Without farming, Britain’s countryside would be drastically different. Imagine walking through landscapes un-tilled, un-sown, un-fertilised and un-treated, nor grazed by cattle or sheep.

Following the Brexit vote, the government has to decide what to do about the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU’s subsidy scheme for owners of farmed land.

Some of these subsidies support food production while others support environmental protection on land suitable to be farmed. In 2015, British farmers received roughly £3.2 billion from the EU.

Agricultural land covers 70% of the UK. If all subsidies stopped, the National Farmers Union reports many farmers would go out of business and large swathes of land would come out of production.

This may be unlikely (and it’s certainly not what I’d recommend) but it’s still worth exploring an even more dramatic scenario: what would happen if Britain’s farmers sold all their livestock and equipment and abandoned their land?

There would be cultural, social and economic shock for sure. With less food grown and reared locally, prices would undoubtedly rise as supermarkets scrambled to secure foreign supply lines. But what would happen to the land itself? Without farming, what would happen to Britain’s nature?

Scenario one: land abandonment

With the hungry mouths of livestock gone, along with the farmer’s ploughs, the great wheels of ecological succession would be freed to turn. Ecological ‘succession’ is the process of change from one set of species to another. In this case, it would begin with dormant seeds, native or otherwise, that would start to emerge. Plants best adapted to fertilised soil such as nettles will thrive.

In time, shrubs and trees will venture into abandoned fields from woodland and hedgerows. Then would come fast growing, light-demanding trees like birch and oak, turning scrubland into early phase woodland. In the shade of the new canopy, lime and elm, both tolerant of low light conditions, will slowly establish themselves until they outlive or outgrow the trees that came before them.

It is a textbook story of succession. The varying climates and soils across Britain mean different species will prosper in different places, and plants will grow at different paces, but in time, in most places, the result will be largely the same. More trees.

Herbivores could halt this process in places, and roe, sika and red deer populations would be likely to thrive post-farming. But Britain is missing the heavy-duty herbivores like aurochs (the ancestor of domestic cows) and wild horses that can help halt succession. Storms and fire would open up the canopy in other places, but it is likely that woodland would come to dominate eventually.

So how would this affect Britain’s wildlife more broadly? We can look to the past for insight. Agriculture arrived in Britain around 5,000 years ago. Early farmers cleared woodland to allow them to graze cattle and grow crops. The result of this transition was that plants and animals that favoured open areas thrived. Woodland associated species suffered. In fact, most of the known recent extinctions in Britain are of woodland species, such as the red-backed shrike or scarce dagger moth.

Farmland abandonment would reverse this trend. Species associated with open habitats, such as grey partridge, skylark, lapwing, as well as many bees and butterflies, would find fewer places that meet their needs. But scrub and woodland species, such as bullfinch, nightingale, and capercaillie birds, as well as other groups like moths, beetles, fungi and mammals would thrive once more.

Scenario two: trophic rewilding

What would happen if instead of just abandoning the land, populations of large herbivores such as bison, wild horse, European elk (aka moose) or wild boar were established, along with their predators lynx, wolf and bear?

This scenario is known as ‘trophic rewilding‘. The starting processes would be similar, and succession would still swing into action. But the shrubs and trees trying to establish in fields will be grazed and browsed. Areas of intense grazing would stay open.

But even large herbivores can be less inclined to browse where spiky bushes of bramble, hawthorn and gorse have established. Predators too will mean some areas are relatively free from large plant eaters, who would soon learn to avoid places where they feel at greater risk of being eaten. These plant havens would allow trees to grow, eventually poking out from the protective cocoon of spikes, to emerge above the browsing height of herbivores.

This combination of vegetation-driven processes rising from the bottom of the food-web and predator and herbivore driven processes cascading down from the top can create rich mosaics of habitats. Some of these habitats would be open grasslands full of wildflowers, others mighty woodlands, and some caught in transition. These different habitats would provide for the full range of Britain’s plants and animals.

But, as far as I know, Britain’s farmers have no plans of quitting. Plus, Britain’s nature is well worth investing in to secure our food supply, safeguard biodiversity and restore resilient ecosystems that support society. But this juncture gives us a chance to think about our future and perhaps, in some places, the return of wild nature should be welcomed.

Christopher Sandom is Lecturer in Biology, University of Sussex.

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

In a healthy democracy, people are not shot at from helicopters for collecting food. They are certainly not then arrested, stripped bare and beaten while in custody without facing trial.

Nor are people banned from their legitimate livelihoods, or persecuted on false pretenses.

Sadly in Botswana, southern Africa’s much-vaunted ‘beacon of democracy’, all of this took place late last month in an incident which has been criminally under-reported. Nine Bushmen were later arrested and subsequently stripped naked and beaten while in custody.

The Bushmen of the Kalahari have lived by hunting and gathering on the southern African plains for millennia. They are a peaceful people, who do almost no harm to their environment and have a deep respect for their lands and the game that lives on it. They hunt antelope with spears and bows, mostly gemsbok, which are endemic to the area.

According to conservation expert Phil Marshall, there are no rhinos or elephants where the Bushmen live. Even if there were the Bushmen would have no reason to hunt them. They hunt various species of antelope, using the fat in their medicine and reserving a special place for the largest of them, the eland, in their mythology. None of these animals are endangered.

A shameful history of state persecution

Despite all this the Botswana government has used poaching as a pretext for its latest round of persecution. The increasingly authoritarian government of General Ian Khama sees the Bushmen as a national embarrassment. It wishes to see them forcibly integrated with mainstream society in the name of ‘progress’.

There are huge diamond deposits on, or close to, the Bushmen’s lands, as well as natural gas which is soon to be fracked out of the soil. Botswana would rather see wealthy foreign tourists on the Bushman’s lands – many of them western trophy hunters – as well as foreign corporations digging for resources underneath it. In their eyes, ‘primitive’ hunter gatherers are an inconvenience.

Between 1997 and 2002, hundreds of Bushman families were brutally evicted from their land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Their homes were destroyed, their wells were capped, their possessions were confiscated, and they were moved to government eviction camps en masse. Any who tried to resist were beaten, or even shot with rubber bullets.

There are close ties between the Botswana government and the infamous De Beers diamond corporation, and both have grown rich from the gemstones. Nevertheless, the government was savvy enough to know that diamonds alone would be an ugly excuse for wiping out an entire people, so they circulated absurd rumors.

The Bushmen were ‘poachers’, they said. They rode around in jeeps, they shot game on a massive scale with rifles, and posed a threat to the environment they had been dependent on and managed for millennia. They had to change, for the sake of ‘civilization’.

Despite a landmark court ruling in 2006 which the Bushmen won with the support of Survival International, the situation is still pretty terrible. Most of the Kalahari Bushmen are still living in government camps, and access to the Reserve has only been granted to a limited number of individuals. It is enforced under a brutal permit system, which sees children born in the reserve forced from their homes and family at the age of 18.

The permits are not heritable, and so when the present generation of Bushmen dies, their people will have effectively been legislated into extinction. The system was compared to the apartheid-era South African pass laws by veteran anti-apartheid activist and former Robben Island prisoner Michael Dingake.

The annihilation of a people – genocide in open sight

As if that wasn’t bad enough they aren’t even allowed to hunt to eat. In 2014, Botswana introduced a nationwide hunting ban, but gave a special dispensation to fee-paying big game hunters, who flock to the northern Kalahari and the Okavango Delta in the extreme north of the country to shoot animals for sport.

Such a dispensation was not extended to the tribal peoples who actually live in these territories, who are accused of ‘poaching’ and face arrest, beatings and torture while tourists are welcomed into luxury hunting lodges.

And now they are being shot at from helicopters. Botswana police scour the Kalahari, looking for people hunting with spears to intimidate and arrest. The government has introduced planes with heat sensors to fly over the Bushmen’s lands looking out for ‘poachers’ – in reality Bushmen hunting antelope for food.

Police and wildlife officials then use whatever brutality they consider to be necessary to enforce the ban.

This is an urgent and horrific humanitarian crisis. An entire people’s future is at stake. If the Bushmen cannot enter their land or find food there, they will have no option but to return to the government camps, where vital services are inadequate and diseases like HIV/AIDS run rampant.

Policies like this have been used by governments all over the world. It is easier and less shocking than simply exterminating people, but in the long-term it has a similar outcome. By denying people their land and basic means of subsistence, viable ways of living are abolished, and peoples’ land, resources and labor are stolen.

In a world of larger-scale and more headline-friendly crises, the plight of the Kalahari Bushmen risks being largely ignored. Nevertheless, the Bushmen – portrayed as backward and primitive simply because their communal ways are different – could face annihilation if the brutal shoot on sight policy is left in place.

Lewis Evans is an author, and a campaigner at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights.

The baffling internal mazes – both literal and bureaucratic – of large organizations continue to frustrate transformative change. The white-washed walls, the sterile air-conditioning, the faceless voice that speaks a united and impenetrable front to all outside of its security patrolled perimeter, construct the same repetitive monoliths across the world. Totalizing and distant, these strange anthropogenic webs push power to the peripheries of our society, more often than not out of sight and out of mind.

These large, faceless, acronymic IGOs, NGOs, NPOs, charities and philanthropic organizations tend to advocate for climate change action at a ‘systems level,’ arguing for a turn to the green economy through green industry, green business and green profit: Carbon reductions for margin increases.

After the rise of climate change awareness and activism in the 1960’s and its subsequent associations with the 60’s lifestyle, many groups acting on climate change have gone to great lengths to establish themselves as ‘professionals’ – ditching direct action in favour of direct phone calls to senior politicians.But does this systems-based approach, used by some of the most prominent environmental groups worldwide, in fact reify an unsustainable political economy of infinite growth on a finite planet?

The charitable-industrial complex – a term first coined in 2013 by the son of a billionaire philanthropist Peter Buffett – suggests that as wealth inequality widens charity becomes a channel to ‘launder’ the conscience of the rich whilst providing just enough for the poor: it ‘keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.’

The climate-industrial complex, then, allows rich nation states in the Global North to insist on mitigation measures in ‘developing’ economies whilst dragging their feet on transforming their own fossil-fuel intensive infrastructure. It also allows science to research adaptation methods with an historical amnesia regarding the contribution of already industrialized nations historical (and current) to carbon emissions. It allows too the continued plundering of resources and perpetuates the colonialism of extractive industry whilst creating space to both criticize the growth of ‘rapidly developing’ states and dismiss the rights, resilience and knowledge of Indigenous peoples and their alternate visions of development. 

Capitalizing on new markets for ‘sustainable’ goods simply reifies the neoliberal logic of exploitation that justifies the myth of infinite growth in free markets, increases the accumulation of wealth among the few, and continues to oppress people and the planet. Instead, we need to start thinking outside of the system we’re currently in, economics and all. This thinking doesn’t start with market logics, theories of ‘development’ or over-priced wholefoods stores located on High Streets that charge more for monthly rent then some people will earn in a year. It starts at home.

Last year at the talks for COP21 in Paris, Prince Charles said that reducing ‘only 1.7% of global annual consumption’ would put us on the ‘right low carbon path.’ When the 10 largest emitters are responsible for 72% of emissions and the smallest 100 are responsible for only 3%, it seems clear where the ability to enact real change lies. Yet, across the board we have seen very little policy and behavioral impetus to reduce consumption from the world’s biggest emitters and richest nation-states. Why is it that among those who are in the most privileged positions to enact the biggest change there is so little drive to accomplish it?

Perhaps it is sheer distance. It is now well-known that those who are least responsible for climate change are the most likely to have their lives impacted by its effects. For many in the Global South, climate change is a matter of survival. The representative for Nicaragua at COP21, Dr Paul Oquist, who refused to sign the Paris Agreement, argued that the tentative reductions by industrialized countries mean that even if the ‘floating’ 2 degrees Celsius target is met, it will result in the loss of jobs, food and lives across the Global South.

So why do we in the Global North continue to disavow what we know about climate change?

Beyond systems, change is embedded in identity and knowledge and values, in communities and in individuals. Often it is seen most in the things we are attached to emotionally: our long-haul holidays, our imported foods, our love of beef, those few extra degrees on the heating in wintertime, the glass bottle used for the wine we drink to celebrate a week’s hard work. It is already too late to wait for lifestyle subsidiaries like low carbon air-travel: we have to start the change ourselves.

There are modes of activism that attempt to enable us to do just that. Carbon Conversations is a six-part series that uses an understanding of values-based change to help us unlearn the climate-costly behaviours that have become intertwined with our understanding of who we are.

Even at a systems level, we are seeing an increase of institutes like the Green House Think Tank, the UK’s only post-growth think tank, consolidating itself as a fixture of the mainstream political establishment.

2016 has seen the opening of the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, a research center at Surrey University hoping to investigate and redefine ideas of growth, prosperity and happiness with the maxim: ‘How can we have more fun with less stuff?’ Also this year, Limits to Growth, the new All-Party Parliamentary Group has been started as a platform for ‘cross-party dialogue on economic growth in a time of environmental and social transition.’

Yet emotions and systems are not in binary opposition – they reflect, consolidate and change one another. Ultimately, however, the change relies on us, just as the Paris Agreement began with collective diplomatic efforts after the failed negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009.

Until we begin to address the values and emotions that drive our carbon consumption, that legitimize our colonial exploitation of communities and justify our pillaging of the planet, we cannot expect the market to make the shift to sustainability for us.

Climate justice begins at home.

This Author

Katie Arthur is one of the Ecologist’s NEW VOICES contributors. She is currently studying for a MSc in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, focusing on the decolonial intervention into climate change narratives and activism in the UK.  Katie has worked with the UNFCCC secretariat, The Surefoot Effect and the Glasgow University Environmental Sustainability Team. She has written for the MIT Center for Civic Media and Novara Media.

You can follow her on on the MIT Civic Media blog https://civic.mit.edu/users/katie-arthur or contact her by e-mail klarthur@mit.edu

Twitter: @ktlsrthr

Fresh evidence of links between the government and EDF Energy has led to concerns over the firm possibly receiving “preferential treatment” for its flagship nuclear project planned for Hinkley Point in Somerset.

Ten advisers and civil servants who worked at the now defunct Department for Energy Climate Change (DECC) in the last five years had ties to EDF, according to an analysis of online professional networking accounts by Energydesk.

This follows new Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to hit the brakes on Hinkley, calling for a review of the project mere hours after the EDF board finally voted to approve it.

Under David Cameron’s premiership, however, Hinkley was a top priority for the government, with then Chancellor George Osborne determinedly putting together a deal involving both French and Chinese government investors.

Dearly departed DECC

Among the 10 EDF-linked government employees is a regulatory and licensing officer currently working for the French company – recently employed by DECC and previously an operating reactors programme manager at the Office for Nuclear Regulation.

There also features an EDF strategy manager, who has been working for the company since 2014 following a 13-month secondment to DECC’s commercial team (from October 2011) while at previous employer KPMG.

DECC’s commercial team played a crucial role in deciding to press ahead with the Hinkley project and NNB Generation Company Limited, an EDF subsidiary, submitted a proposal to the National Planning Inspectorate for a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley on October 31st 2011.

Centrica’s Sarwjit Sambhi told MPs on the Energy and Climate Change committee in June 2012: “On nuclear what is important is making progress on what’s termed the investment instrument or FID-enabling instruments and clearly the DECC commercial team is very much focused on arriving at an instrument that is investable.”

A communications worker currently employed at EDF was previously Senior Ministerial Visits Manager at DECC from the summer of 2013 until early this year. Energydesk also identified a policy adviser and analyst working at DECC who had recently held similar positions at EDF.

As of August 2015, the French energy giant had one member of staff seconded at the department. None of the other big six energy companies had staff seconded at the same time.

EDF’s ties to the UK government hit the headlines earlier this year when The Times revealed that former energy secretary Sir Edward Davey had taken up a job with a lobbying firm that lists it as a client.

Having struck the deal with the company to build the UK’s first new nuclear power station in a generation in 2013, Davey began a part-time job with MHP Communications shortly after leaving parliament.

‘One of the worst deals ever’ for UK consumers

The deal for Hinkley Point C has been heavily criticised on both sides of the political spectrum. George Osborne’s father-in-law, Lord Howell, dubbed the project “one of the worst deals ever“ for British consumers when speaking in the House of Lords last August.

Last month, the National Audit Office warned that Hinkley may cost UK taxpayers £30bn in top-up payments and suggested that pursuing renewable energy projects might prove to be the cheaper option.

Others have raised concerns about the construction materials and methods being used in Hinkley, while movements at the board room level at EDF have suggested disquiet about the project.

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP who has long been a critic of Hinkley and of the relationship between the government and big energy companies, told Energydesk: “Companies such as the big six energy firms do not lend their staff to government for nothing – they expect a certain degree of influence, insider knowledge and preferential treatment in return.

“At such a pivotal time in the UK’s energy and climate change policy, as ministers must get to grips with the realities of climate change, rising costs and energy insecurity, the strong presence of vested interests is a real cause for concern. Given the growing consensus across political divides that Hinkley C is a disastrous policy decision, these revelations add to the feeling that the democratic process may have been undermined.”

EDF: ‘valuable opportunities for career development’

In a statement, EDF defended its relationship with the UK government:

“From time to time Government invites applicants from industry to take on secondments to Government bodies, in order to ensure that Government has access to specialist knowledge, for example in the nuclear field.

“Wherever possible, we will respond positively to any invitations as this can provide valuable opportunities for career development and cross-fertilisation of ideas between the public and private sector.”

Energydesk asked the government for comment, but they failed to respond.

Joe Sandler-Clarke is a UK-based journalist specialising in investigative and public interest stories. His writing has been published in the Guardian, Independent, The Sunday Times, VICE and others, and he curently works at Greenpeace UK.

This article was originally published on Greenpeace Energydesk.

The baffling internal mazes – both literal and bureaucratic – of large organizations continue to frustrate transformative change. The white-washed walls, the sterile air-conditioning, the faceless voice that speaks a united and impenetrable front to all outside of its security patrolled perimeter, construct the same repetitive monoliths across the world. Totalizing and distant, these strange anthropogenic webs push power to the peripheries of our society, more often than not out of sight and out of mind.

These large, faceless, acronymic IGOs, NGOs, NPOs, charities and philanthropic organizations tend to advocate for climate change action at a ‘systems level,’ arguing for a turn to the green economy through green industry, green business and green profit: Carbon reductions for margin increases.

After the rise of climate change awareness and activism in the 1960’s and its subsequent associations with the 60’s lifestyle, many groups acting on climate change have gone to great lengths to establish themselves as ‘professionals’ – ditching direct action in favour of direct phone calls to senior politicians.But does this systems-based approach, used by some of the most prominent environmental groups worldwide, in fact reify an unsustainable political economy of infinite growth on a finite planet?

The charitable-industrial complex – a term first coined in 2013 by the son of a billionaire philanthropist Peter Buffett – suggests that as wealth inequality widens charity becomes a channel to ‘launder’ the conscience of the rich whilst providing just enough for the poor: it ‘keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.’

The climate-industrial complex, then, allows rich nation states in the Global North to insist on mitigation measures in ‘developing’ economies whilst dragging their feet on transforming their own fossil-fuel intensive infrastructure. It also allows science to research adaptation methods with an historical amnesia regarding the contribution of already industrialized nations historical (and current) to carbon emissions. It allows too the continued plundering of resources and perpetuates the colonialism of extractive industry whilst creating space to both criticize the growth of ‘rapidly developing’ states and dismiss the rights, resilience and knowledge of Indigenous peoples and their alternate visions of development. 

Capitalizing on new markets for ‘sustainable’ goods simply reifies the neoliberal logic of exploitation that justifies the myth of infinite growth in free markets, increases the accumulation of wealth among the few, and continues to oppress people and the planet. Instead, we need to start thinking outside of the system we’re currently in, economics and all. This thinking doesn’t start with market logics, theories of ‘development’ or over-priced wholefoods stores located on High Streets that charge more for monthly rent then some people will earn in a year. It starts at home.

Last year at the talks for COP21 in Paris, Prince Charles said that reducing ‘only 1.7% of global annual consumption’ would put us on the ‘right low carbon path.’ When the 10 largest emitters are responsible for 72% of emissions and the smallest 100 are responsible for only 3%, it seems clear where the ability to enact real change lies. Yet, across the board we have seen very little policy and behavioral impetus to reduce consumption from the world’s biggest emitters and richest nation-states. Why is it that among those who are in the most privileged positions to enact the biggest change there is so little drive to accomplish it?

Perhaps it is sheer distance. It is now well-known that those who are least responsible for climate change are the most likely to have their lives impacted by its effects. For many in the Global South, climate change is a matter of survival. The representative for Nicaragua at COP21, Dr Paul Oquist, who refused to sign the Paris Agreement, argued that the tentative reductions by industrialized countries mean that even if the ‘floating’ 2 degrees Celsius target is met, it will result in the loss of jobs, food and lives across the Global South.

So why do we in the Global North continue to disavow what we know about climate change?

Beyond systems, change is embedded in identity and knowledge and values, in communities and in individuals. Often it is seen most in the things we are attached to emotionally: our long-haul holidays, our imported foods, our love of beef, those few extra degrees on the heating in wintertime, the glass bottle used for the wine we drink to celebrate a week’s hard work. It is already too late to wait for lifestyle subsidiaries like low carbon air-travel: we have to start the change ourselves.

There are modes of activism that attempt to enable us to do just that. Carbon Conversations is a six-part series that uses an understanding of values-based change to help us unlearn the climate-costly behaviours that have become intertwined with our understanding of who we are.

Even at a systems level, we are seeing an increase of institutes like the Green House Think Tank, the UK’s only post-growth think tank, consolidating itself as a fixture of the mainstream political establishment.

2016 has seen the opening of the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, a research center at Surrey University hoping to investigate and redefine ideas of growth, prosperity and happiness with the maxim: ‘How can we have more fun with less stuff?’ Also this year, Limits to Growth, the new All-Party Parliamentary Group has been started as a platform for ‘cross-party dialogue on economic growth in a time of environmental and social transition.’

Yet emotions and systems are not in binary opposition – they reflect, consolidate and change one another. Ultimately, however, the change relies on us, just as the Paris Agreement began with collective diplomatic efforts after the failed negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009.

Until we begin to address the values and emotions that drive our carbon consumption, that legitimize our colonial exploitation of communities and justify our pillaging of the planet, we cannot expect the market to make the shift to sustainability for us.

Climate justice begins at home.

This Author

Katie Arthur is one of the Ecologist’s NEW VOICES contributors. She is currently studying for a MSc in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, focusing on the decolonial intervention into climate change narratives and activism in the UK.  Katie has worked with the UNFCCC secretariat, The Surefoot Effect and the Glasgow University Environmental Sustainability Team. She has written for the MIT Center for Civic Media and Novara Media.

You can follow her on on the MIT Civic Media blog https://civic.mit.edu/users/katie-arthur or contact her by e-mail klarthur@mit.edu

Twitter: @ktlsrthr

Fresh evidence of links between the government and EDF Energy has led to concerns over the firm possibly receiving “preferential treatment” for its flagship nuclear project planned for Hinkley Point in Somerset.

Ten advisers and civil servants who worked at the now defunct Department for Energy Climate Change (DECC) in the last five years had ties to EDF, according to an analysis of online professional networking accounts by Energydesk.

This follows new Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to hit the brakes on Hinkley, calling for a review of the project mere hours after the EDF board finally voted to approve it.

Under David Cameron’s premiership, however, Hinkley was a top priority for the government, with then Chancellor George Osborne determinedly putting together a deal involving both French and Chinese government investors.

Dearly departed DECC

Among the 10 EDF-linked government employees is a regulatory and licensing officer currently working for the French company – recently employed by DECC and previously an operating reactors programme manager at the Office for Nuclear Regulation.

There also features an EDF strategy manager, who has been working for the company since 2014 following a 13-month secondment to DECC’s commercial team (from October 2011) while at previous employer KPMG.

DECC’s commercial team played a crucial role in deciding to press ahead with the Hinkley project and NNB Generation Company Limited, an EDF subsidiary, submitted a proposal to the National Planning Inspectorate for a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley on October 31st 2011.

Centrica’s Sarwjit Sambhi told MPs on the Energy and Climate Change committee in June 2012: “On nuclear what is important is making progress on what’s termed the investment instrument or FID-enabling instruments and clearly the DECC commercial team is very much focused on arriving at an instrument that is investable.”

A communications worker currently employed at EDF was previously Senior Ministerial Visits Manager at DECC from the summer of 2013 until early this year. Energydesk also identified a policy adviser and analyst working at DECC who had recently held similar positions at EDF.

As of August 2015, the French energy giant had one member of staff seconded at the department. None of the other big six energy companies had staff seconded at the same time.

EDF’s ties to the UK government hit the headlines earlier this year when The Times revealed that former energy secretary Sir Edward Davey had taken up a job with a lobbying firm that lists it as a client.

Having struck the deal with the company to build the UK’s first new nuclear power station in a generation in 2013, Davey began a part-time job with MHP Communications shortly after leaving parliament.

‘One of the worst deals ever’ for UK consumers

The deal for Hinkley Point C has been heavily criticised on both sides of the political spectrum. George Osborne’s father-in-law, Lord Howell, dubbed the project “one of the worst deals ever“ for British consumers when speaking in the House of Lords last August.

Last month, the National Audit Office warned that Hinkley may cost UK taxpayers £30bn in top-up payments and suggested that pursuing renewable energy projects might prove to be the cheaper option.

Others have raised concerns about the construction materials and methods being used in Hinkley, while movements at the board room level at EDF have suggested disquiet about the project.

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP who has long been a critic of Hinkley and of the relationship between the government and big energy companies, told Energydesk: “Companies such as the big six energy firms do not lend their staff to government for nothing – they expect a certain degree of influence, insider knowledge and preferential treatment in return.

“At such a pivotal time in the UK’s energy and climate change policy, as ministers must get to grips with the realities of climate change, rising costs and energy insecurity, the strong presence of vested interests is a real cause for concern. Given the growing consensus across political divides that Hinkley C is a disastrous policy decision, these revelations add to the feeling that the democratic process may have been undermined.”

EDF: ‘valuable opportunities for career development’

In a statement, EDF defended its relationship with the UK government:

“From time to time Government invites applicants from industry to take on secondments to Government bodies, in order to ensure that Government has access to specialist knowledge, for example in the nuclear field.

“Wherever possible, we will respond positively to any invitations as this can provide valuable opportunities for career development and cross-fertilisation of ideas between the public and private sector.”

Energydesk asked the government for comment, but they failed to respond.

Joe Sandler-Clarke is a UK-based journalist specialising in investigative and public interest stories. His writing has been published in the Guardian, Independent, The Sunday Times, VICE and others, and he curently works at Greenpeace UK.

This article was originally published on Greenpeace Energydesk.

The baffling internal mazes – both literal and bureaucratic – of large organizations continue to frustrate transformative change. The white-washed walls, the sterile air-conditioning, the faceless voice that speaks a united and impenetrable front to all outside of its security patrolled perimeter, construct the same repetitive monoliths across the world. Totalizing and distant, these strange anthropogenic webs push power to the peripheries of our society, more often than not out of sight and out of mind.

These large, faceless, acronymic IGOs, NGOs, NPOs, charities and philanthropic organizations tend to advocate for climate change action at a ‘systems level,’ arguing for a turn to the green economy through green industry, green business and green profit: Carbon reductions for margin increases.

After the rise of climate change awareness and activism in the 1960’s and its subsequent associations with the 60’s lifestyle, many groups acting on climate change have gone to great lengths to establish themselves as ‘professionals’ – ditching direct action in favour of direct phone calls to senior politicians.But does this systems-based approach, used by some of the most prominent environmental groups worldwide, in fact reify an unsustainable political economy of infinite growth on a finite planet?

The charitable-industrial complex – a term first coined in 2013 by the son of a billionaire philanthropist Peter Buffett – suggests that as wealth inequality widens charity becomes a channel to ‘launder’ the conscience of the rich whilst providing just enough for the poor: it ‘keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.’

The climate-industrial complex, then, allows rich nation states in the Global North to insist on mitigation measures in ‘developing’ economies whilst dragging their feet on transforming their own fossil-fuel intensive infrastructure. It also allows science to research adaptation methods with an historical amnesia regarding the contribution of already industrialized nations historical (and current) to carbon emissions. It allows too the continued plundering of resources and perpetuates the colonialism of extractive industry whilst creating space to both criticize the growth of ‘rapidly developing’ states and dismiss the rights, resilience and knowledge of Indigenous peoples and their alternate visions of development. 

Capitalizing on new markets for ‘sustainable’ goods simply reifies the neoliberal logic of exploitation that justifies the myth of infinite growth in free markets, increases the accumulation of wealth among the few, and continues to oppress people and the planet. Instead, we need to start thinking outside of the system we’re currently in, economics and all. This thinking doesn’t start with market logics, theories of ‘development’ or over-priced wholefoods stores located on High Streets that charge more for monthly rent then some people will earn in a year. It starts at home.

Last year at the talks for COP21 in Paris, Prince Charles said that reducing ‘only 1.7% of global annual consumption’ would put us on the ‘right low carbon path.’ When the 10 largest emitters are responsible for 72% of emissions and the smallest 100 are responsible for only 3%, it seems clear where the ability to enact real change lies. Yet, across the board we have seen very little policy and behavioral impetus to reduce consumption from the world’s biggest emitters and richest nation-states. Why is it that among those who are in the most privileged positions to enact the biggest change there is so little drive to accomplish it?

Perhaps it is sheer distance. It is now well-known that those who are least responsible for climate change are the most likely to have their lives impacted by its effects. For many in the Global South, climate change is a matter of survival. The representative for Nicaragua at COP21, Dr Paul Oquist, who refused to sign the Paris Agreement, argued that the tentative reductions by industrialized countries mean that even if the ‘floating’ 2 degrees Celsius target is met, it will result in the loss of jobs, food and lives across the Global South.

So why do we in the Global North continue to disavow what we know about climate change?

Beyond systems, change is embedded in identity and knowledge and values, in communities and in individuals. Often it is seen most in the things we are attached to emotionally: our long-haul holidays, our imported foods, our love of beef, those few extra degrees on the heating in wintertime, the glass bottle used for the wine we drink to celebrate a week’s hard work. It is already too late to wait for lifestyle subsidiaries like low carbon air-travel: we have to start the change ourselves.

There are modes of activism that attempt to enable us to do just that. Carbon Conversations is a six-part series that uses an understanding of values-based change to help us unlearn the climate-costly behaviours that have become intertwined with our understanding of who we are.

Even at a systems level, we are seeing an increase of institutes like the Green House Think Tank, the UK’s only post-growth think tank, consolidating itself as a fixture of the mainstream political establishment.

2016 has seen the opening of the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, a research center at Surrey University hoping to investigate and redefine ideas of growth, prosperity and happiness with the maxim: ‘How can we have more fun with less stuff?’ Also this year, Limits to Growth, the new All-Party Parliamentary Group has been started as a platform for ‘cross-party dialogue on economic growth in a time of environmental and social transition.’

Yet emotions and systems are not in binary opposition – they reflect, consolidate and change one another. Ultimately, however, the change relies on us, just as the Paris Agreement began with collective diplomatic efforts after the failed negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009.

Until we begin to address the values and emotions that drive our carbon consumption, that legitimize our colonial exploitation of communities and justify our pillaging of the planet, we cannot expect the market to make the shift to sustainability for us.

Climate justice begins at home.

This Author

Katie Arthur is one of the Ecologist’s NEW VOICES contributors. She is currently studying for a MSc in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, focusing on the decolonial intervention into climate change narratives and activism in the UK.  Katie has worked with the UNFCCC secretariat, The Surefoot Effect and the Glasgow University Environmental Sustainability Team. She has written for the MIT Center for Civic Media and Novara Media.

You can follow her on on the MIT Civic Media blog https://civic.mit.edu/users/katie-arthur or contact her by e-mail klarthur@mit.edu

Twitter: @ktlsrthr

Fresh evidence of links between the government and EDF Energy has led to concerns over the firm possibly receiving “preferential treatment” for its flagship nuclear project planned for Hinkley Point in Somerset.

Ten advisers and civil servants who worked at the now defunct Department for Energy Climate Change (DECC) in the last five years had ties to EDF, according to an analysis of online professional networking accounts by Energydesk.

This follows new Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to hit the brakes on Hinkley, calling for a review of the project mere hours after the EDF board finally voted to approve it.

Under David Cameron’s premiership, however, Hinkley was a top priority for the government, with then Chancellor George Osborne determinedly putting together a deal involving both French and Chinese government investors.

Dearly departed DECC

Among the 10 EDF-linked government employees is a regulatory and licensing officer currently working for the French company – recently employed by DECC and previously an operating reactors programme manager at the Office for Nuclear Regulation.

There also features an EDF strategy manager, who has been working for the company since 2014 following a 13-month secondment to DECC’s commercial team (from October 2011) while at previous employer KPMG.

DECC’s commercial team played a crucial role in deciding to press ahead with the Hinkley project and NNB Generation Company Limited, an EDF subsidiary, submitted a proposal to the National Planning Inspectorate for a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley on October 31st 2011.

Centrica’s Sarwjit Sambhi told MPs on the Energy and Climate Change committee in June 2012: “On nuclear what is important is making progress on what’s termed the investment instrument or FID-enabling instruments and clearly the DECC commercial team is very much focused on arriving at an instrument that is investable.”

A communications worker currently employed at EDF was previously Senior Ministerial Visits Manager at DECC from the summer of 2013 until early this year. Energydesk also identified a policy adviser and analyst working at DECC who had recently held similar positions at EDF.

As of August 2015, the French energy giant had one member of staff seconded at the department. None of the other big six energy companies had staff seconded at the same time.

EDF’s ties to the UK government hit the headlines earlier this year when The Times revealed that former energy secretary Sir Edward Davey had taken up a job with a lobbying firm that lists it as a client.

Having struck the deal with the company to build the UK’s first new nuclear power station in a generation in 2013, Davey began a part-time job with MHP Communications shortly after leaving parliament.

‘One of the worst deals ever’ for UK consumers

The deal for Hinkley Point C has been heavily criticised on both sides of the political spectrum. George Osborne’s father-in-law, Lord Howell, dubbed the project “one of the worst deals ever“ for British consumers when speaking in the House of Lords last August.

Last month, the National Audit Office warned that Hinkley may cost UK taxpayers £30bn in top-up payments and suggested that pursuing renewable energy projects might prove to be the cheaper option.

Others have raised concerns about the construction materials and methods being used in Hinkley, while movements at the board room level at EDF have suggested disquiet about the project.

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP who has long been a critic of Hinkley and of the relationship between the government and big energy companies, told Energydesk: “Companies such as the big six energy firms do not lend their staff to government for nothing – they expect a certain degree of influence, insider knowledge and preferential treatment in return.

“At such a pivotal time in the UK’s energy and climate change policy, as ministers must get to grips with the realities of climate change, rising costs and energy insecurity, the strong presence of vested interests is a real cause for concern. Given the growing consensus across political divides that Hinkley C is a disastrous policy decision, these revelations add to the feeling that the democratic process may have been undermined.”

EDF: ‘valuable opportunities for career development’

In a statement, EDF defended its relationship with the UK government:

“From time to time Government invites applicants from industry to take on secondments to Government bodies, in order to ensure that Government has access to specialist knowledge, for example in the nuclear field.

“Wherever possible, we will respond positively to any invitations as this can provide valuable opportunities for career development and cross-fertilisation of ideas between the public and private sector.”

Energydesk asked the government for comment, but they failed to respond.

Joe Sandler-Clarke is a UK-based journalist specialising in investigative and public interest stories. His writing has been published in the Guardian, Independent, The Sunday Times, VICE and others, and he curently works at Greenpeace UK.

This article was originally published on Greenpeace Energydesk.

The baffling internal mazes – both literal and bureaucratic – of large organizations continue to frustrate transformative change. The white-washed walls, the sterile air-conditioning, the faceless voice that speaks a united and impenetrable front to all outside of its security patrolled perimeter, construct the same repetitive monoliths across the world. Totalizing and distant, these strange anthropogenic webs push power to the peripheries of our society, more often than not out of sight and out of mind.

These large, faceless, acronymic IGOs, NGOs, NPOs, charities and philanthropic organizations tend to advocate for climate change action at a ‘systems level,’ arguing for a turn to the green economy through green industry, green business and green profit: Carbon reductions for margin increases.

After the rise of climate change awareness and activism in the 1960’s and its subsequent associations with the 60’s lifestyle, many groups acting on climate change have gone to great lengths to establish themselves as ‘professionals’ – ditching direct action in favour of direct phone calls to senior politicians.But does this systems-based approach, used by some of the most prominent environmental groups worldwide, in fact reify an unsustainable political economy of infinite growth on a finite planet?

The charitable-industrial complex – a term first coined in 2013 by the son of a billionaire philanthropist Peter Buffett – suggests that as wealth inequality widens charity becomes a channel to ‘launder’ the conscience of the rich whilst providing just enough for the poor: it ‘keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.’

The climate-industrial complex, then, allows rich nation states in the Global North to insist on mitigation measures in ‘developing’ economies whilst dragging their feet on transforming their own fossil-fuel intensive infrastructure. It also allows science to research adaptation methods with an historical amnesia regarding the contribution of already industrialized nations historical (and current) to carbon emissions. It allows too the continued plundering of resources and perpetuates the colonialism of extractive industry whilst creating space to both criticize the growth of ‘rapidly developing’ states and dismiss the rights, resilience and knowledge of Indigenous peoples and their alternate visions of development. 

Capitalizing on new markets for ‘sustainable’ goods simply reifies the neoliberal logic of exploitation that justifies the myth of infinite growth in free markets, increases the accumulation of wealth among the few, and continues to oppress people and the planet. Instead, we need to start thinking outside of the system we’re currently in, economics and all. This thinking doesn’t start with market logics, theories of ‘development’ or over-priced wholefoods stores located on High Streets that charge more for monthly rent then some people will earn in a year. It starts at home.

Last year at the talks for COP21 in Paris, Prince Charles said that reducing ‘only 1.7% of global annual consumption’ would put us on the ‘right low carbon path.’ When the 10 largest emitters are responsible for 72% of emissions and the smallest 100 are responsible for only 3%, it seems clear where the ability to enact real change lies. Yet, across the board we have seen very little policy and behavioral impetus to reduce consumption from the world’s biggest emitters and richest nation-states. Why is it that among those who are in the most privileged positions to enact the biggest change there is so little drive to accomplish it?

Perhaps it is sheer distance. It is now well-known that those who are least responsible for climate change are the most likely to have their lives impacted by its effects. For many in the Global South, climate change is a matter of survival. The representative for Nicaragua at COP21, Dr Paul Oquist, who refused to sign the Paris Agreement, argued that the tentative reductions by industrialized countries mean that even if the ‘floating’ 2 degrees Celsius target is met, it will result in the loss of jobs, food and lives across the Global South.

So why do we in the Global North continue to disavow what we know about climate change?

Beyond systems, change is embedded in identity and knowledge and values, in communities and in individuals. Often it is seen most in the things we are attached to emotionally: our long-haul holidays, our imported foods, our love of beef, those few extra degrees on the heating in wintertime, the glass bottle used for the wine we drink to celebrate a week’s hard work. It is already too late to wait for lifestyle subsidiaries like low carbon air-travel: we have to start the change ourselves.

There are modes of activism that attempt to enable us to do just that. Carbon Conversations is a six-part series that uses an understanding of values-based change to help us unlearn the climate-costly behaviours that have become intertwined with our understanding of who we are.

Even at a systems level, we are seeing an increase of institutes like the Green House Think Tank, the UK’s only post-growth think tank, consolidating itself as a fixture of the mainstream political establishment.

2016 has seen the opening of the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, a research center at Surrey University hoping to investigate and redefine ideas of growth, prosperity and happiness with the maxim: ‘How can we have more fun with less stuff?’ Also this year, Limits to Growth, the new All-Party Parliamentary Group has been started as a platform for ‘cross-party dialogue on economic growth in a time of environmental and social transition.’

Yet emotions and systems are not in binary opposition – they reflect, consolidate and change one another. Ultimately, however, the change relies on us, just as the Paris Agreement began with collective diplomatic efforts after the failed negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009.

Until we begin to address the values and emotions that drive our carbon consumption, that legitimize our colonial exploitation of communities and justify our pillaging of the planet, we cannot expect the market to make the shift to sustainability for us.

Climate justice begins at home.

This Author

Katie Arthur is one of the Ecologist’s NEW VOICES contributors. She is currently studying for a MSc in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, focusing on the decolonial intervention into climate change narratives and activism in the UK.  Katie has worked with the UNFCCC secretariat, The Surefoot Effect and the Glasgow University Environmental Sustainability Team. She has written for the MIT Center for Civic Media and Novara Media.

You can follow her on on the MIT Civic Media blog https://civic.mit.edu/users/katie-arthur or contact her by e-mail klarthur@mit.edu

Twitter: @ktlsrthr

Fresh evidence of links between the government and EDF Energy has led to concerns over the firm possibly receiving “preferential treatment” for its flagship nuclear project planned for Hinkley Point in Somerset.

Ten advisers and civil servants who worked at the now defunct Department for Energy Climate Change (DECC) in the last five years had ties to EDF, according to an analysis of online professional networking accounts by Energydesk.

This follows new Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to hit the brakes on Hinkley, calling for a review of the project mere hours after the EDF board finally voted to approve it.

Under David Cameron’s premiership, however, Hinkley was a top priority for the government, with then Chancellor George Osborne determinedly putting together a deal involving both French and Chinese government investors.

Dearly departed DECC

Among the 10 EDF-linked government employees is a regulatory and licensing officer currently working for the French company – recently employed by DECC and previously an operating reactors programme manager at the Office for Nuclear Regulation.

There also features an EDF strategy manager, who has been working for the company since 2014 following a 13-month secondment to DECC’s commercial team (from October 2011) while at previous employer KPMG.

DECC’s commercial team played a crucial role in deciding to press ahead with the Hinkley project and NNB Generation Company Limited, an EDF subsidiary, submitted a proposal to the National Planning Inspectorate for a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley on October 31st 2011.

Centrica’s Sarwjit Sambhi told MPs on the Energy and Climate Change committee in June 2012: “On nuclear what is important is making progress on what’s termed the investment instrument or FID-enabling instruments and clearly the DECC commercial team is very much focused on arriving at an instrument that is investable.”

A communications worker currently employed at EDF was previously Senior Ministerial Visits Manager at DECC from the summer of 2013 until early this year. Energydesk also identified a policy adviser and analyst working at DECC who had recently held similar positions at EDF.

As of August 2015, the French energy giant had one member of staff seconded at the department. None of the other big six energy companies had staff seconded at the same time.

EDF’s ties to the UK government hit the headlines earlier this year when The Times revealed that former energy secretary Sir Edward Davey had taken up a job with a lobbying firm that lists it as a client.

Having struck the deal with the company to build the UK’s first new nuclear power station in a generation in 2013, Davey began a part-time job with MHP Communications shortly after leaving parliament.

‘One of the worst deals ever’ for UK consumers

The deal for Hinkley Point C has been heavily criticised on both sides of the political spectrum. George Osborne’s father-in-law, Lord Howell, dubbed the project “one of the worst deals ever“ for British consumers when speaking in the House of Lords last August.

Last month, the National Audit Office warned that Hinkley may cost UK taxpayers £30bn in top-up payments and suggested that pursuing renewable energy projects might prove to be the cheaper option.

Others have raised concerns about the construction materials and methods being used in Hinkley, while movements at the board room level at EDF have suggested disquiet about the project.

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP who has long been a critic of Hinkley and of the relationship between the government and big energy companies, told Energydesk: “Companies such as the big six energy firms do not lend their staff to government for nothing – they expect a certain degree of influence, insider knowledge and preferential treatment in return.

“At such a pivotal time in the UK’s energy and climate change policy, as ministers must get to grips with the realities of climate change, rising costs and energy insecurity, the strong presence of vested interests is a real cause for concern. Given the growing consensus across political divides that Hinkley C is a disastrous policy decision, these revelations add to the feeling that the democratic process may have been undermined.”

EDF: ‘valuable opportunities for career development’

In a statement, EDF defended its relationship with the UK government:

“From time to time Government invites applicants from industry to take on secondments to Government bodies, in order to ensure that Government has access to specialist knowledge, for example in the nuclear field.

“Wherever possible, we will respond positively to any invitations as this can provide valuable opportunities for career development and cross-fertilisation of ideas between the public and private sector.”

Energydesk asked the government for comment, but they failed to respond.

Joe Sandler-Clarke is a UK-based journalist specialising in investigative and public interest stories. His writing has been published in the Guardian, Independent, The Sunday Times, VICE and others, and he curently works at Greenpeace UK.

This article was originally published on Greenpeace Energydesk.