If you build a complex machine which has the power to kill its builders, there should be a way to shut it down, to pull the plug.

In Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey the pilot had to physically crawl into the works of the ship’s computer HAL and pull out the memory chips when it killed all the crew.

When the Euratom Basic Safety Standards Directive (BSS) was put together in 1996, the European Parliament added a Suicide Clause.

If any new important scientific information emerged that the levels of exposure permitted by the Directive were wrong, that it was killing people, the whole process had to stop until a new Justification – a positive appraisal of the benefits of the nuclear industry against its public health impacts – was done.

I wrote about this recently in two articles on The Ecologist: ‘No to Bradwell’s ‘secret’ radioactive discharges to the sea’; and ‘Stopping Europe’s nuclear industry in its tracks: here’s how‘.

Justification is a fundamental requirement in permitting radiation exposures. It is based on the Utilarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Although this is outmoded and arguably unethical (Who gets the cost? Who gets the benefit? Not the same people) it is the way things are really done nowadays.

And in some cases this is inevitable (e.g. kidney dialysis vs. expensive terminal cancer treatment). Resources are allocated and political decisions made on the basis of quasi-economic arguments.

How much harm does 1 milliSievert of radiation cause?

The current dose limit for radiation exposures is 1mSv. A useful page of the USA BEIR VII report version shows what it is currently believed this does.

It says 1mSv causes a cancer in one person in 10,000 exposed. Let’s see an example: in the population of Paris (10.5 million) permitted exposures would result in 1,050 extra cancers. About 630 would die. These cancers are justified on the basis that the advantages gained to France by the practice (nuclear energy, atom bombs, etc.) balance the harm. Society believes this is an acceptable equation.

Same in London: 8.5 million population and 850 cancer diagnoses, 510 deaths. I bet you didn’t know this. Would you have agreed? Yet it is there as if you had. It is the law!

So in Paris, capital of a country with contamination from many nuclear plants, radiation at the maximum permitted level would cause a number of legally licensed radiation deaths far exceeding anything terrorists have achieved with their machine guns and bombs.

This is the current official position. The reality is far worse. On December 1st, I published a letter which makes this clear. It appeared in the prestigious American peer-review scientific journal Genetics and was written in response to an earlier paper on the effects of radiation by Bernard Jordan of the French Centre for Scientific Research in Marseilles.

Jordan’s article in a ‘Perspectives’ review ‘Marking the past – mapping the future’ was about how the public were unreasonably frightened of radiation because science had shown, through the studies of the survivors of Hiroshima: that low doses of radiation were pretty harmless; that you needed very high doses before you increased your chances of cancer; and as for genetic damage, that there was no evidence that radiation caused any effects whatever in humans. The current risk model for heritable effects is based on mice.

The scientific process at work …

Jordan’s article irritated me. Last summer I spent three weeks in the High Court submitting evidence about all this. A significant part of the information which emerged was that the Japanese A-Bomb studies that Jordan believed in and was peddling as the truth, were massively flawed and probably dishonestly manipulated.

I wrote to the overall editor of the Journal and pointed some of this out. To my delight and astonishment, he took me seriously and suggested I provide an account of this which he would send to three expert reviewers. If they passed it, he would publish it and give Jordan space to reply.

This is how science should work, but I have to say, it is rarely how science does work in this area of radiation. In 2015 I wrote to the editor of The Lancet about a disgraceful article on the issue of the A-Bomb studies which they published in their 60th anniversary of Hiroshima issue.

I pointed out that the authors of that travesty of the truth included Richard Wakeford, ex-nuclear industry Rottweiler. I asked to be provided some space to make the points about the failure of the A-Bomb studies. The Lancet refused.

I then wrote a letter and submitted it. Instead of sending it for review, they sent it to the authors of the article! Who (naturally) said there was no merit in what I was saying. The Lancet then threw it out.

In 2016, Alexey Yablokov, Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Alex Rosen and I sent a letter about the failure of the current risk model to the editor of The Lancet, recorded delivery, sent from Geneva by the Independent WHO. There was no reply from The Lancet. This is utterly disgraceful, and the editors who made those decisions should be sacked and shamed.

My Genetics letter is now out there, and it is the trigger, or one of the triggers, for invoking the Suicide Clause of the Euratom 96/29 and 2013/59 Basic Safety Standards Directives and thus shutting down all nuclear energy. At its core is the evidence that the entire basis of the current radiation risk model is false and dishonest.

Piltdown Man has nothing on the ‘Lifespan Study’ scientific fraud

Most people, including Jordan, believed (and he stated in his article) that the Japanese A-Bomb study consisted of looking for cancer and heritable effects in groups of people who were exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs exploded compared with groups who were not in the city but came in later.

So you have three exposed groups, near the bomb, further away and far away and one control group: not there when the bombs exploded. That might be a reasonable epidemiological study. And that is how the Lifespan Study (LSS) started in 1952.

But we discovered by some forensic digging into the annual reports of the outfit, that in 1973, when the early cancer effects began to be assembled, the US / Japanese Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) organisation which superseded the original US / Japanese Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) changed the study protocols in mid study.

Why? Because it emerged (and they wrote this in their 1973 report) that the Not-In-City control group were ‘too healthy’, making the health of those who were exposed look bad (which is exactly what it was). In other words, the cancer rates in the exposed group were too high for their liking.

So they decided to look only at those groups who were exposed and to assume that their cancer rates were linearly correlated with their doses. These doses were not measured, but were calculated mathematically from studies carried out with A-Bomb experiments in the Nevada desert.

This is how the cancer coefficients on which the current risk model are based were created! But they are wildly incorrect.

How do we know? Well, we know from the effects on the leukemia children at Sellafield and all the other nuclear sites, the effects on Thyroid Cancer at Fukushima, the cancer effects in Northern Sweden seen in the study by Martin Tondel, the effects seen in all the Chernobyl-affected countries of Europe reviewed by Alexey Yablokov and many other peer-reviewed studies published in the last 20 years.

‘The dose is too low’ – a familiar but now defunct refrain

But whenever these are discussed by government committees and nuclear industry apologists, it always comes back to the A-Bomb studies, and the arguments of Jordan, Wakeford and others like them. We are told to deny what we see because the dose is too low.

The ‘dose is too low’ means that it is too low on the basis of the A-Bomb studies. But if the A-Bomb studies are wrong, then everything fits. This is their Queen on the chessboard and it is taken – captured in the High Court in London.

The LSS dose group populations, whatever their assumed doses, all lived on the contaminated sites of the towns for many years after the bomb. This contamination was derived from the Uranium and Plutonium in the bomb casing and fissile material. My description is based on Expert and Disclosed evidence presented by Prof. Shoji Sawada and Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake in the Test Veteran case.

The up-draught from the rising fireball at Hiroshima and Nagasaki sucked in moist maritime air which cooled with altitude and condensed on the 95% un-fissioned Uranium nano-particles created in the plasma. This produced ‘black rain’ over an area which included all of the dose groups used for the LSS study where dose was calculated by distance from the hypocentre.

The Uranium was measured later in the contaminated areas. But the LSS studies denied the existence of any fallout.

I have been working on this A-Bomb study issue since 2010 in connection with various court cases in the USA. The obvious way to see the real effects of the exposures, external and internal is to compare the cancer rates of the LSS groups with cancer in the national population or some other unexposed control group.

I used all-Japan data to show that the LSS data were wrong, but never got round to finishing this work, which is tedious and costly in time and effort and no one would pay for it. But a Japanese epidemiologist, Tomoyuki Wanatabe and colleagues did something similar in 2008.

Highest cancer rate / unit dose found in the lowest radiation exposure group

They employed the adjacent Okayama prefecture as control and compared age and sex specific cancer rates between 1971 and 1990. They found that there were significantly greater levels of cancer in all the exposed groups – including the LSS lowest dose controls compared with the Okayama control group, but also (to a lesser extent) when compared with an all-Hiroshima control group.

When compared with Okayama, the highest cancer effect per unit dose was seen in the lowest dose LSS group, where there was a 33% excess risk of all cancer in men at external doses estimated at 0-5mSv. The authors write: “the contribution of residual radiation, ignored in LSS is suggested to be fairly high.”

We can make a rough assessment of how high. As calculated by the current risk model, this dose group 0-5mSv would not have received more than 1mSv from the internal black rain Uranium particles, and probably less. So being very conservative, let’s assume that it is 1mSv.

Then that means that instead of the 1 cancer per 100,000 per 1mSv, we have a 33% increase on the background rate of about 450 cancers from other causes, which is 148 cancers.

This number, 148 times more than ‘official’ estimates, is the minimum error that Wanatabe’s research defines in the LSS study. The real number is higher because the true internal dose (as calculated by the current model) is lower.

Incidentally, you may wonder why low doses of radiation had a more powerful effect than higher doses, per unit of radiation. Here is my explanation. Cancer arises when the DNA in cells is damaged, but the cells are not killed. Higher radiation doses are more likely to kill cells outright. So the lower doses are disproportionately carcinogenic.

Radiation is most definitely not good for you!

By the way, the internal dose to England and Wales from global weapons fallout that came down with the rain in the period 1959-63 was about 1mSv according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR.

This caused an increase in infant mortality at the time of about 5%, and 20 years later the cancer rate had increased in real terms (age standardised) by about 35% – which fits pretty well with the Wanatabe 2008 finding.

It is these results and others in similar populations that are the basis of the risk model of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) which I helped develop in 2003 and by now (in the ECRR 2010 publication) has been shown to be pretty accurate if you want to know the outcome of any exposure.

So this realisation and evidence that the LSS dishonestly discarded its control group when it looked like there would a result, feeds through to the ‘justification’ issue. There is now no defence. Of course they will wriggle and wriggle, telling us that radiation is good for you, Sellafield leukemias are caused by population mixing, and such such nonsense).

In fact Jordan replied to my letter in very much those terms. He wriggled and wriggled and (predictably) referred to how radiation might be good for you. But no one said we were wrong. No one said that they didn’t discard the control group. And that means that no one can any more say the dose is too low. There is no referent.

The silent massacre

We are taking the war to the regulators and Euratom legislators now. No one can justify a regime where the number of deaths in Paris from a dose of 1 mSv become not 1,000, but 93,000. That is a massacre. And legally this is not a single exposure but can occur every year!

And it has been a silent global massacre.

You all have friends and family that have died from cancer. About one in four of those, maybe more, was due to the radiation in the weapons fallout in the 1960s. Unless they lived near Hinkley Point, Trawsfynydd, Bradwell, Sellafield or some other nuclear site or contaminated estuary which added its own further excess risk.

The death yield from Chernobyl has been epic, as Yablokov and others have shown. Sellafield discharges to the Irish Sea are the cause of the 10-fold excess child leukemia at Seascale, as everyone always thought, but which the government’s tame committees can’t explain because the basis of the dose being too low.

They are also the cause of the childhood cancer increases on the coast of Wales – which the Wales Cancer Intelligence (Yes!) Unit deny though fixing the numbers and environmental journalist George Monbiot believes because he knows no better. And the adult cancer increases in Wales also.

All these manifestations of radiation toxicity are denied on the basis of what forensic research now shows is a totally dishonest and manipulated study in Japan, paid for (and no doubt orchestrated by) the United States so as to permit bomb development. And as for Fukushima, watch this space. The thyroid cancers have already appeared.

Anyway, I want to thank the brave American Genetics Society editors, for allowing me to say this in their prestigious journal.

Let’s invoke the Suicide Clause and pull the plug on the monster. It’s simple.

Action: Submit your own claim for rejustification: UK; Ireland; all other EU countries.

The letter: ‘Letter to the Editor on ‘The Hiroshima/Nagasaki Survivor Studies: Discrepancies Between Results and General Perception’ by Bertrand R. Jordan‘. is by Christopher Busby and published in Genetics December 1, 2016 vol. 204 no. 4 1627-1629; DOI: 10.1534/genetics.116.195339. The letter is not open access, but the text can be found at the back of the Euratom Justification Campaign templates.

More information at www.greenaudit.org.

If you build a complex machine which has the power to kill its builders, there should be a way to shut it down, to pull the plug.

In Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey the pilot had to physically crawl into the works of the ship’s computer HAL and pull out the memory chips when it killed all the crew.

When the Euratom Basic Safety Standards Directive (BSS) was put together in 1996, the European Parliament added a Suicide Clause.

If any new important scientific information emerged that the levels of exposure permitted by the Directive were wrong, that it was killing people, the whole process had to stop until a new Justification – a positive appraisal of the benefits of the nuclear industry against its public health impacts – was done.

I wrote about this recently in two articles on The Ecologist: ‘No to Bradwell’s ‘secret’ radioactive discharges to the sea’; and ‘Stopping Europe’s nuclear industry in its tracks: here’s how‘.

Justification is a fundamental requirement in permitting radiation exposures. It is based on the Utilarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Although this is outmoded and arguably unethical (Who gets the cost? Who gets the benefit? Not the same people) it is the way things are really done nowadays.

And in some cases this is inevitable (e.g. kidney dialysis vs. expensive terminal cancer treatment). Resources are allocated and political decisions made on the basis of quasi-economic arguments.

How much harm does 1 milliSievert of radiation cause?

The current dose limit for radiation exposures is 1mSv. A useful page of the USA BEIR VII report version shows what it is currently believed this does.

It says 1mSv causes a cancer in one person in 10,000 exposed. Let’s see an example: in the population of Paris (10.5 million) permitted exposures would result in 1,050 extra cancers. About 630 would die. These cancers are justified on the basis that the advantages gained to France by the practice (nuclear energy, atom bombs, etc.) balance the harm. Society believes this is an acceptable equation.

Same in London: 8.5 million population and 850 cancer diagnoses, 510 deaths. I bet you didn’t know this. Would you have agreed? Yet it is there as if you had. It is the law!

So in Paris, capital of a country with contamination from many nuclear plants, radiation at the maximum permitted level would cause a number of legally licensed radiation deaths far exceeding anything terrorists have achieved with their machine guns and bombs.

This is the current official position. The reality is far worse. On December 1st, I published a letter which makes this clear. It appeared in the prestigious American peer-review scientific journal Genetics and was written in response to an earlier paper on the effects of radiation by Bernard Jordan of the French Centre for Scientific Research in Marseilles.

Jordan’s article in a ‘Perspectives’ review ‘Marking the past – mapping the future’ was about how the public were unreasonably frightened of radiation because science had shown, through the studies of the survivors of Hiroshima: that low doses of radiation were pretty harmless; that you needed very high doses before you increased your chances of cancer; and as for genetic damage, that there was no evidence that radiation caused any effects whatever in humans. The current risk model for heritable effects is based on mice.

The scientific process at work …

Jordan’s article irritated me. Last summer I spent three weeks in the High Court submitting evidence about all this. A significant part of the information which emerged was that the Japanese A-Bomb studies that Jordan believed in and was peddling as the truth, were massively flawed and probably dishonestly manipulated.

I wrote to the overall editor of the Journal and pointed some of this out. To my delight and astonishment, he took me seriously and suggested I provide an account of this which he would send to three expert reviewers. If they passed it, he would publish it and give Jordan space to reply.

This is how science should work, but I have to say, it is rarely how science does work in this area of radiation. In 2015 I wrote to the editor of The Lancet about a disgraceful article on the issue of the A-Bomb studies which they published in their 60th anniversary of Hiroshima issue.

I pointed out that the authors of that travesty of the truth included Richard Wakeford, ex-nuclear industry Rottweiler. I asked to be provided some space to make the points about the failure of the A-Bomb studies. The Lancet refused.

I then wrote a letter and submitted it. Instead of sending it for review, they sent it to the authors of the article! Who (naturally) said there was no merit in what I was saying. The Lancet then threw it out.

In 2016, Alexey Yablokov, Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Alex Rosen and I sent a letter about the failure of the current risk model to the editor of The Lancet, recorded delivery, sent from Geneva by the Independent WHO. There was no reply from The Lancet. This is utterly disgraceful, and the editors who made those decisions should be sacked and shamed.

My Genetics letter is now out there, and it is the trigger, or one of the triggers, for invoking the Suicide Clause of the Euratom 96/29 and 2013/59 Basic Safety Standards Directives and thus shutting down all nuclear energy. At its core is the evidence that the entire basis of the current radiation risk model is false and dishonest.

Piltdown Man has nothing on the ‘Lifespan Study’ scientific fraud

Most people, including Jordan, believed (and he stated in his article) that the Japanese A-Bomb study consisted of looking for cancer and heritable effects in groups of people who were exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs exploded compared with groups who were not in the city but came in later.

So you have three exposed groups, near the bomb, further away and far away and one control group: not there when the bombs exploded. That might be a reasonable epidemiological study. And that is how the Lifespan Study (LSS) started in 1952.

But we discovered by some forensic digging into the annual reports of the outfit, that in 1973, when the early cancer effects began to be assembled, the US / Japanese Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) organisation which superseded the original US / Japanese Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) changed the study protocols in mid study.

Why? Because it emerged (and they wrote this in their 1973 report) that the Not-In-City control group were ‘too healthy’, making the health of those who were exposed look bad (which is exactly what it was). In other words, the cancer rates in the exposed group were too high for their liking.

So they decided to look only at those groups who were exposed and to assume that their cancer rates were linearly correlated with their doses. These doses were not measured, but were calculated mathematically from studies carried out with A-Bomb experiments in the Nevada desert.

This is how the cancer coefficients on which the current risk model are based were created! But they are wildly incorrect.

How do we know? Well, we know from the effects on the leukemia children at Sellafield and all the other nuclear sites, the effects on Thyroid Cancer at Fukushima, the cancer effects in Northern Sweden seen in the study by Martin Tondel, the effects seen in all the Chernobyl-affected countries of Europe reviewed by Alexey Yablokov and many other peer-reviewed studies published in the last 20 years.

‘The dose is too low’ – a familiar but now defunct refrain

But whenever these are discussed by government committees and nuclear industry apologists, it always comes back to the A-Bomb studies, and the arguments of Jordan, Wakeford and others like them. We are told to deny what we see because the dose is too low.

The ‘dose is too low’ means that it is too low on the basis of the A-Bomb studies. But if the A-Bomb studies are wrong, then everything fits. This is their Queen on the chessboard and it is taken – captured in the High Court in London.

The LSS dose group populations, whatever their assumed doses, all lived on the contaminated sites of the towns for many years after the bomb. This contamination was derived from the Uranium and Plutonium in the bomb casing and fissile material. My description is based on Expert and Disclosed evidence presented by Prof. Shoji Sawada and Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake in the Test Veteran case.

The up-draught from the rising fireball at Hiroshima and Nagasaki sucked in moist maritime air which cooled with altitude and condensed on the 95% un-fissioned Uranium nano-particles created in the plasma. This produced ‘black rain’ over an area which included all of the dose groups used for the LSS study where dose was calculated by distance from the hypocentre.

The Uranium was measured later in the contaminated areas. But the LSS studies denied the existence of any fallout.

I have been working on this A-Bomb study issue since 2010 in connection with various court cases in the USA. The obvious way to see the real effects of the exposures, external and internal is to compare the cancer rates of the LSS groups with cancer in the national population or some other unexposed control group.

I used all-Japan data to show that the LSS data were wrong, but never got round to finishing this work, which is tedious and costly in time and effort and no one would pay for it. But a Japanese epidemiologist, Tomoyuki Wanatabe and colleagues did something similar in 2008.

Highest cancer rate / unit dose found in the lowest radiation exposure group

They employed the adjacent Okayama prefecture as control and compared age and sex specific cancer rates between 1971 and 1990. They found that there were significantly greater levels of cancer in all the exposed groups – including the LSS lowest dose controls compared with the Okayama control group, but also (to a lesser extent) when compared with an all-Hiroshima control group.

When compared with Okayama, the highest cancer effect per unit dose was seen in the lowest dose LSS group, where there was a 33% excess risk of all cancer in men at external doses estimated at 0-5mSv. The authors write: “the contribution of residual radiation, ignored in LSS is suggested to be fairly high.”

We can make a rough assessment of how high. As calculated by the current risk model, this dose group 0-5mSv would not have received more than 1mSv from the internal black rain Uranium particles, and probably less. So being very conservative, let’s assume that it is 1mSv.

Then that means that instead of the 1 cancer per 100,000 per 1mSv, we have a 33% increase on the background rate of about 450 cancers from other causes, which is 148 cancers.

This number, 148 times more than ‘official’ estimates, is the minimum error that Wanatabe’s research defines in the LSS study. The real number is higher because the true internal dose (as calculated by the current model) is lower.

Radiation is most definitely not good for you!

By the way, the internal dose to England and Wales from global weapons fallout that came down with the rain in the period 1959-63 was about 1mSv according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR.

This caused an increase in infant mortality at the time of about 5%, and 20 years later the cancer rate had increased in real terms (age standardised) by about 35% – which fits pretty well with the Wanatabe 2008 finding.

It is these results and others in similar populations that are the basis of the risk model of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) which I helped develop in 2003 and by now (in the ECRR 2010 publication) has been shown to be pretty accurate if you want to know the outcome of any exposure.

So this realisation and evidence that the LSS dishonestly discarded its control group when it looked like there would a result, feeds through to the ‘justification’ issue. There is now no defence. Of course they will wriggle and wriggle, telling us that radiation is good for you, Sellafield leukemias are caused by population mixing, and such such nonsense).

In fact Jordan replied to my letter in very much those terms. He wriggled and wriggled and (predictably) referred to how radiation might be good for you. But no one said we were wrong. No one said that they didn’t discard the control group. And that means that no one can any more say the dose is too low. There is no referent.

The silent massacre

We are taking the war to the regulators and Euratom legislators now. No one can justify a regime where the number of deaths in Paris from a dose of 1 mSv become not 1,000, but 93,000. That is a massacre. And legally this is not a single exposure but can occur every year!

And it has been a silent global massacre.

You all have friends and family that have died from cancer. About one in four of those, maybe more, was due to the radiation in the weapons fallout in the 1960s. Unless they lived near Hinkley Point, Trawsfynydd, Bradwell, Sellafield or some other nuclear site or contaminated estuary which added its own further excess risk.

The death yield from Chernobyl has been epic, as Yablokov and others have shown. Sellafield discharges to the Irish Sea are the cause of the 10-fold excess child leukemia at Seascale, as everyone always thought, but which the government’s tame committees can’t explain because the basis of the dose being too low.

They are also the cause of the childhood cancer increases on the coast of Wales – which the Wales Cancer Intelligence (Yes!) Unit deny though fixing the numbers and environmental journalist George Monbiot believes because he knows no better. And the adult cancer increases in Wales also.

All these manifestations of radiation toxicity are denied on the basis of what forensic research now shows is a totally dishonest and manipulated study in Japan, paid for (and no doubt orchestrated by) the United States so as to permit bomb development. And as for Fukushima, watch this space. The thyroid cancers have already appeared.

Anyway, I want to thank the brave American Genetics Society editors, for allowing me to say this in their prestigious journal.

Let’s invoke the Suicide Clause and pull the plug on the monster. It’s simple.

Action: Submit your own claim for rejustification: UK; Ireland; all other EU countries.

The letter: ‘Letter to the Editor on ‘The Hiroshima/Nagasaki Survivor Studies: Discrepancies Between Results and General Perception’ by Bertrand R. Jordan‘. is by Christopher Busby and published in Genetics December 1, 2016 vol. 204 no. 4 1627-1629; DOI: 10.1534/genetics.116.195339. The letter is not open access, but the text can be found at the back of the Euratom Justification Campaign templates.

More information at www.greenaudit.org.

If you build a complex machine which has the power to kill its builders, there should be a way to shut it down, to pull the plug.

In Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey the pilot had to physically crawl into the works of the ship’s computer HAL and pull out the memory chips when it killed all the crew.

When the Euratom Basic Safety Standards Directive (BSS) was put together in 1996, the European Parliament added a Suicide Clause.

If any new important scientific information emerged that the levels of exposure permitted by the Directive were wrong, that it was killing people, the whole process had to stop until a new Justification – a positive appraisal of the benefits of the nuclear industry against its public health impacts – was done.

I wrote about this recently in two articles on The Ecologist: ‘No to Bradwell’s ‘secret’ radioactive discharges to the sea’; and ‘Stopping Europe’s nuclear industry in its tracks: here’s how‘.

Justification is a fundamental requirement in permitting radiation exposures. It is based on the Utilarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Although this is outmoded and arguably unethical (Who gets the cost? Who gets the benefit? Not the same people) it is the way things are really done nowadays.

And in some cases this is inevitable (e.g. kidney dialysis vs. expensive terminal cancer treatment). Resources are allocated and political decisions made on the basis of quasi-economic arguments.

How much harm does 1 milliSievert of radiation cause?

The current dose limit for radiation exposures is 1mSv. A useful page of the USA BEIR VII report version shows what it is currently believed this does.

It says 1mSv causes a cancer in one person in 10,000 exposed. Let’s see an example: in the population of Paris (10.5 million) permitted exposures would result in 1,050 extra cancers. About 630 would die. These cancers are justified on the basis that the advantages gained to France by the practice (nuclear energy, atom bombs, etc.) balance the harm. Society believes this is an acceptable equation.

Same in London: 8.5 million population and 850 cancer diagnoses, 510 deaths. I bet you didn’t know this. Would you have agreed? Yet it is there as if you had. It is the law!

So in Paris, capital of a country with contamination from many nuclear plants, radiation at the maximum permitted level would cause a number of legally licensed radiation deaths far exceeding anything terrorists have achieved with their machine guns and bombs.

This is the current official position. The reality is far worse. On December 1st, I published a letter which makes this clear. It appeared in the prestigious American peer-review scientific journal Genetics and was written in response to an earlier paper on the effects of radiation by Bernard Jordan of the French Centre for Scientific Research in Marseilles.

Jordan’s article in a ‘Perspectives’ review ‘Marking the past – mapping the future’ was about how the public were unreasonably frightened of radiation because science had shown, through the studies of the survivors of Hiroshima: that low doses of radiation were pretty harmless; that you needed very high doses before you increased your chances of cancer; and as for genetic damage, that there was no evidence that radiation caused any effects whatever in humans. The current risk model for heritable effects is based on mice.

The scientific process at work …

Jordan’s article irritated me. Last summer I spent three weeks in the High Court submitting evidence about all this. A significant part of the information which emerged was that the Japanese A-Bomb studies that Jordan believed in and was peddling as the truth, were massively flawed and probably dishonestly manipulated.

I wrote to the overall editor of the Journal and pointed some of this out. To my delight and astonishment, he took me seriously and suggested I provide an account of this which he would send to three expert reviewers. If they passed it, he would publish it and give Jordan space to reply.

This is how science should work, but I have to say, it is rarely how science does work in this area of radiation. In 2015 I wrote to the editor of The Lancet about a disgraceful article on the issue of the A-Bomb studies which they published in their 60th anniversary of Hiroshima issue.

I pointed out that the authors of that travesty of the truth included Richard Wakeford, ex-nuclear industry Rottweiler. I asked to be provided some space to make the points about the failure of the A-Bomb studies. The Lancet refused.

I then wrote a letter and submitted it. Instead of sending it for review, they sent it to the authors of the article! Who (naturally) said there was no merit in what I was saying. The Lancet then threw it out.

In 2016, Alexey Yablokov, Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Alex Rosen and I sent a letter about the failure of the current risk model to the editor of The Lancet, recorded delivery, sent from Geneva by the Independent WHO. There was no reply from The Lancet. This is utterly disgraceful, and the editors who made those decisions should be sacked and shamed.

My Genetics letter is now out there, and it is the trigger, or one of the triggers, for invoking the Suicide Clause of the Euratom 96/29 and 2013/59 Basic Safety Standards Directives and thus shutting down all nuclear energy. At its core is the evidence that the entire basis of the current radiation risk model is false and dishonest.

Piltdown Man has nothing on the ‘Lifespan Study’ scientific fraud

Most people, including Jordan, believed (and he stated in his article) that the Japanese A-Bomb study consisted of looking for cancer and heritable effects in groups of people who were exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs exploded compared with groups who were not in the city but came in later.

So you have three exposed groups, near the bomb, further away and far away and one control group: not there when the bombs exploded. That might be a reasonable epidemiological study. And that is how the Lifespan Study (LSS) started in 1952.

But we discovered by some forensic digging into the annual reports of the outfit, that in 1973, when the early cancer effects began to be assembled, the US / Japanese Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) organisation which superseded the original US / Japanese Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) changed the study protocols in mid study.

Why? Because it emerged (and they wrote this in their 1973 report) that the Not-In-City control group were ‘too healthy’, making the health of those who were exposed look bad (which is exactly what it was). In other words, the cancer rates in the exposed group were too high for their liking.

So they decided to look only at those groups who were exposed and to assume that their cancer rates were linearly correlated with their doses. These doses were not measured, but were calculated mathematically from studies carried out with A-Bomb experiments in the Nevada desert.

This is how the cancer coefficients on which the current risk model are based were created! But they are wildly incorrect.

How do we know? Well, we know from the effects on the leukemia children at Sellafield and all the other nuclear sites, the effects on Thyroid Cancer at Fukushima, the cancer effects in Northern Sweden seen in the study by Martin Tondel, the effects seen in all the Chernobyl-affected countries of Europe reviewed by Alexey Yablokov and many other peer-reviewed studies published in the last 20 years.

‘The dose is too low’ – a familiar but now defunct refrain

But whenever these are discussed by government committees and nuclear industry apologists, it always comes back to the A-Bomb studies, and the arguments of Jordan, Wakeford and others like them. We are told to deny what we see because the dose is too low.

The ‘dose is too low’ means that it is too low on the basis of the A-Bomb studies. But if the A-Bomb studies are wrong, then everything fits. This is their Queen on the chessboard and it is taken – captured in the High Court in London.

The LSS dose group populations, whatever their assumed doses, all lived on the contaminated sites of the towns for many years after the bomb. This contamination was derived from the Uranium and Plutonium in the bomb casing and fissile material. My description is based on Expert and Disclosed evidence presented by Prof. Shoji Sawada and Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake in the Test Veteran case.

The up-draught from the rising fireball at Hiroshima and Nagasaki sucked in moist maritime air which cooled with altitude and condensed on the 95% un-fissioned Uranium nano-particles created in the plasma. This produced ‘black rain’ over an area which included all of the dose groups used for the LSS study where dose was calculated by distance from the hypocentre.

The Uranium was measured later in the contaminated areas. But the LSS studies denied the existence of any fallout.

I have been working on this A-Bomb study issue since 2010 in connection with various court cases in the USA. The obvious way to see the real effects of the exposures, external and internal is to compare the cancer rates of the LSS groups with cancer in the national population or some other unexposed control group.

I used all-Japan data to show that the LSS data were wrong, but never got round to finishing this work, which is tedious and costly in time and effort and no one would pay for it. But a Japanese epidemiologist, Tomoyuki Wanatabe and colleagues did something similar in 2008.

Highest cancer rate / unit dose found in the lowest radiation exposure group

They employed the adjacent Okayama prefecture as control and compared age and sex specific cancer rates between 1971 and 1990. They found that there were significantly greater levels of cancer in all the exposed groups – including the LSS lowest dose controls compared with the Okayama control group, but also (to a lesser extent) when compared with an all-Hiroshima control group.

When compared with Okayama, the highest cancer effect per unit dose was seen in the lowest dose LSS group, where there was a 33% excess risk of all cancer in men at external doses estimated at 0-5mSv. The authors write: “the contribution of residual radiation, ignored in LSS is suggested to be fairly high.”

We can make a rough assessment of how high. As calculated by the current risk model, this dose group 0-5mSv would not have received more than 1mSv from the internal black rain Uranium particles, and probably less. So being very conservative, let’s assume that it is 1mSv.

Then that means that instead of the 1 cancer per 100,000 per 1mSv, we have a 33% increase on the background rate of about 450 cancers from other causes, which is 148 cancers.

This number, 148 times more than ‘official’ estimates, is the minimum error that Wanatabe’s research defines in the LSS study. The real number is higher because the true internal dose (as calculated by the current model) is lower.

Radiation is most definitely not good for you!

By the way, the internal dose to England and Wales from global weapons fallout that came down with the rain in the period 1959-63 was about 1mSv according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR.

This caused an increase in infant mortality at the time of about 5%, and 20 years later the cancer rate had increased in real terms (age standardised) by about 35% – which fits pretty well with the Wanatabe 2008 finding.

It is these results and others in similar populations that are the basis of the risk model of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) which I helped develop in 2003 and by now (in the ECRR 2010 publication) has been shown to be pretty accurate if you want to know the outcome of any exposure.

So this realisation and evidence that the LSS dishonestly discarded its control group when it looked like there would a result, feeds through to the ‘justification’ issue. There is now no defence. Of course they will wriggle and wriggle, telling us that radiation is good for you, Sellafield leukemias are caused by population mixing, and such such nonsense).

In fact Jordan replied to my letter in very much those terms. He wriggled and wriggled and (predictably) referred to how radiation might be good for you. But no one said we were wrong. No one said that they didn’t discard the control group. And that means that no one can any more say the dose is too low. There is no referent.

The silent massacre

We are taking the war to the regulators and Euratom legislators now. No one can justify a regime where the number of deaths in Paris from a dose of 1 mSv become not 1,000, but 93,000. That is a massacre. And legally this is not a single exposure but can occur every year!

And it has been a silent global massacre.

You all have friends and family that have died from cancer. About one in four of those, maybe more, was due to the radiation in the weapons fallout in the 1960s. Unless they lived near Hinkley Point, Trawsfynydd, Bradwell, Sellafield or some other nuclear site or contaminated estuary which added its own further excess risk.

The death yield from Chernobyl has been epic, as Yablokov and others have shown. Sellafield discharges to the Irish Sea are the cause of the 10-fold excess child leukemia at Seascale, as everyone always thought, but which the government’s tame committees can’t explain because the basis of the dose being too low.

They are also the cause of the childhood cancer increases on the coast of Wales – which the Wales Cancer Intelligence (Yes!) Unit deny though fixing the numbers and environmental journalist George Monbiot believes because he knows no better. And the adult cancer increases in Wales also.

All these manifestations of radiation toxicity are denied on the basis of what forensic research now shows is a totally dishonest and manipulated study in Japan, paid for (and no doubt orchestrated by) the United States so as to permit bomb development. And as for Fukushima, watch this space. The thyroid cancers have already appeared.

Anyway, I want to thank the brave American Genetics Society editors, for allowing me to say this in their prestigious journal.

Let’s invoke the Suicide Clause and pull the plug on the monster. It’s simple.

Action: Submit your own claim for rejustification: UK; Ireland; all other EU countries.

The letter: ‘Letter to the Editor on ‘The Hiroshima/Nagasaki Survivor Studies: Discrepancies Between Results and General Perception’ by Bertrand R. Jordan‘. is by Christopher Busby and published in Genetics December 1, 2016 vol. 204 no. 4 1627-1629; DOI: 10.1534/genetics.116.195339. The letter is not open access, but the text can be found at the back of the Euratom Justification Campaign templates.

More information at www.greenaudit.org.

If you build a complex machine which has the power to kill its builders, there should be a way to shut it down, to pull the plug.

In Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey the pilot had to physically crawl into the works of the ship’s computer HAL and pull out the memory chips when it killed all the crew.

When the Euratom Basic Safety Standards Directive (BSS) was put together in 1996, the European Parliament added a Suicide Clause.

If any new important scientific information emerged that the levels of exposure permitted by the Directive were wrong, that it was killing people, the whole process had to stop until a new Justification – a positive appraisal of the benefits of the nuclear industry against its public health impacts – was done.

I wrote about this recently in two articles on The Ecologist: ‘No to Bradwell’s ‘secret’ radioactive discharges to the sea’; and ‘Stopping Europe’s nuclear industry in its tracks: here’s how‘.

Justification is a fundamental requirement in permitting radiation exposures. It is based on the Utilarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Although this is outmoded and arguably unethical (Who gets the cost? Who gets the benefit? Not the same people) it is the way things are really done nowadays.

And in some cases this is inevitable (e.g. kidney dialysis vs. expensive terminal cancer treatment). Resources are allocated and political decisions made on the basis of quasi-economic arguments.

How much harm does 1 milliSievert of radiation cause?

The current dose limit for radiation exposures is 1mSv. A useful page of the USA BEIR VII report version shows what it is currently believed this does.

It says 1mSv causes a cancer in one person in 10,000 exposed. Let’s see an example: in the population of Paris (10.5 million) permitted exposures would result in 1,050 extra cancers. About 630 would die. These cancers are justified on the basis that the advantages gained to France by the practice (nuclear energy, atom bombs, etc.) balance the harm. Society believes this is an acceptable equation.

Same in London: 8.5 million population and 850 cancer diagnoses, 510 deaths. I bet you didn’t know this. Would you have agreed? Yet it is there as if you had. It is the law!

So in Paris, capital of a country with contamination from many nuclear plants, radiation at the maximum permitted level would cause a number of legally licensed radiation deaths far exceeding anything terrorists have achieved with their machine guns and bombs.

This is the current official position. The reality is far worse. On December 1st, I published a letter which makes this clear. It appeared in the prestigious American peer-review scientific journal Genetics and was written in response to an earlier paper on the effects of radiation by Bernard Jordan of the French Centre for Scientific Research in Marseilles.

Jordan’s article in a ‘Perspectives’ review ‘Marking the past – mapping the future’ was about how the public were unreasonably frightened of radiation because science had shown, through the studies of the survivors of Hiroshima: that low doses of radiation were pretty harmless; that you needed very high doses before you increased your chances of cancer; and as for genetic damage, that there was no evidence that radiation caused any effects whatever in humans. The current risk model for heritable effects is based on mice.

The scientific process at work …

Jordan’s article irritated me. Last summer I spent three weeks in the High Court submitting evidence about all this. A significant part of the information which emerged was that the Japanese A-Bomb studies that Jordan believed in and was peddling as the truth, were massively flawed and probably dishonestly manipulated.

I wrote to the overall editor of the Journal and pointed some of this out. To my delight and astonishment, he took me seriously and suggested I provide an account of this which he would send to three expert reviewers. If they passed it, he would publish it and give Jordan space to reply.

This is how science should work, but I have to say, it is rarely how science does work in this area of radiation. In 2015 I wrote to the editor of The Lancet about a disgraceful article on the issue of the A-Bomb studies which they published in their 60th anniversary of Hiroshima issue.

I pointed out that the authors of that travesty of the truth included Richard Wakeford, ex-nuclear industry Rottweiler. I asked to be provided some space to make the points about the failure of the A-Bomb studies. The Lancet refused.

I then wrote a letter and submitted it. Instead of sending it for review, they sent it to the authors of the article! Who (naturally) said there was no merit in what I was saying. The Lancet then threw it out.

In 2016, Alexey Yablokov, Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Alex Rosen and I sent a letter about the failure of the current risk model to the editor of The Lancet, recorded delivery, sent from Geneva by the Independent WHO. There was no reply from The Lancet. This is utterly disgraceful, and the editors who made those decisions should be sacked and shamed.

My Genetics letter is now out there, and it is the trigger, or one of the triggers, for invoking the Suicide Clause of the Euratom 96/29 and 2013/59 Basic Safety Standards Directives and thus shutting down all nuclear energy. At its core is the evidence that the entire basis of the current radiation risk model is false and dishonest.

Piltdown Man has nothing on the ‘Lifespan Study’ scientific fraud

Most people, including Jordan, believed (and he stated in his article) that the Japanese A-Bomb study consisted of looking for cancer and heritable effects in groups of people who were exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs exploded compared with groups who were not in the city but came in later.

So you have three exposed groups, near the bomb, further away and far away and one control group: not there when the bombs exploded. That might be a reasonable epidemiological study. And that is how the Lifespan Study (LSS) started in 1952.

But we discovered by some forensic digging into the annual reports of the outfit, that in 1973, when the early cancer effects began to be assembled, the US / Japanese Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) organisation which superseded the original US / Japanese Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) changed the study protocols in mid study.

Why? Because it emerged (and they wrote this in their 1973 report) that the Not-In-City control group were ‘too healthy’, making the health of those who were exposed look bad (which is exactly what it was). In other words, the cancer rates in the exposed group were too high for their liking.

So they decided to look only at those groups who were exposed and to assume that their cancer rates were linearly correlated with their doses. These doses were not measured, but were calculated mathematically from studies carried out with A-Bomb experiments in the Nevada desert.

This is how the cancer coefficients on which the current risk model are based were created! But they are wildly incorrect.

How do we know? Well, we know from the effects on the leukemia children at Sellafield and all the other nuclear sites, the effects on Thyroid Cancer at Fukushima, the cancer effects in Northern Sweden seen in the study by Martin Tondel, the effects seen in all the Chernobyl-affected countries of Europe reviewed by Alexey Yablokov and many other peer-reviewed studies published in the last 20 years.

‘The dose is too low’ – a familiar but now defunct refrain

But whenever these are discussed by government committees and nuclear industry apologists, it always comes back to the A-Bomb studies, and the arguments of Jordan, Wakeford and others like them. We are told to deny what we see because the dose is too low.

The ‘dose is too low’ means that it is too low on the basis of the A-Bomb studies. But if the A-Bomb studies are wrong, then everything fits. This is their Queen on the chessboard and it is taken – captured in the High Court in London.

The LSS dose group populations, whatever their assumed doses, all lived on the contaminated sites of the towns for many years after the bomb. This contamination was derived from the Uranium and Plutonium in the bomb casing and fissile material. My description is based on Expert and Disclosed evidence presented by Prof. Shoji Sawada and Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake in the Test Veteran case.

The up-draught from the rising fireball at Hiroshima and Nagasaki sucked in moist maritime air which cooled with altitude and condensed on the 95% un-fissioned Uranium nano-particles created in the plasma. This produced ‘black rain’ over an area which included all of the dose groups used for the LSS study where dose was calculated by distance from the hypocentre.

The Uranium was measured later in the contaminated areas. But the LSS studies denied the existence of any fallout.

I have been working on this A-Bomb study issue since 2010 in connection with various court cases in the USA. The obvious way to see the real effects of the exposures, external and internal is to compare the cancer rates of the LSS groups with cancer in the national population or some other unexposed control group.

I used all-Japan data to show that the LSS data were wrong, but never got round to finishing this work, which is tedious and costly in time and effort and no one would pay for it. But a Japanese epidemiologist, Tomoyuki Wanatabe and colleagues did something similar in 2008.

Paradox: the highest cancer rate was found in the lowest radiation exposure group

They employed the adjacent Okayama prefecture as control and compared age and sex specific cancer rates between 1971 and 1990. They found that there were significantly greater levels of cancer in all the exposed groups – including the LSS lowest dose controls compared with the Okayama control group, but also (to a lesser extent) when compared with an all-Hiroshima control group.

When compared with Okayama, the highest cancer effect per unit dose was seen in the lowest dose LSS group, where there was a 33% excess risk of all cancer in men at external doses estimated at 0-5mSv. The authors write: “the contribution of residual radiation, ignored in LSS is suggested to be fairly high.”

We can make a rough assessment of how high. As calculated by the current risk model, this dose group 0-5mSv would not have received more than 1mSv from the internal black rain Uranium particles, and probably less. So being very conservative, let’s assume that it is 1mSv.

Then that means that instead of the 1 cancer per 100,000 per 1mSv, we have a 33% increase on the background rate of about 450 cancers from other causes, which is 148 cancers.

This number, 148 times more than ‘official’ estimates, is the minimum error that Wanatabe’s research defines in the LSS study. The real number is higher because the true internal dose (as calculated by the current model) is lower.

Radiation is most definitely not good for you!

By the way, the internal dose to England and Wales from global weapons fallout that came down with the rain in the period 1959-63 was about 1mSv according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR.

This caused an increase in infant mortality at the time of about 5%, and 20 years later the cancer rate had increased in real terms (age standardised) by about 35% – which fits pretty well with the Wanatabe 2008 finding.

It is these results and others in similar populations that are the basis of the risk model of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) which I helped develop in 2003 and by now (in the ECRR 2010 publication) has been shown to be pretty accurate if you want to know the outcome of any exposure.

So this realisation and evidence that the LSS dishonestly discarded its control group when it looked like there would a result, feeds through to the ‘justification’ issue. There is now no defence. Of course they will wriggle and wriggle, telling us that radiation is good for you, Sellafield leukemias are caused by population mixing, and such such nonsense).

In fact Jordan replied to my letter in very much those terms. He wriggled and wriggled and (predictably) referred to how radiation might be good for you. But no one said we were wrong. No one said that they didn’t discard the control group. And that means that no one can any more say the dose is too low. There is no referent.

The silent massacre

We are taking the war to the regulators and Euratom legislators now. No one can justify a regime where the number of deaths in Paris from a dose of 1 mSv become not 1,000, but 93,000. That is a massacre. And legally this is not a single exposure but can occur every year!

And it has been a silent global massacre.

You all have friends and family that have died from cancer. About one in four of those, maybe more, was due to the radiation in the weapons fallout in the 1960s. Unless they lived near Hinkley Point, Trawsfynydd, Bradwell, Sellafield or some other nuclear site or contaminated estuary which added its own further excess risk.

The death yield from Chernobyl has been epic, as Yablokov and others have shown. Sellafield discharges to the Irish Sea are the cause of the 10-fold excess child leukemia at Seascale, as everyone always thought, but which the government’s tame committees can’t explain because the basis of the dose being too low.

They are also the cause of the childhood cancer increases on the coast of Wales – which the Wales Cancer Intelligence (Yes!) Unit deny though fixing the numbers and environmental journalist George Monbiot believes because he knows no better. And the adult cancer increases in Wales also.

All these manifestations of radiation toxicity are denied on the basis of what forensic research now shows is a totally dishonest and manipulated study in Japan, paid for (and no doubt orchestrated by) the United States so as to permit bomb development. And as for Fukushima, watch this space. The thyroid cancers have already appeared.

Anyway, I want to thank the brave American Genetics Society editors, for allowing me to say this in their prestigious journal.

Let’s invoke the Suicide Clause and pull the plug on the monster. It’s simple.

Action: Submit your own claim for rejustification: UK; Ireland; all other EU countries.

The letter: ‘Letter to the Editor on ‘The Hiroshima/Nagasaki Survivor Studies: Discrepancies Between Results and General Perception’ by Bertrand R. Jordan‘. is by Christopher Busby and published in Genetics December 1, 2016 vol. 204 no. 4 1627-1629; DOI: 10.1534/genetics.116.195339. The letter is not open access, but the text can be found at the back of the Euratom Justification Campaign templates.

More information at www.greenaudit.org.

Indian Mining Company Adani, has won a six year battle to build the Carmichael Mine in central Queensland. Carmichael, with its six open cut and five underground mines, will be built at a cost $22 billion (AUD). The coal is set to provide electricity for up to 100 million people in India and will be sold into Asian markets.

The mega-mine will be Australia’s largest thermal coal mine, producing up to 705 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year – an increase of 1.3 times Australia’s current annual emissions. 

The Great Barrier Reef, sitting alongside the new mine, is vulnerable to long-term damage from these increasing carbon dioxide levels. Higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere raise water temperatures and ocean acidification. When carbon dioxide connects with seawater it forms carbonic acid. The more carbon dioxide in the sea, the less calcium carbonate is made, a vital source for corals to survive. 

Queensland Green’s Senator Larissa Waters says: “Reef scientists are unanimous in saying the biggest threat to the Reef is global warming, which caused the recent devastating coral bleaching. Yet the old parties’ Reef policies totally ignore the threat of global warming by promoting expansion of coal and other fossil fuels”.

Economic Boom or Bust?

Carmichael mine will provide 600 initial jobs to a region suffering with 10% unemployment, the second highest in Australia. Original predictions of 10,000 jobs were disproved in court, with “the correct jobs figures” downgrading the jobs estimated by Adani. There will be 1,464 net jobs, not the Adani figure of 10,000,” says Environmental Defence Office (EDO) CEO, Jo-Ann Bragg.

Adani estimates the project will generate at least $16.5 billion for the Australian economy over its lifetime. With a lifespan of between 25 and 60 years, the mine will bring in anywhere between $660m (£388m) and $275m (£161m) per year between now and 2077. The Great Barrier Reef is worth $5.4 billion (£3.2 bn) a year to the Australian economy, providing roughly 70,000 jobs for Queenslanders.

Political Support a Tipping Point for the Reef  

The final few hurdles were overcome this month, with Queensland government approving the last 20 miles (31.5 km) of railway link needed to complete a 240 mile (389 km) track that will take coal to the Abbott Point Port and out through the Great Barrier Reef.  

Australian Prime Minister, Malcom Turnbull invited Adani to apply for a $1b (£587m) government loan to build the railway line linking the mine to the Reef and expanding ports at Townsville and Abbott Point. Ships travelling between India and Australia will bring supplies in through the Great Barrier Reef at Townsville, and ship the coal back out 200 miles (320 km) to the south at Abbot Point Port.

Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), CEO Kelly O’Shanassy says “It seems Prime Minister Turnbull is preparing to put the interests of big polluters ahead of the interests of the Australian people and misuse a billion dollars of public money to support the mega-polluting Carmichael coal project”.

Long Battle over Court Cases, Coral, Climate Change and Coal 

The latest legal battle to halt the mine collapsed last month. Like so many before, in this long running saga, the case was dismissed on technical not environmental grounds. Environmental Defence Office (EDO) reasoned the granting of a mining license was given without correctly complying with section five of Australia’s Environmental Protection Act (1994); meaning the mine was missing the best ecologically sustainable development measures.

EDO CEO and Solicitor Jo-Anne Brag said the “judgment is a loss for the people and a loss for our precious environment. It says the decision is not unlawful, but is not an endorsement of the merits of the mine”. 

In 2014 and 2015 two more court cases attempted to challenge then Federal Environment Minister, Greg Hunt’s decision to approve the mine. One case, to protect the nature habitat of the Brown Yakka Skink lizard and ornamental snake was initially won. But, the decision was later overturned on a technical point that Minister Hunt hadn’t followed due process.

Indigenous campaigner Mr Burragubba brought a court case against the Queensland government on behalf of the Wangan and Jagalingou people. Burragubba’s unsuccessful case pivoted on whether the Queensland government had taken into account all the facts over land rights and the issuing of mining licences.

Last year, Queensland Land Court heard a case from Land Services of Coast and Country testifying additional carbon dioxide emissions would impact on climate change and global warming. The Land Court agreed, but as Bragg says, “The extent of the impact was not really disputed, with evidence given from experts on global warming and the Great Barrier Reef. The real dispute in this case was the question of what action should be taken – whose fault is it?  There wasn’t a disagreement on climate change and water”.

Proving any potential mining project could increase global temperatures and contribute to climate change is difficult, and often means relying on evidence of scope three emissions.  Scope 3 emissions are indirect emission from organisational activities, such as business travel, rubbish disposal, investments or “environmentally harmful global greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the transportation and burning of coal after its removal from the proposed mines“. 

Adani successfully used a “market substitution” defence, on the basis that if it wasn’t going to burn the coal someone somewhere else would. In other word, any harmful emissions would simply be produced by another company.

Off-setting in Renewables and Reclaiming Land

Adani’s proposal to establish a large-scale solar project near Moranbah is welcomed by Queensland government. With mine investment so far at $4 bn dollars, a promised $200 million investment in solar is just 5% of the total investment being put into coal.

Queensland and Australian government have put in place 200 environmental measures.  Failure to meet these rigorous environmental controls will mean immediate consequences that could jeopardise the project. Port expansion needed for the mines to export, will include capital dredging of 11.4 million cubic metres of sediment to be reused to create 152 hectares of reclaimed land for the port, and an assurance that dredge spoil won’t be dumped in the Great Barrier Reef.

Even with a $1bn loan from the Australian government, Adani is yet to secure the full funding. Earlier uncertainty on the project viability and thermal coal market saw 14 banks walk away. Last year a host of US and European banks – including Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays, as well as Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs – all refused to fund Adani’s plans to expand the port, with some concerned over potential damage to the Great Barrier Reef. ACF CEO Ms O’Shanassy says, “If Adani is unable to fund the mine, Australia will be left with a railway to nowhere and an unpaid billion dollar loan”.

Activists will continue to fight against the mine, and push for greater renewable energy investments from the Queensland and Australian governments. North Queensland Conservation Council, President, Gail Hamilton, told a recent rally in Townsville, “even if we have to chain ourselves to the bulldozers down in Collinsville [near Carmichael] we will do so”.  The Adani mine is due to open mid-2017.

This Author

Maxine Newlands is the Ecologist’s Australia reporter. @Dr_MaxNewlands.

Pardon the pun, but it’s time to stick our necks out for giraffes. We have mistakenly taken the world’s tallest mammal for granted, fretting far more about other beloved animals such as rhinos, elephants and great apes.

But now it seems that all is not well in giraffe-land, with reports emerging that they may be staring extinction in the face.

Why? For starters, thanks to modern molecular genetics, we have just realised that what we thought was one species of giraffe is in fact four, split into between seven and nine distinct subspecies. That’s a lot more biodiversity to worry about.

Even more disturbing is the fact that giraffe populations are collapsing. Where once they roamed widely across Africa’s savannas and woodlands, they now occupy less than half of the real estate they did a century ago.

Where they still persist, giraffe populations are increasingly sparse and fragmented. Their total numbers have fallen by 40% in just the past two decades, and they have disappeared entirely from seven African countries.

Among the most imperilled is the West African giraffe, a subspecies now found only in Niger. It dwindled to just 50 individuals in the 1990s, and was only saved by desperate last-ditch efforts from conservationists and the Niger government.

As a result of these sharp declines, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature recently changed giraffes’ overall conservation status from ‘Least Concern’ to ‘Vulnerable’. In biological terms, that’ like a ship’s pilot suddenly bellowing ‘iceberg dead ahead!’

A tall order

Why are giraffes declining so abruptly? One reason is that they reproduce slowly, as might be expected of a big animal that formerly had to contend only with occasional attacks by lions, hyenas and tribal hunters, and as a result is not well adapted to our hostile modern world.

Giraffes today are being hit by much more than traditional enemies. According to the United Nations, Africa’s population of 1.1 billion people is growing so fast that it could quadruple this century. These extra people are using lots more land for farming, livestock and burgeoning cities.

Beyond this, Africa has become a feeding ground for foreign corporations, especially big mining firms from China, Australia and elsewhere. To export bulk commodities such as iron, copper and aluminium ore, China in particular has gone on a frenzy of road, railway and port building.

Fuelled by a flood of foreign currency, Africa’s infrastructure is booming. A total of 33 ‘development corridors’ – centred around ambitious highway and rail networks – have been proposed or are under active construction. Our research shows that these projects would total more than 53,000km in length, crisscrossing the continent and opening up vast expanses of remote, biologically rich ecosystems to new development pressures.

Meanwhile, giraffes are struggling to cope with poachers armed with powerful automatic rifles rather than customary weapons such as spears. As shown in this poignant video, giraffes are commonly killed merely for their tails, which are valued as a status symbol and dowry gift by some African cultures.

Time to act

For a group of species about which we had been largely complacent, the sudden shift to ‘Vulnerable’ status for giraffes is a red flag telling us it’s time for action.

Giraffes’ sweeping decline reflects a much wider trend in wildlife populations. A recent WWF report forecasts that we are on track to lose two-thirds of all individual birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish on Earth by 2020. Species in tropical nations are doing especially poorly.

What can we do? A critical first step is to help African nations develop their natural resources and economies in ways that don’t decimate nature. This is an urgent challenge that hinges on improving land-use planning, governance and protection of nature reserves and imperilled wildlife.

We can also use emerging technologies to help us. For example, it is now possible to monitor illegal deforestation, road-building and other illicit activities virtually in real time, thanks to remarkable advances in satellites, drones, computing and crowdsourcing.

What’s more, affordable automatic cameras are being widely used to monitor the status of wildlife populations. These are particularly useful for giraffes, which have individual mottling patterns as distinctive as human fingerprints.

But all the technology in the world won’t save wildlife if we don’t address the fundamental drivers of Africa’s plight: its booming population and desperate needs for equitable social and sustainable development.

Ignoring these basic needs while tackling poaching and illegal road-building is akin to plugging the holes in a dam while ignoring the rising flood-waters that threaten to spill over its top. We have to redouble our efforts, pushing for conservation and more sustainable societies all at once – plugging the holes while at the same time building the dam higher.

For the stately giraffe and the rest of Africa’s declining wildlife, it’s time for us to stand tall – or else wave goodbye.

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University.

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

In June 2016 the European Central Bank (ECB) activated another programme intended to boost the Eurozone economy.

In recent years large sums have been spent in an attempt to spur growth – so-called ‘quantitative easing’ – with cheap loans made available to banks, and the buying of sovereign bonds, among other measures.

So far, banks have been the primary recipients. This time around, the ECB has taken it a step further and started buying corporate bonds – essentially, making cheap loans to corporations, which is fundamentally a kind of subsidy to some of the biggest players in the European marketplace.

So who are the beneficiaries? Which corporations are enjoying the goodwill of the big bank?

Only a few names have surfaced over the past months, as the ECB does not reveal the names of the companies, only the codes of the bonds. Now, Corporate Europe Observatory has looked them all up, and the picture that emerges is disturbing.

Notably, it seems the ECB in its own way is helping fuel climate change, providing financial support to both oil and gas companies, and car-makers, including, Shell, Repsol, Volkswagen, and BMW.

The programme

The Corporate Securities Purchasing Programme (CSPP) was decided in March and took off in June. Since then, the ECB has spent €46 billion on corporate bonds (as of 25 November 2016). According to one estimate, it is set to reach €125 billion by September 2017. No small sum.

Bonds are basically a form of loan. The buyer lends the issuer money, interest is paid at regular intervals, and face value is then paid back at a fixed date, the date of maturity. When bonds of a particular kind get popular on the market, corporations have to pay less interest. “It feels good to CSPP’d”, the Financial Times reported on 20 July 2016, citing research that showed how bonds actually bought by the ECB fared better than other bonds.

To issue a bond is not straightforward, it requires expertise in financial markets. Many corporations have banks of their own that manage the complicated transactions. It is a world that is not accessible to SMEs, that would go to a bank for credit, not sell bonds. For that reason, the CSPP is a helping hand to big corporations, not to SMEs.

The bonds are not bought directly by the ECB. The ECB coordinates the effort, but the actual buying takes place in a decentralized manner, with six central banks – the German, Spanish, Italian, Belgian, Finnish, and French – doing the work. They have all been assigned tasks to identify and buy attractive bonds in not just their own country, but in others as well, so the effect can be spread in a more or less even manner.

All six central banks regularly update information on their holdings on the ECB website. Unfortunately, except for Deutsche Bundesbank, they do not reveal the names of the companies, only the codes used to designate a particular bond, the so-called International Securities Identification Number (ISIN).

But finding the names via the ISIN code is a simple job. Corporate Europe Observatory has looked them all up to see what investments the ECB has found worthy of public money.

Unfortunately, a lack of transparency at the ECB means the amounts held in bonds of individual corporations are not revealed. While many pension funds do release this information, it seems that the common national bank for hundreds of millions of European citizens is unable to! Nevertheless, a lot can be learned from the lists.

Dirty energy and cars

From the lists produced by Corporate Europe Observatory, it seems there is a consistent strategy in terms of sectors. High priority is given to infrastructure, including motorways, trains, and even airports. However, by no means is the programme simply focused on utilities. The bond purchases as a whole tell a story; the CSPP as it stands, is about climate change.

There is a distinct smell of fossil fuels in the holdings list, with some of the biggest oil companies enjoying remarkable attention from Frankfurt. The ECB has bought no less than 11 times from Shell, 16 times from Italian oil company Eni, 6 times from Repsol, 6 times from Austrian OMV, and 7 times from Total.

The clear number one sector, though, is electricity and gas utilities. When counting the purchase of bonds for example in Spain, 53% are from companies involved in gas, and the corresponding number in Italy is an astounding 68%.

Though the amounts – the total the ECB holds in these companies – are not available, the high number of trades indicates a strong interest in companies that are contributing the most to climate change.

The bias towards dirty energy companies is strong. Unless Siemens intends to invest in wind turbine production with the money received from the ECB, the only ‘alternative’ energy form present on the list is nuclear, with enriched uranium producer URENCO and Finnish nuclear power company Teollisuuden Voima on the list.

The ECB bond purchases also show a strong preference for the car industry. This is most clearly seen in the list of purchases by the German Bundesbank. The most frequent investment by the ECB is tied between Daimler AG (producer of Mercedes) and BMW with 15 purchases apiece. Volkswagen bonds come in at 7, whereas French carmaker Renault is at 3.

Finally, it must be assumed that the presence of the Agnelli family’s investment holding company Exor is to make sure Italian cars Fiat and Ferrari also feel the Christmas spirit.

Bizarre investments and scandals

The inclusion of some corporations in the ECB bond-purchasing programme will raise eyebrows, particularly Volkswagen, involved in the ongoing dieselgate scandal over fraudulent reporting of emissions. Other corporations on the list currently beset by scandal include:

• Estonian Eesti Energia, involved in the first tar sands mine in the US – the dirtiest energy imaginable – and facing strong local resistance;

• Ryanair, infamous for its contempt for labour rights;

• Spanish company Gas Natural – known for mercilessly cutting off electricity and gas supplies, which recently led to the death in a fire of an elderly Spanish woman forced to use candles;

• ENEL, an Italian energy utilities giant, involved in building of dams in South America that will seriously harm local communities – human rights abuses have been recorded in the face of local resistance;

• and Thales, producer of missiles, rifles, armoured vehicles and military drones, which has been enmeshed in many corruption scandals over the years, including one in South Africa which led to an indictment of then Deputy President, now President, Jacob Zuma.

In addition, the three big private water corporations, Suèz, Vivendi, and Veolia have a strong showing on the French list of purchases. This might stir up angry sentiments among those who oppose the privatization of water, which has been spearheaded by these French companies.

Other investments simply appear bizarre. Why, for instance, would public entities invest in and hence subsidize a gambling company like Novomatic, owned by billionaire Johan Graf and headquartered in Austria?

And why should public funds flow into the coffers of producers of luxury goods, including LVMH, producer of Moët & Chandon champagne, Hennessy cognac, and classy Louis Vuitton women’s handbags, some of which carry price-tags in the thousands of euros?

What is a good investment?

All this begs the question: how are the official ECB investments picked? There appear to be few criteria, and none of them are qualitative in nature.

The corporation must be incorporated in the Eurozone, it cannot be a financial corporation (or a credit institution supervised by the ECB), it cannot be a public entity, and the bond in question to be backed up by a positive credit rating. Other than this, there are no official guidelines in the public domain.

The investments of the ECB are about ‘quantitative easing’ – making money cheap and available to shore up the Eurozone economy. Corporations can in some cases wait up to 31 years before they pay back (maximum ‘maturity’ is up to 31 years), but in no other sense is the CSPP a long term development programme.

And its effect on the real economy is yet to be seen; whether the billions of euros pumped into giant corporations actually lead to growth, jobs, or any other positive for the Eurozone economy.

Imagine if this €46 billion euro had been spent on, say, insulating homes. A rough estimate shows that this eminently practical effort against climate change could have paid for the insulation of 66 million houses and led to tens of thousands of jobs.

Instead, what is certain is that the large sums being spent are in effect a public subsidy for corporations making climate change worse, while in no discernible way helping ordinary people recover from the economic crisis that still stalks Europe.

This article was orginally published by Corporate Europe Observatory.

Pardon the pun, but it’s time to stick our necks out for giraffes. We have mistakenly taken the world’s tallest mammal for granted, fretting far more about other beloved animals such as rhinos, elephants and great apes.

But now it seems that all is not well in giraffe-land, with reports emerging that they may be staring extinction in the face.

Why? For starters, thanks to modern molecular genetics, we have just realised that what we thought was one species of giraffe is in fact four, split into between seven and nine distinct subspecies. That’s a lot more biodiversity to worry about.

Even more disturbing is the fact that giraffe populations are collapsing. Where once they roamed widely across Africa’s savannas and woodlands, they now occupy less than half of the real estate they did a century ago.

Where they still persist, giraffe populations are increasingly sparse and fragmented. Their total numbers have fallen by 40% in just the past two decades, and they have disappeared entirely from seven African countries.

Among the most imperilled is the West African giraffe, a subspecies now found only in Niger. It dwindled to just 50 individuals in the 1990s, and was only saved by desperate last-ditch efforts from conservationists and the Niger government.

As a result of these sharp declines, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature recently changed giraffes’ overall conservation status from ‘Least Concern’ to ‘Vulnerable’. In biological terms, that’ like a ship’s pilot suddenly bellowing ‘iceberg dead ahead!’

A tall order

Why are giraffes declining so abruptly? One reason is that they reproduce slowly, as might be expected of a big animal that formerly had to contend only with occasional attacks by lions, hyenas and tribal hunters, and as a result is not well adapted to our hostile modern world.

Giraffes today are being hit by much more than traditional enemies. According to the United Nations, Africa’s population of 1.1 billion people is growing so fast that it could quadruple this century. These extra people are using lots more land for farming, livestock and burgeoning cities.

Beyond this, Africa has become a feeding ground for foreign corporations, especially big mining firms from China, Australia and elsewhere. To export bulk commodities such as iron, copper and aluminium ore, China in particular has gone on a frenzy of road, railway and port building.

Fuelled by a flood of foreign currency, Africa’s infrastructure is booming. A total of 33 ‘development corridors’ – centred around ambitious highway and rail networks – have been proposed or are under active construction. Our research shows that these projects would total more than 53,000km in length, crisscrossing the continent and opening up vast expanses of remote, biologically rich ecosystems to new development pressures.

Meanwhile, giraffes are struggling to cope with poachers armed with powerful automatic rifles rather than customary weapons such as spears. As shown in this poignant video, giraffes are commonly killed merely for their tails, which are valued as a status symbol and dowry gift by some African cultures.

Time to act

For a group of species about which we had been largely complacent, the sudden shift to ‘Vulnerable’ status for giraffes is a red flag telling us it’s time for action.

Giraffes’ sweeping decline reflects a much wider trend in wildlife populations. A recent WWF report forecasts that we are on track to lose two-thirds of all individual birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish on Earth by 2020. Species in tropical nations are doing especially poorly.

What can we do? A critical first step is to help African nations develop their natural resources and economies in ways that don’t decimate nature. This is an urgent challenge that hinges on improving land-use planning, governance and protection of nature reserves and imperilled wildlife.

We can also use emerging technologies to help us. For example, it is now possible to monitor illegal deforestation, road-building and other illicit activities virtually in real time, thanks to remarkable advances in satellites, drones, computing and crowdsourcing.

What’s more, affordable automatic cameras are being widely used to monitor the status of wildlife populations. These are particularly useful for giraffes, which have individual mottling patterns as distinctive as human fingerprints.

But all the technology in the world won’t save wildlife if we don’t address the fundamental drivers of Africa’s plight: its booming population and desperate needs for equitable social and sustainable development.

Ignoring these basic needs while tackling poaching and illegal road-building is akin to plugging the holes in a dam while ignoring the rising flood-waters that threaten to spill over its top. We have to redouble our efforts, pushing for conservation and more sustainable societies all at once – plugging the holes while at the same time building the dam higher.

For the stately giraffe and the rest of Africa’s declining wildlife, it’s time for us to stand tall – or else wave goodbye.

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University.

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

In June 2016 the European Central Bank (ECB) activated another programme intended to boost the Eurozone economy.

In recent years large sums have been spent in an attempt to spur growth – so-called ‘quantitative easing’ – with cheap loans made available to banks, and the buying of sovereign bonds, among other measures.

So far, banks have been the primary recipients. This time around, the ECB has taken it a step further and started buying corporate bonds – essentially, making cheap loans to corporations, which is fundamentally a kind of subsidy to some of the biggest players in the European marketplace.

So who are the beneficiaries? Which corporations are enjoying the goodwill of the big bank?

Only a few names have surfaced over the past months, as the ECB does not reveal the names of the companies, only the codes of the bonds. Now, Corporate Europe Observatory has looked them all up, and the picture that emerges is disturbing.

Notably, it seems the ECB in its own way is helping fuel climate change, providing financial support to both oil and gas companies, and car-makers, including, Shell, Repsol, Volkswagen, and BMW.

The programme

The Corporate Securities Purchasing Programme (CSPP) was decided in March and took off in June. Since then, the ECB has spent €46 billion on corporate bonds (as of 25 November 2016). According to one estimate, it is set to reach €125 billion by September 2017. No small sum.

Bonds are basically a form of loan. The buyer lends the issuer money, interest is paid at regular intervals, and face value is then paid back at a fixed date, the date of maturity. When bonds of a particular kind get popular on the market, corporations have to pay less interest. “It feels good to CSPP’d”, the Financial Times reported on 20 July 2016, citing research that showed how bonds actually bought by the ECB fared better than other bonds.

To issue a bond is not straightforward, it requires expertise in financial markets. Many corporations have banks of their own that manage the complicated transactions. It is a world that is not accessible to SMEs, that would go to a bank for credit, not sell bonds. For that reason, the CSPP is a helping hand to big corporations, not to SMEs.

The bonds are not bought directly by the ECB. The ECB coordinates the effort, but the actual buying takes place in a decentralized manner, with six central banks – the German, Spanish, Italian, Belgian, Finnish, and French – doing the work. They have all been assigned tasks to identify and buy attractive bonds in not just their own country, but in others as well, so the effect can be spread in a more or less even manner.

All six central banks regularly update information on their holdings on the ECB website. Unfortunately, except for Deutsche Bundesbank, they do not reveal the names of the companies, only the codes used to designate a particular bond, the so-called International Securities Identification Number (ISIN).

But finding the names via the ISIN code is a simple job. Corporate Europe Observatory has looked them all up to see what investments the ECB has found worthy of public money.

Unfortunately, a lack of transparency at the ECB means the amounts held in bonds of individual corporations are not revealed. While many pension funds do release this information, it seems that the common national bank for hundreds of millions of European citizens is unable to! Nevertheless, a lot can be learned from the lists.

Dirty energy and cars

From the lists produced by Corporate Europe Observatory, it seems there is a consistent strategy in terms of sectors. High priority is given to infrastructure, including motorways, trains, and even airports. However, by no means is the programme simply focused on utilities. The bond purchases as a whole tell a story; the CSPP as it stands, is about climate change.

There is a distinct smell of fossil fuels in the holdings list, with some of the biggest oil companies enjoying remarkable attention from Frankfurt. The ECB has bought no less than 11 times from Shell, 16 times from Italian oil company Eni, 6 times from Repsol, 6 times from Austrian OMV, and 7 times from Total.

The clear number one sector, though, is electricity and gas utilities. When counting the purchase of bonds for example in Spain, 53% are from companies involved in gas, and the corresponding number in Italy is an astounding 68%.

Though the amounts – the total the ECB holds in these companies – are not available, the high number of trades indicates a strong interest in companies that are contributing the most to climate change.

The bias towards dirty energy companies is strong. Unless Siemens intends to invest in wind turbine production with the money received from the ECB, the only ‘alternative’ energy form present on the list is nuclear, with enriched uranium producer URENCO and Finnish nuclear power company Teollisuuden Voima on the list.

The ECB bond purchases also show a strong preference for the car industry. This is most clearly seen in the list of purchases by the German Bundesbank. The most frequent investment by the ECB is tied between Daimler AG (producer of Mercedes) and BMW with 15 purchases apiece. Volkswagen bonds come in at 7, whereas French carmaker Renault is at 3.

Finally, it must be assumed that the presence of the Agnelli family’s investment holding company Exor is to make sure Italian cars Fiat and Ferrari also feel the Christmas spirit.

Bizarre investments and scandals

The inclusion of some corporations in the ECB bond-purchasing programme will raise eyebrows, particularly Volkswagen, involved in the ongoing dieselgate scandal over fraudulent reporting of emissions. Other corporations on the list currently beset by scandal include:

• Estonian Eesti Energia, involved in the first tar sands mine in the US – the dirtiest energy imaginable – and facing strong local resistance;

• Ryanair, infamous for its contempt for labour rights;

• Spanish company Gas Natural – known for mercilessly cutting off electricity and gas supplies, which recently led to the death in a fire of an elderly Spanish woman forced to use candles;

• ENEL, an Italian energy utilities giant, involved in building of dams in South America that will seriously harm local communities – human rights abuses have been recorded in the face of local resistance;

• and Thales, producer of missiles, rifles, armoured vehicles and military drones, which has been enmeshed in many corruption scandals over the years, including one in South Africa which led to an indictment of then Deputy President, now President, Jacob Zuma.

In addition, the three big private water corporations, Suèz, Vivendi, and Veolia have a strong showing on the French list of purchases. This might stir up angry sentiments among those who oppose the privatization of water, which has been spearheaded by these French companies.

Other investments simply appear bizarre. Why, for instance, would public entities invest in and hence subsidize a gambling company like Novomatic, owned by billionaire Johan Graf and headquartered in Austria?

And why should public funds flow into the coffers of producers of luxury goods, including LVMH, producer of Moët & Chandon champagne, Hennessy cognac, and classy Louis Vuitton women’s handbags, some of which carry price-tags in the thousands of euros?

What is a good investment?

All this begs the question: how are the official ECB investments picked? There appear to be few criteria, and none of them are qualitative in nature.

The corporation must be incorporated in the Eurozone, it cannot be a financial corporation (or a credit institution supervised by the ECB), it cannot be a public entity, and the bond in question to be backed up by a positive credit rating. Other than this, there are no official guidelines in the public domain.

The investments of the ECB are about ‘quantitative easing’ – making money cheap and available to shore up the Eurozone economy. Corporations can in some cases wait up to 31 years before they pay back (maximum ‘maturity’ is up to 31 years), but in no other sense is the CSPP a long term development programme.

And its effect on the real economy is yet to be seen; whether the billions of euros pumped into giant corporations actually lead to growth, jobs, or any other positive for the Eurozone economy.

Imagine if this €46 billion euro had been spent on, say, insulating homes. A rough estimate shows that this eminently practical effort against climate change could have paid for the insulation of 66 million houses and led to tens of thousands of jobs.

Instead, what is certain is that the large sums being spent are in effect a public subsidy for corporations making climate change worse, while in no discernible way helping ordinary people recover from the economic crisis that still stalks Europe.

This article was orginally published by Corporate Europe Observatory.

In June 2016 the European Central Bank (ECB) activated another programme intended to boost the Eurozone economy.

In recent years large sums have been spent in an attempt to spur growth – so-called ‘quantitative easing’ – with cheap loans made available to banks, and the buying of sovereign bonds, among other measures.

So far, banks have been the primary recipients. This time around, the ECB has taken it a step further and started buying corporate bonds – essentially, making cheap loans to corporations, which is fundamentally a kind of subsidy to some of the biggest players in the European marketplace.

So who are the beneficiaries? Which corporations are enjoying the goodwill of the big bank?

Only a few names have surfaced over the past months, as the ECB does not reveal the names of the companies, only the codes of the bonds. Now, Corporate Europe Observatory has looked them all up, and the picture that emerges is disturbing.

Notably, it seems the ECB in its own way is helping fuel climate change, providing financial support to both oil and gas companies, and car-makers, including, Shell, Repsol, Volkswagen, and BMW.

The programme

The Corporate Securities Purchasing Programme (CSPP) was decided in March and took off in June. Since then, the ECB has spent €46 billion on corporate bonds (as of 25 November 2016). According to one estimate, it is set to reach €125 billion by September 2017. No small sum.

Bonds are basically a form of loan. The buyer lends the issuer money, interest is paid at regular intervals, and face value is then paid back at a fixed date, the date of maturity. When bonds of a particular kind get popular on the market, corporations have to pay less interest. “It feels good to CSPP’d”, the Financial Times reported on 20 July 2016, citing research that showed how bonds actually bought by the ECB fared better than other bonds.

To issue a bond is not straightforward, it requires expertise in financial markets. Many corporations have banks of their own that manage the complicated transactions. It is a world that is not accessible to SMEs, that would go to a bank for credit, not sell bonds. For that reason, the CSPP is a helping hand to big corporations, not to SMEs.

The bonds are not bought directly by the ECB. The ECB coordinates the effort, but the actual buying takes place in a decentralized manner, with six central banks – the German, Spanish, Italian, Belgian, Finnish, and French – doing the work. They have all been assigned tasks to identify and buy attractive bonds in not just their own country, but in others as well, so the effect can be spread in a more or less even manner.

All six central banks regularly update information on their holdings on the ECB website. Unfortunately, except for Deutsche Bundesbank, they do not reveal the names of the companies, only the codes used to designate a particular bond, the so-called International Securities Identification Number (ISIN).

But finding the names via the ISIN code is a simple job. Corporate Europe Observatory has looked them all up to see what investments the ECB has found worthy of public money.

Unfortunately, a lack of transparency at the ECB means the amounts held in bonds of individual corporations are not revealed. While many pension funds do release this information, it seems that the common national bank for hundreds of millions of European citizens is unable to! Nevertheless, a lot can be learned from the lists.

Dirty energy and cars

From the lists produced by Corporate Europe Observatory, it seems there is a consistent strategy in terms of sectors. High priority is given to infrastructure, including motorways, trains, and even airports. However, by no means is the programme simply focused on utilities. The bond purchases as a whole tell a story; the CSPP as it stands, is about climate change.

There is a distinct smell of fossil fuels in the holdings list, with some of the biggest oil companies enjoying remarkable attention from Frankfurt. The ECB has bought no less than 11 times from Shell, 16 times from Italian oil company Eni, 6 times from Repsol, 6 times from Austrian OMV, and 7 times from Total.

The clear number one sector, though, is electricity and gas utilities. When counting the purchase of bonds for example in Spain, 53% are from companies involved in gas, and the corresponding number in Italy is an astounding 68%.

Though the amounts – the total the ECB holds in these companies – are not available, the high number of trades indicates a strong interest in companies that are contributing the most to climate change.

The bias towards dirty energy companies is strong. Unless Siemens intends to invest in wind turbine production with the money received from the ECB, the only ‘alternative’ energy form present on the list is nuclear, with enriched uranium producer URENCO and Finnish nuclear power company Teollisuuden Voima on the list.

The ECB bond purchases also show a strong preference for the car industry. This is most clearly seen in the list of purchases by the German Bundesbank. The most frequent investment by the ECB is tied between Daimler AG (producer of Mercedes) and BMW with 15 purchases apiece. Volkswagen bonds come in at 7, whereas French carmaker Renault is at 3.

Finally, it must be assumed that the presence of the Agnelli family’s investment holding company Exor is to make sure Italian cars Fiat and Ferrari also feel the Christmas spirit.

Bizarre investments and scandals

The inclusion of some corporations in the ECB bond-purchasing programme will raise eyebrows, particularly Volkswagen, involved in the ongoing dieselgate scandal over fraudulent reporting of emissions. Other corporations on the list currently beset by scandal include:

• Estonian Eesti Energia, involved in the first tar sands mine in the US – the dirtiest energy imaginable – and facing strong local resistance;

• Ryanair, infamous for its contempt for labour rights;

• Spanish company Gas Natural – known for mercilessly cutting off electricity and gas supplies, which recently led to the death in a fire of an elderly Spanish woman forced to use candles;

• ENEL, an Italian energy utilities giant, involved in building of dams in South America that will seriously harm local communities – human rights abuses have been recorded in the face of local resistance;

• and Thales, producer of missiles, rifles, armoured vehicles and military drones, which has been enmeshed in many corruption scandals over the years, including one in South Africa which led to an indictment of then Deputy President, now President, Jacob Zuma.

In addition, the three big private water corporations, Suèz, Vivendi, and Veolia have a strong showing on the French list of purchases. This might stir up angry sentiments among those who oppose the privatization of water, which has been spearheaded by these French companies.

Other investments simply appear bizarre. Why, for instance, would public entities invest in and hence subsidize a gambling company like Novomatic, owned by billionaire Johan Graf and headquartered in Austria?

And why should public funds flow into the coffers of producers of luxury goods, including LVMH, producer of Moët & Chandon champagne, Hennessy cognac, and classy Louis Vuitton women’s handbags, some of which carry price-tags in the thousands of euros?

What is a good investment?

All this begs the question: how are the official ECB investments picked? There appear to be few criteria, and none of them are qualitative in nature.

The corporation must be incorporated in the Eurozone, it cannot be a financial corporation (or a credit institution supervised by the ECB), it cannot be a public entity, and the bond in question to be backed up by a positive credit rating. Other than this, there are no official guidelines in the public domain.

The investments of the ECB are about ‘quantitative easing’ – making money cheap and available to shore up the Eurozone economy. Corporations can in some cases wait up to 31 years before they pay back (maximum ‘maturity’ is up to 31 years), but in no other sense is the CSPP a long term development programme.

And its effect on the real economy is yet to be seen; whether the billions of euros pumped into giant corporations actually lead to growth, jobs, or any other positive for the Eurozone economy.

Imagine if this €46 billion euro had been spent on, say, insulating homes. A rough estimate shows that this eminently practical effort against climate change could have paid for the insulation of 66 million houses and led to tens of thousands of jobs.

Instead, what is certain is that the large sums being spent are in effect a public subsidy for corporations making climate change worse, while in no discernible way helping ordinary people recover from the economic crisis that still stalks Europe.

This article was orginally published by Corporate Europe Observatory.