The massive flow of refugees fleeing the violence and atrocities of the Syrian conflict is creating huge political and logistical challenges for neighbouring countries.

Amidst the urgency of the humanitarian response, the environmental footprint of these population surges has been less visible.

But as Jordan is discovering, failing to address the impact of migration during response and recovery could have serious health, environmental and political consequences.

Prior to the conflict in Syria, Jordan’s environment was already in a precarious situation. Its scarce water resources and sensitive, in places unique arid habitats were under significant pressure from rapid population growth and poorly planned urbanisation, unsustainable agricultural practices and inadequate waste management.

The twin threats of desertification and climate change were ever present but also acknowledged by a government increasingly conscious of the health and economic consequences of environmental degradation.

Politics and economics take precedence over environment

Jordan is of course no stranger to the hosting of refugee populations. Globally, Jordan has the second largest ratio of refugees to citizens and the fifth largest refugee population in absolute terms, with large numbers of Palestinians and Iraqis making use of its relative stability within the region.

As a result, Jordan’s population has repeatedly surged in the wake of conflicts – however these influxes of commonly young or wealthy middle-class refugees have often proved economically beneficial. Nevertheless Jordan’s government has had to become adept at managing the political repercussions of these sudden demographic jolts.

However these population surges also carry with them an environmental cost. For example, during the 1991 Gulf War an estimated 1.38m refugees entered Jordan. Predominantly herders, they brought with them 1.8m sheep, goats and camels.

The impact of their livestock on Jordan’s fragile rangelands during the dry season was significant – desert shrubs and plants that take decades to mature were grazed down in weeks and months. Recovery for the 7.1m hectares affected would take years, with endangered species such as oryx, gazelle and caracal all affected by habitat degradation and loss.

Jordan would later claim US$160m from the UN Compensation Commission established in the wake of the conflict for the restoration of its rangelands.

The environmental impact of Syrian refugees in Jordan

As of this month, the UNHCR puts the total number of Syrians fleeing the conflict in Jordan at 638,633. However this only includes those who have officially registered. The Jordanian government believes that more than 1.5m Syrians are currently living in the country – although this includes those who fled before the onset of the conflict.

Of those officially registered, 81 per cent are not in camps but are instead living in urban or rural areas, predominantly in the northern and eastern parts of the country.

The scale and distribution of the refugee population is creating more complex environmental impacts than those seen in 1991. Three issues that have been flagged nationally are those of land and resource degradation, deteriorating air quality and hazardous waste management. Added to these are the more localised impacts from the formal camps and informal settlements.

Growing economic pressure stemming from increased competition for resources has had a number of knock-on effects for Jordan’s environment. Illegal tree cutting is increasing as fuel prices have increased. The increasing price of fodder has led to overgrazing, threatening food security for Jordanians and refugees alike. Illegal wildlife hunting has been on the rise due to the reduced availability of meat from domesticated livestock.

All three trends are being reflected by an increasing number of legal cases coming before the courts and are placing already fragile ecosystems and resources under pressure.

The rapid population growth, and the development of the industrial and service sectors this necessitates, has combined with increased vehicle traffic to increase ambient air pollution levels. Sulphur dioxide – particularly problematic due to the high sulphur content of Jordanian oil, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter all pose risks to public health, with emissions increasing proportionately in relation to population size.

As many refugees arrive with a need for health services, the production of hospital and pharmaceutical waste has also increased. Waste management in Jordan was viewed as inadequate but improving prior to the crisis but since 2011, the volume of medical waste being produced has increased by 184 per cent, pharmaceutical waste by 250 per cent.

Safely managing the health and environmental risks these forms of waste pose is a significant challenge.

Mainstreaming the environment in response and recovery

In 2014, and conscious of the political, social, economic and environmental demands it was facing, Jordan established a coordinated national response platform to cope with the Syria crisis. This unprecedented approach, which brought together government ministries, UN agencies and NGOs, reflects Jordan’s fear that the severity of the crisis will undermine its recent development gains, which in areas such as access to education have been significant.

An assessment on environmental vulnerability published by the response platform argues that mainstreaming environmental factors into refugee projects is crucial to reduce long-term harm and minimise community grievances.

It calls for environmental risk assessments on all projects, more use of clean technologies across multiple sectors, the use of alternative income generation to limit impacts on natural resources and for the strengthening of national capacities for waste management and environmental monitoring.

Meanwhile Lebanon, which is hosting a further 1m Syrian refugees, is facing a similar range of impacts. Speaking in New York in February, the Lebanese environment minister said that the cost of the priority interventions associated with the environmental impact of its refugee crisis could reach US$3bn.

The environmental impacts of humanitarian crises are not unique to countries like Jordan and Lebanon with limited resources or sensitive ecosystems. While governments, humanitarian agencies and international organisations are gradually doing better at mainstreaming the environment in response and recovery, much remains to be done.

For many years, the traditional cluster approach to humanitarian response, which addresses issues such as shelter, health, water and food separately, has viewed the environment as a cross-cutting issue. The problem with cross-cutting issues is that without affirmative action by the stakeholders working on these clusters, the environmental consequences or benefits of projects can fail to be addressed during their design or implementation.

This can have serious consequences for the sustainability and long-term impact of projects on the communities they are intended to help.

As Jordan is finding, a failure to fully integrate the environment into humanitarian response carries with it risks not only for public health and environmental quality but also political risks, as host communities face rising costs due to competition over natural resources.

For nations whose politics, natural resources and ecosystems may be as fragile as each other, mainstreaming the environment in response and recovery must be a priority – not a luxury. 

Twitter: #UNEA2 and #ShareHumanity.

Doug Weir manages the Toxic Remnants of War Project, part of a global coalition of NGOs advocating for a greater standard of environmental and civilian protection before, during and after armed conflict. The project is on Twitter: @detoxconflict

Thirty years on from the world’s largest nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl, people are often astonished that Ukraine is still highly dependent on an ageing nuclear fleet for its electricity provision.

Indeed, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine continue to face the trauma of Chernobyl on a daily basis – both in the form of human tragedy and on-going economic losses.

You might expect the governments of these states to have turned away from nuclear energy and, in the light of the latest climate science, from fossil fuels too.

But Russia continues to promote nuclear power, and Belarus is trying to introduce nuclear reactors at home. Indeed, Belarus and Ukraine share a high dependence on Russia for nuclear technology, fuel, gas, oil and coal – a problem that has only been exacerbated by the crisis in the Donbas.

A move towards clean, renewable energy sources – such as wind, water, sun, biomass and geothermal – would seem a logical route, especially given the potential savings in health costs and increase in energy independence.

Here, in these countries most afflicted by Chernobyl, economic realities make this switch to a clean energy future inevitable: the old centralised energy economy is collapsing, slowly but surely, and an awareness movement is growing.

In Ukraine, future-oriented enterprises will choose independence from the politically and economically unstable conglomerates that dominate the country’s energy sector. The question is: are these companies getting the space they need to start Ukraine’s energy [r]evolution?

The [r]evolution is inevitable – but not when it happens

Clearly, Ukraine currently faces several fundamental choices for the future. These choices relate to political contexts and preferences, but none of them is as inevitable as the need for an energy [r]evolution.

We are not asking anyone to experiment with unknown technologies. The techniques for a clean energy future exist, and Ukraine has even built up experience with them. Technically, then, the next step is an evolution. But one that means a revolutionary departure from a highly unstable energy politics that rely on centralisation of access to gas, oil, coal and nuclear power, and the energy policy and planning paradigms associated with it.

Ukraine has significant potential for the development of renewable energy sources. As research for The Solutions Project by Mark Jacobson and his team at Stanford University shows, Ukraine could cover its entire energy demand in 2050 with wind, solar and water and a 32% decrease in primary energy need.

However, the fact that Ukraine currently enjoys only 1 GW of installed capacity from renewable sources signals that energy policy is yet to undergo fundamental change, and the obstacles are many.

The staying power of old energy structures should not be underestimated. Ukraine’s electricity market is a political battlefield, and not only due to interference of oligarchs and dependency on Russia for coal, nuclear fuel and technology. The market is virtually completely regulated, and regulation has become a political tool.

Consumer prices are set by the powerful state energy regulator (NERC), which enables low tariffs for consumers and even lower ones for consumers using less than 150 kWh/month. Special groups, like recognised victims of Chernobyl, receive other rebates.

While there have been several minor rate hikes since 2014 (with a further increased planned for September 2016), cost realistic increases in electricity prices would be politically risky for any government in power. Low tariffs for private consumers are cross-financed by higher industrial tariffs, but in comparison with, for instance, EU markets, these are still low.

Needless to say, this means that providers don’t receive much in the way of income in comparison with costs.

Oligarchic control of Ukraine’s energy sector

Ukraine’s energy oligarchs have a strong voice in the country’s day-to-day politics. Take the concentration of the thermal coal power market, for instance: thermal is largely steered by the DTEK conglomerate, which is Ukraine’s largest energy company, and is controlled by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man.

In the past, DTEK was able to negotiate a strong position (and higher tariffs) for coal generation, which, in turn, had to be cross-financed by lower prices for nuclear power.

The gas sector of Ukraine’s electricity generation market is highly dependent on the Russian-Ukrainian company RusUkrEnergo, which is under control of Gazprom and another Ukrainian oligarch, Dmytro Firtash, who has strong ties to the current Poroshenko government.

Ukraine’s renewable energy market initially also grew along the lines of large-scale developments driven by oligarchs. For example, Activ Solar, which is owned by Andriy and Serhiy Klyuyev, two powerful figures within the Yanukovych clan, developed large-scale solar power stations in 2011-2013 mainly in the sunny regions of Odessa and Crimea.

This was done while blocking other players from entering the market and securing inflated guaranteed feed-in prices for their projects – in the process undermining the popularity of solar energy in Ukraine.

Donbas war triggered coal crisis in Ukraine’s power market

In 2014, the crisis in the Donbas saw the Ukrainian state lose control of two thirds of its coal mines – and with that of most of its coal resources for the country’s thermal power stations.

This situation led to the coal sector’s financial position deteriorating, which was then exacerbated by the termination of €400m of direct subsidies to state coal mines in 2015. The remaining coal power plants within the country are now dependent on coal trickling in from the Donbas and imports from Russia and South Africa – and that comes at a price.

DTEK’s position has also been hit heavily: a significant part of its assets are situated in the Donbas. This loss of control and income seems to have driven the conglomerate over the edge into bankruptcy.

All this pressure on Ukraine’s energy sector means that Energoatom, the state enterprise that currently generates 55% of Ukraine’s electricity, has to balance the books

Although Ukraine’s gas sector, which covered only 6% of the country’s electricity generation in 2014, recently saw some inflow from the European Union, it remains largely dependent on gas deliveries from Russia. The bulk of gas-fired capacities are large combined heat and power plants, which provide district heating in winter and constitute critical infrastructure for a number of major Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv.

Further south, the annexation of Crimea put an end to the dreams of Activ Solar. The bankrupted company now seeks to sell its leftover assets to a Chinese investor.

All this pressure on Ukraine’s energy sector means that Energoatom, the state enterprise that currently generates 55% of Ukraine’s electricity, has to balance the books. This share needs to be covered by four nuclear power plants with 15 nuclear reactors. Twelve of these reactors were built in the 1980s, and are now in need for large safety upgrades if they are to be operated with a lifetime extension beyond 30 years.

Risky business: ageing nuclear plants starved of investment

And this is where the investment side comes in. Low consumer prices for electricity have combined with heavy pressure to compensate powerful political allies from the coal, gas and (tiny) renewable sectors to reduce Energoatom’s returns. As a result, Ukraine’s nuclear giant has to make adaptations on the cost side.

Every nuclear operator has to put aside money to later decommission its nuclear power plant(s) and manage its high level nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years. In order to do so, reserves are built up during the operation time of a nuclear power station, normally in the form of a fixed amount per kWh sold.

Ukraine decided to lower this amount, slowing down the build-up of these reserves. This has created a shortage in these reserves, which is now used as an argument to continue operating ageing reactors to create at least some income for another 20 years.

The necessary safety upgrades (for life-time extension, but also in reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe – Ukraine participated in the EU post-Fukushima nuclear stress tests) are thus weakened or postponed, and there are even indications that there is a lack of money for operational costs.

At the same time, Ukraine’s nuclear fleet faces an increased security risk due to political instability. The risks for terrorist or insurgent attack on nuclear infrastructure are currently higher than in peace time, meaning further upgrades are necessary.

In addition, most of the upgrading work is dependent on Russian technological input. Delays in the implementation of upgrades are not only caused by lack of finance, but also by unforeseen technical complications and problems with tender procedures. On top of that, Energoatom is bleeding funds on an unrealistic nuclear new build programme in Khmelnytksy, western Ukraine.

The political position of Ukraine’s increasingly risky nuclear sector is strengthened by the rhetoric that only lifetime extension of the ‘independent’ ageing nuclear fleet can fill the gap left by lost coal resources in the east.

The nuclear sector’s dependency on Russia has been masked by swapping the tenders for upgrading and new builds from Russian companies to a Czech-based company Skoda JS (a deal that is part of anti-corruption investigations in Switzerland), which is actually Russian-owned, and by tests at the Yuzhnoukrainsk nuclear power station with the use of Westinghouse nuclear fuel (produced in Sweden), partly in reaction to delivery problems with Russian fuel in the last few years.

The fact that economic control over technology and a large proportion of fuel will always come from Russia remains off the table.

The reliability risks associated with the fact that over 50% of Ukraine’s electricity production comes from an ageing nuclear fleet hardly gets attention. A December 2014 incident in Zaporizhzhya’s nuclear power station (see photos) resulted in heavy blackouts across the region. And the experiences in Japan have shown that a severe accident in any of the reactors could lead to a long suspension of power production across the nuclear fleet.

This poses the question: why then, with 30 years experience of the Chernobyl aftermath, has Ukraine still not kick-started an energy revolution that could shore up its energy independence and, in the long run, lead to important reductions in cost?

Planning without comparison of alternatives

One of the reasons for the Ukrainian elite’s reluctance to engage with renewal energy is that comparative studies on alternative energy policy pathways play no role in major energy decisions. These decisions are taken on political grounds.

There are signs that this inertia is beginning to change. For instance, EcoClub Rivne, a Ukrainian NGO, won a landmark case in 2014 under the Espoo Convention. In principle, the convention and the ruling oblige the Ukrainian government to carry out an environmental impact assessment, in which such a comparison with alternatives would need to be made for decisions on lifetime extensions of nuclear power stations.

However, the Ukrainian authorities have so far done everything to undermine implementation of these international standards.

Another chance would have been for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the EU to have forced comparative studies for the lifetime extension of the Ukrainian nuclear fleet to be carried out. Instead they chose to flatly deny that their €600m investment programme in nuclear upgrades has anything to do with life-time extension, probably because their donors would see life-time extension very critically.

This is in spite of the fact that it was clear from the start that Ukraine intends to add 10 to 20 years more of operation time for the ageing reactors on the basis of these upgrades – if only to recuperate its own investments and prevent problems with the lack of sufficient decommissioning and waste funds.

Systematic obstructions to energy sector reform

In central and eastern Europe, several strong myths about renewable energy remain a barrier to its growth. In Ukraine’s energy strategy, these myths result in a meagre target of only 11% renewables in the electricity sector for 2020, and that includes 8% hydropower.

In comparison, Germany generated a third of its electricity with non-hydro renewable energy sources in 2015, and intends to increase that to 40% or more in 2020.

The most important of these myths is that renewable energy is expensive. And indeed, recent investigations from Greenpeace and NECU showed that it still is virtually impossible to turn Ukrainian houses or public buildings into efficient renewables-powered units in a financially sustainable way.

The regulated consumer price system and lack of accounting (metering) of energy used by consumers makes changes difficult. Relaxation of price regulation could cause severe energy poverty in a country that already is facing sluggish economic growth and high unemployment rates. This means that as long as energy prices remain under what they would be in a healthy market, the combination of energy efficiency and renewable energy sources will need some kind of support.

A first and crucial step to motivate energy efficiency in Ukraine would be to introduce metering of electricity, gas and/or heat used by households. Heating is the highest burden for private consumers and is, for a large part, provided by imported gas. But less than half of the buildings with centralised heating systems have metering in place.

It is estimated that non-metered consumers, who cannot influence their energy bill with efficiency measures, pay over 30% more for their heating than in buildings with individual metering. A law on metering in accordance with EU standards has been prepared, but is stuck in the legislative procedure.

There is a lot of verbal support for the development of energy efficiency and renewable energy sources in Ukraine by western institutions and investors, including rhetoric about how decentralisation of the energy market by the introduction of efficiency and renewables could reduce corruption and increase sustainability.

However the reality is that only 15% of EU total support for energy projects in Ukraine and less than about 16% of EBRD and EIB loans goes to energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.

Neither the EU, nor the EBRD have a sufficiently pro-active policy to turn Ukraine’s energy system onto a sustainable pathway. This is, among others, illustrated by their support for the development of new electricity corridors, which are basically oriented on enabling export of Ukraine’s nuclear power to the EU instead of developing an electricity network that could support the uptake of large amounts of variable renewable sources.

Change is in the air – finally!

What is changing, however, is public perception of clean energy technology. The collapse of Activ Solar and the fact that feed-in tariffs for solar PV are now in the same order of magnitude as those for wind power have changed the idea that renewables are expensive play toys for the enrichment of a few and indeed can deliver an affordable alternative.

Also the awareness that a lot of the corruption in Ukraine is related to the centralised nature of the old energy carriers is growing, and we see an increasing amount of courageous small and medium investors seeing efficiency and renewables as chances for job and income creation.

Ukraine’s 2014 legislative framework for prosumers (people that produce their own electricity and sell the surplus to the grid) enables home generators of solar PV power to sell their surplus for grid-price. This is motivating a growing group of homeowners to investments. Meanwhile, a group of environmental NGOs and a coalition for energy efficient cities are pushing for further steps to decrease Ukraine’s energy wastage and at the same time promote the uptake of renewable energy sources.

But what is really needed is a shift in gear from small, localised projects to efficiency and renewable energy development becoming the backbone of energy policy. It needs projects like the 140 MW Kherson wind project from Windkraft. It would need initiatives from global corporations like those united in the RE100 Climate Group to secure a 100% renewable supply chain in Ukraine.

And it would need the political elite in Ukraine to break with the energy oligarchs, looking instead for support for

• local municipal initiatives and structures that motivate small and middle large enterprises;
• the development of a grid structure based on decentralised electricity generation and optimising the regional advantages in the country; and
• international cooperation partners like the EU, the EBRD and the World Bank to be consistent in their support for an Ukrainian energy [r]evolution.

Given the dilapidated state of Ukraine’s energy industry at this moment, these steps are not only possible – they are inevitable. The question is not whether they will be taken, but how many opportunities and funds will be wasted before they are taken.

The sooner Ukraine moves towards a clean energy future, the better for all involved. After all, it could become a positive model for Belarus and Russia to find – at last – a way off the path set by Chernobyl.

Jan Haverkamp is an expert consultant on nuclear energy and energy policy for Greenpeace in Central and Eastern Europe. He has an academic engineering degree in environmental sciences.

Iryna Holovko is energy analyst for the CEE Bankwatch Network and the National Ecological Centre of Ukraine(NECU) since 2007.

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

For the benefit of those parts of the world where public acceptance of biotechnology is incomplete, a public relations blitz is at full tilt.

It concerns an emerging set of methods for altering the DNA of living organisms.

Just look at these recent media headlines: ‘Easy DNA Editing Will Remake the World. Buckle Up‘; ‘We Have the Technology to Destroy All Zika Mosquitoes‘; and ‘CRISPR: gene editing is just the beginning‘.

By the way: CRISPR is short for CRISPR/cas9, which is short for Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR associated protein 9; Jinek et al., 2012. It is a combination of a guide RNA and a protein that can cut DNA.

The hubris is alarming; but the more subtle element of the propaganda campaign is the biggest and most dangerous improbability of them all: that CRISPR and related technologies are ‘genome editing’ (Fichtner et al., 2014). That is, they are capable of creating precise, accurate and specific alterations to DNA.

Even the ‘serious’ media is in on it. Nature magazine in July 2015 published ‘Super-muscly pigs created by small genetic tweak‘. Two value judgments in a seven word headline: “small” and “tweak”, neither supported by the content of the article.

Still enthralled, if not wholly original, just last week the NY Times opinion section offered: ‘Tweaking genes to save species‘.

How do I know this is a propaganda war? I heard it from the horse itself. In February I was at a UN meeting on biotechnology in Rome, Italy, where a senior representative of the Biotechnology Industry Organisation (BIO) explained to the assembled delegates the “exquisite specificity” and “precision” of genome editing.

Myth 1: Current genome editing technologies are not error prone

BIO’s exposition is belied by the evidence. If CRISPR were already precise, accurate and specific there would, for example, be no publications in prominent scientific journals titled “Improving CRISPR-Cas nuclease specificity using truncated guide RNAs“.

And these would not begin by describing how ordinary CRISPR “can induce mutations at sites that differ by as many as five nucleotides from the intended target”, i.e. CRISPR may act at unknown sites in the genome where it is not wanted (Fu et al., 2014).

Thus CRISPR itself will need tweaking before it can be useful for safe commercial products, and that is the first error of the tweaking argument. So far, it is technically not possible to make a single (and only a single) genetic change to a genome using CRISPR and be sure one has done so (Fichtner et al., 2014).

As Fichtner noted “in mammalian systems Cas9 causes a high degree of off-target effects”. And at least until modified versions come into use, this will limit the safety, and hopefully limit the application, of CRISPR and related biotechnologies.

There is, furthermore, no guarantee that more precise versions of CRISPR are even biologically possible. Technically therefore, precision is a myth: no form of genome editing can do what is currently being claimed.

Myth 2: Precision equals control

The second key error of CRISPR boosters is to assume that even if we had complete precision, this would allow control over the consequences for the resulting organism.

Suppose, as a non-Chinese speaker, I were to precisely remove from a Chinese text one character, one line, or one page. I would have 100% precision, but zero control over the change in meaning. Precision, therefore, is only as useful as the understanding that underlies it, and surely no DNA biologist would propose we understand DNA – or else why are we studying it?

A classic example of how DNA can still reveal unexpected functions decades after discovery is the CaMV 35S promoter, a DNA sequence used in commercialised GMO plants for almost twenty years. The CaMV 35S DNA is described in every application for commercial use as a simple DNA ‘promoter’ (an ‘on’ switch for gene expression).

In 1999, however, the CaMV 35S ‘promoter’ was found to encode a recombinational hostpot (Kohli et al., 1999). In 2011 it was found to produce massive quantities of small RNAs. These RNAs probably function as decoys to neutralise the plant immune system (Blevins et al., 2011).

One year later still, regulators found it to contain an overlapping viral gene whose functions are still being elucidated (Podevin and du Jardin 2012). Will we ever know enough about any DNA sequence to accurately describe changing it as ‘editing’?

Myth 3: DNA functions are modular and changes are predictable

The third error of CRISPR advocates is to imply that changes to gene functions can be presumed to be discrete and constrained.

The concept of the precise editing of a genome leading to a precise biological outcome depends heavily on the conception that genes give rise to simple outputs. This is the genetic paradigm taught in schools. It is also the paradigm presented to the public and that even plays a large role in the thinking of molecular genetic researchers.

However, a defined, discrete or simple pathway from gene to trait probably never exists. Most gene function is mediated murkily through highly complex biochemical and other networks that depend on many conditional factors, such as the presence of other genes and their variants, on the environment, on the age of the organism, on chance, and so forth.

Geneticists and molecular biologists, however, since the time of Gregor Mendel, have striven to find or create artificial experimental systems in which environmental or any other sources of variation are minimised so as not to distract from the more ‘important’ business of genetic discovery.

But by discarding organisms or traits that do not follow their expectations, geneticists and molecular biologists have built themselves a circular argument in favour of a naive deterministic account of gene function.

Their paradigm habitually downplays the enormous complexities by which information passes (in both directions) between organisms and their genomes. It has created an immense and mostly unexamined bias in the default public understanding of genes and DNA.

This is not my argument. It belongs to Richard Lewontin of Harvard University, probably the most famous geneticist of our time.

The benefits of naive genetic determinism to the architects of the genome-industrial complex are very great. Since it pretty much requires that organisms be seen as robots being operated by mini-dictators (rather than, for example, as systems with emergent properties) and those genes as having effects that are narrow and clearly defined rather than being diffuse and unpredictable, it simplifies their sales pitch and frames risk assessment as unnecessary.

The problem comes to a head, however, when this narrow conceptualisation of genetics is applied to the real world and situations that have not been, as it were, set up in advance. In the case of the “Super-muscly” pigs reported by Nature, strength is not their only feature.

They must also have more skin to cover their bodies and stronger bones to carry themselves. They also, apparently, have difficulty giving birth; and if they were ever released into the wild, they would presumably have to eat more. Thus a supposedly simple genetic tweak can have wide effects on the organism throughout its lifecycle.

Nature also revealed that 30 of the 32 two pigs died prematurely and only one animal was still considered healthy at the time the study authors were interviewed. So much for precision.

The never ending story

Why is this discussion of precision important? Because for the last seventy years all chemical and biological technologies, from genetic engineering to pesticides, have been built on a myth of precision and specificity. They have all been adopted under the pretense that they would function without side effects or unexpected complications.

Yet the extraordinary disasters and repercussions of DDT, leaded paint, agent orange, atrazine, C8, asbestos, chlordane, PCBs, and so on, when all is said and done, have been stories of the steady unraveling of a founding myth of precision and specificity.

Nevertheless, with the help of industry propagandists, their friends in the media, even the United Nations, we are once again being preached the gospel of precision. But no matter how you look at it, precision is a fable and should be treated as such.

The issues of CRISPR and other related new ‘genome editing’ biotechnologies are the subject of intense activity behind the scenes.

The US Department of Agriculture has just explained that it will not be regulating organisms whose genomes have been edited since it doesn’t consider them to be GMOs at all. The EU was about to call them GMOs but the US has caused them to blink, meanwhile the US is in the process of revisiting its GMO regulatory environment entirely.

Will future safety regulations of GMOs be based on a schoolboy version of genetics and an interpretation of genome editing crafted in a corporate public relations department? If history is any guide it will.

Dr Jonathan R. Latham is editor of Independent Science News.

This article was originally published by Independent Science News under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Its creation was supported by The Bioscience Resource Project.

References

• Blevins, Todd, Rajendran Rajeswaran, Michael Aregger, Basanta K. Borah, Mikhail Schepetilnikov, Loïc Baerlocher, Laurent Farinelli, Frederick Meins Jr, Thomas Hohn and Mikhail M. Pooggin (2011) Massive production of small RNAs from a non-coding region of Cauliflower mosaic virus in plant defense and viral counter-defense. Nucleic Acids Research 39: 5003-5014.
• Franziska Fichtner, Reynel Urrea Castellanos, and Bekir Ülker (2014) Precision genetic modifications: a new era in molecular biology and crop improvement. Planta 239: 921-939 (doi:10.1007/s00425-014-2029-y.
• Fu Y, Foden JA, Khayter C, Maeder ML, Reyon D, Joung JK, Sander JD (2013) High-frequency off-target mutagenesis induced by CRISPR-Cas nucleases in human cells. Nat Biotechnol 31:822-826.
• Fu Y, Jeffry D. Sander, Deepak Reyon, Vincent M. Cascio, and J. Keith Joung (2014) Improving CRISPR-Cas nuclease specificity using truncated guide RNAs. Nat Biotechnol. 32: 279-284.
• Martin Jinek, Krzysztof Chylinski, Ines Fonfara, Michael Hauer, Jennifer A. Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier (2012) A Programmable Dual-RNA – Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity Science 337: 816-821.
• Podevin N and du Jardin P (2012) Possible consequences of the overlap between the CaMV 35S promoter regions in plant transformation vectors used and the viral gene VI in transgenic plants. GM Crops and Food 3: 1-5.

Nuclear fall-out, like carbon dioxide and other climate-changing greenhouse gases, does not respect national borders.

On 26th April 1986 an explosion at the Chernobyl power plant, in Ukraine but only a few kilometres from the southern border of Belarus, sent clouds of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. 

It’s estimated that as much as 70% of the fall-out from what rates as the world’s worst nuclear accident fell on Belarus, affecting hundreds of thousands of people. 

Now, 30 years later, Belarus itself is going nuclear – building its own huge 2,400 MW nuclear power plant at Ostrovets in the north-west of the country, close to the border with Lithuania.

The first power unit at Ostrovets is due to start operations in late 2018. More than 6,000 people are working at the kilometre-square site, building cooling towers and giant containment vessels which will enclose the nuclear reactor at the heart of the plant.

Nina Rybik, who was born in the southern Belarus village of Ulusy, a few kilometres from the Chernobyl plant, remembers the time before the accident well. And through a strange twist of fate, she now finds herself working equally close to the new plant at Ostrovets. Her mother died a few years ago; her father lives with her.

“My children and I had already moved away from the area, but my parents had to leave soon after the explosion, and could not go back there to live”, she recalls. “Now we are allowed to go there only once a year, to visit our ancestors’ graves. Our old house is falling down, our lands are useless now. It is all so sad.”

‘Going critical’ in 2018

Nuclear power enthusiasts say building plants like Ostrovets is a safe way of securing energy supplies without causing a further build-up of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.

Vladimir Gorin, deputy chief engineer at the plant, told one of the first media groups to visit that, while the reactor at Chernobyl had no outer containment shell, Ostrovets will have a double wall made of thick steel and concrete. Officials say the whole containment structure will be further secured by large quantities of iron bands.

“Our design and construction methods are among the safest in the world”, said Gorin. “We follow all international standards and checks at every stage of building. We are proud to have such a plant in Belarus.”

But opponents insist that no matter how strict the safety regulations, catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl are always possible. They also say the whole issue of storing nuclear waste – radioactive for generations – has still not been tackled, and that the costs of nuclear power are spiralling out of control.

At present Belarus imports more than 80% of its primary energy, mostly from Russia. One of the main reasons cited by Minsk for the construction of Ostrovets is to lessen its dependence on Moscow for energy supplies.

However Ostrovets has been designed and built by Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear company, which will also be in charge of operating the plant. Russia will also be responsible for disposing of the nuclear waste produced at the plant.

60% favour Ostrovets nuclear plant, says government

Rubyk is among those supporting the new nuclear plant. “At first we felt strange, living once again so close to a nuclear site”, she said. “But then I think that accidents can’t happen twice. I’m confident that the new plant will be safe – Belarus needs energy, and nuclear power is the only way to guarantee that.”

However it is unclear how the 9 million population of Belarus – some of whom are still suffering health problems caused by the Chernobyl explosion – feel about Ostrovets. Belarus is tightly controlled by the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, in power for the last 21 years.

In a ‘Chernobyl day’ speech in 2008 (26th April) Lukashenko even went so far as to denounce opponents of Ostrovets as “enemies of the state”.

Officials at Ostrovets say a poll carried out by a government-run institute found that more than 60% were in favour of the plant. But Irina Sukhy of the Green Network, a Belarus environment non-governmental organisation, says no proper public hearings have been held on Ostrovets.

Moreover those who raised questions about the plant have been harassed and arrested, among them Tatyana Novikova, an environmental campaigner and journalist from Belarus – and spoken opponent of the nuclear plant and member of the environmental NGO Ecohome – who has been subject to arbitrary detention.

Andrey Ozharovskiy, a Russian nuclear expert, was likewise arrested by Belarus police on 18th July 2012 to prevent him delivering a letter of protest, detained in insanitary conditions for five nights, then deported and banned from entering Belarus for ten years.

Vilnius at risk from any accident

In neighbouring Lithuania – a member of the European Union (EU) – there’s no doubt which way public opinion is leaning. With Ostrovets less than 50 kilometres from Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, opposition is strong, and the government has raised strong objections to the plant.

Vitalijus Auglys, an official at Lithuania’s Ministry of Environment, says Belarus has not fully answered questions about the safety of the Ostrovets plant and is in contravention of international conventions on building nuclear facilities – accusations the government in Minsk denies.

In addition flexRISK, an Austrian research team, have analysed the potential effects of a severe accident at one the Ostrovets reactors. They identified that Cesium-137 pollution could force the evacuation of the population within 300 kilometres of the plant – taking in much of Lithuania including Vilnius.

Lithuania, as part of its 2004 accession agreement with the EU, agreed to close its own Ignalina nuclear facility, a plant similar in design to Chernobyl. Officials at Ignalina say decommissioning at the plant will take till 2037 to complete and will cost about €3 billion.

But despite its trenchant protests about Ostrovets, the Lithuanian government has not fully ruled out constructing another, more modern, nuclear facility on the same site.

Kieran Cooke writes for Climate News Network, where this article was originally published.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Belarus – fighting nuclear power in the shadow of Chernobyl‘ by Chris Garrard.

A Maasai tribe leader from Northern Tanzania, Edward Loure is a leader in the fight of the country’s Maasai People for their communal land rights.

And it’s a struggle in which he has ultimately been successful – securing community ownership of more than 200,000 acres of land for his own village and other communities.

His campaigning alone makes him a worthy winner of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa, the world’s largest prize for grassroots environmental activists – and the fact that he has been successful where so many others have failed, all the more so.

He now hopes the Goldman Prize will bring recognition for his organisation and community, a marginalised people. “It is a really big thing for us. It will put my organisation into a wider global context.”

Loure leads the grassroots organisation Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT), which has championed community land rights and sustainable development in Northern Tanzania for the past 20 years.

After much struggle, they pioneered an approach which gives land titles to an entire community, as opposed to individuals – something absolutely necessary for the Maasai to pursue their traditional lifestyle in which land and natural resources are shared at a community level.

Thanks to determined advocacy by UCRT, the Maasai’s strong communal culture became the basis for the Certificates of Customary Right of Occupancy (CCRO), a creative approach to applying the Tanzanian Village Land Act. Instead of the conventional model of giving land titles to individuals, CCROs allow entire communities to secure indivisible rights over their ancestral lands and manage those territories through bylaws and management plans.

Whether it is because of the prize or just his nature, Loure is cheerful when talking about his work. He laughs a lot and thoroughly enjoys talking about his fellow herdsmen. He says the success of his campaigns is “thanks to very strong support from the communities.”

Conservation with a human face

Loure says his community has a long history of experiencing injustice as a result of the creation of nature reserves in Tanzania. He explains that often when land is turned into conservation areas it is not for the benefit of the local communities, who in fact may find themselves being pushed out of the land they have lived on for generations.

Starting in the 1950s, the establishment of national parks did just that, causing the Maasai to become so-called conservation refugees, and in recent years, this conflict have intensified. Urban migrants encroach on rangelands traditionally managed by the Maasai, and the government sells land concessions to a growing safari and hunting industry, though deals often made in secrecy.

Loure grew up in the Simanjiro plains, where his family and others in the community led a peaceful semi-nomadic life. In 1970, the Tanzanian government sealed off part of their village land to create Tarangire National Park and forcefully evicted those residing within the park boundaries.

He believes that this land belongs to the indigenous communities, but as is the situation for many other peoples around the world, this was not recognised as a legal right in the modern nation state. He says he is now suspicious of any piece of land being set aside for organisations purely involved in what is referred to as conservation:

“I’m really worried about it. In my experience, not one piece of land has been given back to us after it was grabbed in the name of conservation.”

He says that the Maasai idea of conservation is a better approach, as it incorporates people. Their cultural practice depends on three main pillars of the pastoralists: land and natural resources, livestock and people.

“The conservation that we want is coexisting with our livestock: animals together with people in a way that has benefits for entire communities. Any conservation that does not have a human face, we are reluctant to support.”

The modern Maasai

How has the life of the Maasai changed during his lifetime? Loure himself is an educated man with degrees in management and administration.

While higher education is not yet the norm in his community, an increasing number has some form of education today. Loure believes this to be an important part of their development alongside the more modern urban communities.

“Things are changing. We are now encouraging our local communities to take their kids to school. For although we need to preserve our culture, they need to have a formal education to make sure that we know what is going on in the world, so we can compete.”

And in order to compete, knowledge of economics is key. “Before, the cattle of the Maasai was for food and prestige, and now we want to also make sure that the cattle can be sold to pay hospital bills, buying food, and other economic needs for the community.”

A modern man with strong bonds to tradition

A modern man in many ways, Loure lives a modest lifestyle when he stays in his village, the place he calls home. They cook using firewood and water is sourced from smaller rivers or dams. Their houses are made from wood, grass and mud and typically have only two rooms. “I’m educated and I work for this organisation. But when I am at home, we live in a very traditional fashion”, he says, and gives me the recipe of a “delicious” porridge made from grains from the market and milk from the local cattle.

He welcomes some aspects of the modern world, but it does have its complications. Once the children are educated they sometimes leave the community for a more modern life in the city. “We can’t prevent that, but this is the main weakness of education. Once you are educated there are no guarantees that you will remain in your original home.

“So we are now trying to work on the tradition, customs and taboos, to make sure that we nurture our kids, so that whenever they get an education, they come back as teachers at our local school, or doctors in our local hospital or involved in the development.”

Loure has become an inspiration for how the Maasai can combine the new and the old. “I’ve become a model in my village and people are now learning a lot from me because I have cattle and I live in the village. So they have started to realise that the combination of both education and culture can really be possible.”

The picture of him among his goats is not just a pose. They are his herd which he leads to their pastures and takes care of himself, at the weekends, when he is not working. “I love it and I have a big passion for my goats and cows. They are almost like pets to me.”

The communal lifestyle

The 4,300 people in his village have a strong sense of community. There is an area for schools and other training centres, smaller shops and traders. He says it is in the interest of the entire village to look after them:

“Ninety percent of the land is owned by the community and everybody is the watchdog of those areas to make sure that no one can come and misuse that land, for it belongs to all of us.”

This arrangement prevents individuals from selling off the land for commercial use, for no one person has the right to make such decision.

The Maasai are traditionally a semi-nomadic people. Apart from cattle rearing, the community gets a minor revenue stream from a small amount of tourism and a carbon credit scheme. Loure says it is important for the community to source all their income sustainably.

When asked how they go about ensuring sustainable grazing in practice, he says mobility is the key strategy to sustainable livestock herding. “We make an annual calendar for how we are going to use the land for the coming year, and we then make sure that everyone understands it.”

The calendar shows exactly when, where and how to move the herds between the different areas. “This is because when you move, you allow grass to grow back in one particular area. You also avoid soil erosion, because if too many cattle are grazing in one point it will affect the soil and the grass.”

He says that although marginalised, in some ways the Maasai are in a good position, because Tanzania needs them. “Tourism comes to this country for two main things: apart from nature and wildlife they also come because of the Maasai culture. This puts us in a position where we feel that our culture is unique and very strong, and we are very proud.”

This, he adds, can be used as leverage for his work. “We are trying to use our tourism and connect this to advocacy programmes for pastoralists.”

Inspiring other indigenous peoples fight for communal rights

As successful as he has been, Loure’s work does not end with his community. Others face similar threats and his organisation, along with national and international partners, is now looking to replicate the CCRO model throughout Tanzania, with communal grazing lands of nearly 700,000 acres slated for titling in the next year or two.

Loure says it will be tough, as they lack both human and financial resources. Yet his drive, passion and determination are far from depleted. “The plan is to work as hard as we can to secure land rights for all the 76 communities in the northern part of the country, but we still have a long way to go.”

Perhaps his work can set a precedent for land rights for other indigenous communities, or at the very least inspire new avenues of advocacy. As one of the Goldman Prize winners this year, Loure is about to set off on a 10-day tour of San Francisco and Washington as we speak.

There, he will attend an awards ceremony, presentations, news conferences and meetings with political, public policy and environmental leaders. He is thrilled about the trip and hopes to be able to exchange ideas with other campaigners:

“I think it is a good opportunity for me to meet a lot of people and try to share our good practice on the ground at home, and really to try to influence different indigenous peoples in the world to deal with issues of land grabbing, and to make sure that they understand that conservation can’t only be done with protected areas, but also on a community level.”

Sophie Morlin-Yron is a freelance journalist based in London. For more examples of her work, visit her website.

Also on The Ecologist

• ‘Lies in conservation: the truth about big-game hunting and African nature reserves‘ by Navaya ole Ndaskoi.
• ‘Tanzania breaks promise – thousands of Maasai evicted to make way for lion hunt‘.
• ‘Uvinje, Tanzania – an indigenous community erased in the name of conservation‘ by Alejandra Orozco-Quintero.

The Goldman Environmental Prize supports individuals struggling to win environmental victories against the odds and inspires ordinary people to take extraordinary actions to protect the world. The Goldman Environmental Prize was created in 1989 by civic leaders and philanthropists Richard N. Goldman and his wife, Rhoda H. Goldman. Winners are selected by an international jury from confidential nominations submitted by a worldwide network of environmental organizations and individuals.

So much methane gas is now bubbling up through the Condamine River in Queensland, Australia that it exploded with fire and held a large flame.

Gas seeping into the river began shortly after coal seam gas operations started nearby and is growing in volume and the stretch of river affected is expanding in length.

Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham travelled to Chinchilla in South Western Queensland to investigate the impact of the coal seam gas industry on the environment as part of the Greens’ campaign to ban fracking and unconventional gas in Australia.

“I was shocked by the force of the explosion when I tested whether gas boiling through the Condamine River, Queensland was flammable. So much gas is bubbling through the river that it held a huge flame for over an hour”, said Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham.

Methane was first discovered bubbling through the Condamine River near Chinchilla in 2012 where coal seam gas wells had been drilled by Origin Energy nearby. There are hundreds of wells in the immediate area, with three companies, Origin Energy, QGC and Arrow Energy all operating coal seam gas fields nearby.

Could gas drilling possibly be to blame?

Locals say the river has never bubbled with has like this historically. Government investigations found (p19) that the source of the gas was “consistent with gas originating from Surat Basin geological formations.”

The concern is that depressurising the coal seams for gas extraction has caused methane gas to flow up other cracks, fissures, bores, to the surface – such as through the Condamine River. This is directly polluting the river and the air, but also methane is a potent greenhouse gas and these fugitive emissions are a major concern. 

Not only is the gas bubbling becoming more intense recently, but it is spreading to a greater length of the river. Origin Energy which operates has wells in close proximity to the gas seep, has installed some monitoring pipework, and the Queensland Government has put stakes on the river bank to mark each visible seep.

Mr Buckingham said: “Explosive gas boiling through a river shows just how damaging fracking and unconventional gas extraction can be. We should be going with clean renewable energy and banning fracking and unconventional gas in Australia. The era of fossil fuels is over.”

“I do not want to see this happen to the Namoi River, or any other river in New South Wales, or anywhere else, which is why unconventional gas should be stopped. The fact that this is happening in the Murray Darling Basin is a national disgrace.”

‘We are all deeply concerned’

Chinchilla local resident, John Jenkyn who lives next door to the QGC Kenya gas field and gas processing facility said: “Anything that contaminates the underground water is a terrible thing. Depressurising the aquifers to extract the coal seam gas seems to have made the gas flow out beneath the Condamine River and it’s now spreading further.

“Over the last few years there more and more patches of bubbles have appeared on the river and the pressure of the gas has increased to the point where it is like an over-sized spa bath. It’s a river, it shouldn’t be doing that.”

Karen Auty, Chinchilla resident and activist against unconventional gas said: “It’s deeply troubling to see contaminated water ways and to see water bores blow out with gas or fail and ground water levels drop. We’re all deeply concerned about the water.” 

“As local residents we want to know whether it is safe to live among all these gas wells and infrastructure, what are the impacts on our health?”

Source: Australian Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham.

Over 150 world leaders are meeting in New York today to sign the Paris Agreement, negotiated at the COP21 UN climate conference in Paris last December.

But amid the razzmatazz and hyperbolic speeches you would never know the world just failed the first big test of its ability to deliver the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C global warming ceiling.

Countries have been meeting this week at the International Maritime Organisation’s (IMO) annual marine environment protection meeting in London to debate proposals to limit fast growing emissions from international shipping.

But they failed to take decisive action. Instead countries divided over a proposal that would have the UN body set emissions targets for global shipping as early as 2017 – and any decision was pushed off until the next IMO marine environment protection committee (MEPC) meeting in October this year.

The proposal, submitted by The Marshall Islands and initially backed by Belgium, France, Germany, Morocco, and the Solomon Islands, said it was the “right time” to determine shipping’s “fair share” in the fight against climate change.

It’s up to the IMO to act because international shipping and aviation are not covered by the Paris Agreement. However the head of the IMO indicated that the group would take up the challenge of GHG emissions from ships during this meeting.

Blocked by BRIC?

Writing in The Ecologist this week, Labour’s Shadow climate minister Barry Gardiner expressed concern that the UK was lukewarm on the Marshall Islands’ plan.

But in the event the opposition came from a group of powerful countries including the US, Saudi Arabia and the entire BRIC group who want to delay any concrete emissions targets and instead continue with a plan that focuses on monitoring and evaluating CO₂ data before any decisions are made.

The plan to establish a monitoring and data collection plan before making any decision was proposed by the USA last year – and they continue to support the slower approach. The Chinese delegation said it was “too soon” for action. Brazil claimed it was “too complex” to run talks about fair shares in parallel with the data collection work.

The Marshall Islands’ proposal, also supported by other countries including Denmark, Italy, Norway, and Sweden, quoted the Paris Agreement at length, and urged the assembled delegates to support its goal of limiting warming to 1.5C. If adopted it would have called on the IMO to select a method to determine the shipping industry’s ‘share of emissions’ by the MEPC meeting in 2017, and apply it the following year.

The IMO itself predicts that emissions from shipping could rise by as much as 250% from 2012 levels by 2050. At 3% of global emissions, the shipping sector currently has a carbon footprint roughly the size of Germany, but at that rate it could grow to equal that of the entire EU.

Delayed compromise

Late Thursday afternoon MEPC Chairman Arsenio Dominguez suggested a compromise: creating a working group specifically focused on GHG emissions for next year’s meeting. The Nordic states, the UK, Canada, and some 30 other countries supported the working group idea.

However a group led by China, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia vociferously opposed him, with Colombia suggesting he was “making decisions in a personal capacity.” The suggestion was further put off into a working group meeting next year that would discuss “all the documents and comments today” – effectively delaying the debate for a further year.

The IMO has previously been criticised for failing to take action on shipping emissions, which account for some 3% of the global total. Mr Lim had hoped that the momentum of Paris would carry into this week’s meeting and deliver more concrete action.

If the IMO remains unable to deliver action on climate change, the UNFCCC may end up intervening in the discussion to force action. However that would entail much political wrangling – and additional delays the world can ill afford.

Delegates from France, which co-sponsored the Marshall Islands proposal, noted that UNFCCC president Ségolène Royal, France’s Energy Secretary, was being given regular updates on the meeting, and warned the assembled delegates that the eyes of the world were on them:

“It is up to this organisation to establish a fair level of effort. If we fail we will be judged impotent.”

And sadly, that’s just how it looks. And with the fate of the Marshall Islands’ proposals on tackling emissions from shipping standing as an objective measure of the future prospects of the Paris Agreement, there’s little cause for optimism for the world’s climate.

Stephen Buranyi is a freelance writer for DeSmog.uk and other publications. He tweets @stephenburanyi.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

This article is an edited version of one originally published on DeSmog.uk.

It is common for activists to decry the enormous sums of money spent on the military. Any number of social programs, or schools, or other public benefits could instead be funded.

Not least is this the case with the United States, which by far spends the most of any country on its military.

The official Pentagon budget for 2015 was $596 billion, but actual spending is far higher. (Figures for 2015 will be used because that is the latest year for which data is available to make international comparisons.)

If we add military spending parked in other portions of the US federal government budget, we’re up to $786 billion, according to a study by the War Resisters League.

Veterans’ benefits add another $157 billion. WRL also assigns 80% of the interest on the budget deficit, and that puts the grand total well above $1 trillion. The War Resisters League notes that other organizations estimate that 50 to 60% of the interest would be more accurate.

Let’s split the difference – if we assign 65% of the interest payments to past military spending (midway between the high and low estimates), then the true amount of US military spending was $1.25 trillion. Yes, that is a gigantic sum of money. So gigantic that it was more than the military spending of every other country on Earth combined.

China is second in military spending, but far behind at US$215 billion in 2015, according to an estimate by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Saudi Arabia ($87.2 billion), Russia ($66.4 billion) and Britain ($55.5 billion) round out the top five.

And lest we chalk up the bloated Pentagon budget to the size of the US economy, the official $596 billion budget constituted 3.5% of its gross domestic product, the fourth-highest ratio in the world, while China spent 2.1% of its GDP on its military. But if we use the actual total of US military spending, then US spending as a share of GDP leaps to second place, trailing only Saudi Arabia.

The US maintains military bases in 80 countries, and has military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories. Another way of looking at this question is the number of foreign military bases: The US has around 800 while the rest of the world combined has perhaps 30, according to an analysis published in The Nation. Almost half of those 30 belong to Britain or France.

Asking others to pay more is endorsing imperialism

Is there some sort of altruism in the US setting itself up as the gendarme of the world? Well, that’s a rhetorical question, obviously, but such self-deception is widespread, and not just among the foreign-policy establishment.

One line of critique sometimes heard, especially during this year’s presidential campaign, is that the US should demand its allies “pay their fair share.” It’s not only from right-wing quarters that phrase is heard, but even from left-wing populist Bernie Sanders, who insisted during this month’s Brooklyn debate with Hillary Clinton that other members of Nato ought to pay more so the Pentagon budget can be cut.

Senator Sanders said this in the context of pointing out the superior social benefits across Europe as compared to the US, but what it really implies is that militarism is justified. Setting aside that Senator Sanders’ record on imperialism is not nearly as distant from Secretary Clinton’s as his supporters believe, it is a reflection of how deeply imperialism is in the bones of United Statesians when even the candidate positioning himself as a Left insurgent doesn’t seriously question the scale of military operations or their purpose.

So why is US military spending so high? It’s because the repeated use of force is what is necessary to maintain the capitalist system. As top dog in the world capitalist system, it’s up to the US to do what is necessary to keep itself, and its multi-national corporations, in the driver’s seat.

That has been a successful project. US-based multi-nationals hold the world’s highest share in 18 of 25 broad industrial sectors, according to an analysis in New Left Review, and often by commanding margins – US multi-nationals hold at least a 40% global share in 10 of those sectors.

A partial list of US interventions from 1890, as compiled by Zoltán Grossman, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington state, lists more than 130 foreign military interventions (not including the use of troops to put down strikes within US). Consistently, these were used to impose US dictates on smaller countries.

At the beginning of the 20th century, US President William Howard Taft declared that his foreign policy was “to include active intervention to secure our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment” abroad. Taft overthrew the government of Nicaragua to punish it for taking a loan from a British bank rather than a US bank, and then put Nicaragua’s customs collections under US control and handed two US banks control of Nicaragua’s national bank and railroad.

Little has changed since, including the overthrows of the governments of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973), and more recently the invasion of Iraq and the attempted overthrow of the Venezuelan government.

Muscle men for big business

We need only recall the statement of Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, who summarized his highly decorated career in 1935, in this manner: “I spent thirty three years and four months [in] the Marine Corps … during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

The bipartisan refusal to acknowledge this is exemplified in US narratives concerning the Vietnam War. The ‘debate’ that is conducted in the corporate media is only between two ‘acceptable’ viewpoints – an honourable effort that tragically failed or a well-intentioned but flawed effort that should not have been undertaken if the US was not going to be ‘serious’ about fighting.

Never mind that tonnage of bombs dropped on Vietnam were greater than what was dropped by all combatants in World War II combined, 3 million Vietnamese were killed, cities were reduced to rubble and millions of acres of farmland was destroyed. By what sane measure could this be said to be fighting ‘without really trying’, as right-wing mythology still asserts?

No modern corporate enterprise would be complete without subcontracting, and the Pentagon has not stinted here. That is not a reference to the massive, and often guaranteed, profits that military contractors enjoy as more supply operations are handed over to connected companies, but rather to the teaching of torture techniques to other militaries so that some of the dirty work of maintaining capitalism can be undertaken locally.

The US Army’s infamous School of the Americas, lately masquerading under the deceptively bland-sounding name Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, has long been a finishing school for the personnel enforcing the rule of military and civilian dictatorships throughout Latin America.

Capitalism is built on violence

Major Joe Blair, who was the director of instruction at the School of the Americas from 1986 to 1989, had this to say about the curriculum:

“The doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get that person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them – and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”

The change of the name more than a decade ago was cosmetic, Major Blair said while testifying at a 2002 trial of School of the Americas protestors: “There are no substantive changes besides the name. They teach the identical courses that I taught, and changed the course names and use the same manuals.”

The entire history of capitalism is built on violence, and violence has been used to both impose and maintain the system from its earliest days. Slavery, colonialism, dispossession of the commons, draconian laws forcing peasants into factories and control of the state to suppress all opposition to economic coercion built capitalism.

The forms of domination change over the years, and are often financial rather than openly militaristic today (although the armed fist lurks in the background); regardless, exploitation is the lifeblood of wealth.

Demanding that the cost of this should be spread around is a demand to continue exploitation, domination and imperialism, and nothing more.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His forthcoming book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment‘, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, has just been published by Zero Books.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.

The European Commission has shelved a legal opinion confirming that a new breed of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) must undergo rigorous safety testing and labelling.

This paradoxical decision – in effect saying that organisms whose genes have been altered using certain novel technologies are not, in fact, genetically modified – follows intense lobbying by the US government.

Internal Commission documents and correspondence obtained by NGOs under freedom of information law reveal that US representatives pushed to exempt plants and animals produced through gene-editing and other new techniques from existing EU GMO rules.

The US pressure focussed on potential barriers to trade from the application of EU GMO law. It appears the US wants the EU to drop health and environmental safeguards on GMOs to pave the way for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement. The next round of TTIP negotiations starts on 25 April 2016 in New York.

In advance of a meeting with DG SANTE’s deputy director-general Ladislav Miko, on 7th October 2015, the US mission to the EU said “it came to their attention” that the Commission’s legal opinion was going to classify the ODM gene-editing technique “as a GM technique”. The US mission warned DG SANTE that this would be “another blow to agriculture and technology”, according to a Commission briefing.

Civil society organisations, small-scale farmers and the organic sector have called on the Commission to apply EU GMO law to all products of genetic engineering, including new breeding techniques.

However US companies are heavily involved in gene-editing. For example Cibus has already brought a herbicide-resistant oilseed rape engineered through ODM to the US market. Dow Chemicals and DuPont, two US companies that recently merged into DowDuPont, also have a strong interest in gene-editing, as documented by their recent patent applications in the field.

‘Gene editing is genetic engineering!’

The Commission’s decision transparently violates the EU’s own laws on GM crops and foods that require case-by-case risk assessment, detectability and labelling. GMOs are defined as any organism, with the exception of humans, “in which the genetic material (DNA) has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating or natural recombination”. Gene-edited plants and animals should therefore be covered by the law

But in the US, GMOs are not systematically tested and can even be placed on the market without any form of testing. Labelling is not required although it soon will be in the state of Vermont. Gene-edited plants and animals are mostly unregulated. For example, US regulators ruled that Cibus’ SU Canola is exempt from regulation.

“The Commission must recognise that gene-editing is genetic engineering”, said Greenpeace EU food policy director Franziska Achterberg. “It must come out of the bushes and reassure EU citizens that it won’t allow the GM industry to bypass rigorous safety tests and labelling. There are fundamental issues of public trust and transparency at stake, and the Commission should act accordingly.”

Nina Holland, researcher for Corporate Europe Observatory, added: “The biotech industry has waged an under-the-radar campaign to get new GM products absolved from GM regulation. The TTIP negotiations are seen by industry across the board and the US government as the perfect opportunity to block EU processes that are supposed to protect public health and the environment. The regulation of new GM techniques is a case in point.”

Greenpeace trade expert Juergen Knirsch warned that the Commission’s cave-in to US pressure was a harbinger of more and worse to come:

“If TTIP is agreed, the US government will always get its way. In fact, the EU will progressively weaken its standards and safeguards to suit the US, and any plan to better protect our environment and health would be neutralised before it hits the democratic scrutiny of the European Parliament.”

The new techniques: very clever, but poorly understood

Most gene-editing techniques use enzymes to cut parts of the genome’s DNA, after which the cell’s repair mechanisms ‘repair’ the break – but in the process insert, replace or remove bits of DNA. Because the technique is not 100% reliable, unintended DNA cuts or other gene alterations can also occur, with unknowable consequences.

The techniques in question are listed on the Commission website under the industry-coined heading ‘New Breeding Techniques‘ and include zinc fingernucleases (ZFN), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) and the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) systems.

Another gene-editing technique involves the introduction of short strands of synthetic DNA that trigger cells to modify their DNA to match the introduced fragments. This technique is known as oligonucleotide directed mutagenesis (ODM).

The gene-editing process is not well understood, and can result in negative effects on the environment, and human and animal health. As little is known about how these techniques actually work, it is difficult even to identify potential hazards.