commitment to action on climate change, and UKIP stand diametrically opposed to any such idea.

So for all our sakes, it is vital that the ‘progressive’ parties open up now the question of working together. MPs, councillors, local party members, supporters, bloggers, trades unionists, citizens at large, all can create the pressure to make it happen.

And I can only agree with Caroline as she concludes: “I hope that Labour’s leadership candidates recognise that multiparty politics is here to stay – and I look forward to hearing how they’ll embrace the change rather than attempt, against the tide of history, to clamp down on it.”

Rupert Read was Parliamentary candidate for Cambridge for the Green Party in  the 2015 election, and remains Green Party national Transport Spokesperson. In his day job he’s Reader in Philosophy in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Languages at the University of East Anglia, and Chair of Green House.

Nuclear power was promised as an energy source that would be too cheap to meter. It is now too expensive to generate.

If we were planning a nuclear policy from scratch, would we choose to do a deal with two French companies, one of which is bankrupt, while the other, Électricité de France, has a debt of €33 billion?

Would we also collaborate with a country with a dreadful human rights record – China, whose national investment department is coming into the arrangement – and with Saudi Arabia, with its atrocious record on human rights, where people are executed on the street?

We are left with the dregs of investment from throughout the world-fragile and tainted. The sensible money deserted Hinkley Point years ago. Centrica had an investment of £200 million, and it abandoned it and ran away, because it saw the project as a basket case.

Still, nuclear power has wide support in the House of Commons, from almost all parties except the Scottish National Party [and the Greens]. I hope that the new Minister, Andrea Leadsom, whom I welcome to her new work, can apply her distinguished forensic skills to taking a fresh look at the situation.

The public has been ‘protected’ from the truth of Fukushima

Many people are gravely disturbed by the prospect of new nuclear power. That is particularly so among Treasury civil servants. We are in an extraordinary situation, where there is still public support in spite of Fukushima.

One of the main reasons for that is that the British public were ‘protected’ by a skilled public relations operation from knowing the terrible cost of Fukushima – between $100 billion and $250 billion. Radiation is still leaking four years after the event, and tens of thousands of people cannot return to their homes.

Other populations were not protected from knowing about Fukushima by an obedient press. However, former lobbyists for nuclear power appeared as independent witnesses, such as Malcolm Grimston, who was on television every day during the Fukushima events, praising the explosions of hydrogen as something of benefit.

There is ludicrous PR spin, to the extent that this week two different people from a public relations agency that works for nuclear power rang me up and offered to write my speech for me. They inquired who the Chair would be, as if that might be important. Those are lobbyists and spinners, presenting a favourable case for nuclear power.

‘Not enough electricity to light a bicycle lamp’

Hinkley Point B is a European Pressurised Reactor. There are some under construction in Finland, France and China. Not one of them has produced enough electricity to light a bicycle lamp. They are all in serious trouble, so why do we continue with our belief in Hinkley Point C?

The EPR in Finland was due to generate electricity in 2009. There has been a series of delays, problems and cost overruns, which have themselves now overrun, and the bill is €4 billion greater than anticipated. The possible opening date has been moved year after year and is now set at 2016, at a cost of €8.3 billion. However, other problems have come up.

There is another station under construction at Flamanville. It was due to be completed at a cost of €3.3 billion and now has an overrun of nearly €5 billion. There is a serious problem at Flamanville which will affect all the reactors – the carbon level in the steel for the pressure vessel is too high. That means that the steel is brittle and could crack open, with catastrophic results.

That affects the planned reactors in China, Finland, France and of course at Hinkley Point. It is a catastrophic problem and will mean a major delay. There is no way of reconstituting that steel.

Hinckley C: ‘a deal at any price’

The way the deal was done is almost unbelievable. We agreed under pressure, because there were Government promises and political pressure, to do a deal at almost any price to justify Hinkley Point C. We struck a deal for £92.50 per MWh. That is twice the going rate for electricity now, and we said that we would guarantee that deal for 35 years.

That was two years ago. Since then, the price of energy throughout the world has gone down a great deal, because of shale gas and the drop in the price of oil. The price we agreed was ludicrous at the time – far too generous.

The head of INEOS, the company in Grangemouth, has struck a deal since then with the same company – Électricité de France – for less than half that price. The country was ripped off, and we cannot seem to get out of it. We must do something about the strike price that we agreed.

In the world as a whole, nuclear powered energy generation peaked in 2006. Since then it has been in decline. It has gone down by 10% in Europe. Most energy consultants say that the total cost of the project is indefensible.

We omit something from our calculations of historical costs and pretend that nuclear is cheap, when we forget about the cost of waste. In fact we do not know what the cost of the waste from Sellafield is. We are still adding up the bill.

The latest estimate for clearing up Sellafield – just one site – is £53 billion. It is thought that the figure will exceed £100 billion eventually. When those costs are added to the historical costs of nuclear power it will not be found to be competitive any more.

Also, we now have alternatives. We are not in a situation where nothing else is available. The world has moved towards renewables, including the clean renewables, to a far greater extent.

The Government are to be congratulated on having put forward a package and the money for tidal lagoons in the Severn estuary. An enormous tide of water sweeps up that estuary twice a day. That is vast untapped energy – British, free, eternal and entirely predictable. The technology involved is simple and has been working successfully in France for 50 years, producing the cheapest electricity in the world.

Whatever happened to the LibDems’ ‘Say No to Nuclear?’

It is a curious thing, but the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the previous Parliament had an impeccable record on energy some years ago, when he launched the Liberal Democrat energy policy under the heading ‘Say No to Nuclear’, saying that “a new generation of nuclear power stations will cost taxpayers and consumers tens of billions of pounds.”

That is absolutely right. He went on: “In addition to posing safety and environmental risks, nuclear power will only be possible with vast taxpayer subsidies or a rigged market”.

That was the man who, when the red boxes and chauffeur-driven car arrived, changed his mind altogether and did a terrible financial deal to get Hinkley Point on the road. We will be paying for that for many years.

The cost of Hinkley Point has been estimated as an additional £200 a year for every consumer in Britain. That is billions of pounds in subsidy over 35 years. The Government have guaranteed £16 billion in subsidy for a technology that has not been proved to work and is not working anywhere. Almost any alternative is better than pressing on with Hinkley Point.

There are older nuclear designs that we could use, but we are heading into a technological jam where there will be difficulties. We are proposing to invest tens of billions in a system that has not been proved to be effective, and has certainly never proved to be economic.

There have been many problems at Flamanville, near Cherbourg, which are not limited to the pressure vessel. There have also been problems with the valves and the whole cooling system, following a warning in April from the French nuclear safety regulator about an excessive amount of carbon in the reactor vessel.

That is not a journalist causing trouble but the head of the French nuclear industry talking about a potential disaster in the making.

The certainty of nuclear disaster

What is likely to happen in future? There is a nuclear disaster almost every 10 to 15 years, due to various causes. The result of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima has been great fear among the population.

That is what happened in Germany, which felt the full force of the truth about Fukushima and sensibly cancelled its whole nuclear programme. Germany is now going into solar power and many other alternatives that are available to us. Tidal power is not available to Germany, but we have that great opportunity ahead.

There will almost certainly be problems in future. Some hazards today were unknown in the past. I recall going to an exhibition called ‘Atoms for Peace’ as a young boy in 1948, when we believed that nuclear would be the answer, but experience has taught us otherwise.

The possible accidents range from simple mechanical errors, such as not having enough carbon in the steel, to the simple human errors that happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Technical faults also occur, but the greatest risk we now face is terrorism.

Older nuclear power stations were not built to withstand terrorist attacks by drones and all the means by which people could attack them. Anyone living anywhere near a nuclear power station must be in a state of anxiety about that possibility, because of the accidents and disasters we have seen.

Fukushima was built to withstand a tsunami, but it could not withstand the tsunami and earthquake that came together. Any of these natural disasters are possible. We have not had a tsunami for some time along the Severn estuary, but we had one in 1607 when part of the area that I represent and the area where Hinkley Point now stands was flooded by a tsunami that came up the Bristol Channel.

It is believed to have come from underwater activity out in the deep ocean, so a tsunami is unlikely but possible there. We cannot guard against it. Why on earth risk a catastrophic accident when alternatives are available?

Civil servants – speak your concerns in public!

I am encouraged to see reports that many civil servants in the Treasury are deeply unhappy about the financial situation of nuclear power. There was a story that if Labour had been elected, it would have turned its back on nuclear power. I believe that to be true.

There have been reports in The Times and elsewhere – authoritative reports from serious journalists – that groups in the Treasury are saying that it will be a terrible mistake and a financial catastrophe if we go ahead. May I say to those civil servants that it is their job to speak publicly?

We know now what happened in Scotland during the referendum debate, when Sir Nicholas Macpherson decided to leak – to publish – a report of his advice to the Chancellor. His reason for doing so was that he thought the likely effects of Scottish independence would be catastrophic for the country and for Scotland.

He justified that leak, which was almost unprecedented among senior civil servants, on the basis that it was in the national interest. He was supported by the head of the civil service, Sir Jeremy Heywood, and condemned by a Committee of this House.

Look at the past; look, for example, the commercial advantages of the steam-generating heavy water reactor, which produced nothing and was useless, but cost £200 million. That was many years ago. There was also the decision to treat Concorde as a commercial venture that would succeed.

There were civil servants who quite rightly opposed those, but the ethos of the civil service is the unimportance of being right. The careers of civil servants who go along with the ministerial folly of the day prosper, while the careers of those who are right in the long term wither.

It is different now. There is some heroism in civil servants speaking truth to power and saying to their masters, “This should not go on. There are alternatives. The time has gone for nuclear power.”

Civil servants who know the new ethos in the civil service should regard it as their patriotic duty to speak truth, not only to power but to the nation, by saying that the time for nuclear power is over.

Paul Flynn is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Newport West since the 1987 general election.

This article is based on the speech he gave in Westminster Hall on 17th June. See the Hansard transcript for the original version and ensuing debate with energy minister Andrea Leadsom.

What makes Pope Francis and his 183-page encyclical so radical isn’t just his call to urgently tackle climate change.

It’s the fact he openly and unashamedly goes against the grain of dominant social, economic and environment policies.

While the Argentina-born pope is a very humble person whose vision is of a “poor church for the poor“, he seems increasingly determined to play a central role on the world stage.

Untainted by the realities of government and the greed of big business, he is perhaps the only major figure who can legitimately confront the world’s economic and political elites in the way he has.

However his radical message potentially puts him on a confrontation course with global powerbrokers and leaders of national governments, international institutions and multinational corporations.

The backlash has begun even before the encyclical has been officially published. US presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a Catholic, feels the pope should stay out of the climate debate, joining other Republicans, fossil fuel lobbyists and climate denier think-tanks in seeking to discredit Pope Francis’s intervention.

What makes the pope so radical?

There a several meanings of the word ‘radical’ that can be applied to the Pope and in particular his forthcoming encyclical.

First, radical can be understood as going back to the roots (from Latin radix, root). The majority of Catholics live in the Global South; in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Francis is the first pope from the Global South, and naming himself in honour of Saint Francis of Assisi, “a man of poverty and peace who loved nature and animals“, signalled to the world a commitment to going back to the roots of human existence.

The pope knows the plight of the majority world. Before he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was a priest in the vast, poor neighbourhoods, the villas miserias or slums, of Argentina’s capital.

Improving the lives of slum dwellers and addressing climate change is, for Pope Francis, one and the same thing. Both require tackling the structural, root causes of inequality, injustice, poverty and environmental degradation. For example, his encyclical says:

“Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drink- able water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights.” (p. 23)

Challenging the logic of the market and consumerism

This stands in stark contrast to, for example, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, the world’s largest food and bottled water company, who thinks water is a normal commodity with a market value, and not a human right. Nestlé is far from unusual. Its stance is backed up by the official water privatisation policies of the World Bank, IMF and other international institutions.

In fact, the encyclical is a radical – for a pope and international leader, unprecedented – attack on the logic of the market and consumerism, which has been expanded into all spheres of life. For example,

Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism … leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power.” (p. 149-150)

The pope rejects market fundamentalism, instead arguing that “the market alone does not ensure human development and social inclusion.”

In the same way, he warns us of the brave new world of carbon markets such as the EU Emissions Trading System and the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism, which have been created to reduce the world’s carbon emissions:

“The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.” (p. 126)

The pope’s right. The same criticisms of carbon markets have been made by myself and others.

Will he make any difference?

Pope Francis has already angered conservative Catholics in the US by clearly stating in the draft (p.20) that “Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”

While the pope is not a politician – or maybe precisely because he is not one – he commands high moral and ethical authority that goes beyond traditional partisan lines. His encyclical speaks truth to power, and he might be the only person with both the clout and the desire to meaningfully deliver a message like this:

“Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change. However, many of these symptoms indicate that such effects will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption.

“There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy.” (p.21)

The bosses of Shell, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies will not like this message, as it threatens their fundamental business model, and it also stands in contrast to the underwhelming ambitions of the G7 leaders who recently pledged to phase out fossil fuels only by 2100.

The time for bold, radical action on the environment as well as poverty eradication has come. This seems to be Pope Francis’ message: “The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty.” (p.128)

We need to think beyond the current, taken-for-granted logic that believes only markets and consumerism can solve the world’s social and environmental problems. The pope himself believes the situation is so grave that only a new, “true world political authority” will be able to address these problems.

Steffen Böhm is Professor in Management and Sustainability, and Director, Essex Sustainability Institute at University of Essex.

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