The nuclear industry and its supporters were busily promoting nuclear power – and attacking environmentalists – before and during the COP21 UN climate conference in Paris.

All the usual suspects were promoting nuclear power as a climate-friendly energy source: the World Nuclear Association, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Energy Agency, the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency, the US Nuclear Energy Institute, and so on.

The Breakthrough Institute has been promoting its pro-nuclear “paradigm-shifting advocacy for an ecomodernist future” and arguing against the “reactionary apocalyptic pastoralism” of anyone who disagrees with them.

In reality the Breakthrough Institute is anything but ‘paradigm shifting’. It endorses all things capitalist … even the Kardashians, apparently. A glowing endorsement in the National Review states:

“Ecomodernists are pro-fracking. They advocate genetically engineered crops (GMOs) … Most distinctively, the ecomodernists are pro-growth and pro-free markets. ‘The Kardashians are not the reason Africans are starving,’ chides Alex Trembath, a senior researcher at the Breakthrough Institute …”

Bill Gates was in Paris to announce the formation of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition – which has been suspiciously vague about exactly what kind of ‘clean energy’ it wants to finance research into. It seems likely the capital the Coalition attracts will be directed disproportionately to nuclear R&D.

Robert Stone, director of the Pandora’s Promise pro-nuclear propaganda film, launched a ‘resource hub’ called Energy For Humanity, promoting “more advanced, mass-producible, passively safe, reactor designs”.

Rauli Partanen and Janne Korhonen, members of the Finnish Ecomodernist Society, have been attacking environmentalists for opposing nuclear power. Rebutting a rebuttal by Michael Mariotte from the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Partanen and Korhonen offer this gem:

“Even the much-maligned Olkiluoto 3 nuclear project [in Finland] turns out to be very fast way of adding low-carbon energy production when compared to any real-world combination of alternatives.”

A single reactor that will take well over a decade to build (and is three times over budget) is a “very fast way” of adding low-carbon energy? Huh? Maybe that’s why a second reactor of the same EPR design to be built at Okiluoto was cancelled in May 2015, while the main players are locked in a €10 billion legal battle.

‘The instransigent network of anti-nukes’ versus Astroturf

Partanen and Korhanan authored a booklet called ‘Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?‘, and crowdfunded the printing of 5,000 copies which were distributed for free at the COP21 conference.

James Hansen and three other climate scientists were in Paris to promote nuclear power. Hansen attacks the “intransigent network of anti-nukes” that has “grown to include ‘Big Green,’ huge groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund and World Wide Fund for Nature. They have trained lawyers, scientists, and media staff ready to denounce any positive news about nuclear power.”

By way of sharp contrast, the impoverished US nuclear industry could only rustle up US$60 million (€55m) to lobby Congress and federal agencies in 2013-14.

So is there an undercurrent of grassroots pro-nuclear environmentalism waiting to burst forth if only their voice could cut through Big Green hegemony? Perhaps Nuclear for Climate, promoted as a ‘grassroots organization‘, is the environmental network to take on Big Green?

Well, no. Nuclear for Climate isn’t a network of grassroots environmentalists, it’s a network of more than 140 nuclear societies. It isn’t grassroots environmentalism, it’s corporate astroturf.

And the list of 140 associations includes 36 chapters of the ‘Women in Nuclear’ organisation and 43 chapters of the ‘Young Generation Network’. One wonders whether these organisations have any meaningful existence. Does Tanzania really have a pro-nuclear Young Generation Network? Don’t young people in Tanzania have better things to do?

Nuclear for Climate has a website, a hashtag, a twitter handle and all the modern social media sine qua non. But it has some work to do with its messaging. One of its COP21 memes was: ‘The radioactive waste are not good for the climate? Wrong!’ So radioactive waste is good for the climate?!

Has the nuclear lobby achieved anything?

But in the face of all its efforts and extravagant budget lines, the nuclear industry’s hopes for the COP21 conference were dashed. As Michael Mariotte from the Nuclear Information & Resource Service writes:

“The international Don’t Nuke the Climate campaign had two major goals for COP 21: 1) to ensure that any agreement reached would not encourage use of nuclear power and, preferably, to keep any pro-nuclear statement out of the text entirely; and 2) along with the rest of the environmental community, to achieve the strongest possible agreement generally.

“The first goal was certainly met. The word ‘nuclear’ does not appear in the text and there are no incentives whatsoever for use of nuclear power. That was a clear victory. But that is due not only to a global lack of consensus on nuclear power, but to the fact that the document does not specifically endorse or reject any technology (although it does implicitly reject continued sustained use of fossil fuels).

“Rather, each nation brought its own greenhouse gas reduction plan to the conference. ‘Details’, for example whether there should be incentives for any particular technology, will be addressed at follow-up meetings over the next few years. So it is imperative that the Don’t Nuke the Climate campaign continue, and grow, and be directly involved at every step of the way – both inside and outside the meetings.

“As for the strongest possible agreement, well, it may have been the ‘strongest possible’ that could be agreed to by 195 nations in 2015. By at least recognizing that the real goal should be limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Centigrade rather than the 2 degrees previously considered by most nations to be the top limit, the final document was stronger than many believed possible going into the negotiations.

“That said, the environmental community agrees that the agreement doesn’t go far enough and, importantly, that the commitments made to date do not meet even this document’s aspirations.”

Public opinion remains firmly anti-nuclear

So the nuclear industry didn’t make any gains at COP21, but is it making any progress in its broader efforts to attract public support? It’s hard to say, but there’s no evidence of a shift in public opinion.

A 2005 IAEA-commissioned survey of 18 countries found that there was majority opposition to new reactors in all but one of the 18 countries. A 2011 IPSOS survey of nearly 19,000 people in 24 countries found 69% opposition to new reactors, and majority opposition to new reactors in all but one of the 24 countries.

Is the nuclear industry having any success winning over environmentalists? Around the margins, perhaps, but the ranks of ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ (PNEs – an acronym previous used to describe ‘peaceful nuclear explosions’) are very thin. As James Hansen complained in the lead-up to COP21, the Climate Action Network, representing all the major environmental groups, opposes nuclear power.

‘Big Green’ opposes nuclear power, and so does small green. And dark green and light green. Efforts by nuclear lobbyists to split the environment movement have failed. And that fact alone represents a victory for the entire green movement.

The nuclear lobby certainly isn’t winning where it matters most: nuclear power has been stagnant for the past 20 years and costs are rising, whereas the growth of renewables has been spectacular and costs are falling.

One of the recurring claims in the pro-nuclear propaganda surrounding COP21 is that renewables can’t be deployed quickly enough whereas nuclear can. But 783 gigawatts of new renewable power capacity were installed in the decade from 2005-2014. That’s more power producing capacity than the nuclear industry has installed in its entire 60+ year history!

The nuclear lobby didn’t even win the battle of the celebrities at COP21. OK, James Hansen, Bill Gates and other pro-nuclear celebrities put up a good fight against pro-renewable celebrities such as conservationist David Attenborough. But the pro-renewable celebrities raising their voice during COP21 included Pope Francis. And he’s infallible!

Next – keeping nuclear out of the Green Climate Fund

But we must now look forward to the next battle, one the nuclear lobbyists are already fighting. They are pushing for nuclear power to be included in the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF), intended to finance developing country mitigation and adaptation activities.

One commitment in the Paris Agreement is that rich countries will collectively mobilise $100 billion per year into the GCF. So if the nuclear lobbyists succeed in their aim, vast sums could be diverted into nuclear programs at the expense of renewables and other genuine climate change mitigation and adaptation programs.

We must not let them get away with it!

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter, where this article was originally published.

Nuclear Monitor is published 20 times a year. It has been publishing deeply researched, often strongly critical articles on all aspects of the nuclear cycle since 1978. A must-read for all those who work on this issue!

The nuclear industry and its supporters were busily promoting nuclear power – and attacking environmentalists – before and during the COP21 UN climate conference in Paris.

All the usual suspects were promoting nuclear power as a climate-friendly energy source: the World Nuclear Association, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Energy Agency, the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency, the US Nuclear Energy Institute, and so on.

The Breakthrough Institute has been promoting its pro-nuclear “paradigm-shifting advocacy for an ecomodernist future” and arguing against the “reactionary apocalyptic pastoralism” of anyone who disagrees with them.

In reality the Breakthrough Institute is anything but ‘paradigm shifting’. It endorses all things capitalist … even the Kardashians, apparently. A glowing endorsement in the National Review states:

“Ecomodernists are pro-fracking. They advocate genetically engineered crops (GMOs) … Most distinctively, the ecomodernists are pro-growth and pro-free markets. ‘The Kardashians are not the reason Africans are starving,’ chides Alex Trembath, a senior researcher at the Breakthrough Institute …”

Bill Gates was in Paris to announce the formation of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition – which has been suspiciously vague about exactly what kind of ‘clean energy’ it wants to finance research into. It seems likely the capital the Coalition attracts will be directed disproportionately to nuclear R&D.

Robert Stone, director of the Pandora’s Promise pro-nuclear propaganda film, launched a ‘resource hub’ called Energy For Humanity, promoting “more advanced, mass-producible, passively safe, reactor designs”.

Rauli Partanen and Janne Korhonen, members of the Finnish Ecomodernist Society, have been attacking environmentalists for opposing nuclear power. Rebutting a rebuttal by Michael Mariotte from the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Partanen and Korhonen offer this gem:

“Even the much-maligned Olkiluoto 3 nuclear project [in Finland] turns out to be very fast way of adding low-carbon energy production when compared to any real-world combination of alternatives.”

A single reactor that will take well over a decade to build (and is three times over budget) is a “very fast way” of adding low-carbon energy? Huh? Maybe that’s why a second reactor of the same EPR design to be built at Okiluoto was cancelled in May 2015, while the main players are locked in a €10 billion legal battle.

‘The instransigent network of anti-nukes’ versus Astroturf

Partanen and Korhanan authored a booklet called ‘Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?‘, and crowdfunded the printing of 5,000 copies which were distributed for free at the COP21 conference.

James Hansen and three other climate scientists were in Paris to promote nuclear power. Hansen attacks the “intransigent network of anti-nukes” that has “grown to include ‘Big Green,’ huge groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund and World Wide Fund for Nature. They have trained lawyers, scientists, and media staff ready to denounce any positive news about nuclear power.”

By way of sharp contrast, the impoverished US nuclear industry could only rustle up US$60 million (€55m) to lobby Congress and federal agencies in 2013-14.

So is there an undercurrent of grassroots pro-nuclear environmentalism waiting to burst forth if only their voice could cut through Big Green hegemony? Perhaps Nuclear for Climate, promoted as a ‘grassroots organization‘, is the environmental network to take on Big Green?

Well, no. Nuclear for Climate isn’t a network of grassroots environmentalists, it’s a network of more than 140 nuclear societies. It isn’t grassroots environmentalism, it’s corporate astroturf.

And the list of 140 associations includes 36 chapters of the ‘Women in Nuclear’ organisation and 43 chapters of the ‘Young Generation Network’. One wonders whether these organisations have any meaningful existence. Does Tanzania really have a pro-nuclear Young Generation Network? Don’t young people in Tanzania have better things to do?

Nuclear for Climate has a website, a hashtag, a twitter handle and all the modern social media sine qua non. But it has some work to do with its messaging. One of its COP21 memes was: ‘The radioactive waste are not good for the climate? Wrong!’ So radioactive waste is good for the climate?!

Has the nuclear lobby achieved anything?

But in the face of all its efforts and extravagant budget lines, the nuclear industry’s hopes for the COP21 conference were dashed. As Michael Mariotte from the Nuclear Information & Resource Service writes:

“The international Don’t Nuke the Climate campaign had two major goals for COP 21: 1) to ensure that any agreement reached would not encourage use of nuclear power and, preferably, to keep any pro-nuclear statement out of the text entirely; and 2) along with the rest of the environmental community, to achieve the strongest possible agreement generally.

“The first goal was certainly met. The word ‘nuclear’ does not appear in the text and there are no incentives whatsoever for use of nuclear power. That was a clear victory. But that is due not only to a global lack of consensus on nuclear power, but to the fact that the document does not specifically endorse or reject any technology (although it does implicitly reject continued sustained use of fossil fuels).

“Rather, each nation brought its own greenhouse gas reduction plan to the conference. ‘Details’, for example whether there should be incentives for any particular technology, will be addressed at follow-up meetings over the next few years. So it is imperative that the Don’t Nuke the Climate campaign continue, and grow, and be directly involved at every step of the way – both inside and outside the meetings.

“As for the strongest possible agreement, well, it may have been the ‘strongest possible’ that could be agreed to by 195 nations in 2015. By at least recognizing that the real goal should be limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Centigrade rather than the 2 degrees previously considered by most nations to be the top limit, the final document was stronger than many believed possible going into the negotiations.

“That said, the environmental community agrees that the agreement doesn’t go far enough and, importantly, that the commitments made to date do not meet even this document’s aspirations.”

Public opinion remains firmly anti-nuclear

So the nuclear industry didn’t make any gains at COP21, but is it making any progress in its broader efforts to attract public support? It’s hard to say, but there’s no evidence of a shift in public opinion.

A 2005 IAEA-commissioned survey of 18 countries found that there was majority opposition to new reactors in all but one of the 18 countries. A 2011 IPSOS survey of nearly 19,000 people in 24 countries found 69% opposition to new reactors, and majority opposition to new reactors in all but one of the 24 countries.

Is the nuclear industry having any success winning over environmentalists? Around the margins, perhaps, but the ranks of ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ (PNEs – an acronym previous used to describe ‘peaceful nuclear explosions’) are very thin. As James Hansen complained in the lead-up to COP21, the Climate Action Network, representing all the major environmental groups, opposes nuclear power.

‘Big Green’ opposes nuclear power, and so does small green. And dark green and light green. Efforts by nuclear lobbyists to split the environment movement have failed. And that fact alone represents a victory for the entire green movement.

The nuclear lobby certainly isn’t winning where it matters most: nuclear power has been stagnant for the past 20 years and costs are rising, whereas the growth of renewables has been spectacular and costs are falling.

One of the recurring claims in the pro-nuclear propaganda surrounding COP21 is that renewables can’t be deployed quickly enough whereas nuclear can. But 783 gigawatts of new renewable power capacity were installed in the decade from 2005-2014. That’s more power producing capacity than the nuclear industry has installed in its entire 60+ year history!

The nuclear lobby didn’t even win the battle of the celebrities at COP21. OK, James Hansen, Bill Gates and other pro-nuclear celebrities put up a good fight against pro-renewable celebrities such as conservationist David Attenborough. But the pro-renewable celebrities raising their voice during COP21 included Pope Francis. And he’s infallible!

Next – keeping nuclear out of the Green Climate Fund

But we must now look forward to the next battle, one the nuclear lobbyists are already fighting. They are pushing for nuclear power to be included in the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF), intended to finance developing country mitigation and adaptation activities.

One commitment in the Paris Agreement is that rich countries will collectively mobilise $100 billion per year into the GCF. So if the nuclear lobbyists succeed in their aim, vast sums could be diverted into nuclear programs at the expense of renewables and other genuine climate change mitigation and adaptation programs.

We must not let them get away with it!

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter, where this article was originally published.

Nuclear Monitor is published 20 times a year. It has been publishing deeply researched, often strongly critical articles on all aspects of the nuclear cycle since 1978. A must-read for all those who work on this issue!

As reported recently on The Ecologist, The Philippines has banned GM crop trials until further notice.

The GM-testing-mega-coprorations are going to have to find a new testing ground.

The Philippines have defiantly set a global precedent with their decision, through their invocation in it of the Precautionary Principle. Taiwan too have taken a step in this direction banning GM foods in school meals; Hawaii has banned GMOs on the Big Island.

And with Thailand set to follow these two countries after a number of widespread protests against their new proposed ‘Biological Safety Bill’, GMOs could be in for a rough ride, and maybe even worldwide retreat. That is certainly what the historic Philippines decision suggests.

Some may be wondering where exactly this drive for Precaution is coming from. Part of the answer is that the Supreme Court cited, as part of its deliberation process, a recent paper by one of us (Read, writing jointly with Nassim Taleb et al).

The paper argues that lack of scientific certainty does not justify non-intervention when there is a risk of potentially very serious or irreversible harm to the environment. Specifically, it argues that risk of ‘ruin’ is a decisive grounds for precautionary action. And, as scientific and technological research has run ahead of legislation, as it has with genetic engineering (and similarly with geo-engineering), then there is indeed sore need for precaution.

Deep pragmatism in action

What makes the decision in the Philippines so special, and such a hopeful potential precedent for other countries including our own, is this reference to precaution. It challenges or removes a number of disagreements that might otherwise be had. Firstly, precaution is not a ‘merely’ moral consideration, it is just reason, deep pragmatism in action.

You don’t get out of the car without putting on the handbrake, even if you’re on the flat. Or again: precaution doesn’t demand that we don’t cross streets; it just counsels us not to cross the street blind-folded. Secondly, it’s not a complete, forever-and-eternity decision. Precaution demands we keep rethinking, and keep learning more; it is about covering all your bases and not going recklessly into a situation half-blind.

That is one of the things that the paper brings out. It places GMOs in a category of systemic risk due to their capacity to cause a total collapse or irreversible alteration of an entire eco-system. In the case of GMOs, the authors argue for the existence two types of systemic risk.

First, the risk to whole ecosystems if GMOs get released into the wild and become fertile; to quote Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way”. In this case, for instance, the introduction of what would essentially be a super-species could strangle the life from all or most of the other species of (say) plant in the area thus devastating the local biodiversity which the ecosystem depends upon; causing a collapse of an unpredictable area of land.

Second, is the risk to human health in the long and short term through consumption of GMO foods. This is simply an unknown. There’s plenty of evidence that the high levels of herbicide residues found in ‘Roundup ready’ and similar GM foods may be harmful, but it’s harder to pin it on the genetic modifications themselves.

There are causes for concern, however, as set out on The Ecologist by Jonathan Latham. Arguably one could say that short term risks are low. However no long term research into the health impacts of GMO foods on people who eat them has ever been carried out, leaving the question open.

And absence of evidence of harm is not evidence of absence of harm. This is one of the crucial features of the Precautionary Principle, properly understood. GMOs have only been in the food chain since the 1990’s so we just don’t know anything significant about their long-term effects.

To know for sure, we need to do the epidemiology

For these reasons we need to be precautious: we need to do some very carefully controlled and contained, independent, genuinely long-term ‘longitudinal’ studies, as well short term studies, and above all consider all the options, including options (such as agroecology) which escape the downsides not only of GM technology but also of ‘conventional’ agriculture.

Don’t just assume that GMOs are the only way forwards. But look instead for solutions that contain no risk of ruin. They exist!

Finally, just to be clear, if we can get GMO’s right and properly long-term test them then one day we could potentially lift some of the bans and start using them. Just not until we’ve removed all of the systemic risk from the equation.

The point of thinking truly long-term and taking precaution seriously is: it will be a long long time before we can safely test GM over long periods and against all likely potential harms.

Thus the wisdom of this decision by the Philippines Supreme Court. Which finally helps those of us who have been seeking to find an effective way of raising doubts about GMOs get off the backfoot, and to take the high ground.

The principle that the potential for ‘ruin’ must trigger firm regulatory action can and should be applied in numerous other contexts, among them climate change (think ‘runaway greenhouse effect’); release of chemicals (think CFCs, thalidomide, chlorpyrifos, neonicotinoids); nuclear power (think Chernobyl and Fukushima); nanotechnology; introduction of alien species; and synthetic biology.

Precaution is simply the new common-sense.

The paper: ‘The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)‘ is by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman & Yaneer Bar-Yam, and published in the NYU School of Engineering Working Paper Series.

Dr. Rupert Read is Chair of the Green House think tank and a  co-author of the cited paper.

David Burnham is a Masters student in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia.

Energy Secretary Amber Rudd wallows in the warm extravagance of her own hyperbole.

She is stunned by the historic significance of Paris especially her own contribution to ending the threat of global warming.

To bridge her rhetoric to reality she must map out practical future action. Her statement to the Commons after Paris sadly displayed her continuing enthusiasm to cut support for renewables and the depth of her deluded optimism on the role of nuclear power.

Mass delusion is an unrecognized malign force in politics. Shared accepted wisdom is often a harbinger of future catastrophes.
Almost every time when all major parties agree on any project, they are wrong.

Faith in the value of drugs-prohibition is evidence-free and prejudice-rich. Three Prime Ministers and their parties were bewitched by the blandishments of Kids Company. The Pied Piper of nuclear power has enchanted and deceived with impossibilist promises.

But the consensus of the gullible is breaking down. Boris Johnson spotted that the nuclear Emperor has no clothes He said the mega-subsidy of taxpayers £2 billion a year for 35 years (perhaps rising to £10bn) is an “extraordinary amount of money to spend”.

Treasury officials are becoming twitchy and nauseous at the prospect that they are incubating a looming financial cataclysm. The magnitude of the future scandal could rival those of the Tanganyika groundnuts fiasco and the South Sea Bubble.

A remarkable track record of economic and technological failure

The financial deal has an incredible history. All the sensible investors fled years ago. Centrica abandoned a £200 million investment. The near bankrupt EDF has no choice. They hope that their €30 billion debt could be reduced by this desperate gamble.

The Chinese’s long-term plan is to use their designs in all future UK reactors, including Bradwell, to establish world dominance for their nuclear technology. However not a single one of their so-called ‘third generation’ reactor designs has ever actually been completed. The ‘Hualong’ design chosen for Bradwell is, remarkably, a fusion of two older reactor designs neither of which has ever been built.

Originally conceived in 2006 the earliest date for completion at Hinkley is now 2023. The Government’s ludicrously generous deal agreed to buy electricity at more than twice the present going rate with a price guaranteed and index-linked for 35 years! It’s impossible to guess what fuel prices will be for 35 weeks. Future fuel payers could be fleeced for decades by two foreign governments, France and China, with the most expensive electricity in the world.

In denial the UK stumbles on. Europe’s catastrophic delays in all other European Pressurised Reactors (EPR) stations are ignored even though their problems are likely to be repeated here. Finland’s first Olkiluoto EPR was due to generate electricity in 2009. The latest of many promised completion dates is 2018. Cost overruns stand at €5.2 billion. A second EPR to be built on the site has been cancelled.

The sister EPR station at Flamanville in Normandy was originally planned to be completed in 2012 at a cost of €3.3 billion. Later the hope was 2016 at €8.5 billion. In April 2015 a serious safety problem was discovered in the vessel’s steel that will add more years delay and billions of Euros of unplanned cost. The current target is to complete in late 2018 at a cost of €10.5 billion, and even that aspiration is looking doubtful.

Other factors are likely to doom Hinkley. The EPR reactors have yet to generate enough electricity to light a bicycle lamp, and other designs that (so far) lack the EPR’s track record of failure are pushing ahead. The financial forecast disregards the problem of nuclear waste. The stratospheric cost of cleaning up past nuclear waste at Sellafield is currently heading from £53 billion to a possible £100 billion.

A major obstacle is the legality of massive subsidy to be paid by UK taxpayers, estimated at €108 billion / £76 billion. Austria and Luxembourg are challenging this in the European court. Insiders suggest our Government will lose.

The green alternative

There is an ignored alternative – in addition to wind and solar, both becoming ever more competitive. Lapping the walls of Hinkley Point is the world’s second biggest tidal flow. An immense cliff of water sweeps up the Bristol Channel twice a day. Its power could be tapped with a simple proven technology.

It’s green, entirely predictable, carbon-free, British and eternal. Lagoons linked with pump-storage schemes in the Welsh Valleys could store up its surplus energy at times of peak production or low power demand, to provide abundant power when it’s wanted.

Amber Rudd is cautious … perhaps swayed by the poisoned propaganda of the nuclear lobbyists who haunted the Paris conference. They continue to denigrate the advantages of all renewables. She told me in the Commons on December 14th that

“We are looking closely at the opportunity for tidal power. My Department is now engaging in due diligence and if tidal power can meet the targets of being secure, clean and affordable, we will certainly take it very seriously.”

The technology is free of the hideous complexity of the EPRs. France’s La Rance tidal barrage and others have been producing some of the cheapest, greenest electricity in the world since 1966. The Government should recognise that the UK’s coasts offer us a green renewable power source as sumptuous in its promise as the North Sea oil bonanza, with a choice of technologies available.

It’s said that Civil Service careers are dominated by the ethos of the unimportance of being right. The careers of those who push the conventional un-wisdom of the day blossom. The careers of far-sighted who challenge with solutions that work in the long term wither. Amber Rudd has no specialist knowledge of energy politics and has opinions dumped on her by officials.

We must hope the curiosity she exhibited in her former career as a financial journalist will lead her to discover a rational green path through the jungle of vested interests and elephant traps of doomed hopes.

Paul Flynn is Labour MP for Newport West in South Wales, a position he has held since the 1987 general election.

This article is an extended version of one originally published in The House magazine and subsequently on Paul’s website.

Activist and campaigner Aruna Rodrigues has filed a petition against three members of India’s highest regulatory body for the licencing of GMOs, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC).

Rodrigues is seeking the initiation of contempt proceedings for wilfully and deliberately disobeying the explicit orders of the Supreme Court (SC) on 8th May 2007, 15th February 2007, 8th April 2008 and 12th August 2008 for proceeding with numerous GMO field trials of GM mustard, with the aim of commercially introducing to India for the first time herbicide tolerant (HT) food crops.

The case of GM mustard (DMH 11) is critical. On the back of large-scale trials (LSTs), the application for commercialisation was reportedly sent by the crop developer Dr Deepak Pental (of the Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants) to the GEAC in Sept 2015. It is being considered for surreptitious approval for commercialisation, according to newspaper reports.

As LSTs are the final stage of trials before commercialisation and carry a serious risk of contamination, the SC-appointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) requires that crop biosafety tests are first completed, prior to LSTs.

The crop must then be signalled as utterly safe before proceeding further. Biosafety studies and risk assessment protocols must be addressed and completed during Biosafety Level I (BRL I) trials. Then the process may move towards the next stage (BRL II). The petition claims that these protocols were not adhered to.

Data hidden and Supreme Court rulings ignored

Rodrigues argues that the official regulators have hidden all data about GM mustard from the public and the independent scientific community. This goes directly against the constitutional provisions and the orders of the SC, and the GEAC have failed to respond positively to requests for access to such data.

She claims that mandatory rigorous biosafety protocols and independent and open scientific scrutiny have not been carried out and the data pertaining to ‘mustard DMH 11’ therefore needs to be concealed.

Moreover, there is clearly no data online available from official sources, in defiance of an SC order for the public disclosure of all data. The members of the GEAC are thus claimed to be in contempt of court because:

1. They have failed to provide public access to information, including full biosafety dossiers, meeting minutes and safety dossiers, thus side-lining court orders.
2. They have failed to implement biosafety measures during open field trials to ensure no contamination, which for GM mustard is a serious issue, as the petition makes clear. Enabling orders to prevent contamination during trials were thus side-lined. Among other issues, no active testing for contamination with validated protocols was done in order to demonstrate regulatory commitment to contain risk under the supervision of named scientists.

The Petition in its own words

On the second point, the petition states, “A conscionable regulator would never have entertained these trials. It is emphasised that these crops constitute the opening up of a second front in GMO technology, i.e. HT crops, and with stealth, which make[s] the contempt of orders with respect to these LSTs even more unconscionable …

“There is a great chasm between what is required for proper GMO risk assessment & oversight, which prioritises bio-safety and upholds the national interest, and what is taking place in India. The regulatory vacuum constitutes deliberate malfeasance and fraud, putting us at infinite and irremediable and irreversible risk.”

And driving home the point, the petition adds, “what we are now confronted with, in the specific matter of Mustard DMH 11 and also LSTs of corn and flex cotton, all of them HT crops, is more corrupt and even sinister because we have brazen and repeated contempt including ‘underground’ approvals to keep the biosafety fraud of these approvals secret and promote a clear agenda to promote GMOs into Indian Agriculture. The Regulators and our Institutions of GMO governance are ‘serial offenders’ without compunction.”

The conclusion is that there seems to be no room for science or transparency in this process. Approval of LSTs of GM mustard point to the unrelenting determination of the regulator to facilitate the market expansion of GM food crops despite the incontrovertible evidence of serious hazards.

Contamination from field trials and subsequent commercialisation means that the impacts on biodiversity will be irreversible. Rodrigues says that it is a matter of great perplexity that the public interest can be allowed to be drowned by corporate power in this way.

Evident regulatory delinquency

The GEAC’s reckless rush into GM foods, unless checked, will have massive impacts on India’s farmers, their crop choices, consumers’ food and health and on wild places and the countryside.

The secrecy and regulatory delinquency outlined here is integral to accelerating the wider agenda of restructuring Indian agriculture for the benefit of a Western agribusiness cartel, while potentially threatening the displacement of an estimated 400 million agricultural workers.

And this point could not be made any clearer by Rodrigues in the petition: “The core problem is the proven and pernicious conflict of interest which has pervaded the entire system. In so far as Mustard DMH 11 is concerned, the Regulators, Promoters, and Developers have stitched up every angle to facilitate the commercialisation of this crop.”

Rodrigues proceeds to set out evidence for this capture of government bodies and agencies by the pro-GMO lobby to make her point (as indeed she has previously). Her concluding comments in the petition make the situation clear in terms of India possessing an “utterly delinquent regulatory system” and “unremitting fraud” where regulating GMOs are concerned:

“The only recourse is to eliminate the peril of an utterly delinquent regulatory system, through a full moratorium on GMOs … We are well beyond the point when the Precautionary Principle must be applied, because the build-up of evidence of environmental and health hazards points to unremitting fraud in the regulation of GMOs …

“This technology is a classic case of ‘unforeseeable systemic ruin’, which means that we will know we are ruined after it happens. As they say, the dead cannot make a comeback.”

Read Aruna Rodrigues’ full Petition against the GEAC here.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. You can support his work here.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Rice, wheat, mustard … India drives forward first GMO crops under veil of secrecy‘.

Activist and campaigner Aruna Rodrigues has filed a petition against three members of India’s highest regulatory body for the licencing of GMOs, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC).

Rodrigues is seeking the initiation of contempt proceedings for wilfully and deliberately disobeying the explicit orders of the Supreme Court (SC) on 8th May 2007, 15th February 2007, 8th April 2008 and 12th August 2008 for proceeding with numerous GMO field trials of GM mustard, with the aim of commercially introducing to India for the first time herbicide tolerant (HT) food crops.

The case of GM mustard (DMH 11) is critical. On the back of large-scale trials (LSTs), the application for commercialisation was reportedly sent by the crop developer Dr Deepak Pental (of the Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants) to the GEAC in Sept 2015. It is being considered for surreptitious approval for commercialisation, according to newspaper reports.

As LSTs are the final stage of trials before commercialisation and carry a serious risk of contamination, the SC-appointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) requires that crop biosafety tests are first completed, prior to LSTs.

The crop must then be signalled as utterly safe before proceeding further. Biosafety studies and risk assessment protocols must be addressed and completed during Biosafety Level I (BRL I) trials. Then the process may move towards the next stage (BRL II). The petition claims that these protocols were not adhered to.

Data hidden and Supreme Court rulings ignored

Rodrigues argues that the official regulators have hidden all data about GM mustard from the public and the independent scientific community. This goes directly against the constitutional provisions and the orders of the SC, and the GEAC have failed to respond positively to requests for access to such data.

She claims that mandatory rigorous biosafety protocols and independent and open scientific scrutiny have not been carried out and the data pertaining to ‘mustard DMH 11’ therefore needs to be concealed.

Moreover, there is clearly no data online available from official sources, in defiance of an SC order for the public disclosure of all data. The members of the GEAC are thus claimed to be in contempt of court because:

1. They have failed to provide public access to information, including full biosafety dossiers, meeting minutes and safety dossiers, thus side-lining court orders.
2. They have failed to implement biosafety measures during open field trials to ensure no contamination, which for GM mustard is a serious issue, as the petition makes clear. Enabling orders to prevent contamination during trials were thus side-lined. Among other issues, no active testing for contamination with validated protocols was done in order to demonstrate regulatory commitment to contain risk under the supervision of named scientists.

The Petition in its own words

On the second point, the petition states, “A conscionable regulator would never have entertained these trials. It is emphasised that these crops constitute the opening up of a second front in GMO technology, i.e. HT crops, and with stealth, which make[s] the contempt of orders with respect to these LSTs even more unconscionable …

“There is a great chasm between what is required for proper GMO risk assessment & oversight, which prioritises bio-safety and upholds the national interest, and what is taking place in India. The regulatory vacuum constitutes deliberate malfeasance and fraud, putting us at infinite and irremediable and irreversible risk.”

And driving home the point, the petition adds, “what we are now confronted with, in the specific matter of Mustard DMH 11 and also LSTs of corn and flex cotton, all of them HT crops, is more corrupt and even sinister because we have brazen and repeated contempt including ‘underground’ approvals to keep the biosafety fraud of these approvals secret and promote a clear agenda to promote GMOs into Indian Agriculture. The Regulators and our Institutions of GMO governance are ‘serial offenders’ without compunction.”

The conclusion is that there seems to be no room for science or transparency in this process. Approval of LSTs of GM mustard point to the unrelenting determination of the regulator to facilitate the market expansion of GM food crops despite the incontrovertible evidence of serious hazards.

Contamination from field trials and subsequent commercialisation means that the impacts on biodiversity will be irreversible. Rodrigues says that it is a matter of great perplexity that the public interest can be allowed to be drowned by corporate power in this way.

Evident regulatory delinquency

The GEAC’s reckless rush into GM foods, unless checked, will have massive impacts on India’s farmers, their crop choices, consumers’ food and health and on wild places and the countryside.

The secrecy and regulatory delinquency outlined here is integral to accelerating the wider agenda of restructuring Indian agriculture for the benefit of a Western agribusiness cartel, while potentially threatening the displacement of an estimated 400 million agricultural workers.

And this point could not be made any clearer by Rodrigues in the petition: “The core problem is the proven and pernicious conflict of interest which has pervaded the entire system. In so far as Mustard DMH 11 is concerned, the Regulators, Promoters, and Developers have stitched up every angle to facilitate the commercialisation of this crop.”

Rodrigues proceeds to set out evidence for this capture of government bodies and agencies by the pro-GMO lobby to make her point (as indeed she has previously). Her concluding comments in the petition make the situation clear in terms of India possessing an “utterly delinquent regulatory system” and “unremitting fraud” where regulating GMOs are concerned:

“The only recourse is to eliminate the peril of an utterly delinquent regulatory system, through a full moratorium on GMOs … We are well beyond the point when the Precautionary Principle must be applied, because the build-up of evidence of environmental and health hazards points to unremitting fraud in the regulation of GMOs …

“This technology is a classic case of ‘unforeseeable systemic ruin’, which means that we will know we are ruined after it happens. As they say, the dead cannot make a comeback.”

Read Aruna Rodrigues’ full Petition against the GEAC here.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. You can support his work here.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Rice, wheat, mustard … India drives forward first GMO crops under veil of secrecy‘.

Activist and campaigner Aruna Rodrigues has filed a petition against three members of India’s highest regulatory body for the licencing of GMOs, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC).

Rodrigues is seeking the initiation of contempt proceedings for wilfully and deliberately disobeying the explicit orders of the Supreme Court (SC) on 8th May 2007, 15th February 2007, 8th April 2008 and 12th August 2008 for proceeding with numerous GMO field trials of GM mustard, with the aim of commercially introducing to India for the first time herbicide tolerant (HT) food crops.

The case of GM mustard (DMH 11) is critical. On the back of large-scale trials (LSTs), the application for commercialisation was reportedly sent by the crop developer Dr Deepak Pental (of the Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants) to the GEAC in Sept 2015. It is being considered for surreptitious approval for commercialisation, according to newspaper reports.

As LSTs are the final stage of trials before commercialisation and carry a serious risk of contamination, the SC-appointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) requires that crop biosafety tests are first completed, prior to LSTs.

The crop must then be signalled as utterly safe before proceeding further. Biosafety studies and risk assessment protocols must be addressed and completed during Biosafety Level I (BRL I) trials. Then the process may move towards the next stage (BRL II). The petition claims that these protocols were not adhered to.

Data hidden and Supreme Court rulings ignored

Rodrigues argues that the official regulators have hidden all data about GM mustard from the public and the independent scientific community. This goes directly against the constitutional provisions and the orders of the SC, and the GEAC have failed to respond positively to requests for access to such data.

She claims that mandatory rigorous biosafety protocols and independent and open scientific scrutiny have not been carried out and the data pertaining to ‘mustard DMH 11’ therefore needs to be concealed.

Moreover, there is clearly no data online available from official sources, in defiance of an SC order for the public disclosure of all data. The members of the GEAC are thus claimed to be in contempt of court because:

1. They have failed to provide public access to information, including full biosafety dossiers, meeting minutes and safety dossiers, thus side-lining court orders.
2. They have failed to implement biosafety measures during open field trials to ensure no contamination, which for GM mustard is a serious issue, as the petition makes clear. Enabling orders to prevent contamination during trials were thus side-lined. Among other issues, no active testing for contamination with validated protocols was done in order to demonstrate regulatory commitment to contain risk under the supervision of named scientists.

The Petition in its own words

On the second point, the petition states, “A conscionable regulator would never have entertained these trials. It is emphasised that these crops constitute the opening up of a second front in GMO technology, i.e. HT crops, and with stealth, which make[s] the contempt of orders with respect to these LSTs even more unconscionable …

“There is a great chasm between what is required for proper GMO risk assessment & oversight, which prioritises bio-safety and upholds the national interest, and what is taking place in India. The regulatory vacuum constitutes deliberate malfeasance and fraud, putting us at infinite and irremediable and irreversible risk.”

And driving home the point, the petition adds, “what we are now confronted with, in the specific matter of Mustard DMH 11 and also LSTs of corn and flex cotton, all of them HT crops, is more corrupt and even sinister because we have brazen and repeated contempt including ‘underground’ approvals to keep the biosafety fraud of these approvals secret and promote a clear agenda to promote GMOs into Indian Agriculture. The Regulators and our Institutions of GMO governance are ‘serial offenders’ without compunction.”

The conclusion is that there seems to be no room for science or transparency in this process. Approval of LSTs of GM mustard point to the unrelenting determination of the regulator to facilitate the market expansion of GM food crops despite the incontrovertible evidence of serious hazards.

Contamination from field trials and subsequent commercialisation means that the impacts on biodiversity will be irreversible. Rodrigues says that it is a matter of great perplexity that the public interest can be allowed to be drowned by corporate power in this way.

Evident regulatory delinquency

The GEAC’s reckless rush into GM foods, unless checked, will have massive impacts on India’s farmers, their crop choices, consumers’ food and health and on wild places and the countryside.

The secrecy and regulatory delinquency outlined here is integral to accelerating the wider agenda of restructuring Indian agriculture for the benefit of a Western agribusiness cartel, while potentially threatening the displacement of an estimated 400 million agricultural workers.

And this point could not be made any clearer by Rodrigues in the petition: “The core problem is the proven and pernicious conflict of interest which has pervaded the entire system. In so far as Mustard DMH 11 is concerned, the Regulators, Promoters, and Developers have stitched up every angle to facilitate the commercialisation of this crop.”

Rodrigues proceeds to set out evidence for this capture of government bodies and agencies by the pro-GMO lobby to make her point (as indeed she has previously). Her concluding comments in the petition make the situation clear in terms of India possessing an “utterly delinquent regulatory system” and “unremitting fraud” where regulating GMOs are concerned:

“The only recourse is to eliminate the peril of an utterly delinquent regulatory system, through a full moratorium on GMOs … We are well beyond the point when the Precautionary Principle must be applied, because the build-up of evidence of environmental and health hazards points to unremitting fraud in the regulation of GMOs …

“This technology is a classic case of ‘unforeseeable systemic ruin’, which means that we will know we are ruined after it happens. As they say, the dead cannot make a comeback.”

Read Aruna Rodrigues’ full Petition against the GEAC here.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. You can support his work here.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Rice, wheat, mustard … India drives forward first GMO crops under veil of secrecy‘.

Activist and campaigner Aruna Rodrigues has filed a petition against three members of India’s highest regulatory body for the licencing of GMOs, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC).

Rodrigues is seeking the initiation of contempt proceedings for wilfully and deliberately disobeying the explicit orders of the Supreme Court (SC) on 8th May 2007, 15th February 2007, 8th April 2008 and 12th August 2008 for proceeding with numerous GMO field trials of GM mustard, with the aim of commercially introducing to India for the first time herbicide tolerant (HT) food crops.

The case of GM mustard (DMH 11) is critical. On the back of large-scale trials (LSTs), the application for commercialisation was reportedly sent by the crop developer Dr Deepak Pental (of the Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants) to the GEAC in Sept 2015. It is being considered for surreptitious approval for commercialisation, according to newspaper reports.

As LSTs are the final stage of trials before commercialisation and carry a serious risk of contamination, the SC-appointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) requires that crop biosafety tests are first completed, prior to LSTs.

The crop must then be signalled as utterly safe before proceeding further. Biosafety studies and risk assessment protocols must be addressed and completed during Biosafety Level I (BRL I) trials. Then the process may move towards the next stage (BRL II). The petition claims that these protocols were not adhered to.

Data hidden and Supreme Court rulings ignored

Rodrigues argues that the official regulators have hidden all data about GM mustard from the public and the independent scientific community. This goes directly against the constitutional provisions and the orders of the SC, and the GEAC have failed to respond positively to requests for access to such data.

She claims that mandatory rigorous biosafety protocols and independent and open scientific scrutiny have not been carried out and the data pertaining to ‘mustard DMH 11’ therefore needs to be concealed.

Moreover, there is clearly no data online available from official sources, in defiance of an SC order for the public disclosure of all data. The members of the GEAC are thus claimed to be in contempt of court because:

1. They have failed to provide public access to information, including full biosafety dossiers, meeting minutes and safety dossiers, thus side-lining court orders.
2. They have failed to implement biosafety measures during open field trials to ensure no contamination, which for GM mustard is a serious issue, as the petition makes clear. Enabling orders to prevent contamination during trials were thus side-lined. Among other issues, no active testing for contamination with validated protocols was done in order to demonstrate regulatory commitment to contain risk under the supervision of named scientists.

The Petition in its own words

On the second point, the petition states, “A conscionable regulator would never have entertained these trials. It is emphasised that these crops constitute the opening up of a second front in GMO technology, i.e. HT crops, and with stealth, which make[s] the contempt of orders with respect to these LSTs even more unconscionable …

“There is a great chasm between what is required for proper GMO risk assessment & oversight, which prioritises bio-safety and upholds the national interest, and what is taking place in India. The regulatory vacuum constitutes deliberate malfeasance and fraud, putting us at infinite and irremediable and irreversible risk.”

And driving home the point, the petition adds, “what we are now confronted with, in the specific matter of Mustard DMH 11 and also LSTs of corn and flex cotton, all of them HT crops, is more corrupt and even sinister because we have brazen and repeated contempt including ‘underground’ approvals to keep the biosafety fraud of these approvals secret and promote a clear agenda to promote GMOs into Indian Agriculture. The Regulators and our Institutions of GMO governance are ‘serial offenders’ without compunction.”

The conclusion is that there seems to be no room for science or transparency in this process. Approval of LSTs of GM mustard point to the unrelenting determination of the regulator to facilitate the market expansion of GM food crops despite the incontrovertible evidence of serious hazards.

Contamination from field trials and subsequent commercialisation means that the impacts on biodiversity will be irreversible. Rodrigues says that it is a matter of great perplexity that the public interest can be allowed to be drowned by corporate power in this way.

Evident regulatory delinquency

The GEAC’s reckless rush into GM foods, unless checked, will have massive impacts on India’s farmers, their crop choices, consumers’ food and health and on wild places and the countryside.

The secrecy and regulatory delinquency outlined here is integral to accelerating the wider agenda of restructuring Indian agriculture for the benefit of a Western agribusiness cartel, while potentially threatening the displacement of an estimated 400 million agricultural workers.

And this point could not be made any clearer by Rodrigues in the petition: “The core problem is the proven and pernicious conflict of interest which has pervaded the entire system. In so far as Mustard DMH 11 is concerned, the Regulators, Promoters, and Developers have stitched up every angle to facilitate the commercialisation of this crop.”

Rodrigues proceeds to set out evidence for this capture of government bodies and agencies by the pro-GMO lobby to make her point (as indeed she has previously). Her concluding comments in the petition make the situation clear in terms of India possessing an “utterly delinquent regulatory system” and “unremitting fraud” where regulating GMOs are concerned:

“The only recourse is to eliminate the peril of an utterly delinquent regulatory system, through a full moratorium on GMOs … We are well beyond the point when the Precautionary Principle must be applied, because the build-up of evidence of environmental and health hazards points to unremitting fraud in the regulation of GMOs …

“This technology is a classic case of ‘unforeseeable systemic ruin’, which means that we will know we are ruined after it happens. As they say, the dead cannot make a comeback.”

Read Aruna Rodrigues’ full Petition against the GEAC here.

Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher, based in the UK and India. You can support his work here.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Rice, wheat, mustard … India drives forward first GMO crops under veil of secrecy‘.

The Paris Agreement has mostly been greeted with enthusiasm, though it contains at least one obvious flaw.

Few seem to have noticed that the main tool mooted for keeping us within the 2C global warming target is a massive expansion of carbon trading, including offsetting, which allows the market exchange of credits between companies and nations to achieve an overall emissions reduction.

That’s despite plenty of evidence that markets haven’t worked well enough, or quickly enough, to actually keep the planet safe.

The debate over whether to include carbon markets in the final agreement came right to the wire. Some left-leaning Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia vehemently opposed any mention.

However the EU, Brazil, and New Zealand, among other countries, pushed hard for their inclusion – with support from the World Bank, the IMF and many business groups.

Murky semantics disguise the true intent

What we have ended up with is some murky semantics. Though terms such as ‘carbon trading’, ‘carbon pricing’, ‘carbon offsetting’ and ‘carbon markets’ don’t appear anywhere in the text, the agreement is littered with references to a whole range of new and expanded market-based tools.

Article 6 refers to “voluntary cooperation” between countries in the implementation of their emissions targets “to allow for higher ambition in their mitigation and adaptation actions”. If that’s not exactly plain speak, then wait for how carbon trading is referred to as “internationally transferred mitigation outcomes”.

The same Article also provides for an entirely new, UN-controlled international market mechanism. All countries will be able to trade carbon with each other, helping each to achieve their national targets for emissions cuts.

While trading between companies, countries or blocs of countries is done on a voluntary basis, the new mechanism, dubbed the Sustainable Development Mechanism (SDM), will be set up to succeed the existing Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism, providing for a massive expansion of carbon trading and offsetting while setting some basic standards.

Carbon market proponents have already celebrated this as “a new era of international carbon trading“, allowing the linking of existing national and regional trading schemes, such as the EU-ETS, as well as the soon to be established Chinese market.

Forest offsets included for the first time

Richer countries can also make deals to reduce deforestation and enhance sustainable forest management to enhance forest carbon sinks in developing nations.

This forest-based offsetting has been debated since 2005 but, due to political controversies and complexities of measuring how much carbon is actually stored in a forest, it has been left out of any international agreements so far. It is now included in Article 5.2 of the Paris text.

But will these carbon trading and offsetting tools save the planet? The short answer is no. These tools will not save the planet from overheating. In fact, they might be counter-productive to the goal of limiting warming to 2C, never mind the unrealistic 1.5C ambition.

Carbon markets basically function as a delaying tactic. It’s been that way ever since their first inclusion in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The EU-ETS for instance, the first, biggest and most significant of all trading schemes, simply hasn’t delivered.

It took the best part of ten years for it to start after Kyoto, and once in action it was riddled by fraud, corruption, over-allocation of permits and perverse incentives for carbon offsetting – all contributing to the fact that the price for carbon is so low that nobody cares.

Carbon markets and the ‘polluter is paid’ principle

Offsetting projects in developing countries have been responsible for the expansion of polluting industries and land grabs among other unintentional yet real negative consequences.

We’ll see more of this once forest-based offsets are included. Many bilateral forest and UN-REDD projects have been running for years, while critics say they have led to fraud, support of monocultures, forest enclosures, and forced displacements and evictions of indigenous people from their land in countries such as Kenya, Congo, Papua New Guinea or Brazil.

The Paris Agreement is keen to avoid such pitfalls, explicitly stating that it wants “environmental integrity and transparency” with “robust accounting”. Such promises have been given numerous times before, yet carbon trading and offsetting keep running into problems.

At the start of the Paris climate talks I warned that they would fail. I’m afraid I was right. While the final agreement contains words of urgency, ambition and action, I have serious doubts that the actual tools that are supposed to deliver the much needed emissions cuts will work fast enough, if at all.

By adopting carbon trading and offsetting as main mitigation tools, the Paris Agreement has created the possibility for years, if not decades, of further delays. Time we can ill afford.

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

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

Between five and 10 million red-legged partridges, a non-native species, are released on UK shooting estates every year.

All of these birds come from intensive breeding farms where their parents are confined year-round in tiny cages.

In November 2015, investigators from the League Against Cruel Sports visited three of Britain’s largest red-legged partridge breeding farms which supply British shooting estates:

• Heart of England Farms, Claverdon, Warwickshire
• Hy-Fly, Pilling Lane, Preesall, Lancashire
• Southern Partridges, Court Barton, Yarnscombe, Devon

Video footage (see below) reveals that the breeding partridges on all three farms were confined in small, barren cages without perches, enrichment or litter. They were surrounded on four sides by solid walls, their only view of the world being the sky above and piles of excrement below.

Two or three years egg-laying in cruel confinement. Then shot

Breeding partridges spend two to three years confined in these battery cages, released only when their egg production declines. Then they’ll be shipped out to shooting estates just like their chicks.

Caged birds on all of the farms we visited exhibited repeated jump-escape behaviour – futile attempts to fly away – a clear sign of stress. This can lead to ‘scalping’, open wounds on the top of the bird’s head from repeated impact on the mesh roof.

Our investigators also spotted one bird with its head sticking out under the cage wall in what appears to be a futile attempt to escape. Sadly, when freedom does come for these birds it will be short – a few weeks loose on an estate before shooting season begins. Of course many birds will not survive that long and will die in the cage.

At one farm, Southern Partridges, the cages were predominantly wooden and in an extremely poor state of repair with exposed nails and holes in the walls between cages large enough for birds to fit through. This could lead to fights and injuries as partridges are extremely choosy about their cage mate.

The wooden structure also makes disinfection impossible, increasing the risk of illness and disease among the birds.

At the other two farms, Heart of England and Hy-Fly, the cages were essentially metal boxes with wire mesh for the floor and roof. Neither farm provided adequate cover for the partridges during adverse weather. At both sites the food and water were automated, just like most industrial poultry farms.

Free range and natural? If only …

One of the partridges we filmed at Heart of England Farms had been debeaked – the tip of the upper mandible had been sliced off. This is a routine practice in chicken battery farms and is done to prevent injuries when aggressive pecking inevitably occurs due to the stressful conditions.

The same bird also had a metal ‘bit’ forced in its nostrils which is designed to limit damage done by pecking as it impairs the bird’s ability to close its beak fully.

This industrial production of birds is little different to the battery farming of hens for eggs, yet the shooting industry continues to promote shot game as free range and natural. In fact laying hens in the EU now have greater protection than partridges on game farms and could not legally be kept in these small, barren cages. The semi-wild nature of farmed partridges makes their extreme confinement even more inhumane.

The conditions that partridges and pheasants endure on breeding farms are so bad that even the shooting industry itself via the British Association of Shooting & Conservation once pushed for a ban on breeding cages.

The League continues to call for a ban on these cages as well as a full and independent inquiry into the whole commercial shooting industry.

Dr Toni Shephard is Head of Policy & Research at the League Against Cruel Sports.

To find out more, including what you can do to help stop this cruelty, visit league.org.uk/stopshooting.