Just in case you hadn’t noticed: something is rotten in the state of Europe.

The EU is becoming a dictatorial imposer of austerity and deregulation, uncaring about its impacts on the wellbeing of people and planet, and determined to derail any elected government that dares dissent from its neoliberal ideology.

We write as Greens who have stood for the European Parliament on a mission of EU reform. We acknowledge that the EU can be and has been a powerful force for good – for example, in keeping the peace among member states, and in its impressive role in social and environmental regulation – now tragically at risk from the drive to ‘deregulate’.

But we believe that the general support of the EU by the Green Party, and the Left, and bien-pensant intellectuals, and ‘progressives’, needs to come to an end, to be replaced by a more honest willingness to face up to the very serious flaws besetting the EU.

The two key events of the last few days that have made starkly clear that something is rotten at the top of our continent are first, the EU moving a big step closer to backing TTIP, the starkly anti-democratic and pro-corporatocratic ‘TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership’.

And second, last night’s imposition on Athens of a programme for privatisation and savage cuts even worse than that rejected by the Greek people in the referendum last week onto Greece with its decisive ‘NO’ vote.

Secret corporate lobbying over the heads of the people

The TTIP is the EU-US ‘free trade’ agreement currently being negotiated, to which the European Parliament, tragically, gave its provisional approval last week.

The Green Party is united against TTIP. And the Green Party argues strongly in favour of the EU. Is there any tension between these two facts? We think that there is. The TTIP

• enables the democratic will of the people to be struck down by big business;
• is in its very essence a project of secretive lobbying;
• is about gigantic corporations being able to break open and gobble up public procurement and public services.

Our case is simple: this should not be viewed as some kind of aberration from EU standard practice. It is EU standard practice.

The EU has been from the beginning (but also increasingly, the key examples here being the Lisbon Treaty and the ‘Stability and Growth pact’) a pro-business front, a vehicle for organisations such as the European Roundtable of Industrialists to get their way.

There is far too little democracy in the EU: for example, the Council of Ministers operates almost entirely in secrecy and holds the whip hand over the Parliament on most issues; Brussels is dominated by corporate lobbyists who outnumber NGO lobbyists by about 15:1, while wielding immense powers of hospitality and patronage. EU rules would make it very difficult for (e.g.) the railways to be brought back into full public ownership in this country.

It is an illusion to think that TTIP is anything other than a natural extension of the logic of the EU as it is currently. Greens, being serious about our outright opposition to TTIP, need to be serious also about radically reforming the EU.

Anything less than truly radical reform – democratisation, an end to the culture of lobbying and secrecy, prioritisation of public service over private profit, prioritisation of one-planet ecological sanity over business profit – would leave the EU more of a hindrance than a help to Green objectives.

Greece – you call this ‘negotiation’?

The imposition on Greece of harsh and unwanted measures that eliminate its sovereignty and strip the people of the democratic power they exercised last week in the referendum is not a departure from business as usual for the EU.

It is, on the contrary, a manifestation of the EU’s long-standing disrespect for democracy and the sovereignty of its member states, and the determination among EU elites to impose a business-friendly vision onto any recalcitrant government and people.

This deal forced onto Athens – on pain of a forced crash out of the Euro – is a massive wake-up call to democrats everywhere. It is increasingly clear that the EU, far from standing up for Europe’s people against overweening corporate power, are doing the exact opposite: ganging up with corporate and finance capital to suppress democracy and popular aspirations.

Above all, the huge power of business lobbyists in the EU – who can usually get what they want, unless the European public puts its foot down (as happened, thankfully, over ACTA –  but that is a very rare event) – simply must end.

Moreover, systemic problems are caused by the ‘four freedoms’ that are at the core of the Treaty of Rome: the freedom to move capital, products, services and labour all over the EU. The four freedoms add up to a ‘bosses charter’ giving capital one great supranational freedom – that to exploit labour anywhere in Europe on the most favourable possible terms. There is no Leftist case for an unreformed EU.

That referendum – in or out?

There are tremendous structural difficulties in the way of reforming the EU to address these problems and recreate it in a Green image. But unless they can be achieved we may have to support withdrawal in the UK’s ‘in or out’ EU referendum.

Just as Syriza’s negotiating position has been fatally undermined by its refusal (in our view deeply mistaken) to countenance leaving the Euro, so we – Green and progressive voters – will lack any leverage so long as we tolerate a bad EU, for fear of something even worse.

Meanwhile we have to contend with David Cameron’s own campaign to ‘reform’ the EU, backed by other right-wing governments like Poland’s: for them, the EU’s main problem is that it is not pro-business enough, and imposes intolerable shackles on the pursuit of corporate profit as a result of its social and environmental legislation.

Leave the reform agenda to Cameron and friends, and the EU will only become an even more anti-democratic, anti-ecological, pro-growth, pro-big business centralising organisation than it already is. We must be forceful in opposing and denouncing that dystopian vision of a corporate Europe.

And make no mistake: a pro-TTIP European Union, eager to impose the imperatives of capital against people, determined to evacuate democracy in Greece and other member states of its meaning, is not an EU we should wish to be part of.

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.

Jenny Jones, aka Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, is a London Assembly member, green campaigner, long term Green Party member, and member of the House of Lords.

In a year when the all-important UN climate change summit will take place in Paris and the UN’s sustainable development goals will be finalised, one would have thought the government of one of the world’s most powerful nations might seize the moment to put forward progressive environmental policies.

Unfortunately that’s exactly what the summer budget introduced last week by UK Chancellor George Osborne, has failed to do.

Nothing announced this week will put the UK into a leadership position at the negotiations later this year – and it becomes increasingly clear things will not change for the next five years of Conservative government.

It’s hard to remember now but the beginning of David Cameron’s Tory leadership was marked by an increasing sense of urgency over environmental issues.

He visited Arctic glaciers to see the effects of climate change – and famously hugged the local huskies. On taking office he pronounced the coalition would be “the greenest government ever“.

In: fossil fuels, roads, cars; out: renewables, energy efficiency

But the new, fully Conservative, government has signalled a rollback of green policies. In his summer budget, Osborne promised continued tax breaks and subsidies for North Sea oil and gas – which, understandably, delights the industry.

This comes on top of vast existing direct or hidden subsidies to the UK fossil fuel industry which in 2012/13 amounted to almost £2 billion, according to a Friends of the Earth study.

Osborne’s budget continued the onslaught on renewable energy, as he announced the removal of the climate change levy (CCL) exemption for renewables, which might cost the green energy industry up to £1 billion by 2020/21. This comes after the Queen’s Speech announcement to end subsidies for onshore wind projects.

Not to forget the Chancellor’s new commitment to road building, financed by a new system of green car taxes. New roads will not help reduce the significant share of the UK’s private transport system in carbon emissions and will increase the pressure on UK cities’ air quality, which is among the worst in Europe. The government has also ditched its pledge to ensure all new homes would be zero carbon.

In a year when climate change should be on top of the political agenda these policy U-turns are, at best, counter-productive. At worst, making fossil fuels more competitive is nothing but reckless and extremely shortsighted.

You get what you pay for: an energy policy written by oil majors and the ‘big six’

The Chancellor is clearly responding to conservative forces in his party who have called for the removal of green subsidies for a long time. But he’s also listening hard to the needs of oil and gas majors such as Shell and BP which have far more access to Whitehall than the renewable energy industry.

It is not that George Osborne and David Cameron are climate change deniers. Far from it. Along with the big fossil fuel companies – even ExxonMobil – they know about the risks climate change poses to economies and the entire planet.

But what the big oil and gas majors are extremely good at is lobbying to keep the existing fossil fuel-driven status quo in place for as long as possible.

Shell plans to still expand fossil fuel production until at least 2050. The G7 doesn’t want to phase out fossil fuels until 2100. Every sensible climate scientist knows that these are unsustainable projections, posing a real risk to the planet’s biosphere.

Yet, at the same time, most major fossil fuel companies have already factored in some form of carbon tax, as ExxonMobil recently admitted. On the one hand it seems oil and gas majors want to prolong the good times (and big profits) they’ve enjoyed. On the other hand, they know perfectly well that this cannot go on forever (and have taken measures accordingly).

What’s missing is political leadership. While – back in 2010 – Cameron made political hay out of his commitment to “green up” his government, the first Conservative budget for almost 20 years signals a return to the unsustainable ways of the past.

The UK’s environmental and other progressive forces need to unite to pressure the government to honour its legal climate change commitments and follow the Pope’s moral leadership in tackling the big environmental and social issues of our time.

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.

Deregulation is often packaged as a fight against red tape or a drive to improve efficiency by removing so-called ‘burdens’ on business or ‘barriers’ to trade.

But such ‘burdens’ are the social and environmental standards that protect us all and the world we live in.

With human activity responsible for both dangerous levels of damage to natural habitats in Europe and the onset of the biggest mass extinction event in over 65 million years, we should be asking what more we can do to protect Europe’s most vulnerable plants and species, not assessing rules that are there to protect the environment against a set of outdated jobs and growth objectives.

Unfortunately, the European Commission currently seems to be intent on the latter.

As part of its deregulation drive – known as the ‘Better Regulation’ agenda, the EU’s executive body has put the spotlight on two little-known but vital EU nature laws by holding a review of the Birds Directive, and the Habitats & Species Directive – a ‘Fitness Check’ in Brussels parlance.

By setting limits and restrictions on where and how land can be used and developed, the aim of these laws is to ensure the most-threatened species and habitat types are protected, maintained, or restored to favourable conservation status across their natural range.

If a project is given the go-ahead in an area designated for nature protection under these EU laws, developers will usually be required to avoid or minimise the destruction of protected species and habitats.

The laws work – so what is ‘modernisation’ meant to achieve?

Such thorough but flexible rules have resulted in higher levels of nature conservation and the protection of species like the Eurasian lynx, the European beaver and the Blue butterfly, as well as over 2,000 habitats such as marshlands, estuaries, mountains, coastal lagoons, meadows, dunes and grasslands, to name a few.

In total, 20% of Europe’s land and 4% of its marine sites are protected – the biggest network of protected areas in the world.

Taking a look at legislation to check it is still relevant is not problematic in itself. Yet, while the official outcome of the review won’t be known before the end of the year, European Commission President Juncker has already asked Environment Commissioner Vella to investigate merging the two Directives into a “more modern piece of legislation” – sentiments echoed by Frans Timmermans, the Commission’s First Vice-President who has been tasked with leading President Juncker’s deregulation push.

The Commission rebuffs the idea that it is pre-empting the results by emphasising its commitment to nature protection and the objectives of EU nature laws – and indeed, the EU’s commitment to the objectives was recently reinforced by heads of state and government in the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy to 2020.

But the Commission’s line that they won’t “lower ambition” has not convinced NGOs since the Fitness Check process was never meant to be about a review of the objectives – it is a review of the means to achieve these objectives.

What makes it difficult to believe that the Commission is as committed as it says it is to the level of ambition spelled out in the EU Biodiversity Strategy and in the objectives of the Birds and Habitats Directives is the fact that biodiversity and environment do not feature on Juncker’s list of top-ten political priorities.

Nature laws don’t even make the ‘top ten’ of business burdens

The facts show that these laws are effective at protecting plants, species, and habitats. The Commission has launched infringement procedures against member states where planned infrastructure projects would have destroyed habitats and wildlife protected under EU nature laws.

In 2007, the European Commission took Poland to the European Court of Justice, challenging the government’s plans to build a new 17.1 kilometre bypass through the Rospuda river valley – a series of unspoilt habitats within the Augustów Primeval Forest which is protected by EU nature legislation.

The European Commission successfully argued that the planned project would destroy “precious natural heritage” and Poland was forced to choose a new route for the bypass. If the site had not been protected by EU nature laws, the European Commission would not have had such a strong case against the project. Today Poland is exemplary in addressing conservation in all its planning activities.

Getting rid of these standards by introducing more flexibility would be sacrificing our natural world in the name of short-term profit-making, and opening up the legislation for revision will create years of legal uncertainty for both business and nature. Instead, these laws, widely regarded as exemplary by environmental experts, should be fully implemented and better enforced by EU countries to protect nature for future generations.

This singling out of the nature directives is particularly disturbing since the idea that nature laws impose unnecessary or disproportionate constraints on economic activity is a myth.

In reality, in 2014 the Commission’s own High Level Group on Administrative Burden (known as the ‘Stoiber Group’) estimated that environmental regulation was responsible for just 1% of the total administrative burdens facing businesses, and in 2012 EU nature laws didn’t even feature on a list of the top 10 most-burdensome EU laws for SMEs.

Record-breaking numbers of citizen responses

But there is a fightback. As part of this review of EU nature laws, a public consultation has been opened for European citizens to have their say.

And through ‘Nature Alert‘, a campaign organised by four NGOs – the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), WWF, BirdLife Europe and Friends of the Earth Europe – over 325,500 people have responded to tell the Commission that they want Europe’s nature laws not only maintained, but better implemented and enforced.

This is a record-breaking level of participation in a Commission public consultation, even surpassing the 145,000 responses to one on elements of the controversial EU-US trade deal – the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP).

And just as mounting public pressure has successfully slowed progress on TTIP and the imminent risk it poses for hard-fought-for social and environmental standards, so too can widespread public mobilisation against this attack on nature expose this new Commission’s hostile approach to both new and existing environmental laws.

Deregulation is often packaged as a fight against red tape or a drive to improve efficiency by removing so-called ‘burdens’ on business or ‘barriers’ to trade, and its advocates defend it as ‘not lowering standards’. But the reality is that most of what some may call ‘burdens’ are not unnecessary bureaucratic procedures. They are the social and environmental standards that protect us all and the world we live in.

EU citizens don’t want an EU where environmental concerns are put on the back burner as leaders look for ways to indiscriminately deregulate to prove they are delivering on a ‘growth and jobs’ agenda.

They want nature at the forefront of EU policymaking – before it’s too late to reverse the damage human activity has had on our natural world.

Take part in the public consultation on EU nature laws via Nature Alert, or fill the survey out in full on the European Commission website. The Consultation runs until 24 July.

Leonardo Mazza is the Senior Policy Officer for Biodiversity, Water & Soil Protection at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). The EEB is the environmental voice of European citizens, standing for environmental justice, sustainable development and participatory democracy. We want the EU to ensure all people a healthy environment and rich biodiversity.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

The humble bumblebee is feeling the squeeze from climate change.

Newly published research shows that its southern range is being reduced as the planet warms – and yet it seems to show no sign of migrating northwards to safety.

This unwillingness to head for cooler climes could prove disastrous, and has prompted some scientists to suggest that humans may need to intervene by creating refuges for the bees away from the heat.

Jeremy Kerr, a biologist at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and colleagues report in the journal Science that they generated a database of 423,000 local observations of 36 European and 31 North American species of the genus Bombus and mapped the patterns of change.

They found that in recent, increasingly warmer decades, bumblebees tended to disappear from the southernmost and hottest parts of their range, but did not shift north. In some cases, the insects’ range had shrunk by as much as 300 kilometres.

“Using long-term observations across Europe and North America over 110 years, we tested for climate change-related range shifts in bumblebee species across the full extents of their latitudinal and thermal limits and movements along elevation gradients”, the paper states.

“We found cross-continentally consistent trends in failures to track warming through time at species’ northern range limits, range losses from southern range limits, and shifts to higher elevations among southern species. These effects … underscore the need to test for climate impacts at both leading and trailing latitudinal and thermal limits for species.”

Bumblebees trapped in ‘climate vice’

“Global warming has trapped bumblebee species in a kind of climate vice”, Professor Kerr says. “The result is dramatic losses of bumblebee species from the hottest areas across two continents.

“For species that evolved under cool conditions, like bumblebees, global warming might be the kind of threat that causes many of them to disappear for good. Unlike so many other species, bumblebees generally haven’t expanded into more northern areas. We may need to help these species establish new colonies to the north, and at continental scales.”

The finding is a clear indication that some naturally mobile species may not be able to adapt to climate change.

In recent decades, biologists have used animal and even plant migration to monitor climate change. Alpine species in Switzerland have been observed moving uphill, and in the UK, the butterfly range has tended to shift northwards.

In the latest study, the scientists looked at a range of factors that might limit bumblebee migration – things such as changes in land use, and pesticide prevalence, create problems for all wild species. But these factors seemed to play no significant part in limiting the creature’s range.

There is evidence that, where they can do, some species are moving uphill by as much as 300 metres, while still staying in the same latitude. But researchers do know that bumblebees don’t thrive in the extremes of heat that have been an increasing feature of recent decades.

Bees should be able to migrate north – but they’re not doing it

“We don’t know for sure what is causing a stagnation at the northern end of things“, says Paul Galpern, a landscape ecologist at the University of Calgary, and a co-author of the report.

“Bees should be able to start new colonies in places they did not historically occupy. But we don’t know why this is happening so slowly that it looks like the ranges are not moving at all. This all points to the fact that bumblebees are at risk, and the services that they provide are increasingly threatened by human-caused climate change.”

Such creatures play an important role in temperate zone ecosystems. “Bumblebees pollinate many plants that provide food for humans and wildlife“, says Leif Richardson, a biologist at the University of Vermont, and also a co-author of the report.

“If we don’t stop the decline in the abundance of bumblebees, we may well face higher food prices, diminished varieties, and other troubles.”

Professor Kerr reinforces the message: “Pollinators are vital for food security and our economy, and widespread losses of pollinators due to climate change will diminish both.

“We need to figure out how we can improve the outlook for pollinators at continental scales, but the most important thing we can do is begin to take serious action to reduce the rate of climate change.”

The paper: ‘Climate change impacts on bumblebees converge across continents‘ by Jeremy T Kerr et al is published in Science.

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

When the government announced on Wednesday that they were aiming to amend the Hunting Act, there was understandable outcry.

Hidden in the language of ‘flushing to guns’ and ‘a minor amendment’ was basically a cynical attempt to make it easier for hunts to chase and kill foxes. It would also make it harder for hunts to be convicted when they break the law.

Now we have seen the full details of what the government are proposing. And it’s a whole lot worse than we thought.

The changes to the Hunting Act are not minor or subtle, they are massive. This is not a ‘tweak’ to facilitate pest control, this is nothing short of repeal.

All of the exemptions to the Act have been altered to allow an unlimited number of dogs, not just the flushing exemption. So a full pack could be used to:

• Retrieve an injured or diseased animal
• Carry out research and observation
• Flush a mammal to waiting guns

What this means is that any hunt can go out with a full pack of dogs and just pick the exemption that suits them best on the day. They’ll never even have to have a gun present, they can claim to be carrying out observation. Or that they spotted a diseased fox or hare, or even deer, and were retrieving it to be shot, but, uh oh, the hounds killed it first.

What all this means is that prosecution under the Hunting Act will be extremely difficult, or even impossible.

The myth of ‘pest control’

They are also relaxing the exemption for terrier work, allowing it to be used to protect livestock as well as birds reared for shooting, and not requiring the perpetrators to carry written permission from landowners.

What is terrier work? This is the despicable practice of sending terrier dogs down under the ground to do battle with foxes who have escaped. You can only imagine the fear and the damage inflicted on both animals. This should be outlawed, full stop, but through this amendment the Government will make it legal.

For the record, do the arguments about ‘pest’ or ‘fox control’ have any substance? The main argument being used to justify this change is that farmers who need to kill foxes to protect their livestock cannot do it by only using two dogs to ‘flush to guns’ – that means chase the foxes from cover into a waiting shotgun.

In Scotland they can use an unlimited number of dogs, and this is what the amendment in England and Wales is claiming to try and achieve.

All this might sound reasonable until you look into it a bit deeper. Yes, foxes do kill lambs – but by no means to the extent that is implied by the pro-hunt lobby. Evidence and the Government’s own figures show that a tiny proportion of lamb deaths can be attributed to foxes.

One study attributed only 1% of lamb deaths to foxes, the other 99% are due to inclement weather and failures of husbandry. We’ve had farmers come to us to say that lethal fox control is completely unnecessary.

What it’s really all about – the fun of killing

But the point is, this is actually nothing to do with flushing to guns or pest control. This is not about hunting foxes for pest control, it’s about hunting foxes for fun. Let’s get real – hunts talk about the ‘thrill of the chase’ – they don’t talk about the ‘thrill of surrounding some trees so the fox can get shot’.

And if fox hunting has anything to do with pest control, why would hunts, or closely connected individuals, be feeding up foxes with offal piles in the woods and even ‘farming’ fox cubs – as revealed in The Ecologist?

Hunting has been illegal for ten years, but in many places it has continued. There have been over 400 convictions under the Hunting Act making it very successful, but hunts have also found many ways to jump through loopholes. The new amendments being suggested will turn those loopholes into one massive blackhole.

If amended in this way it will run a coach and horses through the legislation and will allow hunts to get away with chasing wild animals across the countryside to allow the hounds to rip them apart.

And remember: these are the people who spent years arguing that the Hunting Act was a bad and ineffective law, when the real problem was that it worked all too well. Now, with this amendment, they are trying to make sure that it’s a bad and ineffective law.

MPs’ decision time

The question is, will MPs let this happen? We know that eight out of ten people in this country are opposed to hunting. We know that the majority of opposition MPs are opposed to hunting – including those of the Scottish National Party, whose participation in the vote is not yet guaranteed.

We also know that at least 40 Conservative MPs are opposed to hunting, along with seven out of ten Conservative voters are opposed to hunting. So could this actually go through? The sad truth is yes, if MPs allow it.

Our somewhat archaic Parliamentary system means that only people attending the session can vote, so we need to ensure that everyone opposed to fox hunting is present. All it will take to bring back hunting is for anti-hunting MPs not to turn up.

The government is being canny by proceeding this way, however. The initial manifesto pledge was for a free vote on ‘repeal of the Hunting Act’. Over the last few weeks they have obviously seen how much opposition there would be to that, and realised they wouldn’t win.

We then heard rumours of a so-called ‘middle way’ option – something that would potentially have the same impact as repeal, but would somehow be more appealing to wavering or nervous Conservative MPs and voters. And this is it.

So we need to ensure that every MP understands that this ‘amendment’ is nothing less than repeal by the back door – and to make sure that they vote against it!

Robbie Marsland is Director of the League Against Cruel Sports.

Contact your MP at www.league.org.uk/savetheact. Please do this before anything else as it will be far more effective than signing a petition!

Action: The League Against Cruel Sports will be joining Team Fox for a rally against the amendments at Old Palace Yard, SW1, on Tuesday, starting 11am.

Twitter: #keeptheban

Petitions

Please sign either or both of these petitions – but only after you have contacted your MP!

• ‘Don’t make any changes to the Fox Hunting ban!‘ – by 38 Degrees.
• ‘URGENT: Ask SNP to vote against fox hunting next week!‘ by Care2.

In a year when the all-important UN climate change summit will take place in Paris and the UN’s sustainable development goals will be finalised, one would have thought the government of one of the world’s most powerful nations might seize the moment to put forward progressive environmental policies.

Unfortunately that’s exactly what the summer budget introduced last week by UK Chancellor George Osborne, has failed to do.

Nothing announced this week will put the UK into a leadership position at the negotiations later this year – and it becomes increasingly clear things will not change for the next five years of Conservative government.

It’s hard to remember now but the beginning of David Cameron’s Tory leadership was marked by an increasing sense of urgency over environmental issues.

He visited Arctic glaciers to see the effects of climate change – and famously hugged the local huskies. On taking office he pronounced the coalition would be “the greenest government ever“.

In: fossil fuels, roads, cars; out: renewables, energy efficiency

But the new, fully Conservative, government has signalled a rollback of green policies. In his summer budget, Osborne promised continued tax breaks and subsidies for North Sea oil and gas – which, understandably, delights the industry.

This comes on top of vast existing direct or hidden subsidies to the UK fossil fuel industry which in 2012/13 amounted to almost £2 billion, according to a Friends of the Earth study.

Osborne’s budget continued the onslaught on renewable energy, as he announced the removal of the climate change levy (CCL) exemption for renewables, which might cost the green energy industry up to £1 billion by 2020/21. This comes after the Queen’s Speech announcement to end subsidies for onshore wind projects.

Not to forget the Chancellor’s new commitment to road building, financed by a new system of green car taxes. New roads will not help reduce the significant share of the UK’s private transport system in carbon emissions and will increase the pressure on UK cities’ air quality, which is among the worst in Europe. The government has also ditched its pledge to ensure all new homes would be zero carbon.

In a year when climate change should be on top of the political agenda these policy U-turns are, at best, counter-productive. At worst, making fossil fuels more competitive is nothing but reckless and extremely shortsighted.

You get what you pay for: an energy policy written by oil majors and the ‘big six’

The Chancellor is clearly responding to conservative forces in his party who have called for the removal of green subsidies for a long time. But he’s also listening hard to the needs of oil and gas majors such as Shell and BP which have far more access to Whitehall than the renewable energy industry.

It is not that George Osborne and David Cameron are climate change deniers. Far from it. Along with the big fossil fuel companies – even ExxonMobil – they know about the risks climate change poses to economies and the entire planet.

But what the big oil and gas majors are extremely good at is lobbying to keep the existing fossil fuel-driven status quo in place for as long as possible.

Shell plans to still expand fossil fuel production until at least 2050. The G7 doesn’t want to phase out fossil fuels until 2100. Every sensible climate scientist knows that these are unsustainable projections, posing a real risk to the planet’s biosphere.

Yet, at the same time, most major fossil fuel companies have already factored in some form of carbon tax, as ExxonMobil recently admitted. On the one hand it seems oil and gas majors want to prolong the good times (and big profits) they’ve enjoyed. On the other hand, they know perfectly well that this cannot go on forever (and have taken measures accordingly).

What’s missing is political leadership. While – back in 2010 – Cameron made political hay out of his commitment to “green up” his government, the first Conservative budget for almost 20 years signals a return to the unsustainable ways of the past.

The UK’s environmental and other progressive forces need to unite to pressure the government to honour its legal climate change commitments and follow the Pope’s moral leadership in tackling the big environmental and social issues of our time.

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.

Deregulation is often packaged as a fight against red tape or a drive to improve efficiency by removing so-called ‘burdens’ on business or ‘barriers’ to trade.

But such ‘burdens’ are the social and environmental standards that protect us all and the world we live in.

With human activity responsible for both dangerous levels of damage to natural habitats in Europe and the onset of the biggest mass extinction event in over 65 million years, we should be asking what more we can do to protect Europe’s most vulnerable plants and species, not assessing rules that are there to protect the environment against a set of outdated jobs and growth objectives.

Unfortunately, the European Commission currently seems to be intent on the latter.

As part of its deregulation drive – known as the ‘Better Regulation’ agenda, the EU’s executive body has put the spotlight on two little-known but vital EU nature laws by holding a review of the Birds Directive, and the Habitats & Species Directive – a ‘Fitness Check’ in Brussels parlance.

By setting limits and restrictions on where and how land can be used and developed, the aim of these laws is to ensure the most-threatened species and habitat types are protected, maintained, or restored to favourable conservation status across their natural range.

If a project is given the go-ahead in an area designated for nature protection under these EU laws, developers will usually be required to avoid or minimise the destruction of protected species and habitats.

The laws work – so what is ‘modernisation’ meant to achieve?

Such thorough but flexible rules have resulted in higher levels of nature conservation and the protection of species like the Eurasian lynx, the European beaver and the Blue butterfly, as well as over 2,000 habitats such as marshlands, estuaries, mountains, coastal lagoons, meadows, dunes and grasslands, to name a few.

In total, 20% of Europe’s land and 4% of its marine sites are protected – the biggest network of protected areas in the world.

Taking a look at legislation to check it is still relevant is not problematic in itself. Yet, while the official outcome of the review won’t be known before the end of the year, European Commission President Juncker has already asked Environment Commissioner Vella to investigate merging the two Directives into a “more modern piece of legislation” – sentiments echoed by Frans Timmermans, the Commission’s First Vice-President who has been tasked with leading President Juncker’s deregulation push.

The Commission rebuffs the idea that it is pre-empting the results by emphasising its commitment to nature protection and the objectives of EU nature laws – and indeed, the EU’s commitment to the objectives was recently reinforced by heads of state and government in the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy to 2020.

But the Commission’s line that they won’t “lower ambition” has not convinced NGOs since the Fitness Check process was never meant to be about a review of the objectives – it is a review of the means to achieve these objectives.

What makes it difficult to believe that the Commission is as committed as it says it is to the level of ambition spelled out in the EU Biodiversity Strategy and in the objectives of the Birds and Habitats Directives is the fact that biodiversity and environment do not feature on Juncker’s list of top-ten political priorities.

Nature laws don’t even make the ‘top ten’ of business burdens

The facts show that these laws are effective at protecting plants, species, and habitats. The Commission has launched infringement procedures against member states where planned infrastructure projects would have destroyed habitats and wildlife protected under EU nature laws.

In 2007, the European Commission took Poland to the European Court of Justice, challenging the government’s plans to build a new 17.1 kilometre bypass through the Rospuda river valley – a series of unspoilt habitats within the Augustów Primeval Forest which is protected by EU nature legislation.

The European Commission successfully argued that the planned project would destroy “precious natural heritage” and Poland was forced to choose a new route for the bypass. If the site had not been protected by EU nature laws, the European Commission would not have had such a strong case against the project. Today Poland is exemplary in addressing conservation in all its planning activities.

Getting rid of these standards by introducing more flexibility would be sacrificing our natural world in the name of short-term profit-making, and opening up the legislation for revision will create years of legal uncertainty for both business and nature. Instead, these laws, widely regarded as exemplary by environmental experts, should be fully implemented and better enforced by EU countries to protect nature for future generations.

This singling out of the nature directives is particularly disturbing since the idea that nature laws impose unnecessary or disproportionate constraints on economic activity is a myth.

In reality, in 2014 the Commission’s own High Level Group on Administrative Burden (known as the ‘Stoiber Group’) estimated that environmental regulation was responsible for just 1% of the total administrative burdens facing businesses, and in 2012 EU nature laws didn’t even feature on a list of the top 10 most-burdensome EU laws for SMEs.

Record-breaking numbers of citizen responses

But there is a fightback. As part of this review of EU nature laws, a public consultation has been opened for European citizens to have their say.

And through ‘Nature Alert‘, a campaign organised by four NGOs – the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), WWF, BirdLife Europe and Friends of the Earth Europe – over 325,500 people have responded to tell the Commission that they want Europe’s nature laws not only maintained, but better implemented and enforced.

This is a record-breaking level of participation in a Commission public consultation, even surpassing the 145,000 responses to one on elements of the controversial EU-US trade deal – the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP).

And just as mounting public pressure has successfully slowed progress on TTIP and the imminent risk it poses for hard-fought-for social and environmental standards, so too can widespread public mobilisation against this attack on nature expose this new Commission’s hostile approach to both new and existing environmental laws.

Deregulation is often packaged as a fight against red tape or a drive to improve efficiency by removing so-called ‘burdens’ on business or ‘barriers’ to trade, and its advocates defend it as ‘not lowering standards’. But the reality is that most of what some may call ‘burdens’ are not unnecessary bureaucratic procedures. They are the social and environmental standards that protect us all and the world we live in.

EU citizens don’t want an EU where environmental concerns are put on the back burner as leaders look for ways to indiscriminately deregulate to prove they are delivering on a ‘growth and jobs’ agenda.

They want nature at the forefront of EU policymaking – before it’s too late to reverse the damage human activity has had on our natural world.

Take part in the public consultation on EU nature laws via Nature Alert, or fill the survey out in full on the European Commission website. The Consultation runs until 24 July.

Leonardo Mazza is the Senior Policy Officer for Biodiversity, Water & Soil Protection at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). The EEB is the environmental voice of European citizens, standing for environmental justice, sustainable development and participatory democracy. We want the EU to ensure all people a healthy environment and rich biodiversity.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

The humble bumblebee is feeling the squeeze from climate change.

Newly published research shows that its southern range is being reduced as the planet warms – and yet it seems to show no sign of migrating northwards to safety.

This unwillingness to head for cooler climes could prove disastrous, and has prompted some scientists to suggest that humans may need to intervene by creating refuges for the bees away from the heat.

Jeremy Kerr, a biologist at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and colleagues report in the journal Science that they generated a database of 423,000 local observations of 36 European and 31 North American species of the genus Bombus and mapped the patterns of change.

They found that in recent, increasingly warmer decades, bumblebees tended to disappear from the southernmost and hottest parts of their range, but did not shift north. In some cases, the insects’ range had shrunk by as much as 300 kilometres.

“Using long-term observations across Europe and North America over 110 years, we tested for climate change-related range shifts in bumblebee species across the full extents of their latitudinal and thermal limits and movements along elevation gradients”, the paper states.

“We found cross-continentally consistent trends in failures to track warming through time at species’ northern range limits, range losses from southern range limits, and shifts to higher elevations among southern species. These effects … underscore the need to test for climate impacts at both leading and trailing latitudinal and thermal limits for species.”

Bumblebees trapped in ‘climate vice’

“Global warming has trapped bumblebee species in a kind of climate vice”, Professor Kerr says. “The result is dramatic losses of bumblebee species from the hottest areas across two continents.

“For species that evolved under cool conditions, like bumblebees, global warming might be the kind of threat that causes many of them to disappear for good. Unlike so many other species, bumblebees generally haven’t expanded into more northern areas. We may need to help these species establish new colonies to the north, and at continental scales.”

The finding is a clear indication that some naturally mobile species may not be able to adapt to climate change.

In recent decades, biologists have used animal and even plant migration to monitor climate change. Alpine species in Switzerland have been observed moving uphill, and in the UK, the butterfly range has tended to shift northwards.

In the latest study, the scientists looked at a range of factors that might limit bumblebee migration – things such as changes in land use, and pesticide prevalence, create problems for all wild species. But these factors seemed to play no significant part in limiting the creature’s range.

There is evidence that, where they can do, some species are moving uphill by as much as 300 metres, while still staying in the same latitude. But researchers do know that bumblebees don’t thrive in the extremes of heat that have been an increasing feature of recent decades.

Bees should be able to migrate north – but they’re not doing it

“We don’t know for sure what is causing a stagnation at the northern end of things“, says Paul Galpern, a landscape ecologist at the University of Calgary, and a co-author of the report.

“Bees should be able to start new colonies in places they did not historically occupy. But we don’t know why this is happening so slowly that it looks like the ranges are not moving at all. This all points to the fact that bumblebees are at risk, and the services that they provide are increasingly threatened by human-caused climate change.”

Such creatures play an important role in temperate zone ecosystems. “Bumblebees pollinate many plants that provide food for humans and wildlife“, says Leif Richardson, a biologist at the University of Vermont, and also a co-author of the report.

“If we don’t stop the decline in the abundance of bumblebees, we may well face higher food prices, diminished varieties, and other troubles.”

Professor Kerr reinforces the message: “Pollinators are vital for food security and our economy, and widespread losses of pollinators due to climate change will diminish both.

“We need to figure out how we can improve the outlook for pollinators at continental scales, but the most important thing we can do is begin to take serious action to reduce the rate of climate change.”

The paper: ‘Climate change impacts on bumblebees converge across continents‘ by Jeremy T Kerr et al is published in Science.

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

When the government announced on Wednesday that they were aiming to amend the Hunting Act, there was understandable outcry.

Hidden in the language of ‘flushing to guns’ and ‘a minor amendment’ was basically a cynical attempt to make it easier for hunts to chase and kill foxes. It would also make it harder for hunts to be convicted when they break the law.

Now we have seen the full details of what the government are proposing. And it’s a whole lot worse than we thought.

The changes to the Hunting Act are not minor or subtle, they are massive. This is not a ‘tweak’ to facilitate pest control, this is nothing short of repeal.

All of the exemptions to the Act have been altered to allow an unlimited number of dogs, not just the flushing exemption. So a full pack could be used to:

• Retrieve an injured or diseased animal
• Carry out research and observation
• Flush a mammal to waiting guns

What this means is that any hunt can go out with a full pack of dogs and just pick the exemption that suits them best on the day. They’ll never even have to have a gun present, they can claim to be carrying out observation. Or that they spotted a diseased fox or hare, or even deer, and were retrieving it to be shot, but, uh oh, the hounds killed it first.

What all this means is that prosecution under the Hunting Act will be extremely difficult, or even impossible.

The myth of ‘pest control’

They are also relaxing the exemption for terrier work, allowing it to be used to protect livestock as well as birds reared for shooting, and not requiring the perpetrators to carry written permission from landowners.

What is terrier work? This is the despicable practice of sending terrier dogs down under the ground to do battle with foxes who have escaped. You can only imagine the fear and the damage inflicted on both animals. This should be outlawed, full stop, but through this amendment the Government will make it legal.

For the record, do the arguments about ‘pest’ or ‘fox control’ have any substance? The main argument being used to justify this change is that farmers who need to kill foxes to protect their livestock cannot do it by only using two dogs to ‘flush to guns’ – that means chase the foxes from cover into a waiting shotgun.

In Scotland they can use an unlimited number of dogs, and this is what the amendment in England and Wales is claiming to try and achieve.

All this might sound reasonable until you look into it a bit deeper. Yes, foxes do kill lambs – but by no means to the extent that is implied by the pro-hunt lobby. Evidence and the Government’s own figures show that a tiny proportion of lamb deaths can be attributed to foxes.

One study attributed only 1% of lamb deaths to foxes, the other 99% are due to inclement weather and failures of husbandry. We’ve had farmers come to us to say that lethal fox control is completely unnecessary.

What it’s really all about – the fun of killing

But the point is, this is actually nothing to do with flushing to guns or pest control. This is not about hunting foxes for pest control, it’s about hunting foxes for fun. Let’s get real – hunts talk about the ‘thrill of the chase’ – they don’t talk about the ‘thrill of surrounding some trees so the fox can get shot’.

And if fox hunting has anything to do with pest control, why would hunts, or closely connected individuals, be feeding up foxes with offal piles in the woods and even ‘farming’ fox cubs – as revealed in The Ecologist?

Hunting has been illegal for ten years, but in many places it has continued. There have been over 400 convictions under the Hunting Act making it very successful, but hunts have also found many ways to jump through loopholes. The new amendments being suggested will turn those loopholes into one massive blackhole.

If amended in this way it will run a coach and horses through the legislation and will allow hunts to get away with chasing wild animals across the countryside to allow the hounds to rip them apart.

And remember: these are the people who spent years arguing that the Hunting Act was a bad and ineffective law, when the real problem was that it worked all too well. Now, with this amendment, they are trying to make sure that it’s a bad and ineffective law.

MPs’ decision time

The question is, will MPs let this happen? We know that eight out of ten people in this country are opposed to hunting. We know that the majority of opposition MPs are opposed to hunting – including those of the Scottish National Party, whose participation in the vote is not yet guaranteed.

We also know that at least 40 Conservative MPs are opposed to hunting, along with seven out of ten Conservative voters are opposed to hunting. So could this actually go through? The sad truth is yes, if MPs allow it.

Our somewhat archaic Parliamentary system means that only people attending the session can vote, so we need to ensure that everyone opposed to fox hunting is present. All it will take to bring back hunting is for anti-hunting MPs not to turn up.

The government is being canny by proceeding this way, however. The initial manifesto pledge was for a free vote on ‘repeal of the Hunting Act’. Over the last few weeks they have obviously seen how much opposition there would be to that, and realised they wouldn’t win.

We then heard rumours of a so-called ‘middle way’ option – something that would potentially have the same impact as repeal, but would somehow be more appealing to wavering or nervous Conservative MPs and voters. And this is it.

So we need to ensure that every MP understands that this ‘amendment’ is nothing less than repeal by the back door – and to make sure that they vote against it!

Robbie Marsland is Director of the League Against Cruel Sports.

Contact your MP at www.league.org.uk/savetheact. Please do this before anything else as it will be far more effective than signing a petition!

Action: The League Against Cruel Sports will be joining Team Fox for a rally against the amendments at Old Palace Yard, SW1, on Tuesday, starting 11am.

Twitter: #keeptheban

Petitions

Please sign either or both of these petitions – but only after you have contacted your MP!

• ‘Don’t make any changes to the Fox Hunting ban!‘ – by 38 Degrees.
• ‘URGENT: Ask SNP to vote against fox hunting next week!‘ by Care2.