“Moving under normal circumstances is a personal decision. Evacuees have no choice. They are forced to flee.”

Yoshiko Aoki knows exactly what this feels like. A petite, older woman, Aoki, like almost 160,000 of her fellow Japanese citizens, was one of those forced from her hometown when the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster of 11th March 2011 began to unfold.

She still lives in exile.

Aoki has been traveling the world to speak out for Fukushima refugees, as she did at a London event in January hosted by Nuclear Free Local Authorities, Green Cross and the Nuclear Consulting Group.

Aoki is from Tomioka, situated 10km from the Fukushima plant and one of the ghost towns that may be reopened by governmental decree in March 2017 and declared ‘safe.’ She now runs a community center for Fukushima evacuees in Koriyama.

When you flee like that, Aoki says, with the threat of radiation literally hanging over you, “you leave your home, your land, you lose your job, you are separated from family members, and your animals are abandoned or killed before you leave.”

The cries of abandoned animals gave voice to the Fukushima tragedy

It was those animals left abandoned who first gave voice to the tragedy. Harrowing videos of starving, dying cows in the Fukushima ‘zone’ emerged in the first weeks following the disaster, a searing lament of unbearable agony. Many of these videos are so painful to watch that they come with a warning of the horrors ahead.

For some, the suffering of the animals was too much. In Alone in the Zone, a 2013 video report from Vice, Naoto Matsumura, then 53 and also from Tomioka, describes how he eventually left his family to return home and look after the animals there who still survived.

“We ran for it when reactor unit 4 exploded”, he recalls in the video, while hugging an ostrich. “I grabbed my family and we escaped.”

But Matsumura and his family were turned away by a relative to whom they fled for refuge. “She wouldn’t even let us in. She said we were contaminated by radiation”, he related.

Fukushima evacuees are the new Hibakusha

Such misconceptions were widespread. Fukushima evacuees had become the new Hibakusha, the name given to survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb blasts, many of whom were stigmatized and treated as outcasts.

After finding no room at shelters either, Matsumura took the decision to return to Tomioka alone. When he saw the starving animals he said he had no choice but to stay on.

Matsumura’s story is less uncommon than one would expect. A 2013 ITN news feature profiled Kago Sakamoto, then 58, who refused to abandon his animal sanctuary situated less than 12 miles from the Fukushima nuclear plant.

Although he lives there illegally, Sakamoto survives on charitable in-kind donations from supporters. The older men are gambling that any radiation-borne disease will outlive them anyway, given the long latency period for illnesses like leukemia that can take a couple of decades or more to manifest.

The elderly want to die where they were born

Indeed, statistics indicate that it is the retired and the elderly who have been willing to return from exile so far. Even though studies show that reliable decontamination is unlikely and will not be long-lasting, the elderly, as Aoki explained it, “want to die where they were born and not die in an unfamiliar place.”

Dr. Ian Fairlie, writing in The Ecologist last August, estimates that as many as 2,000 people have already died due to the stress of evacuation itself.

“The uprooting to unfamiliar areas, cutting of family ties, loss of social support networks, disruption, exhaustion, poor physical conditions and disorientation can and do result in many people, in particular older people, dying”, Fairlie wrote.

Some who decline to return are ostracized by others, Aoki said. “They are accused of abandoning their homeland.” Some government officials have even tried to position the return to previous exclusion zones as some kind of patriotic duty.

That patriotic duty will be center stage in the lead-up to the 2020 Summer Olympic Games to be hosted in Tokyo. Between now and then, a comprehensive public relations effort must sweep aside all doubts about radiation risks.

Fukushima will bid for an Olympic event

In a blatant example of the depth of denial about the true extent of the disaster, Fukushima City hopes to be an Olympic venue. As Fukushima City official Hiroaki Kuwajima told AFP:

“If baseball and softball return to the Olympics, and preliminary games are played outside Tokyo, then we hope to be able to stage games. We are still in the process of recovery from the disaster and it would be a dream to have world-class athletes play here.”

Kuwajima and other officials are positioning the pariah status of Fukushima Prefecture as “harmful rumors” that can be dispelled by moving refugees back, encouraging Olympic events and luring young people into the workforce, essential to re-boot the region’s crushed economy.

“The Governor of Fukushima spoke about a safe Fukushima”, Aoki said. “We want it to become safe. But our thoughts and reality are not one and the same.”

Not everyone is cooperating. Before the Fukushima disaster, there was a cultural lockstep when it came to trust in government. But with unprecedented anti-nuclear demonstrations and the revelations of government and industry collusion, the traditional culture of group obedience has eroded to some degree. But it has not entirely vanished.

Voices of opposition dismissed as ‘extremists’

“There persists an anti-scientific stance and group mentality”, said Dr. Tetsunari Iida, executive director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies in Japan, speaking at the same London conference as Aoki. “People are told they shouldn’t be expressing fearfulness. People who speak up are dismissed as extremists.”

Minamisoma city, located 14-38 km north of the Fukushima nuclear site, was one of the communities worst hit by radiation fallout. About 42% of all Fukushima Prefecture evacuees were former residents of the city. But while the Japanese Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters has declared the city safe for residents to return, only a little over half of the former population has gone back, about 50% of whom are senior citizens.

Those who remain away – still around 110,000 people according to Aoki – lost many tangibles in their lives, but also, she says, something more fundamental: “People must not lose their dignity. How can we possibly construct something that will annihilate dignity?”

That decimation of spirit along with land and livelihood, prompted Aoki to repeat the warning she gave when she visited the Wylfa nuclear site in Wales, where two reactors are shut down but a new one is proposed. Like a Cassandra of the East, she intones:

“Please learn from Fukushima. Please learn from our mistake. You don’t want to apologize to your own children, to your grandchildren, for making the choice before they were even born.”

That choice was the blunder of nuclear power, one for which Japan is paying a terrible and still incalculable price.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a Takoma Park, MD, USA environmental advocacy group.

Most consumers want to know where their food has come from and to have the option to purchase products that ensure higher welfare for farm animals.

Unfortunately, current EU legislation means that labelling on meat and dairy products can often be bewildering and doesn’t always provide customers with the information they want.

Understandably, many consumers are taken in by the power of suggestion that appear on many food labels. I myself – with a wealth of knowledge on the subject – can still find labels challenging to decipher.

Marketing techniques can be clever at creating confusing visual and written cues that make shoppers feel, at a glance, that they are buying a fair, sustainable product. It’s nothing short of scandalous.

Labels on intensively reared products often display images of rolling landscapes, cosy family farms and happy animals when in reality the livestock are crammed into barren cages, or kept in such close confinement with one another, that they are unable to express their natural behaviours.

Generic, meaningless phrases are brandished across a lot of factory farmed food packaging, such as ‘farm fresh’ and ‘natural’, when in fact more appropriate slogans would be ‘raised in confinement’ or ‘grown quickly, without access to the outdoors’. When you think about it, it’s obvious. The truth about factory farming isn’t advertised on food labels because it’s an unsavoury one.

Consumer power can create change

A staggering 50 billion animals exist in factory farms globally, where they are treated as commodities, kept in confinement, and routinely deprived of the freedoms that are so central to their welfare.

Animals commonly injure one another out of boredom and stress. In order to reduce these injuries, mutilations such as teeth clipping, tail docking and beak trimming are commonplace and usually carried out without pain relief.

Many breeds are selected for fast growth and high yields, putting them at risk of developing physical problems such as lameness, and infections. Factory farming is also highly dependent on large quantities of precious resources, contributing to a catalogue of social and environmental ills, from pollution and deforestation to poverty, hunger and disease.

More than 80% of the animals raised in the EU each year are factory farmed. These inhumane farming practices are hidden behind closed doors, out of public view. But consumer power can change this and allow shoppers clarity when opting for foods that are better for animal welfare.

Mandatory method of production labelling for eggs sold in the European Union was introduced in 2004, allowing customers to easily see the system used to produce them – whether it be caged, barn, free-range, or organic. Since then, the proportion of hens in cage-free systems has more than doubled, from 19.7% in 2003 to 44.3% in 2014.

When consumers know which farm system has been used to produce their eggs, many opt for higher welfare. In turn, this increases demand for higher welfare eggs, helping to drive welfare improvements for millions of egg-laying hens. This is an excellent example of how effective and honest labelling can re-shape the market.

I am sure the lives of many other farm animals throughout the EU could also be improved if mandatory labelling, providing transparent information to consumers, were to be introduced. Mandatory, rather than voluntary, labelling is essential to ensure that not only products farmed to good standards of animal welfare are marked accordingly, but that products from intensively reared animals indicate this too.

Let’s make labels open and honest

It would seem that some companies, through clever marketing, are keeping consumers in the dark about the harsh reality of where much of their food really comes from. That’s why my organisation, Compassion in World Farming is working across the EU as part of the Labelling Matters partnership, with the RSPCA, Eurogroup for Animals, and the Soil Association, to campaign for full and honest food labelling.

We believe that all meat and dairy products should be labelled by method of production, to show the conditions in which each animal was reared. Confusing food labels are fundamentally unfair, not only to the countless farm animals whose suffering they conceal, but also to committed higher-welfare farmers whose products often fail to stand out from the crowd.

Clear labelling would create confidence for producers wishing to invest in higher welfare farm systems.

I urge consumers to look for the highest available standards of animal welfare when purchasing meat, egg and dairy products. Organic and free-range products have the best potential for animal welfare and ensure the animal has had access to the outdoors.

Alternatively, look for products that describe a higher welfare indoor system, and are backed by an independent assurance mark, such as RSPCA Assured. Pork products labelled ‘outdoor bred’ and ‘outdoor reared’, indicate better welfare than intensive indoor systems.

Experience has shown that informing consumers of the realities of intensive food production can be an effective way to change the system for the better.

Building on the success achieved in the egg industry, honest labelling can shed light on the horrors of factory farming and create a kinder system – for farm animals, people, and the planet.

Philip Lymbery is Chief Executive of leading international farm animal welfare organisation, Compassion in World Farming and a prominent commentator on the effects of industrial farming.

The book: Philip is author of ‘Farmageddon: The true cost of cheap meat‘, published by Bloomsbury in 2014 and written with Sunday Times political editor, Isabel Oakeshott. The Evening Standard called it an “unusually punchy and fast-paced” enviro-shocker. The Independent said it was an “unforgettable indictment of the new hyper-industrialised agriculture originating in the USA.”

Our nation’s Founders, in the US Constitution, elected not to restrict its fundamental guarantees to the present generation.

Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and the other Architects of our democracy, instead, aimed to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

They thus took account of future generations by establishing an enduring guide to those principles most relevant to just resolution of our nation’s fundamental challenges, including those arising centuries after the Constitution’s signing.

Our nation’s manifestly outsized role in causing dangerous climate change presents such a fundamental problem. Though we compose less than 5% of the world population, cumulative fossil fuel emissions from the US exceed 25% of the world total, far outstripping contributions from China, Russia, Germany, or Britain over time.

In light of the long atmospheric residence time of carbon dioxide (CO₂), America bears a heavy measure of responsibility for present and future climate damages. There is no climate-related impact to persons or other living things for which our nation is not substantially liable.

Today’s court case in Oregon

A judge in the US District Court in Oregon, is today (9th March 2016) considering whether a constitutional challenge to federal actions that underwrite fossil fuel emissions may proceed.

Brought by youth plaintiffs, and by me on behalf of future generations, the lawsuit alleges that by permitting, authorizing, and subsidizing the exploitation, production, transport, and burning of fossil fuels, our government has caused or substantially contributed to the present emergency in which the very viability of a hospitable climate system is at stake.

We argue that such federal actions infringe upon the fundamental guarantees of the 5th Amendment, including the rights to life, liberty, property, and equal protection of the law.

Industry intervenors and the government urge the court to duck the fundamental issues, alleging they are ‘political’ or encroach on Executive prerogatives now that the President has begun to act, however inadequately.

But our nation would be more riven with turmoil and injustice had our courts failed to rise, at critical junctures, to defend our fundamental constitutional rights against legalized segregation and other forms of officially sanctioned abuse.

Our courts face such a challenge now, with global warming, an issue on which our federal government has to date dithered, and worse, in the face of the gathering storm.

A massive thermal imbalance is arleady evident

Because of the buildup of CO₂ in the atmosphere, stemming mainly from the burning of fossils fuel, Earth is in a state of significant energy imbalance.  That imbalance now averages about 0.6 Watts/m² over the entire planet – equivalent to exploding more than 400,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs per day, 365 days per year.

This imbalance, more energy coming in than going out, means that additional warming of terrestrial and ocean systems remains ‘in the pipeline’, to be felt by future generations. Already, based on modern instrumental and paleoclimate records, Earth’s surface temperature is rising out of the range of the Holocene, the current 10,000 year geological period characterized by a relatively stable climate and coastlines that enabled civilization to develop.

Continued failure to phase out fossil fuel emissions will consign our children and our Posterity to a diminishing existence. Their compromised prospects are described in reviews of national and international scientific bodies – including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the US National Academy of Sciences.

They include deteriorating food security, soil desiccation and groundwater depletion, shrinking snowpack and consequential reduced freshwater supplies, recurrent superstorms, ocean acidification, increasing wildfires, worsened air pollution, a host of assaults on human health, and widespread species extinction.

Perhaps worst of all – as colleagues and I describe in a paper now in press – our planet’s major ice sheets are likely subject to disintegration if the buildup of atmospheric CO₂ is not soon abated.

This would raise sea levels several meters, jeopardizing the functionality of coastal cities. There is no prospect of economical adaptation to this looming catastrophe, if it is not averted.

Exxon knew. And so did the US Government

Our case will show that federal officials have been aware for decades of the major risks even as they approved or underwrote fossil fuel project after project without CO₂ controls.

A 1965 White House report, for instance, warned that continued CO₂ addition to the atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas “will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable though local or even national efforts, could occur.”

Similarly, a 1991 Congressional Office of Technology Assessment report observed that “the decision to limit emissions cannot await the time when the full impacts are evident. The lag time between emission of the gases and their full impact is on the order of decades to centuries; so too is the time needed to reverse any effects.”

In over 40 years of service at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies – as its Director from 1981-2013 – I provided federal officials climate data and testimony warning of our progressively worsening situation of atmospheric CO₂ build-up and the need for effective, prompt action to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

There is, then, no excuse. Continued delay in implementing serious climate remedies challenges the vision of our Founders, eviscerating fundamental constitutional guarantees. Congress and the President manifestly lack the requisite resolve. Accordingly, the Court should immediately order the government to develop and implement a climate recovery plan.

Effective measures, in my view, should include a rising fee on carbon emissions to ensure that fossil fuel industry costs now imposed on our health and our children’s future are accounted for in energy purchase and investment decisions. Such a plan could pave the way for deep decarbonization of our industrial system, and guide effective international action.

It will take such a court order to extricate our nation from the looming danger that our government’s actions have done so much to bring about. Our children’s lives, their prospects, and the Blessings of Liberty we are obliged to secure for them, hang in the balance.

Dr. James Hansen, formerly Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where he directs the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions. Best known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue, Hansen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and was designated by Time Magazine in 2006 as one of the 100 most influential people on Earth.

This article was originally published on the CSAS website.

Within six years, the cost of owning an electric car will be cheaper than purchasing and running a petrol or diesel model.

 That’s the conclusion of a report on the fast-expanding electric car market by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The report says that even if petrol or diesel driven cars improve their fuel efficiency over the coming years, the cost of owning an electric car – buying it and running it – will be below that of conventional vehicles by 2022.

The increased sale of electrically-powered cars is seen as an important element in the fight against climate change. CO₂ emissions from vehicles fuelled by petrol and diesel cause a build-up of greenhouse gases and, especially in cities, pollution from exhausts causes serious damage to health.