Conservation organisation Wildcat Haven has obtained documents from Scottish Government agency Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) about its Scottish Wildcat Action Plan under a Freedom of Information request that reveal its secret plan to shoot cats with shotguns.

A key aim of the project is to engage members of the public to donate money and to report sightings of feral domestic cats and wildcat-domestic cat hybrids. One of the main threats to the wildcat is cross-mating, or hybridisation, with domestic and feral cats.

To that end the Action Plan makes assurances that neutering will be used to reduce cross-mating with wildcats under its ‘Trap-Neuter-Release programme’. Neutering is the only feral cat control method listed in the publicly published Action Plan on SNH’s website (page 8).

However the trapping licence issued by SNH to Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) dictates that all feral cats caught must be shot by gamekeepers in the cage trap (see page 12 first para RZSS licence application document).

Claire Bass, Executive Director of Humane Society International / UK, which supports the Wildcat Haven project, commented: “We are appalled and dismayed that feral cats in Scotland are facing death in the name of ‘conservation’ under protocols authored by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland.

“I am sure the public will be rightly shocked by this sad revelation. Wildcat Haven has proven that feral cats can be sterilised, not shot, to protect Scottish wildcats in their natural habitat.

‘Humane Dispatch Protocols’

The license application is supported by a detailed document authored by RZSS, setting out  ‘Humane Dispatch Protocols’ which includes the stipulation (page 21 last para RZSS licence application document):

“Any individuals which are obviously feral domestic cats, non-native or unfit for release will bedispatched according to standard predator control practices, by the land manager, as per estate norms. Dispatch with a 12 bore shotgun using number three shot (lead shot not to be used overforeshore or wetlands), positioned 5m from the trap, aiming at the head and front of shoulder, is recommended.”

The documents also note that any cats brought to the project as suspected wildcats will be killed if they do not meet the standards of a wildcat genetic test developed by RZSS. (‘Opportunistic Acquisition’ pages 12/13 and 24 of RZSS licence application document):

“Such individuals will undergo the same process as licenced trapped cats, placed within quarantine facilities at HWP and undergo health, genetic and pelage screening and subsequently either included in the conservation breeding for release programme or euthanized based on the results of the screening process.”

The documents obtained by Wildcat Haven include SNH minutes, emails and policies relating to conservation of the Scottish wildcat. They also show that the Action Plan receives funding from the taxpayer, the Heritage Lottery Fund and several other sources.

The £2 million Heritage Lottery Fund and tax-funded Scottish Wildcat Action Plan project, also known as ‘Save Our Wildcats’ and ‘Scottish Wildcat Action’, is driven by SNH and RZSS (which owns Edinburgh Zoo and Highland Wildlife Park) and signed off by Scottish Environment Minister Aileen McLeod.

The project also incudes the Scottish Government, Chester Zoo, Scottish Wildlife Trust, National Trust for Scotland and The Royal School of Veterinary Studies Edinburgh University.

Another way: humane sterilisation

Wildcat Haven runs a project based entirely on compassionate conservation. It has created a vast, 800 square mile safe region in the West Highlands, by humanely sterilising the domestic and feral cat population, in partnership with landowners and local communities.

Wildcat Haven and its lawyers held a meeting with SNH and RZSS Edinburgh Zoo in last month to raise a range of concerns relating to the Action Plan, and requested that the Action Plan be suspended pending investigation. But this request was refused, and RZSS Edinburgh Zoo confirmed that it had already killed feral domestic cats under the license after they failed genetic tests.

Claire Bass praised Wildcat Haven’s approach for being both humane and effective: “I’ve had the opportunity to see Wildcat Haven’s team in action as they create support in communities and implement humane approaches.

“Given Wildcat Haven’s successes, it seems illogical that the Scottish Government’s Action Plan insists on compromising animal welfare in this way, whilst simultaneously purporting to support humane feral cat controls. We join Wildcat Haven in urging for an immediate suspension of this lethal plan.”

SNH confirmed in the meeting with Wildcat Haven that the Heritage Lottery Fund was fully aware of all activities taking place under the Action Plan. An HLF spokesperson said:

“The Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting a project run by leading conservation organisations to raise awareness of how the public can help endangered wildcat species through identifying, neutering and vaccinating feral cats. This is done in a humane way and does not involve the killing of any animal. It is not for us to comment on elements of the wildcat action plan that are not covered by National Lottery funding.”

‘Barbaric and entirely unnecessary’

Dr Paul O’Donoghue, Chief Scientific Advisor to Wildcat Haven, and previously an advisor to Scottish Wildcat Action, having left the project in 2014 due to grave concerns with the Action Plan, commented:

“I am deeply saddened  to discover the animal welfare compromises that are being made. Neutering has proven to be incredibly effective in the Wildcat Haven fieldwork area for humanely managing feral cat populations and Scottish Natural Heritage are fully aware of the results from our work under their licence; hundreds of square miles of safe habitat for wildcats.

“In contrast, we have seen no evidence that the approach taken by the Action Plan to date has reduced the risk posed to wildcats from feral cats in any of its priority areas. Instead of following the evidence we have provided to them, Scottish Natural Heritage has chosen to allow the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland to trap feral cats, only to shoot them in the face with a shotgun. It is barbaric and entirely unnecessary.

“This process also carries an inevitable risk to wildcats being shot through misidentification in the trap, and an equally unacceptable risk that someone’s pet could be killed in this way. We urge Scottish Natural Heritage to place a moratorium on the Scottish Wildcat Action Plan in its current form in order to deal properly with the wide range of concerns we have raised.”

Action: Share your thoughts on social media to:

• Aileen McLeod, Environment Minister. Facebook: www.facebook.com/AileenMcLeodMSP. Twitter: @AileenMcLeodMSP. Email: Aileen.McLeod.msp@scottish.parliament.uk
• Scottish Government. Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheScottishGovernment. Twitter: @scotgov
• Save Our Wildcats / Scottish Wildcat Action Plan. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saveourwildcats. Twitter: @SaveOurWildcats
• Scottish Natural Heritage. Facebook: www.facebook.com/ScottishNaturalHeritage. Twitter: @SNH_Tweets
• RZSS. Facebook: www.facebook.com/edinburgh.zoo. Twitter: @rzss.
• Edinburgh Zoo. Facebook: www.facebook.com/EdinburghZooScotland. Twitter: @Edinburgh Zoo.

Large sections of the Great Barrier Reef, the Earth’s largest living structure, are dying before our eyes.

Sustained high sea temperatures have stressed the corals to the point where they expel the brightly coloured algae that live within their tissues.

This process is aptly named bleaching as it removes all pigment and exposes the shocking white calcium skeleton of the reef structures. The coral can survive in this state for up to a few weeks. Thereafter, if temperatures do not decrease then they will die.

The Great Barrier Reef has experienced bleaching events twice before. The first, in 1998, was bad enough, with 50% of the reef affected. 2002 was even worse with 60% of the reef bleached. Recent aerial surveys of the northern 1000 km of the reef evaluated 500 different sections – 95% were bleached.

The full impact that such bleaching is having will not be known until biologists directly observe the corals in the water. Estimates coming back from initial monitoring show that on some reefs more than half of the coral has already died.

Given the record-shattering temperatures over the past year, coral researchers were preparing themselves for another mass bleaching. But the scale of this event has left some researchers stunned. Or angry. Returning from five weeks investigating the reefs, Jodie Rummer, a biologist at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies said:

“I witnessed a sight underwater that no marine biologist, and no person with a love and appreciation for the natural world for that matter, wants to see”.

Not one recorded bleaching event before 1998

Many are asking the simple question – why is this happening? First, we need to stress that there was not a single coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef in the 400 years prior to 1998.

While the current extreme El Niño is playing a part in this latest episode of coral destruction, the underlying driver is increasing global temperatures as a consequence of human-made climate change.

Coral polyps and their colourful zooxanthellae algae have a tightly coupled relationship, where each aids the other. The algae are autotrophic photosynthesisers, which means they make their own food by using sunlight to split carbon dioxide molecules and form sugars. Coral polyps are much more complex heterotrophs – they use fine-meshed sieves to sweep up suspended organic matter from sea water.

For the algae, a coral reef represents the perfect place to live. There, they are safe and secure within a strong structure, near the surface and so able to receive large amounts of energy from the sun along with coral polyp waste, which helps promote photosynthesis.

In fact photosynthesis is so productive that the algae produce more food than they can consume. This surplus is greedily gobbled up by the coral polyps. It’s a win-win situation – what biologists call a mutualistic symbiosis.

However, just like any biological process there are environmental limits. Higher temperatures along with very bright sunshine can impact both coral polyps and their algae and their relationship breaks down, leading to the expulsion of the algae and bleached coral.

The response of scientists – and the Australian government

Bleaching can also be driven by pollution, particularly agricultural run-off and sedimentation from activities such as dredging. These two factors threaten the more southern portions of the Great Barrier Reef which at least so far have dodged some of the very worst bleaching as sea temperatures have been lower.

The northern stretch of the reef is more remote and better protected from human impacts, but it has borne the brunt of extreme temperatures.

Given that scientists have been warning about a significant bleaching episode for some time now, one may have hoped for a coordinated response to this predictable disaster. There have indeed been related developments.

While biologists were in the air and under the water scrambling to understand the severity of this latest bleaching event, the Queensland Government approved mining leases for the A$21.7 billion Carmichael coal mine and associated new rail line in the Galilee Basin.

If all of this coal is extracted and burnt, some 4.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide will be released into the Earth’s atmosphere. Given climate change’s obvious impact on the Great Barrier Reef, some scientists have pointed out the fundamental contradiction in a government stating that it is both committed to protecting the reef and developing these new coal mines.

As if adding insult to injury, the vast majority of the Galilee Basin coal will be shipped out of the deep water port of Abbot Point which is within the Great Barrier Reef UNESCO world heritage site. Those shipping the coal will be able to wave goodbye to the reef in more than one way as they transport it to power stations in India, China and Japan where it will be burnt and so contribute to further warming and further bleaching.

Where will it all lend?

At times like this, it’s hard not to anthropomorphise – to see the Great Barrier Reef and other coral reefs around the world turning white not due to bleaching, but in shock at our sustained attack on the natural world.

The events unfolding off the coast of north eastern Australia are dramatic, but are also just the latest manifestation of the mass extinction event humans have initiated. This not only drains the colour from the Earths’ most magnificent aquatic ecosystems, but robs us of biological beauty across the world.

We will all lead diminished lives because of it.

James Dyke is a lecturer in Sustainability Science at the University of Southampton.

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

The dominant type of new nuclear power plant, light-water reactors (LWRs), proved unfinanceable in the robust 2005-08 capital market, despite new US subsidies approaching or exceeding their total construction cost.

New LWRs are now so costly and slow that they save 2-20x less carbon, 20-40x slower, than micropower and efficient end-use [1].

As this becomes evident, other kinds of reactors are being proposed instead – novel designs claimed to solve LWRs’ problems of economics, proliferation, and waste [2]. Even climate-protection pioneer Jim Hansen says these ‘Gen IV’ reactors merit rapid R&D [3].

But on closer examination, the two kinds most often promoted – Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) and thorium reactors – reveal no economic, environmental, or security rationale, and the thesis is unsound for any nuclear reactor.

Integrated Fast Reactors (IFRs)

The IFR – a pool-type, liquid-sodium-cooled fast-neutron [4] reactor plus an ambitious new nuclear fuel cycle – was abandoned in 1994 [5], and General Electric’s S-PRISM design in ~2003, due to both proliferation concerns and dismal economics.

Federal funding for fast breeder reactors [6] halted in 1983, but in the past few years, enthusiasts got renewed Bush Administration support by portraying IFRs as a solution to proliferation and nuclear waste. It’s neither.

Fast reactors were first offered as a way to make more plutonium to augment and ultimately replace scarce uranium. Now that uranium and enrichment are known to get cheaper while reprocessing, cleanup, and nonproliferation get costlier – destroying the economic rationale – IFRs have been rebranded as a way to destroy the plutonium (and similar transuranic elements) in long-lived radioactive waste.

Two or three redesigned IFRs could in principle fission the plutonium produced by each four LWRs without making more net plutonium. However, most LWRs will have retired before even one commercial-size IFR could be built; LWRs won’t be replaced with more LWRs because they’re grossly uncompetitive; and IFRs with their fuel cycle would cost even more and probably be less reliable.

It’s feasible today to ‘burn’ plutonium in LWRs, but this isn’t done much because it’s very costly, makes each kg of spent fuel 7x hotter, enhances risks, and makes certain transuranic isotopes that complicate operation. IFRs could do the same thing with similar or greater problems, offering no advantage over LWRs in proliferation resistance, cost, or environment.

IFRs’ reprocessing plant, lately rebranded a ‘recycling center’, would be built at or near the reactors, coupling them so neither works without the other. Its novel technology, replacing solvents and aqueous chemistry with high-temperature pyrometallurgy and electrorefining, would incur different but major challenges, greater technical risks and repair problems, and speculative but probably worse economics.

Argonne National Laboratory, the world’s experts on it, contracted to pyroprocess spent fuel from EBR-II – a small IFR-like test reactor shut down in 1994 – by 2035, at a cost DOE estimated in 2006 at ~50x today’s cost of fresh LWR fuel.

Reprocessing of any kind makes waste management more difficult and complex, increases the volume and diversity of waste streams, increases by several- to many-fold the cost of nuclear fueling, and separates bomb-usable material that can’t be adequately measured or protected.

Mainly for this last reason, all Presidents since Gerald Ford in 1976 (except G.W. Bush in 2006-08) discouraged it. An IFR/pyroprocessing system would give any country immediate access to over a thousand bombs’ worth of plutonium to fuel it, facilities to recover that plutonium, and experts to separate and fabricate it into bomb cores – hardly a path to a safer world.

IFRs might in principle offer some safety advantages over today’s light-water reactors, but create different safety concerns, including the sodium coolant’s chemical reactivity and radioactivity. Over the past half-century, the world’s leading nuclear technologists have built about three dozen sodium-cooled fast reactors, 11 of them Naval.

Of the 22 whose histories are mostly reported, over half had sodium leaks, four suffered fuel damage (including two partial meltdowns), several others had serious accidents, most were prematurely closed, and only six succeeded. Admiral Rickover canceled sodium-cooled propulsion for USS Seawolf in 1956 as “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.”

Little has changed. As Dr. Tom Cochran of NRDC notes, fast reactor programs were tried in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the USSR, and the US and Soviet Navies. All failed. After a half-century and tens of billions of dollars, the world has one operational commercial-sized fast reactor (Russia’s BN600) out of 438 commercial power reactors, and it’s not fueled with plutonium.

IFRs are often claimed to “burn up nuclear waste” and make its “time of concern … less than 500 years” rather than 10,000-100,000 years or more. That’s wrong: most of the radioactivity comes from fission products, including very long lived isotopes like iodine-129 and technicium-99, and their mix is broadly similar in any nuclear fuel cycle.

IFRs’ wastes may contain less transuranics, but at prohibitive cost and with worse occupational exposures, routine releases, accident and terrorism risks, proliferation, and disposal needs for intermediate- and low-level wastes. It’s simply a dishonest fantasy to claim, as a Wall Street Journal op-ed just did [7], that such hypothetical and uneconomic ways to recover energy or other value from spent LWR fuel mean “There is no such thing as nuclear waste”. Of course, the nuclear industry wishes this were true.

No new kind of reactor is likely to be much, if at all, cheaper than today’s LWRs, which remain grossly uncompetitive and are getting more so despite five decades of maturation. ‘New reactors’ are precisely the ‘paper reactors’ Admiral Rickover (mastermind of the US Navy’s development of the Pressurized Water Reactor, the PWR) described in 1953:

Every new type of reactor in history has been costlier, slower, and harder than projected. IFRs’ low pressure, different safety profile, high temperature, and potentially higher thermal efficiency (if its helium turbines didn’t misbehave as they have in all previous reactor projects) come with countervailing disadvantages and costs that advocates assume away, contrary to all experience.

Thorium reactors

Some enthusiasts prefer fueling reactors with thorium – an element 3x as abundant as uranium but even more uneconomic to use. India has for decades failed to commercialize breeder reactors to exploit its thorium deposits.

But thorium can’t fuel a reactor by itself: rather, a uranium- or plutonium-fueled reactor can convert thorium-232 into fissionable (and plutonium-like, highly bomb-usable) uranium-233. Thorium’s proliferation [8], waste, safety, and cost problems differ only in detail from uranium’s: e.g., thorium ore makes less mill waste, but highly radioactive U-232 makes fabricating or reprocessing U-233 fuel hard and costly.

And with uranium-based nuclear power continuing its decades-long economic collapse, it’s awfully late to be thinking of developing a whole new fuel cycle whose problems differ only in detail from current versions.

Spent LWR fuel ‘burned’ in IFRs, it’s claimed, could meet all humanity’s energy needs for centuries. But renewables and efficiency can do that forever at far lower cost, with no proliferation, nuclear wastes, or major risks [9].

Moreover, any new type of reactor would probably cost even more than today’s models: even if the nuclear part of a new plant were free, the rest – two-thirds of its capital cost – would still be grossly uncompetitive with any efficiency and most renewables, sending out a kilowatt-hour for ~9-13¢/kWh instead of new LWRs’ ~12-18+¢.

In contrast, the average US windfarm completed in 2007 sold its power (net of a 1¢/kWh subsidy that’s a small fraction of nuclear subsidies) for 4.5¢/kWh. Add ~0.4¢ to make it dispatchable whether the wind is blowing or not and you get under a nickel delivered to the grid.

Most other renewables also beat new thermal power plants too, cogeneration is often comparable or cheaper, and efficiency is cheaper than just running any nuclear- or fossil-fueled plant. Obviously these options would also easily beat proposed fusion reactors that are sometimes claimed to be comparable to today’s fission reactors in size and cost.

And unlike any kind of hypothetical fusion or new fission reactor – or LWRs, which have a market share below 2% – efficiency and micropower now provide at least half the world’s new electrical services, adding tens of times more capacity each year than nuclear power does.

It’s a far bigger gamble to assume that the nuclear market loser will become a winner than that these winners will turn to losers.

Small reactors

Toshiba claims to be about to market a 200-kWe nuclear plant (~50x smaller than today’s norm); a few startup firms like Hyperion Power Generation aim to make 10¢/kWh electricity from miniature reactors for which it claims over 100 firm orders.

Unfortunately, 10¢ is the wrong target to beat: the real competitor is not other big and costly thermal power plants, but micropower and negawatts, whose delivered retail cost is often ~1-6¢/kWh [10]. Can one imagine in principle that mass-production, passive operation, automation (perhaps with zero operating and security staff), and supposedly failsafe design might enable hypothetical small reactors to approach such low costs? No, for two basic reasons:

• Nuclear reactors derive their claimed advantages from highly concentrated sources of heat, and hence also of radiation. But the shielding and thermal protection needed to contain that concentrated energy and exploit it (via turbine cycles) are inherently unable to scale down as well as technologies whose different principles avoid these issues.
• By the time the new reactors could be proven, accepted by regulators and the public, financed, built, and convincingly tested, they couldn’t undercut the then prices of negawatts and micropower that are beating them by 2-20x today – and would have gained decades of further head start on their own economies of mass production.

In short, the notion that different or smaller reactors plus wholly new fuel cycles (and, usually, new competitive conditions and political systems) could overcome nuclear energy’s inherent problems is not just decades too late, but fundamentally a fantasy. Fantasies are all right, but people should pay for their own.

Investors in and advocates of small-reactor innovations will be disappointed. But in due course, the aging advocates of the half-century-old reactor concepts that never made it to market will retire and die, their credulous young devotees will relearn painful lessons lately forgotten, and the whole nuclear business will complete its slow death of an incurable attack of market forces.

Meanwhile, the rest of us shouldn’t be distracted from getting on with the winning investments that make sense, make money, and really do solve the energy, climate, and proliferation problems, led by business for profit.

Amory Lovins, a student of nuclear issues since the 1960s, is Chairman and Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute.

Author’s note: Thanks to Drs. Tom Cochran (NRDC), Frank von Hippel (Princeton), and Hal Feiveson (Princeton) for generously sharing their insights that contributed to this article.

Editor’s note: Obviously a number of the 2009 figures are out of date seven years later. The main change since this was written is the collapse in the price of renewable energy, solar in particular, which is now much cheaper than nuclear almost everywhere. The result is that the case against new nuclear has become even stronger.

This article was written by Amory Lovins on 21st March 2009. It is reprinted by kind permission of Rocky Mountain Institute from the original DOC file.

References

1. A.B. Lovins et al., Nuclear Power: Climate Fix or Folly?, RMI, 31 Dec. 2008, www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E09-01_NuclPwrClimFixFolly1i09.pdf.
2. Eg, Tom Blees’s Prescription for the Planet, skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm, and three retired Argonne National Laboratory physicists’ 2005 Scientific American summary article at www.nationalcenter.org/NuclearFastReactorsSA1205.pdf.
3. See www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/20081229_Obama_revised.pdf.
4. Such reactors, called ‘fast reactors’ for short, do not slow down their neutrons with a ‘moderator’ like water or graphite. They therefore don’t depend on a small fraction of ‘delayed’ neutrons to keep the chain reaction going, so they require different means of control and safety.
5. See www.nationalcenter.org/NPA378.html.
6. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor.
7. W. Tucker, 13 March 2009, online.wsj.com/article/SB123690627522614525.html.
8. Most proposed thorium cycles need reprocessing to separate U-233 for use in fresh fuel. Some also use 20%-enriched uranium-235, which needs very little further enrichment to become bomb-usable. Diluting U-233 with U-238 also makes more separable plutonium.
9. See A.B. Lovins, ‘Thorium Cycles and Proliferation’, Bull. atom. Scient. 35(2):16-22 (1979), 35(5):50-54 (1979), 35(9):57-59 (1979), all at books.google.com/books?id=GgsAAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0#all_issues_anchor.
10. See ref. 1, Id.

Conservation organisation Wildcat Haven has obtained documents from Scottish Government agency Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) about its Scottish Wildcat Action Plan under a Freedom of Information request that reveal its secret plan to shoot cats with shotguns.

A key aim of the project is to engage members of the public to donate money and to report sightings of feral domestic cats and wildcat-domestic cat hybrids. One of the main threats to the wildcat is cross-mating, or hybridisation, with domestic and feral cats.

To that end the Action Plan makes assurances that neutering will be used to reduce cross-mating with wildcats under its ‘Trap-Neuter-Release programme’. Neutering is the only feral cat control method listed in the publicly published Action Plan on SNH’s website (page 8).

However the trapping licence issued by SNH to Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) dictates that all feral cats caught must be shot by gamekeepers in the cage trap (see page 12 first para RZSS licence application document).

Claire Bass, Executive Director of Humane Society International / UK, which supports the Wildcat Haven project, commented: “We are appalled and dismayed that feral cats in Scotland are facing death in the name of ‘conservation’ under protocols authored by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland.

“I am sure the public will be rightly shocked by this sad revelation. Wildcat Haven has proven that feral cats can be sterilised, not shot, to protect Scottish wildcats in their natural habitat.

‘Humane Dispatch Protocols’

The license application is supported by a detailed document authored by RZSS, setting out  ‘Humane Dispatch Protocols’ which includes the stipulation (page 21 last para RZSS licence application document):

“Any individuals which are obviously feral domestic cats, non-native or unfit for release will bedispatched according to standard predator control practices, by the land manager, as per estate norms. Dispatch with a 12 bore shotgun using number three shot (lead shot not to be used overforeshore or wetlands), positioned 5m from the trap, aiming at the head and front of shoulder, is recommended.”

The documents also note that any cats brought to the project as suspected wildcats will be killed if they do not meet the standards of a wildcat genetic test developed by RZSS. (‘Opportunistic Acquisition’ pages 12/13 and 24 of RZSS licence application document):

“Such individuals will undergo the same process as licenced trapped cats, placed within quarantine facilities at HWP and undergo health, genetic and pelage screening and subsequently either included in the conservation breeding for release programme or euthanized based on the results of the screening process.”

The documents obtained by Wildcat Haven include SNH minutes, emails and policies relating to conservation of the Scottish wildcat. They also show that the Action Plan receives funding from the taxpayer, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and several other sources.

SNH confirmed in the meeting with Wildcat Haven that the National Lottery Heritage Fund was fully aware of all activities taking place under the Action Plan.

The £2 million National Lottery Heritage Fund and tax-funded Scottish Wildcat Action Plan project, also known as ‘Save Our Wildcats’ and ‘Scottish Wildcat Action’, is driven by SNH and RZSS (which owns Edinburgh Zoo and Highland Wildlife Park) and signed off by Scottish Environment Minister Aileen McLeod.

The project also incudes the Scottish Government, Chester Zoo, Scottish Wildlife Trust, National Trust for Scotland and The Royal School of Veterinary Studies Edinburgh University.

Another way: humane sterilisation

Wildcat Haven runs a project based entirely on compassionate conservation. It has created a vast, 800 square mile safe region in the West Highlands, by humanely sterilising the domestic and feral cat population, in partnership with landowners and local communities.

Wildcat Haven and its lawyers held a meeting with SNH and RZSS Edinburgh Zoo in last month to raise a range of concerns relating to the Action Plan, and requested that the Action Plan be suspended pending investigation. But this request was refused, and RZSS Edinburgh Zoo confirmed that it had already killed feral domestic cats under the license after they failed genetic tests.

Claire Bass praised Wildcat Haven’s approach as beiong both humane and effective: “I’ve had the opportunity to see Wildcat Haven’s team in action as they create support in communities and implement humane approaches.

“Given Wildcat Haven’s successes, it seems illogical that the Scottish Government’s Action Plan insists on compromising animal welfare in this way, whilst simultaneously purporting to support humane feral cat controls. We join Wildcat Haven in urging for an immediate suspension of this lethal plan.”

Dr Paul O’Donoghue, Chief Scientific Advisor to Wildcat Haven, and previously an advisor to Scottish Wildcat Action, having left the project in 2014 due to grave concerns with the Action Plan, commented:

“I am deeply saddened  to discover the animal welfare compromises that are being made. Neutering has proven to be incredibly effective in the Wildcat Haven fieldwork area for humanely managing feral cat populations and Scottish Natural Heritage are fully aware of the results from our work under their licence; hundreds of square miles of safe habitat for wildcats.

“In contrast, we have seen no evidence that the approach taken by the Action Plan to date has reduced the risk posed to wildcats from feral cats in any of its priority areas. Instead of following the evidence we have provided to them, Scottish Natural Heritage has chosen to allow the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland to trap feral cats, only to shoot them in the face with a shotgun. It is barbaric and entirely unnecessary.

“This process also carries an inevitable risk to wildcats being shot through misidentification in the trap, and an equally unacceptable risk that someone’s pet could be killed in this way. We urge Scottish Natural Heritage to place a moratorium on the Scottish Wildcat Action Plan in its current form in order to deal properly with the wide range of concerns we have raised.”

Action: Share your thoughts on social media to:

• Aileen McLeod, Environment Minister. Facebook: www.facebook.com/AileenMcLeodMSP. Twitter: @AileenMcLeodMSP. Email: Aileen.McLeod.msp@scottish.parliament.uk
• Scottish Government. Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheScottishGovernment. Twitter: @scotgov
• Save Our Wildcats / Scottish Wildcat Action Plan. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saveourwildcats. Twitter: @SaveOurWildcats
• Scottish Natural Heritage. Facebook: www.facebook.com/ScottishNaturalHeritage. Twitter: @SNH_Tweets
• RZSS. Facebook: www.facebook.com/edinburgh.zoo. Twitter: @rzss.
• Edinburgh Zoo. Facebook: www.facebook.com/EdinburghZooScotland. Twitter: @Edinburgh Zoo.

On the face of it, Trump is Reagan on steroids. His towering size, his nativist US supremacism, his down-home talk, and his reality-show confidence make him ideal for the role of bullying and big lies from the Oval Office.

He is America come to meet itself in larger-than-life image to rejuvenate it as its pride slips away in third-world conditions and a multi-polar world. He is America come to meet itself in larger-than-life image to rejuvenate it as its pride slips away in third-world conditions and a multi-polar world.

While Trump’s narrative is that the American Dream seeks recovery again, the dominant media and political elite relentlessly denounce him as an implicit fascist and disastrous fake.

Something deeper is afoot. An untapped historic resentment is boiling up from underneath which has long been unspeakable on the political stage. Trump has mined it and proposed a concrete solution always denied of his candidacy.

From his promise to halve the Pentagon’s budget to getting the Congress off corporate-donation payrolls, the public money that the big corporate lobbies stand to lose from a Trump presidency are off the charts. But his attackers dare not recognize these explosive issues because they are all part of the problem.

The public money stakes may be bigger than the US corporate stakes behind the foreign wars the US state has initiated since 1991. The takeaway promised by Trump’s policies threaten almost every big lobby now in control of US government purse strings. It grounds in the military-industrial complex spending close to $2,000,000,000 a day for its endless new untested weapons and foreign wars both of which Trump opposes.

But the cut-off of hundreds of billions of public giveaways to the Big Corps do not end here. They hit almost every wide-mouthed transnational corporate siphon into the US Treasury, taxpayers’ pockets and the working majority of America.

Masses of American citizens increasingly without living wages and benefits and in increasing public squalor and insecurity are paying attention to what the political establishment and corporate media have long buried and continue to silence. Trump has raised the great dispossession from impotence into the establishment’s face, and this is why he is a contagion on the American political scene.

The attacks on his campaign

He is pervasively mocked, accused and slandered in non-stop public fireworks of ad hominem hits, but the counter-attacks never engage what Trump has set his sights on – the long stripping of America by cancer stage corporate globalization selecting for the limitless enrichment of the very rich living off an ever-growing take from public coffers and the impoverishment of America’s working people.

A primal rage unites the political establishment across party lines, but they can’t say why. No defaming scorn and abuse is off limits, but Trump’s underlying betrayal of the ruling game remains unspeakable on the stage. The electoral dynamite of all the Americans who have lost all their good blue-collar jobs, social benefits and public infrastructures is recognized only in class condescension.

But the facts cannot be denied of a corporate globalization effectively stripping the lower middle classes and the public realm itself with no-one in Washington establishment saying a word against the greatest transfer of wealth to the 1% in history. Trump may deserve back as bad he gives. But this understanding keeps our eyes on the ego-contest which is the standard spectacle to avoid the real issues.

The personal attacks only tells us how deep the rupture has become between Trump’s campaign and the establishment on the issues kept out of sight. This is why the corporate politicians and media are almost as wound into one-way demonization of Trump as they are when they beat the drums of war against a designated Enemy abroad.

In the end, it may get to him – as when he tries to find angry millions again from onside with an evangelical trumpet of abortion-is-murder just before the primary in Wisconsin. Trump is a shameless opportunist, no doubt. Yet we continue to revolve within an ad hominem circle until we go deeper than the establishment morality tale of the evil of the stigma object – the oldest propaganda trick in the book.

The major money interests that are really at stake in the conflict between Trump and the political-economic establishment remain unconnected and blocked out. ‘Who will stop Trump?’ is not only now asked across America, but the world’s media in China too.

But nothing is less talked about than the globally powerful interests he has promised to rein back from the public troughs bleeding the country’s capacities to build for and to employ its people. On this topic, there is only silence or abusive distortion frothing from the mouth.

Joining the dots of the Great Silence

Eventually people may ask why the establishment unanimously abhors Trump across party divisions which are otherwise unbridgeable. Even if he is a caricature of American privilege and self-promotion, who else could fight the corrupt corporate-state and media establishment? Who else could ever get public support from dispossessed masses and from inside the Republican Party base itself?

Who else could take on the supra-dominant corporate interests of the war state, drug monopoly, health insurance racket, lobby-run foreign policy, off-shore tax evasion, and global trade with only corporate rights to profit taking jobs in the tens of millions from home workers, and still hold a large and right-wing voter base onside?

Conversely, what else than Trump’s threat to the corporate-state establishment can explain the unity of voice and venom against an American paragon of wealth and chupzpah? What else could motivate a cross-party and corporate media hate campaign where there is nothing else in common across the condemning voices? Only those citizens depending on the deep system corruptions he promises to reverse are really threatened by Trump’s candidacy.

But how do these huge private interests go on getting away with a corporate-lobby state transferring every more public wealth and control to them at the expense of the American majority and their common interest when most people already dislike and are systemically exploited by them?

They get away with it by no-one being able to do anything about it. Trump represents a threat to these gargantuan public-trough interests that even the super clean and informed Ralph Nader candidacy for president never did. The corporate media and party machines just shut him down on the electoral stage so few even knew he was a presidential candidate.

You can’t do that with Trump. That is the very big problem for the otherwise seamless political and media establishment who are all in on the fabulous payoffs of this corporate state game. Trump’s entire strategy is based on getting public attention, and he is a master at it, un-buyably rich, and the most watched person in America across the country and the world. He can’t be shut up.

Personal stigmatization and attack without let-up are the only way to gag his policies and turn the tide against him at the same time. Maybe it will work in the end. It’s how disastrous and bankrupting foreign aggressions and wars have been sold whatever the ruinous costs to the public paying for them.

Until Wisconsin

When you join the dots to Trump also preaching a policy revolt against the insatiable corporate jaws feeding on trillions of dollars of public budgets in Washington, the meaning becomes clear. But that connected meaning is blacked out. In its place, the corporate media and politicians present an egomaniac blowhard bordering on fascism who preaches hate, racism and sexism.

But the silenced policies he advocates are more like jumping into a crocodile pit. He is on record saying he will cut the Pentagon’s budget “by 50%”. No winning politician has ever dared to take on the military-industrial complex, with even Eisenhower only naming it in his parting speech.

Trump also says that the US “must be neutral, an honest broker” on the Israeli-Palestine conflict – as unspeakable as it gets in US politics. Big Pharma is also called out with “$400 billion to be saved by government negotiation of prices”. The even more powerful HMO’s are confronted by the possibility of a ‘one-payer system’, the devil incarnate in America’s corporate-welfare state.

Trump even challenges ‘the Enemy’ cornerstone of US ideology when he says “wouldn’t it be nice to get along with Russia and China for a change?” Not very fascist of him. He was also open to nationalizing the Wall Street banks after 2008.

None of this sees the light of day in the hate-Trump culture that been effectively mounted across even left-right divisions. Most of all, Trump rejects the whole misnamed ‘free trade’ global system because it has “hollowed out the lives of American workers” with rights to corporations to move anywhere to get cheaper labour and import back into the US tariff-free.

But again the connected meaning is repressed. That Trump also wants to get the US out of foreign wars at the same time, the other great pillar of corporate globalization, is the real danger to the transnational corporate state he has set in motion.

All these policies threaten only the ruling money interests of America that depend on the superpower public purse to extend their transnational monopolies and multiply their wealth. This is the real establishment interest that has so far evaded the glare of publicity and critique of the Donald Trump phenomenon, bigger now with Bernie Sanders than any political challenge to the US system since the 1960’s.

Trump is certainly not a working-class hero. He is a pure capitalist, with all the furies of private interest and greed that capitalism selects for. But at this time he is a capitalist who is not rich from looting the public purse as the biggest annual cash flow. Neither is it from exporting the costs of labour and taxes to foreign jurisdictions with subhuman standards that come back to the US as ‘necessary to compete’.

Trump has initiated a long overdue recognition of parasite capitalism eating out the life capacities of the US itself.

John McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada whose work is translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his most recent book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: from Crisis to Cure.

This article was originally published by Counterpunch.

The French energy minister, Ségolène Royal, has said that a postponement of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power project was still a possibility.

She also stated that the project must not be allowed to drain funds away from planned investments in renewable energy to bring France towards its 40% green power target.

The comments came in a French television interview on Thursday on the BMFTV channel, in which she was asked whether Hinkley Point would be postponed. (See 9.35 in video)

“It’s still under discussion”, Royal replied. “There’s an agreement between France and Britain, so things should go ahead. But the trade unions are right to ask for the stakes to be re-examined.”

Asked if she was in favour of a postponing the £18 billion project, Royal ducked the question and said she would not make rash comments. However, she did not want to “decisively throw the project into question just like that.”

Royal continued: “I think the project should bring supplementary proof that it is well founded and provide assurances that investment in this project is not going to turn aside or dry out investments that need to be made in renewable energy.”

She then spoke at length of France’s ambitions to generate 40% of its electricity from renewable sources, wind in particular, and France’s broader ambitions to establish itself as an environmental super-power with global expertise across the gamut of green technologies – all without mentioning nuclear power once.

Her comments fit in with EDF’s broader strategy to become a global player in renewable energy. It is already the US’s largest wind power developer and is on track to be producing more wind power in the US every year by 2025 than would Hinkley Point C.

A further delay in EDF’s ‘final investment decision’?

EDF, the energy company controlled by the French government, has still not made a firm commitment to build the new nuclear power station. Its board had been expected to make a final investment decision on the project at its next meeting on 11 May, however this is now looking less likely following Royal’s pointed intervention.

Also weighing against an immediate decision, EDF’s Force Ouvriere (FO) union this week threatened strike action if the company was to hold a meeting to decide on the project before its Annual General Meeting on 12th May.

“If a board meeting is scheduled, we will launch a strike to demand that the Hinkley Point project is delayed”, FO union leader Jacky Chorin told Reuters. “Once the strike is on, I could see CGT and CFE-CGC follow, as they are also against the project.”

Last week an EDF board member called for Hinkley Point C to be postponed, in the latest sign of discord at the top of the French energy company over the troubled project. Christian Taxil, an employee director, said a raft of changes to the Somerset reactor scheme agreed over the past three years significantly raised the risk for EDF.

The dissent follows weeks of behind the scenes bickering and theresignation last month of EDF finance director, Thomas Piquemal, despite continual promises from EDF chief executive Jean-Bernard Lévy that the controversial project will go ahead.

EDF’s litany of nuclear woes

EDF has been hit by falling power prices, cost overruns on other projects, and demands to upgrade French nuclear reactors to make them safer. Its Paris-listed shares are down by almost 60% over the past 12 months.

The company is being compelled by the French government to buy the reactors division of Areva, which is also state-controlled.

Areva’s European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) technology is slated to be used at Hinkley Point. However, the first power station to use it – which is being built in Finland – is running nine years behind schedule due to problems and cost overruns. The problems had left Areva virtually bankrupt after four years of losses.

Concerns about the EPR technology has also delayed EDF’s construction of another EPR reactor at Flamanville, on France’s west coast. Its budget has gone from €3bn to €10.5bn and it is running six years late.

Building two new nuclear reactors at Hinkley has been heavily backed by the UK government in order to keep the lights on in Britain. The last of the UK’s coal-fired power stations will be closed in 2025.

Simon Taylor, a specialist in nuclear financing and a lecturer at Cambridge University, said last month that the Hinkley project appeared to be “poor value for money” and it would be best if the French government abandoned it.

“It would preserve the rest of the nuclear options in the UK, as it would not cast any doubt on the UK’s underlying commitment,” he said. “But if the UK cancels the project it could jeopardise all the other projects in the pipeline.”

Angelique Chrisafis is the Guardian’s Paris correspondent. Follow her on Twitter: @achrisafis

Chris Johnston is a London-based freelance journalist for the Guardian.

This article was originally published by Guardian Environment. This version includes additional reporting by The Ecologist.