Last Sunday was a big day for me. The Mail on Sunday ran my article about the dreadful conditions in an intensive UK pig farm I investigated.

In turn that drew massive public attention to my film showing the horrific conditions the pigs and piglets had to endure (see video embed, below). As I write the film has now been viewed 140,000 times.

It shows the horror of factory farming systems – including some legal practicies, and others that are outlawed by EU and UK animal welfare regulations.

For example, it is perfectly legal to raise piglets in farrowing crates, where the mother pig stays in a cage so small that she can’t even turn around for five weeks – both before they are born, and for the 3-4 weeks for which she is suckling her piglets.

But the farmer was breaking several EU laws by failing to provide manipulable material in the pen for the piglets to follow their natural instincts to root, chew and explore for food. Without this the pigs are so bored, frustrated and stressed that they fight, scratch, and bite (particularly each other’s tails). This farmer had also routinely amputated all the pigs tails when in fact the law says that he must change the cause of their biting.

The stressful conditions leads the need for preventative antibiotics to stave off diseases which is leading to antibiotic resistant bacteria that pass from pigs to humans. This is bringing us ever nearer to the day when antibiotics no longer work for human diseases.

Piteous squeals alerted a local resident

I was tipped off about the farm by a local resident who was concerned about the piteous squeals he heard coming out of the pigsheds, at such a pitch that the animals’ conditions could only be extremely poor.

Unlike many intensive animal farms, the premises were unsecured so I was able to gain access to the buildings after the workers had gone home. But I decided not to expose the name and location of the farm and farmer because there was no point: I only needed to show the conditions that are common on pig farms across the UK – and this particular farm, horrific though it was, is no worse than hundreds of of others.

Before the film was released and I returned for a second visit to film the farm live on Facebook. But by then a massive gate had been newly installed and padlocked. So I hid my car and walked with my cameraman towards the farm suspecting that the farmer may have been alerted to our interest.

We heard a car approach so we rushed into a nearby field and lay on the ground. A beaten up Landrover drew to a halt beside us. An elderly man in the driving seat gave us a menacing glare and asked what we were doing on his land.

I said I was just having a cuddle with my boy friend. As I am 57 and my cameraman is a mere 22 years old, he was understandably incredulous. He drove off. We decided to call off our mission and return to my car in case he was letting the tyres down in revenge for the trespass. As we walked back down the lane the farmer returned, this time on foot. We had been rumbled.

The farmer’s story: ‘what else can I do?’

The farmer, initially furious and defensive, calmed down once I told him that we were keeping his identity confidential and that our mission, along with promoting the humane treatment of pigs, was to protect British farmers by exposing the impossible situation that they find themselves in due to cheap imports. We ended up having a genial conversation.

His farm had been in the family for 200 years and he felt that it was his responsibility to keep it going for future generations. He employed local people who, usually, stayed for life. It was lucky, he told us, that it had been him and not his highly protective workers who had found us. And in case we felt like revisiting, he had now had alarms installed.

But for all that he was willing to talk. He told me that he had recently sold all his pigs, disinfected his sheds and bought brand new stock. His old stock had been routinely given preventative antibiotics to prevent respiratory problems brought on by ammonia, part of the toxic cocktail of gases from rotting faeces. But he was concerned about antibiotic resistance passing from the pigs to humans, and thought the practice would probably soon be banned. He had made this investment for the future of the farm despite the odds stacked against him.

It was both humbling surprising to come face to face with the farmer whose farm we had exposed, only to find that he believed in the same things that we did. We began with the farrowing crates where sows are kept for five weeks while they suckle their young: “I know you don’t like those crates and I don’t either”, he told me. But he explained how the vagaries of the global economy along with the way British supermarkets treat farmers left him very little room to improve.

“It goes back to the repeal of the Corn Laws 200 years ago”, he said, “Feed the people cheap, keep wages down and sell your product abroad.” With UK politicians wedded to this mantra and advocating reduced CAP payments, he told me that most British farmers relied on the French to mobilize and keep European farming in the competition for ever cheaper meat.

Small farmers under constant pressure

He had been born on this farm at a time when farms were mixed, he told me, growing a variety of produce, so that when one market failed they had contingency. Now farms are pushed towards specialisation in one product and when the bottom falls out of that market, farms are forced into bankruptcy. When Russia closed their markets to pigs resulting in a glut in the market many of his colleagues were forced out of business.

He shrugged and showed me the cuts and bruises on his arms, battle scars of a lifetime eking out a living on the farm he wished to keep for his daughter and his grandsons. In an era of industrialised farming, he knows his small-scale farm is at risk. What then?

I explained my ambition to persuade consumers to buy high welfare produce and he agreed that this was a solution, but that it would take too long. He told me I was an idealist and not living in the real world where people like him had a bank manager to answer to. And then he answered to my wish for re-localising farming by describing his close relationship with local consumers, how his pigs only had a mile to go to slaughter, that all processing was done on his farm and his employees had worked for him for up to 40 years.

In the past he had the high welfare RSPCA label but, when consumers were not prepared to pay for it, supermarkets returned his meat and he couldn’t afford to continue. A friend of his who runs a dairy farm is about to go out of business after the ‘villain’ discount supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl were undercutting Tesco and Sainsbury’s efforts to guarantee to pay over the cost of production to the farmer.

As dusk surrounded us and the gentle night bird sounds of the British countryside started up, the great irony occurred to me: this farmer who I had exposed for cruel practices was, in fact, one of the last standing traditional farmers who, if we paid a fair price for our pork, could be a high welfare farmer once again. He was a prime example of the issue that I have been campaigning about for over a decade: a traditional British farmer only forced to cut costs and neglect animal welfare because of cheap imports and industrialised farming practises – not due to malice.

And so there we were, standing on the edge of his farm in failing light agreeing with each other. Limiting my harm to him personally by withholding his name, he was my route to showing shoppers how farmers could only up their standards if they were given a fair price.

As we shook hands, he told me he was sorry to have gated his farm and, smiling, he said he knew I was trying to mislead him as he didn’t think I was having a cuddle.

Shoppers – buy only high-welfare meat!

As farmers are being pushed to the wall by cheap imports, they are forced into becoming more intensive – which often involves breaking EU animal welfare rules.

That’s why I see the farmer as the victim of global trade. They have no choice in the matter if they are competing with massive low-cost factory farms across Europe and beyond.

And as I found in my conversation with the farmer, he had tried to find an alternative by producing his pork under the RSPCA ‘Freedom Food’ label – but the demand hadn’t been there from supermarket shoppers willing to pay a small premium for a higher standard of animal welfare.

That puts the responsibility onto us – ordinary consumers and supermarket shoppers – to seek out and select meat sold under high welfare labels such as ‘RSPCA Assured’, ‘Outdoor Bred’, ‘Free Range’ and best of all ‘Organic’.

Farmers and consumers together can ensure healthy food and farming. But we must make the change now before any more of our precious local farmers go bankrupt – leaving us with no choice but to buy from remote, gigantic, unaccountable corporate factory pig farms.

Tracy Worcester has been a food, farming, animal welfare and health campaigner and filmmaker ever since she began working as a volunteer with Friends of the Earth in 1989.

Films: Tracy’s films include Is Small Still Beautiful in India, (BBC World 2005), The Politics of Happiness in Bhutan, (BBC World 2005), Pig Business, (Channel 4 spring 2009). Pig Business, now in 21 languages, has been broadcast around the world, screened at the House of Commons, EU Parliament and on Capitol Hill. Via a three minute video, she worked on a consumer outreach campaign called the Pig Pledge – to only buy pork with high welfare labels RSPCA Assured, Free Range, Outdoor Bred and Organic. She launched a new celebrity-led video and poster campaign called #TurnYourNoseUp in May. Released a UK intensive pig farm expose in the Mail On Sunday.

Merging the environment and energy portfolios is a strategy to shush dissenting voices from the climate sceptic right.  But, environmental advocates and climate scientists see linking the environment with energy as a sideward step in addressing climate change and protecting the Reef.

The new Minister for Environment and Energy, Josh Frydenberg is nicknamed ‘Mr Coal’ because of his past support for the mining industry.  Critics say the Minister can’t be objective with 50% of his job reducing emissions to address climate change whilst simultaneously supporting increasing carbon emissions from new coal mines.

Turnbull’s outward vision is that the two portfolios will complement each other in reaching a renewable energy target (RET) of 23.5% by 2020.  Australian Labor Party wants a target of 50% by 2020.  RET investment will come from an emissions reduction fund put in place by market fund mechanisms and supported by a $10bn clean energy finance corporation.

Greenpeace Australia, Senior Climate and Energy Campaigner Nikola Casule thinks the PM’s strategy shows contempt for the Australian environment.  Casule says “For Malcolm Turnbull to appoint a minister who still believes that there is still a strong moral case for coal even during the worst coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef’s history is a clear show of contempt for the Australian public”. 

Turnbull is attempting to keep the conservative sceptics onside, including former PM Tony Abbott; and pacify Labor on renewable targets.  With the balance of power down to a single seat, Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull faces pressure to support the mining industry over renewable energy targets.

Labor’s position strengthened this week with the remaining federal election seat of Herbert going their way.  Herbert has been a Liberal National stronghold for 20 years and is a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef.  With Labor seizing the seat by just 35 votes, any future mining applications that come up in Parliament will pile on the pressure.

Can Australia really move to clean energy?

Australia isn’t the first country combining environment and energy portfolios.  The Republic of Maldives and Sweden hold similar positions.  But, it is the first country with a heavy reliance on the mining industry for economic stability, and to have a Minister who advocates for coal export and nuclear power.  Australia is a nuclear-power free zone, yet it holds the world’s third largest uranium deposits after Kazakhstan and Canada.

Frydenberg is holding all the cards on future mining licenses, and already ruling out a U-turn on the world’s second largest coal mine, the Galilee Basin Mining Project.  He’s adamant that mining and renewables can be symbiotic and help preserve the World Heritage status of environmental icons including the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park and Tasmanian Forests.  He says, “In 2004, 70% of Australia’s electricity generation came from coal, today it’s just above 60%”. The coal market is declining, and electricity sources will need to come from elsewhere. Over the last two years, prices for high quality metallurgical coal, thermal coal and iron ore has shrunk by 7.4% at ($9.4bn) to $118.3bn. The export Price Index  has fallen to 23% in the last three years.

Frydenberg took to social media this week to defend himself against accusations of climate scepticism.  Tweeting a video link with the line “Despite David Marr’s [a journalist’s] claim I’ve said climate change is real &transition [sic] away from coal not a bad thing”.  Frydenberg can be heard saying “The environment is an important issue at this election…and I’m not here to debate the science, I accept the science”.  Yet, he’s on record saying that Australia’s coal export is a necessity to help people in India out of energy poverty.

Australia’s Conservative Right and the Climate Deniers.

Time will tell if Turnbull’s strategy is an innovative climate change policy, but first he needs to convince conservative members within his own party that combining energy and the environment is a shrewd move.

Josh Frydenberg’s successor as Minister for Resources and Northern Development, Matt Canavan is a climate sceptic.  He says that “climate change science has become less certain and gives us less reason to worry since the last major climate conference in Copenhagen six years ago”.  Speaking in the Australian Senate last December, Canavan adds “recent research shows that Arctic sea ice and polar ice caps are not melting at ‘unnatural’ rates and do not constitute evidence of a human impact on the climate”. 

Canavan is not a lone voice. Tony Abbott says “the climate change science is far from settled. The facts we’ve had if anything suggest cooling temperatures”.  Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi calls the debate alarmism, “I have never bought the alarmist hysteria attached to carbon dioxide as driving climate change. There’s no consensus of scientists”.  Deputy PM, and leader of the Nationals Party, Barnaby Joyce tweeted, “I’m just always sceptical of the idea about the way that anybody’s going to change the climate”.

Worryingly, two of the five constituencies along the Great Barrier Reef are held by climate sceptics. To the south, Liberal National MP George Christensen likens “climate change to a science fiction film plot”.  Further north, Liberal Senator Iain McDonald recently told parliament “Never have I denied the climate was changing…Australia was once covered in ice; of course the climate changes. The centre of Australia was once a rainforest; of course the climate changes…This new theory-I often refer to it as a fad, a farce or a hoax-that suddenly, since the start of the industrial age, that sort of change of climate is happening anew, is just farcical and fanciful”.

Balance of Power a Tough Task.

Fusing energy and the environment could see an innovative partnership easing any transition from dirty to clean energy.  Australia’s Green’s co-leader and Queensland Senator, Larissa Waters says that if the merger by Turnbull is genuine it could “give the Reef a chance and to protect our Pacific neighbours from sea-level rise” and suggests Frydenberg’s title should be Minister for the Environment and for Clean Energy.

Frydenberg chairs the bi-annual Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Energy Council in August.  The meeting promises to look for ways to integrate renewables into the energy markets; gas prices and supply, promotion of gas market reform to make sure prices are competitive for energy consumers.  

Maxine.newlands@jcu.edu.au or maxine@newlands.tv

@Dr_MaxNewlands

This Author

Maxine is a Political Scientist at James Cook University, Queensland, Australia. Her research centres on environmental governance, politics, protest movements and political communication in the media. Maxine is a regular political commentator for both print, TV and radio, and has been writing for the Ecologist for the past four years. 

In early July, French parliamentarians produced a report on EdF, the largely state-owned electricity company that wants to build a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point.

The legislators concluded that the Hinkley project “is probably the last opportunity for EdF to restore the reputation of the French nuclear industry internationally and gain new business in a highly competitive market.”

The implication was clear; Hinkley is a central part of the national industrial strategy of France.

The nuclear power station will proceed not because it is good for Britain or its electricity users but because the French state thinks that maintaining the capacity to export nuclear power stations is a paramount objective.

And, by the way, France itself is closing down the nuclear plants on its own soil as fast as it can, with no intention of replacing them. Instead it is driving forward with solar and wind.

A few days after the French parliamentary report, the UK’s National Audit Office brought out its own report on nuclear power. Among its conclusions was a calculation that Hinkley will receive subsidies of about £30bn in the first 35 years of its life. This figure is the difference between the open-market price of electricity and the much higher figure paid to EdF for the electricity produced by the proposed new power station.

Directly and indirectly through higher prices of goods and services, the average UK household will pay about £32 a year for more than three decades for the privilege of supporting the French industrial strategy.

Nuclear gets ever more expensive as wind and solar costs plummet

In fact, the NAO figures are probably too optimistic. It assumed wholesale electricity prices of around £60 per megawatt hour. Based on today’s trades, the electricity market thinks differently. Wholesale prices for 2018 – the best guide we have to the future – are around £41, or less than 70% of the NAO’s figure. If the cost of wholesale electricity remains at this level, Hinkley won’t cost UK households £30bn but the rather larger figure of £47bn.

Estimates for the underlying price of putting nuclear power on the grid continue to rise sharply. Nuclear power stations being built around the world today are almost all very much more costly than predicted and are taking several years longer to build than promised.

The most troublesome new plant – at Olkiluoto in Finland – is now slated to start generating in late 2018, about eight years late. The cost overruns have near-bankrupted the developer, which is now fighting legal battles over $5bn of claims and counter-claims in international arbitration. Olkiluoto is built to the same design as Hinkley, suggesting that the French unions and EdF middle managers that are so opposed to the UK power station have considerable logic behind them.

The NAO acknowledges the cost inflation of nuclear power around the world and also notes that solar and wind require lower subsidies. One chart in its report shows this point clearly. By 2025, the earliest conceivable date by which Hinkley could be providing electricity, the NAO sees solar costing £60 a megawatt hour (about 65% of nuclear’s cost) with onshore wind at a similar figure. In other words, the subsidy needed by solar is expected to be little more than a third of that required by EdF.

What’s also clear is that while nuclear power is tending to get more expensive, wind and solar get cheaper and cheaper every year. Even experts find it difficult to keep up with the speed of the change. In 2010, the government’s energy department said that solar would cost £180 a megawatt hour in 2025. The most recent estimates, less than six years later, are no more than a third of this level.

And, by the way, this failure to predict the steepness of decline in the costs of solar power is characteristic of all governmental and research institute forecasts around the world. The likelihood is that by 2025 solar will actually need no subsidies at all, even in the gloomier parts of the UK.

The totally fallacious ‘baseload’ argument

Nobody really disputes any of this. Even the NAO acknowledges that the only remaining argument in favour of the “cathedral within a cathedral“ (as described by Cambridge nuclear engineer Tony Roulstone) at Hinkley is that nuclear gives the UK what is known as baseload power.

This comment mirrors an assessment by the new UK Chancellor, Philip Hammond, who described security of energy supply as an “absolute prerequisite” in a BBC interview on July 14th, although he did also admit he hadn’t seen the new cost figures from the NAO. A well-functioning nuclear power station will provide a stable and consistent output for every hour of the year. It cannot be turned up and down as power needs vary during the year.

Mr Hammond sees this an an advantage but as renewable sources grow in importance, the opposite is likely to be true. Modern economies actually don’t want baseload at all; we need electricity sources that ramp up and down to complement highly variable amounts of wind, solar and other renewables. Inflexible nuclear power is the worst possible fit with increasingly cheap but intermittent – although predictable – sources of low-carbon energy.

By 2025 the UK will probably have at least 18GW (gigawatts) of offshore wind and perhaps 12GW of onshore wind. My guess is that we might see at least 25GW of solar power, and it could be much more if photovoltaic technologies continue to surprise us with rapid declines in price. (We already have about 12 GW, mostly added in the last two years). The scope for continued improvement in the cost and performance of solar is substantial.

Total demand for electricity falls as low as 19 GW in summer compared to the 55 GW of renewables. So there will be many occasions when the UK has too much power and nuclear power will be unnecessary. On other occasions, such as still December evenings, demand will be 50 GW or so and solar and wind will be producing a fraction of the amount required. The 3 GW at Hinkley will be helpful but insufficient.

Come on Greg Clark, this is time for strategic thinking!

Here then is the challenge facing Greg Clark, the new minister in charge of both energy and ‘industrial strategy’. How does the UK avoid becoming the testbed for France’s horrendously expensive nuclear technologies and the proving ground for EdF, its national champion?

What technologies will come to the fore that allow the world to switch principally to cheap solar power, by far the most abundant source of renewable energy? In what technologies can the UK develop knowledge and skills that both provide us both with the reliable power that Philip Hammond stressed is needed but also give us goods to make and to export?

Batteries aren’t the answer for us. Although the energy storing potential of lithium ion cells is substantial, they will never get northern latitude countries like the UK through the winter. We have little sun and sometimes the wind doesn’t blow for weeks at a time. Batteries won’t hold enough electricity. And, second, the car makers and the Asian industrial companies that make their batteries have that market already cornered.  The UK would be wasting its money on R+D in this area.

The real opportunity is finding ways of storing large amounts of energy for months at a time. This is where the need is greatest, and the possible return most obvious. More precisely, what we require are technologies that take the increasing amounts of surplus power from sun or wind and turn this energy into storable fuels.

In The Switch, a book just out from Profile Books, I explore the best ways of converting cheap electricity from renewables into natural gas and into liquid fuels similar to petrol or diesel so provide huge buffers of energy storage.

This sounds like alchemy. It is not. Surplus electricity can be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen can then be merged by microbes to make more complex molecules, such as methane. Methane is the main constituent of natural gas, so it can be simply stored in the existing gas network. Other microbes take carbon and hydrogen molecules and turn them into liquids that can be kept in the oil storage networks.

The ‘renewable fuel’ opportunity for Britain’s industrial future

Many companies around the world are trying to commercialise zero-carbon gas and green fuels as natural complements to solar and wind. This is where Greg Clark’s new industrial strategy could really make a difference.

A few percent of the £30bn+ subsidy for Hinkley devoted to conversion technologies that can take cheap renewable electricity and use it to store energy in gas or liquids could help build British companies that could expand around the world.

The UK’s ability in applied biochemistry is acknowledged and the country could become the global research and manufacturing centre. We missed the early opportunity to develop a large onshore wind industry and gave the market to Denmark 20 years ago. Brexit threatens to have the same impact on offshore wind fabrication here.

Greg Clark has the chance to support an even larger industry developing chemical transformation technologies for seasonal storage. Let’s not miss this opportunity.

The book: ‘The Switch‘ is written and researched by Chris Goodall and published by Profile Books.

Special offer for readers of The Ecologist: Enter the discount code SWITCHECO at the checkout on Profile Books’ web site to buy the book at £7.99 including postage and packing, a price lower than currently available at the main online booksellers.

Chris Goodall is an expert on energy, environment and climate change, and a frequent contributor to The Ecologist. He blogs at Carbon Commentary.

This article was originally published on openDemocracy and comes to The Ecologist via Carbon Commentary.

In early July, French parliamentarians produced a report on EdF, the largely state-owned electricity company that wants to build a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point.

The legislators concluded that the Hinkley project “is probably the last opportunity for EdF to restore the reputation of the French nuclear industry internationally and gain new business in a highly competitive market.”

The implication was clear; Hinkley is a central part of the national industrial strategy of France.

The nuclear power station will proceed not because it is good for Britain or its electricity users but because the French state thinks that maintaining the capacity to export nuclear power stations is a paramount objective.

And, by the way, France itself is closing down the nuclear plants on its own soil as fast as it can, with no intention of replacing them. Instead it is driving forward with solar and wind.

A few days after the French parliamentary report, the UK’s National Audit Office brought out its own report on nuclear power. Among its conclusions was a calculation that Hinkley will receive subsidies of about £30bn in the first 35 years of its life. This figure is the difference between the open-market price of electricity and the much higher figure paid to EdF for the electricity produced by the proposed new power station.

Directly and indirectly through higher prices of goods and services, the average UK household will pay about £32 a year for more than three decades for the privilege of supporting the French industrial strategy.

Nuclear gets ever more expensive as wind and solar costs plummet

In fact, the NAO figures are probably too optimistic. It assumed wholesale electricity prices of around £60 per megawatt hour. Based on today’s trades, the electricity market thinks differently. Wholesale prices for 2018 – the best guide we have to the future – are around £41, or less than 70% of the NAO’s figure. If the cost of wholesale electricity remains at this level, Hinkley won’t cost UK households £30bn but the rather larger figure of £47bn.

Estimates for the underlying price of putting nuclear power on the grid continue to rise sharply. Nuclear power stations being built around the world today are almost all very much more costly than predicted and are taking several years longer to build than promised.

The most troublesome new plant – at Olkiluoto in Finland – is now slated to start generating in late 2018, about eight years late. The cost overruns have near-bankrupted the developer, which is now fighting legal battles over $5bn of claims and counter-claims in international arbitration. Olkiluoto is built to the same design as Hinkley, suggesting that the French unions and EdF middle managers that are so opposed to the UK power station have considerable logic behind them.

The NAO acknowledges the cost inflation of nuclear power around the world and also notes that solar and wind require lower subsidies. One chart in its report shows this point clearly. By 2025, the earliest conceivable date by which Hinkley could be providing electricity, the NAO sees solar costing £60 a megawatt hour (about 65% of nuclear’s cost) with onshore wind at a similar figure. In other words, the subsidy needed by solar is expected to be little more than a third of that required by EdF.

What’s also clear is that while nuclear power is tending to get more expensive, wind and solar get cheaper and cheaper every year. Even experts find it difficult to keep up with the speed of the change. In 2010, the government’s energy department said that solar would cost £180 a megawatt hour in 2025. The most recent estimates, less than six years later, are no more than a third of this level.

And, by the way, this failure to predict the steepness of decline in the costs of solar power is characteristic of all governmental and research institute forecasts around the world. The likelihood is that by 2025 solar will actually need no subsidies at all, even in the gloomier parts of the UK.

The totally fallacious ‘baseload’ argument

Nobody really disputes any of this. Even the NAO acknowledges that the only remaining argument in favour of the “cathedral within a cathedral“ (as described by Cambridge nuclear engineer Tony Roulstone) at Hinkley is that nuclear gives the UK what is known as baseload power.

This comment mirrors an assessment by the new UK Chancellor, Philip Hammond, who described security of energy supply as an “absolute prerequisite” in a BBC interview on July 14th, although he did also admit he hadn’t seen the new cost figures from the NAO. A well-functioning nuclear power station will provide a stable and consistent output for every hour of the year. It cannot be turned up and down as power needs vary during the year.

Mr Hammond sees this an an advantage but as renewable sources grow in importance, the opposite is likely to be true. Modern economies actually don’t want baseload at all; we need electricity sources that ramp up and down to complement highly variable amounts of wind, solar and other renewables. Inflexible nuclear power is the worst possible fit with increasingly cheap but intermittent – although predictable – sources of low-carbon energy.

By 2025 the UK will probably have at least 18GW (gigawatts) of offshore wind and perhaps 12GW of onshore wind. My guess is that we might see at least 25GW of solar power, and it could be much more if photovoltaic technologies continue to surprise us with rapid declines in price. (We already have about 12 GW, mostly added in the last two years). The scope for continued improvement in the cost and performance of solar is substantial.

Total demand for electricity falls as low as 19 GW in summer compared to the 55 GW of renewables. So there will be many occasions when the UK has too much power and nuclear power will be unnecessary. On other occasions, such as still December evenings, demand will be 50 GW or so and solar and wind will be producing a fraction of the amount required. The 3 GW at Hinkley will be helpful but insufficient.

Come on Greg Clark, this is time for strategic thinking!

Here then is the challenge facing Greg Clark, the new minister in charge of both energy and ‘industrial strategy’. How does the UK avoid becoming the testbed for France’s horrendously expensive nuclear technologies and the proving ground for EdF, its national champion?

What technologies will come to the fore that allow the world to switch principally to cheap solar power, by far the most abundant source of renewable energy? In what technologies can the UK develop knowledge and skills that both provide us both with the reliable power that Philip Hammond stressed is needed but also give us goods to make and to export?

Batteries aren’t the answer for us. Although the energy storing potential of lithium ion cells is substantial, they will never get northern latitude countries like the UK through the winter. We have little sun and sometimes the wind doesn’t blow for weeks at a time. Batteries won’t hold enough electricity. And, second, the car makers and the Asian industrial companies that make their batteries have that market already cornered.  The UK would be wasting its money on R+D in this area.

The real opportunity is finding ways of storing large amounts of energy for months at a time. This is where the need is greatest, and the possible return most obvious. More precisely, what we require are technologies that take the increasing amounts of surplus power from sun or wind and turn this energy into storable fuels.

In The Switch, a book just out from Profile Books, I explore the best ways of converting cheap electricity from renewables into natural gas and into liquid fuels similar to petrol or diesel so provide huge buffers of energy storage.

This sounds like alchemy. It is not. Surplus electricity can be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen can then be merged by microbes to make more complex molecules, such as methane. Methane is the main constituent of natural gas, so it can be simply stored in the existing gas network. Other microbes take carbon and hydrogen molecules and turn them into liquids that can be kept in the oil storage networks.

The ‘renewable fuel’ opportunity for Britain’s industrial future

Many companies around the world are trying to commercialise zero-carbon gas and green fuels as natural complements to solar and wind. This is where Greg Clark’s new industrial strategy could really make a difference.

A few percent of the £30bn+ subsidy for Hinkley devoted to conversion technologies that can take cheap renewable electricity and use it to store energy in gas or liquids could help build British companies that could expand around the world.

The UK’s ability in applied biochemistry is acknowledged and the country could become the global research and manufacturing centre. We missed the early opportunity to develop a large onshore wind industry and gave the market to Denmark 20 years ago. Brexit threatens to have the same impact on offshore wind fabrication here.

Greg Clark has the chance to support an even larger industry developing chemical transformation technologies for seasonal storage. Let’s not miss this opportunity.

The book: ‘The Switch‘ is written and researched by Chris Goodall and published by Profile Books.

Special offer for readers of The Ecologist: Enter the discount code SWITCHECO at the checkout on Profile Books’ web site to buy the book at £7.99 including postage and packing, a price lower than currently available at the main online booksellers.

Chris Goodall is an expert on energy, environment and climate change, and a frequent contributor to The Ecologist. He blogs at Carbon Commentary.

This article was originally published on openDemocracy and comes to The Ecologist via Carbon Commentary.

The Badger Trust recently put out a post-referendum call to Andrea Leadsom, the new Secretary of State at Defra, England’s environment and countryside department, to halt the badger culls. As the Trust’s CEO Dominic Dyer put it:

“Defra is already reeling from a brutal round of budget cuts and does not have the staff capacity to cope with rearranging subsidies to farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy, changing food labelling and safety regulations, free movement of labour and disease control policy, to mention just a few.

“Every key aspect of Defra’s work will now have to be reviewed and significantly altered to cope with this workload and we cannot see how such a marginal and ineffective policy like the badger cull can survive this process.”

Dominic Dyer should know – he used to work for Defra. And what makes the badger culling even more pointless is that, as he continued,

“Defra has already stated that they will never be able to tell if culling has impacted on the levels of TB in cattle and, given the £25m they have spent so far on this policy, we cannot see a rational justification for them continuing with it.”

Why should the money-no-object largesse to farmers continue?

Some 55% of the UK’s income from farming comes from the EU via the Common Agricultural Policy support. Would any post-Brexit government be able to replace this? Would they even be willing to?

Defra is already drastically cutting farm inspections in the hope of saving some money – consistent with Westminster’s traditionally cavalier approach to all things concerning the environment, ecology and food production.

Back in 2001, at the height of the foot and mouth disease crisis, there was a television interview with an ‘advisor’ to the government. When faced with the possibility that British farming might be destroyed by the way FMD was being handled (and at that time many suffering farmers felt that the aim was to put them out of business), he casually replied:

“That’s okay. We can import all of our food.”

No. it’s not okay! Depending on what terms we leave the EU, large scale importation of food might not be an option. With the ongoing global financial turmoil and the pound losing its value, the prices of imported goods are set to rise while the value of exports fall.

And while farmers grow feed crops like maize (incidentally a big hit with badgers), we still import a vast amount of animal feed, another cost that will hit farmers, on top of all their other worries.

Bovine TB is (for England at least) a problem. But killing badgers won’t solve it.

On top of the CAP subsidies, the EU currently gives the UK £23 million a year to tackle bovine TB in cattle. They do not allow any of this money to be used for culling badgers, hence the £25 million of our money that Defra has spent on the culls. What the EU money pays for includes testing of herds, compensation for farmers and, one hopes, ongoing research into and trials on vaccine for cattle.

Landowners and farmers are now taking on much of the cost of the culls apart from the policing, which over the last three years has cost £6.5 million.

The first culls in Somerset and Gloucestershire, unwillingly funded by the taxpayer, were ‘pilot’ culls that were meant to run for four years, after which Defra could hopefully judge whether they had any impact on bovine TB. But the word ‘pilot’ was scrapped after the first year. They became simply ‘badger control’ programmes.

The initial regulations have been changed, dropped or scaled right down, and more culling areas are being rolled out across the country. Or are they?

Financing the badger culls

Any area that applies for a licence to cull badgers has to set up a ‘contracting company‘ with a board and members. The company is in charge of the shooters (who must hold appropriate gun licences) and trappers, all of whom have to be trained (training and licensing costs are among those for which Defra is ultimately responsible).

The company also has to demonstrate that, through its members and participating landowners, it has the finance to cover all four years of the cull. Farmers have to pay up front to become members, and must financially commit to the cull for the four-year period.

Due to all the expensive machinery now required for modern farming, most farms run large overdrafts. Will they now be looking at their post-Brexit overdrafts and wondering if they should pull out?

There are of course the rich landowners. Some of them have been eager for their land to be part of culling areas and willing to make the financial commitment. In their terms the money needed might seem fairly minimal, but the Brexit vote has seen the investments of the rich take a hammering.

No one yet knows what will happen to trade and investment, and culling badgers might become an unnecessary distraction.

The effect of the Brexit vote on farming

As pointed out by West Dorset MP Oliver Letwin – a closet Brexiteer who was (until sacked by Theresa May) trying to assemble a huge international trade team to negotiate the UK’s post-Brexit future – there are over 40 years of trade and other agreements to unpick and rewrite in a way that is acceptable to the EU and other trading partners.

Yet ministers are still demanding that we have it all when we leave; our political grandees suffer from an enormous sense of ‘entitlement’.

Given the government’s arrogant attitude towards the EU and the reaction that is having in much of Europe, it is likely that what the UK ends up with will not be favourable to farmers, some of whom do well from trading with the EU. Where Scottish farmers are concerned, over 70% of their business is exporting to the EU.

Initially, many farmers were in favour of leaving the EU, having been persuaded by the Farming Minister George Eustice’s optimistic line. He even claimed the farm animals would vote for Brexit. The NFU, particularly in Scotland, was not so sure. The NFU Chair Meurig Raymond expressed doubts about what would happen to framing, food prices and agricultural exports.

And since the vote to leave, farmers have been really waking up to how it might affect them. Like the rest of government, Defra had no ‘plan B’ for what it would do if Brexit won.

BBC Radio 4’s daily Farming Today programme has featured a lot of worried farmers. John Shropshire runs G’s, one of the UK’s largest vegetable growers, and has farms not just here but in Spain, Poland and Senegal. Much of his business relies on access to the European Single Market. When asked by Farming Today what he would do if that access became difficult, he said he would move all his operations outside the UK.

All in all, it might seem just possible that the badger culls could be a victim of Brexit. But before you get too hopeful, consider this:

At a meeting with some of his constituents Letwin was asked whether – considering how much the UK has benefited from the EU environmental and wildlife protection laws – the government would consider putting all that protective legislation into our own domestic law.

He assured them that of course it would all be part of our law when we finally left the EU, pausing only to add in his usual cheery manner:

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t dismantle it if we want to.”

Lesley Docksey is a freelance writer who writes for The Ecologist and other media on the badger cull and other environmental topics, and on political issues for UK and international websites.

Trade agreements: weapons for the fossil fuel industry

In 2011, the government of Quebec responded to concerns over water pollution by implementing a moratorium on the use of fracking. The energy company Lone Pine Resources then filed an investor-state lawsuit based on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), seeking US$109.8 million plus interest in damages. In 2009, Swedish energy multinational Vattenfall sued the German government, seeking €1.4 billion in compensation for environmental restrictions imposed on one of their dirty coal plants.

The TTIP would put in place a parallel judicial system that allows companies to bypass national courts altogether. “I think this is one of the most dangerous things we have seen in the last decade: this idea of Investor State Dispute Settlements (ISDS). If a regulation only potentially cuts into the profits of a company, these companies can turn to arbitration”, warns Jesse Bragg from Corporate Accountability International.

According to a United Nations report, 35% of all cases in which corporations are suing governments on the basis of trade agreements, are so far related to Climate Change.  And with the fossil fuel industry currently under enormous pressure, these numbers are growing.

Fossil fuel corporations are increasingly using ISDS under existing trade and investment deals, thus contributing to a recent surge in legal cases. In 2014, for example, half of the new ISDS cases targeted policies affecting oil and gas extraction, mining, or power generation.

 “As the anti-fossil fuel forces gain strength, extractive companies are beginning to fight back using a familiar tool: the investor protection provisions in free trade agreements”, warned Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein.

 The fossil fuel industry now openly admits how it wants to make use of TTIP to maintain their polluting business. According to Houston attorney Tom Sikora, Legal Counsel with ExxonMobil, energy companies are particularly keen to turn to arbitration. And as US-based oil and gas giant Chevron stated in a 2013 statement, the company would lobby for “a world-class investment chapter” in TTIP. The company has had several meetings behind closed doors with the EU’s TTIP negotiators. To Chevron, TTIP is “one of our most important issues globally”. Meanwhile, Chevron remains one of the biggest polluters of our times, refusing to pay for its toxic mess, and currently facing a lawsuit for contamination of the Amazonian rainforest, as ordered by the Ecuadorian courts.

If an oil company describing a trade treaty between states as one of “our most important issues” raises suspicion, then what is actually written in the TTIP text?

TTIP – making climate protection a “trade barrier”

Elected governments normally have the right and power to regulate and adopt laws for protecting the air, the climate and people’s health. The TTIP would turn this principle upside down. Companies will no longer face restrictions such as having to prove that their operations violate a country’s environmental legislation. Instead, the TTIP imposes the complete burden of proof on the Governments, who will have to prove that all their measures are “necessary”, “appropriate” and “legitimate”.

Some examples from the leaked TTIP documents:

The general idea behind trade agreements – that of reducing unnecessary regulations – is not necessarily a bad one but the TTIP has no “crash-barrier-clauses” in the form of strong paragraphs, which ensure that governments will keep their right to regulate when it comes to protecting the environment, people’s health or the climate. In fact, in the TTIP text, the word climate appears only in the context of good “investor climates” and this speaks volumes.

• The chapter on national treatment and market access for goods demands that “all import and export licensing procedures are neutral in application and administered in a fair, equitable and transparent manner”. This might sound reasonable at first glance, but makes it potentially impossible to ban the import of certain products that destroy the climate or the environment, because this would be “discriminatory”. Furthermore, if there are any conditions to the import of certain goods, governments will have to prove that “other appropriate procedures to achieve an administrative purpose are not reasonably available.”
• The article on risk management states that governments “shall design and apply risk management in a manner as to avoid arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination, or disguised restrictions on international trade”. Any restrictions on international trade would enable companies to sue governments in Investor State Dispute Settlements – just as Lone Pine did when Quebec implemented a moratorium on fracking to protect its ground water (as reported above).
• The chapter on technical barriers to trade demands from governments to always choose the “least burdensome possible procedures” when they regulate. This means that democratically elected governments and parliaments could be forced to reduce restrictions for corporations, instead of controlling their emissions. This is an open invitation for corporations to sue governments for climate protection measures that would cut into the profits of the fossil fuel industry.

According to Professor Gus van Harten of Osgoode Hall Law School, “States may be deterred from implementing measures to fulfill their climate change responsibilities, faced with risks of uncapped financial liability due to ISDS claims”. In the case of Vattenvall and Germany mentioned above, just the threat of ISDS was enough for Germany to water down environmental standards related to the company’s coal plant.

A completely new scope

The TTIP would by far dwarf all trade agreements the world has seen so far, directly affecting the lives of 800 million people in the EU and the US. Of the 51,495 US-owned subsidiaries currently operating in the EU, more than 47,000 would be newly empowered to launch ISDS attacks on European policy making and government actions.

But the resistance of the global climate movement against the TTIP is rising. In June, a major coalition of more than 450 NGOs called on the US Congress to oppose TTIP because of its climate impacts. A letter signed by organisations including Greenpeace, 350.org and the Sierra Club reflects one of the broadest civil society coalitions to ever call on the US Congress officially. They state that “the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), as proposed, would empower an unprecedented number of fossil fuel corporations, including some of the world’s largest polluters, to challenge US policies in tribunals not accountable to any domestic legal system.”

Had the negotiation process leading to the TTIP remained so highly opaque, as was the case until the recent leaks, it would really sabotage the fight for energy transition. With the ink still wet on the Paris Agreement, citizens around the world are rising, demanding to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The TTIP and the ISDS are the latest tricks in the dirty industry’s book, which could turn out to be a valuable weapon in the hands of companies like Chevron and Exxon.

This is why it is important to stop it.

Further Resources:

TTIP Leaks: https://ttip-leaks.org

Profiling from Injustice: How law firms, arbitrators and financiers are fuelling an investment arbitration boom.

Polluters Paradise: How investor rights in EU trade deals sabotage the fight for energy transition.

Related Articles:

Greece is the testing ground for the TTIP era of corporate rule.

Leaked TTIP papers reveal 100% corporate sellout.

Goodbye to democracy if TTIP is passed.

These Authors:

Ecologist New Voices contributors Andreas Sieber and Pavlos Georgiadis are both Emembers of the Climate Trackers, an international network of young environmental writers tracking the climate negotiations. They tweet at: @SieberAndreas @geopavlos, @ClimateTracking

“Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”

William J. Perry, US Secretary Of Defense (1994-97)

Perry has been an inside player in the business of nuclear weapons for over 60 years and his book, ‘My Journey at the Nuclear Brink‘ is a sober read.

It is also a powerful counterpoint to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) current European strategy that envisions nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war: “Their [nuclear weapons] role is to prevent major war, not to wage wars”, argues the Alliance’s magazine, NATO Review.

But, as Perry points out, it is only by chance that the world has avoided a nuclear war – sometimes by nothing more than dumb luck-and, rather than enhancing our security, nukes “now endanger it”.

It’s thanks to pure luck and individual heroism that we have survived till now

The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is generally represented as a dangerous standoff resolved by sober diplomacy. In fact, it was a single man – Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov – who countermanded orders to launch a nuclear torpedo at an American destroyer that could have set off a full-scale nuclear exchange between the USSR and the US

There were numerous other incidents that brought the world to the brink. On a quiet morning in November 1979, a NORAD computer reported a full-scale Russian sneak attack with land and sea-based missiles, which led to scrambling US bombers and alerting US missile silos to prepare to launch. There was no attack, just an errant test tape.

Lest anyone think the 9th November incident was an anomaly, a little more than six months later NORAD computers announced that Soviet submarines had launched 220 missiles at the US – this time the cause was a defective chip that cost 49 cents – again resulting in scrambling interceptors and putting the silos on alert.

But don’t these examples prove that accidental nuclear war is unlikely? That conclusion is a dangerous illusion, argues Perry, because the price of being mistaken is so high and because the world is a more dangerous place than it was in 1980.

It is 71 years since atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and humanity’s memory of those events has dimmed. But even were the entire world to read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, it would have little idea of what we face today.

The bombs that obliterated those cities were tiny by today’s standards, and comparing ‘Fat Man’ and ‘Little Boy’ – the incongruous names of the weapons that leveled both cities – to modern weapons stretches any analogy beyond the breaking point.

If the Hiroshima bomb represented approximately 27 freight cars filled with TNT, a one-megaton warhead would require a train 300 miles long. Each Russian RS-20V Voevoda intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) packs 10 megatons.

Playing with hellfire

What has made today’s world more dangerous, however, is not just advances in the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but a series of actions by the last three US administrations.

• First was the decision by President Bill Clinton to abrogate a 1990 agreement with the Soviet Union not to push NATO further east after the reunification of Germany or to recruit former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact.
     NATO has also reneged on a 1997 pledge not to install “permanent” and “significant” military forces in former Warsaw Pact countries. This month NATO decided to deploy four battalions on, or near, the Russian border, arguing that since the units will be rotated they are not ‘permanent’ and are not large enough to be ‘significant’. It is a linguistic slight of hand that does not amuse Moscow.
• Second was the 1999 US-NATO intervention in the Yugoslav civil war and the forcible dismemberment of Serbia. It is somewhat ironic that Russia is currently accused of using force to “redraw borders in Europe” by annexing the Crimea, which is exactly what NATO did to create Kosovo. The US subsequently built Camp Bond Steel, Washington’s largest base in the Balkans.
• Third was President George W, Bush’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the decision by the Obama administration to deploy anti-missile systems in Romania and Poland, as well as Japan and South Korea.
• Last is the decision by the White House to spend upwards of $1 trillion upgrading its nuclear weapons arsenal, which includes building bombs with smaller yields, a move that many critics argue blurs the line between conventional and nuclear weapons.

The Yugoslav War and NATO’s move east convinced Moscow that the Alliance was surrounding Russia with potential adversaries, and the deployment of anti-missile systems (ABM) – supposedly aimed at Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons – was seen as a threat to the Russian’s nuclear missile force.

One immediate effect of ABMs was to chill the possibility of further cuts in the number of nuclear weapons. When Obama proposed another round of warhead reductions, the Russians turned it down cold, citing the anti-missile systems as the reason.

“How can we take seriously this idea about cuts in strategic nuclear potential while the United States is developing its capabilities to intercept Russian missiles?” asked Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.

When the US helped engineer the 2014 coup against the pro-Russian government in Ukraine, it ignited the current crisis that has led to several dangerous incidents between Russian and NATO forces – at last count, according to the European Leadership Network, more than 60.

Several large war games were also held on Moscow’s borders. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev went so far as to accuse NATO of “preparations for switching from a cold war to a hot war.” In response, the Russians have also held war games involving up to 80,000 troops.

The ‘colossal asymmetry’ between US and Russian military power

It is unlikely that NATO intends to attack Russia, but the power differential between the US and Russia is so great – a “colossal asymmetry”, Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Financial Times – that the Russians have abandoned their ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons pledge.

It the lack of clear lines that make the current situation so fraught with danger. While the Russians have said they would consider using small, tactical nukes if “the very existence of the state” was threatened by an attack, NATO is being deliberately opaque about its possible tripwires.

According to NATO Review, nuclear “exercises should involve not only nuclear weapons states … but other non-nuclear allies”, and “to put the burden of the doubt on potential adversaries, exercises should not point at any specific nuclear thresholds.” In short, keep the Russians guessing.

The immediate problem with such a strategy is: what if Moscow guesses wrong? That won’t be hard to do. The US is developing a long-range cruise missile – as are the Russians – that can be armed with conventional or nuclear warheads. But how will an adversary know which is which?

And given the old rule in nuclear warfare – use ’em, or lose ’em – uncertainty is the last thing one wants to engender in a nuclear-armed foe. Indeed, the idea of no “specific nuclear thresholds” is one of the most extraordinarily dangerous and destabilizing concepts to come along since the invention of nuclear weapons.

There is no evidence that Russia contemplates an attack on the Baltic states or countries like Poland, and, given the enormous power of the US, such an undertaking would court national suicide.

Moscow’s ‘aggression’ against Georgia and Ukraine was provoked. Georgia attacked Russia, not vice versa, and the Ukraine coup torpedoed a peace deal negotiated by the European Union, the US, and Russia. Imagine Washington’s view of a Moscow-supported coup in Mexico, followed by an influx of Russian weapons and trainers.

In a memorandum to the recent NATO meetings in Warsaw, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity argued, “There is not one scintilla of evidence of any Russian plan to annex Crimea before the coup in Kiev and coup leaders began talking about joining NATO. If senior NATO leaders continue to be unable or unwilling to distinguish between cause and effect, increasing tension is inevitable with potentially disastrous results.”

The organization of former intelligence analysts also sharply condemned the NATO war games. “We shake our heads in disbelief when we see Western leaders seemingly oblivious to what it means to the Russians to witness exercises on a scale not seen since Hitler’s army launched ‘Unternehumen Barbarossa’ 75 years ago, leaving 25 million Soviet citizens dead.”

European states are getting scared – and so they should be!

While the NATO meetings in Warsaw agreed to continue economic sanctions aimed at Russia for another six months and to station four battalions of troops in Poland and the Baltic states – separate US forces will be deployed in Bulgaria and Poland – there was an undercurrent of dissent. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for deescalating the tensions with Russia and for considering Russian President Vladimir Putin a partner not an enemy.

Greece was not alone. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeler called NATO maneuvers on the Russian border “warmongering” and “saber rattling”. French President Francois Hollande said Putin should be considered a “partner”, not a “threat”, and France tried to reduce the number of troops being deployed in the Baltic and Poland. Italy has been increasingly critical of the sanctions.

Rather than recognizing the growing discomfort of a number of NATO allies and that beefing up forces on Russia’s borders might be destabilizing, US Secretary of State John Kerry recently inked defense agreements with Georgia and Ukraine.

After disappearing from the radar for several decades, nukes are back, and the decision to modernize the US arsenal will almost certainly kick off a nuclear arms race with Russia and China. Russia is already replacing its current ICBM force with the more powerful and long range ‘Sarmat’ ICBM, and China is loading its ICBM with multiple warheads.

Add to this volatile mixture military maneuvers and a deliberately opaque policy in regards to the use of nuclear weapons, and it is no wonder that Perry thinks that the chances of some catastrophe is a growing possibility.

Conn Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, A Think Tank Without Walls, and an independent journalist. A winner of a Project Censored ‘Real News Award’, he lives in Berkeley, California, and blogs at Dispatches from the Edge.

This article was originally published on Dispatches from the Edge.

Humans’ appetite for gnawing away at the fabric of the Earth itself is growing prodigiously. According to a new UN report, the amount of the planet’s natural resources extracted for human use has tripled in 40 years.

A report produced by the International Resource Panel (IRP), part of the UN Environment Programme, says rising consumption driven by a growing middle class has seen resources extraction increase from 22 billion tonnes in 1970 to 70 billon tonnes in 2010.

It refers to natural resources as primary materials, and includes under this heading biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores and non-metallic minerals.

The increase in their use, the report warns, will ultimately deplete the availability of natural resources – causing serious shortages of critical materials and risking conflict.

Growing primary material consumption will affect climate change mainly because of the large amounts of energy involved in extraction, use, transport and disposal.

Irreversibly depleted

“The alarming rate at which materials are now being extracted is already having a severe impact on human health and people’s quality of life”, says the IRP’s co-chair, Alicia Bárcena Ibarra.

“We urgently need to address this problem before we have irreversibly depleted the resources that power our economies and lift people out of poverty. This deeply complex problem, one of humanity’s biggest tests yet, calls for a rethink of the governance of natural resource extraction.”

The IRP says the information contained in the new report supports the monitoring of the progress countries are making towards achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It also shows the uneven way in which the materials exploited are shared.

The richest countries consume on average ten times as much of the available resources as the poorest, and twice as much as the world average. This total – almost three times today’s amount – will probably increase the acidification of the world’s waters, the eutrophication of its soils and waters, worsen soil erosion, and lead to greater amounts of waste and pollution.

The report also ranks countries by the size of their per capita material footprints – the amount of material required in a country, an indicator that sheds light on its true impact on the global natural resource base. It is also a good way to judge a country’s material standard of living.

Europe and North America, which had annual per capita material footprints of 20 and 25 tonnes in 2010, are at the top of the table. China’s footprint was 14 tonnes and Brazil’s 13. The annual per-capita material footprint for Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and West Asia was 9-10 tonnes, and Africa’s was below 3 tonnes.

Unprecedented amounts

Global material use has rapidly accelerated since 2000, the report says, as emerging economies such as China undergo industrial and urban transformation that requires unprecedented amounts of iron, steel, cement, energy and building materials.

Compounding the problems, there has been little improvement in global material efficiency since 1990. The global economy now needs more material per unit of GDP than it did at the turn of the century, the IRP says, because production has moved from material-efficient economies such as Japan, South Korea and Europe to far less materially-efficient countries such as China, India and some in south-east Asia.

The report says uncoupling the increasing material use from economic growth is the “imperative of modern environmental policy and essential for the prosperity of human society and a healthy natural environment.”

This will require investment in research and development, combined with better public policy and financing, creating opportunities for sustained economic growth and job creation.

The IRP also recommends putting a price on primary materials at extraction to reflect the social and environmental costs of resource extraction and use, while reducing consumption. The extra funds generated, it says, could then be invested in R&D in resource-intensive sectors of the economy.

It is concerned that the expanding demand for materials that low-income countries are likely to experience could contribute to local conflicts such as those seen in areas where mining competes with agriculture and urban development. 

The report: ‘Global Material Flows And Resource Productivity – Assessment Report for the UNEP International Resource Panel‘.

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network, where this article was originally published.