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.

‘Debating Nature’s Value’ is a new network – launched on November 1^st – designed to promote discussion about the idea of “natural capital” and the various problems that arise from using that concept. [1]

It is always easy to imagine the debate about an issue in one’s own country reflects the state of the debate internationally. Here in the UK, it is clear that the concept of “natural capital” holds a dominant position in any debate about nature’s value and the implications for policy. This reflects the general current dominance of the language of market economics.

However, internationally the situation is rather different. “Natural capital” is recognised as an important idea but the legitimacy of other ideas is recognised too.

The most important international governmental body in the field of biodiversity is IPBES – the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services – otherwise known as the “IPCC for biodiversity”. It is the body that integrates and channels information from scientists around the world to representatives of governments. Rather than having to deal with an ever-expanding swirl of journal articles, the point of IPBES is to present to government policy-makers (as near as it is possible to be) an authoritative summary of the current state of the relevant science of extinctions and ecosystems.

At its conference in 2013, IPBES adopted a “Conceptual Framework” to guide its work. The term “natural capital” is not even mentioned in the document (“intrinsic” value is mentioned twice). Instead what we have is a pluralistic approach based principally not on economics but on science, and not on science on its own but including other worldviews. Referring to its central diagram, the Framework says it: “demonstrates the main elements and relationships for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystem services, human wellbeing and sustainable development. Similar conceptualizations in other knowledge systems include “living in harmony with nature” and “Mother Earth”, among others… text in green denotes the concepts of science; and text in blue denotes those of other knowledge systems.” [2]

The following year, a progress report on the implementation of the IPBES work programme noted the existence of an IPBES “task force on indigenous and local knowledge systems”. [3] Again, “natural capital” isn’t mentioned as featuring in the Platform’s work. The language of the document makes clear, however, that its inclusiveness is directed principally towards indigenous knowledge rather than approaches from other religious, philosophical or political standpoints.

The IPBES work programme, covering the period 2014-18, includes “Deliverable 3(d)”. This is summarised as follows: “The assessment of tools and methodologies regarding multiple values of biodiversity to human societies is important for guiding the use of such methodologies in all IPBES work. Different valuation methodologies will be evaluated according to different visions, approaches and knowledge systems, and their policy relevance based on the diverse conceptualization of values of biodiversity and nature’s benefits to people …” [4]

Again, this is a very clear signal of a pluralistic approach. It is difficult to see how anything else would be feasible in a global international body, and particularly in a world where the local inhabitants of many of the areas where biodiversity is under the most extreme pressure have a deep understanding of the natural world but not in a way which is conceptualised in terms of either Western biological science or economics.

It is easy in a country like the UK to imagine that science and economics command the whole debate about nature’s value.  But step back and look at the bigger picture internationally, and it all looks rather different.

This Author

Victor Anderson is Visiting Professor at the Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University, UK. He is the author of Alternative Economic Indicators and worked as an economist for the UK Sustainable Development Commission.

Victor.anderson@anglia.ac.uk

[1] The aims of the Network were set out in my previous Ecologist blog:

http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/Blogs/2987917/nature_vs_natural_capital.html

[2]  Decision IPBES-2/4: ‘Conceptual framework for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’, Para B1.5

[3] Decision IPBES-4/1: progress report on ‘Work programme of the Platform’, Para II.3.

[4] IPBES Work Programme: Deliverable 3(d).

Robotisation is probably going to be a temporary phenomenon: planetary limits will (within a generation or at most two) severely limit the supplies of raw materials and energy needed to enable large-scale robotisation, and pollution-crises – part-speeded-up by huge investments in automation/robotisation – will have the same effect. The question is whether we can rein in robotisation soon enough to ensure that ‘Peak Robot’ occurs under our control, and not as a result of a crash forced on us by collapsing ecosystems.

The delusion of endless growth

In the heady days of early industrialization, when infinite economic growth was the unchallenged dogma that promised to dispel the twin evils of inequality and poverty, a dangerous fantasy began to take place in the minds of our most celebrated economists. The idea was that as production refined its efficiency through technology, we would inevitably reach a state of ever more widespread industrial automation. To this day, ‘growthist’ capitalism and socialism still tend to argue that the refinement of technology promises us diminished working hours and ever increasing consumption, leading (allegedly) to ever higher standards of material wellbeing.

It is perhaps no wonder that the ‘left’ has been as keen to embrace this catastrophically deluded daydream as the ‘right’ – for both are simply versions of economism (the delusion that the economy is all that matters in society) and productivism (the delusion that what society should be aiming to do is to maximise economic ‘production’). Considering that economic growth has so far failed to deliver on fewer-working days as promised, and that the fantasy that it will do so has largely been an excuse for withholding adequate remuneration and redistribution, now is an important moment to question whether robotisation itself can deliver on the promises so often made by its proponents.

Fully-automated luxury communism?

As my title suggests, I am as yet thoroughly unconvinced that robotisation is or indeed ever will become as automated as the fantasy of the complete leisure society would demand. Undoubtedly technology has allowed us to automate many jobs, and increase efficiency in others, which could free up more time for leisure if its fruits were fairly dispersed. However, there is a vital and unaddressed constraint that may well mean that we will be at ‘Peak Robot’ sooner than one thinks. This constraint is the bread and butter of my think tank, Green House (Green House Think Tank): it is the set of planetary boundaries that are popularly known as ‘the limits to growth’. As we in Green House maintain and have detailed, not only is it the case that economic growth is no longer necessary (for there is enough stuff to go around already, if only we shared it out better), it is also no longer desirable (for it isn’t making us happier; and it is destroying our collective future by gradually eroding the shared basis of our planetary home). Moreover, it is now only even possible at heavy cost: i.e. it is possible only if one is prepared to create on balance a less desirable future. And before too long, it won’t be possible at all.

What this means for the daydream of full automation is potentially profound. For the ‘march of the robots’ idea relies tacitly on the assumption that the limits to growth are negotiable, or indeed non-existent. It buys into the idea that there can be a complete – or at least near complete – decoupling of production from carbon emissions; despite the fact that, as Tim Jackson and others have shown, there is no evidence that any such decoupling is likely to happen or is indeed even possible. It should not surprise that this is the case; after all, what would ever more automation even look like if it did not include ever more consumption and environmental degradation?

Robotisation depends upon a ready supply of metals and plastics; on a ready supply of concentrated energy, permanently. And on much more. Robots will also without any shadow of a doubt produce far more GHG emissions than their blue-collar counterparts, to operate and to remain operable; for robots are not alive: they need repair, maintenance, and monitoring, and constantly risk being broken, superseded, etc. And when the robot ‘dies’, it will need to be fully recyclable –  which is a very big ask indeed, and again will be highly energy-consumptive if it is to be anything-like achieved. (Recycling always requires energy-loss. This is a basic result of the profound limit imposed by entropy.)

In a world which takes seriously the limits to growth that are constituted by the steadily advancing threat of global warming, then there will be ever-rising constraints on the rise of the robots. (‘Incidentally’, if we do not soon become such a world, then the whole discussion will become academic, as civilisation collapses). And in a world which takes seriously those limits to growth that are constituted by limits of resource depletion (fuel supplies, rare earths, etc.) then again there will be yet further ever-rising constraints on the rise of robots. While we are not yet in such a world quite as much as the original Club of Rome projected, the moment of truth here has only been slightly delayed, not overcome (See on this the important research recently conducted by the new All-Party-Parliamentary-Group on Limits to Growth: Limits To Growth). Given these twin constraints, whether one looks at the front or back end of the pipe, the limits to growth will place severe limits on the march of the robots.

Don’t overdose on sci-fi

If one reads too many sci-fi books, one imagines that it will be centuries or millennia (or never) until ‘Peak Robot’: One then fantasises, as Dr. Who and Star Trek and many many more do, routinely, a cornucopian tech-based future. Or, at worst, a Battlestar Galactica style robot-apocalypse… But such scenarios, which have for instance exercised Saint Stephen Hawking recently, are of course premised on assuming, utterly rashly, that the limits to growth can be gainsaid. The clever people spending their time worrying about the robot-apocalypse would probably be better employed worrying about more ‘down-to-Earth’ threats to our common survival – such as human-triggered runaway climate-change, reckless geo-engineering, reckless genetic engineering, and so forth.

If I were forced to bet, I would bet that, on an optimistic scenario for our future, Peak Robot will come within 20 years or so from now at the most. For, as a species, we are already living as if we have more than one planet. How are we going to rein that in in time, and survive (let alone flourish), if we pour more and more resources into producing fragile metal people and energy-hungry super-computers to replace low-skilled workers? The Club of Rome scenarios suggest that, unless we rein in impacts within a generation or so, then it will be too late to avert a crash. A better, Greener route will of course be to reduce our impact and footprint pro-actively, to live more locally etc., to share more – and then we won’t need very many of either shelf-stackers or of robots, and all without causing poverty.

On a pessimistic scenario for our future, I would guess at Peak Robot occurring within 50 years or so. Because by then, if we haven’t massively changed our way of life, climate chaos and others of our ongoing or incipient exceedings of planetary boundaries will have become so gross that the complex systems that robotisation relies on will be collapsing. In the long run, as the doyen of ecological economics Herman Daly, has shown us in his vital books, human labour is going to be in greater supply than ‘raw materials’, and also usable (low-entropy) energy. The extraordinary thing about people is, of course, that we are a truly renewable ‘resource’.

Conclusion: The ultimate resource

The real challenge for the future, then, is to use our human ingenuity – what some have called ‘the ultimate resource’ – to navigate boldly and precautiously the difficulties presented by this time, a time when something worth calling ‘a leisure society’ is possible, if we are willing to take our power back from the 1%, and ensure that the benefits of what automation is ecologically viable are fairly shared. Though of course it follows from what I have argued here that in any viable society there is always going to be an essential and substantial role for human work – especially once we take seriously that robots are not going to replace us for long without hastening our (and their) collective demise. The leisure society is going to be one in which we aren’t working excessively to make more and more money for big corporates. But it isn’t going to be a society in which we are laying around being served by robots either. It is going to involve us doing a great deal of what we want to be doing: including such things as growing food.

The leisure society is not going to be achieved through endless ramping up of our desires/ satisfaction of those desires by robots. It is going to be achieved, if at all, by our reducing our desires. Limiting our selfish wants. Cleaving rather to our needs, and to each other, and to our fragile home. ‘The leisure society’ in its true sense will be one in which we still engage in lots of activity, but less of it in return for money, and more of it just because we actually want to do it. (A society in which growing much of one’s own food, for example, is not considered a chore. There are already many of us – would-be smallholders, for instance – who are in this mental space.)

My Green House colleague Molly Scott Cato and I have a favourite quote, from John Ruskin: “There is no wealth but life“. In the long run, the amazing capacity of human and non-human life to organise ecological webs of activity with relatively low entropy and – potentially – with high wellbeing, is going largely to trump the novel fad that is robotisation. Unless we fall fully afoul of the limits to growth, in which case, we’ll all be trumped.

I would like to propose then that we disavow ourselves of our misplaced trust in robotisation, and instead focus our (renewable) energies, as I’ve argued previously here at the Ecologist, (Lets Build A Post-growth Economy That Works) on creating a truly fair, sustainable and post-growth economy – an economy for people.

A final thought: when I put these contrarian ideas to robotisation-fans, they often reply by claiming to me something like the following: “But robots are going to be more energy- and resource-efficient, overall; think of robot-workers who don’t need holidays or sleep.” I reply by pointing out what everyone seems to miss: that, if this scenario is actually going to generate a net-efficiency, then it can only be at the cost of eliminating a significant chunk of the (human) population altogether. Because, if the human population remains the same, and all those humans are still eating and holidaying and so on, then adding a population of robots on top of them certainly does not lead to an overall efficiency: i.e. it obviously leads to more of the really scarce resources (e.g. non-renewable materials and energy) being used up. So, bear this carefully in mind: when the claim is made that robots will be better overall, ecologically speaking, what the speaker has in mind, either consciously or unconsciously, is a society where robots are not merely replacing human labour; they are replacing some humans altogether.

Perhaps the fans of robotisation will be kind enough to tell us, before they sketch their next utopia, just which humans they propose to cut out.

This Author

Rupert Read is philosopher working and writing at UEA, the Chair of Green House think tank, and a former parliamentary candidate for the Green Party of England & Wales. He Tweets at: @GreenRupertRead & @rupertread

[Thanks also to Atus Russell and Dave Burnham for help with preparing this article, which had its origins in a much shorter piece published in Green World.]

The Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s elevation to the US Presidency have turned the international status quo upside down.

But some things – like the nuclear industry’s insatiable appetite for taxpayers’ money – never change.

Sellafield’s Evaporator D project, with NuGen’s Moorside in hot pursuit, is a prime example as it limps along, sustained only by ever increasing helpings from the public purse.

With nuclear power rightly acknowledged as being a hideously expensive way of boiling a kettle, then Evaporator D – known to the Sellafield workforce as the ‘Big Kettle’ – must be breaking all records.

Initially costed at £90 million (2007) and originally due to come into operation in 2010/11, the cost has increased eight-fold to £740m – as at September 2015. With a ‘challenging’ operational date currently pencilled in as 2017/18, and with updated figures yet to be published, the sky is clearly the limit for Evaporator D.

The tortured progress of the new Evaporator, designed to reduce (by evaporation) the volume of the dangerous liquid High Level Wastes (HLW) produced by spent fuel reprocessing, reveals a catalogue of project mismanagement and eye-watering cost hikes that show little sign of abating.

Promoted specifically by BNFL and subsequently by the NDA as being urgently needed to support continued reprocessing operations in the B205 (magnox fuel) and THORP (oxide fuel) plant, Evaporator D is currently being shoe-horned into the HLW complex.

There it will join its three fellow but semi-crippled evaporators (A,B & C) whose increasing unreliability through age and internal corrosion had underpinned the urgency for Evaporator D.

A tale of mismanagement and incompetence

Despite claiming not to recognise the £90m estimate of 2007, the NDA was nevertheless happy to confirm a price tag of £100m in 2008, since when the cost of Evaporator D has risen in almost annual increments – with the biggest hike to over £600m.

That number comes in a damning report by the National Audit Office that was highly critical of the NDA’s project management and that of its subsequently sacked contractor Nuclear Management Partners (NMP) who had acted for the NDA as Sellafield’s Parent Body Organisation since 2008. As the NAO reported,

“Gaps in the capability of subcontractors in the supply chain to undertake work to the standards required for nuclear installations have had direct consequences for the speed and efficiency of project delivery. For example, the Authority estimates that £50 million of the £244 million increase in the cost of evaporator D and part of the 18-month delay since 2009 is because the subcontractor lacked experience in welding to the necessary nuclear quality standards.

“The Authority was aware of these risks when it approved the start of construction. It relied on Sellafield Limited’s assurances that its subcontractor could manage the risks. The Authority did not obtain assurance from Sellafield Limited that it had put in place appropriate quality assurance and training.”

The cramped conditions in and around the HLW complex was a major factor in employing the novel option of having the main elements of the Evaporator built off-site (by Interserve at Ellesmere Port) and delivered by barge to Sellafield beach in the form of 11 modules, the largest weighing 500 tonnes and measuring 12.5 x 7.5 x 27 metres tall. The Evaporator, whose top and bottom sections are shown above being fabricated at Ellesmere Port, will operate in an upright position once installed at Sellafield.

Novel as the option was, it soon fell foul of a range of problems that included a disorganised supply chain, design changes, the quality of module fabrication, and seismic qualification.

With the modules delivered to Sellafield beach and hauled onto site between 2011 and 2013, Evaporator D’s cost increases from 2013 onwards are largely attributed by the NDA to the ‘transfer of incomplete modules to site’. This resulted in extensive additional cutting and welding work being needed – in a confined work space – to connect together the component parts of the Evaporator system.

And now Evaporator D looks set to miss the ‘reprocessing boat’

The greatest irony of all is, of course, that despite the early hullabaloo about its urgent and crucial support role for reprocessing at Sellafield, Evaporator D can be of service to THORP reprocessing (due to finish in 2018) for no more than one year at best.

At worst it will be of service only for THORP’s post-2018 clean out, the remnant days of B205 reprocessing which is due to end around 2020 and other site decommissioning work.

Faced with this prospect and the embarrassing reality that its much vaunted Evaporator D could indeed miss the THORP reprocessing boat for which it was primarily designed, the NDA and Sellafield Ltd damage limitation teams have recently swung into top gear – by stressing the Evaporator’s future decommissioning role through its ability to deal with the larger waste particles expected to be encountered during the coming years of clean-up work.

For a project whose £740m cost will undoubtedly escalate further, aggrieved taxpayers may take some comfort from Sellafield’s 2012 announcement that plans for a fifth (£600m) Evaporator E had been scrapped. But they should now cast a wary eye to NuGen’s new-build project just across the road from Sellafield where the prospect of further pilfering from the public purse is simmering on the back-burner.

Moorside nuclear power plant – another massive drain on taxpayers’ money

Largely under-reported by the media, Moorside’s developer NuGen told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee in early November that it had been calculating how elements of its proposed triple AP1000 reactor site might be carved up to allow the non-nuclear elements of the project to be paid for by the UK Government.

For despite casting its net far and wide in an attempt to drum up the additional finance to meet the clearly under-estimated £15 billion cost of building Moorside, the consortium of Japan’s Toshiba and France’s Engie is clearly struggling to attract support.

The struggle was intensified by the not unexpected news on 8th December that Engie itself has declared that it will pull out of the Moorside and other new-build developments because “it no longer has the resources to finance such expensive projects” and wants to concentrate on renewables instead.

Hoping that the Treasury’s taxpayer cavalry will ride to the rescue, NuGen’s CEO Tom Samson told the House of Lords that one non-nuclear element of the project has been identified by the consortium as the seawater system required to cool Moorside’s reactors.

Exactly how this vital component of reactor operation can be classified by NuGen as a non-nuclear element and thereby qualify for taxpayer support is as incomprehensible as is the further suggestion that major ‘civil works’ such as the removal of excavation spoil, could also qualify for Government largesse.

It’s a telling sign of NuGen’s dire financial straits, and one that will leave tax-paying observers wondering exactly which part it is of the Government’s erstwhile promise – that future developers would shoulder the whole cost of new-build in the UK – that NuGen doesn’t understand or seeks to circumvent in its hour of self-inflicted need.

And now – taxpayer-funded transport infrastructure and powerlines

Then there’s the suggestion of Government assistance in improving the transport infrastructure in the Cumbrian area to help support both the decommissioning operations at Sellafield and the proposed construction site at Moorside.

Leaving aside NuGen’s less than subtle ploy to boost its case for infrastructure improvements by lumping together Moorside and Sellafield decommissioning, local communities will nevertheless know to their frustration that pleas to improve West Cumbria’s chronic road and rail infrastructure have fallen on deaf Government and industry ears for decades.

Even the construction of the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) in the 1980’s and 90’s – a project of similar workforce size to that forecast for Moorside and with similar demands on the local infrastructure – saw no improvements whatsoever made to the outdated transport system.

With Sellafield’s commercial reprocessing operations in their death throes and the site in clean-up mode, it would be morally indefensible for the taxpayer to be expected to step in now to bank roll a Japanese / French private consortium that has clearly bitten off more than it can chew and finds itself short of funding for a project whose timetable and sums increasingly fail to add up.

The very notion that the Treasury should ride to the rescue of NuGen’s vested interest in a new-build project that has considerably less than full public support will be anathema to taxpayers, particularly as they witness hospital and community services in West Cumbria – whose survival is in everyone’s interest – being increasingly starved of Government support.

A thought must be spared too for those facing the double whammy of increased electricity bills as a result of the estimated £2.5 billion cost of connecting Moorside to an upgraded North West Coast grid system – a contentious and hugely disruptive and visually damaging upgrade that National Grid has confirmed again recently would not be necessary if the Moorside project was not on the table.

The government must pull back from this boondoggle project

Time will tell whether the historically apron-stringed – some would say incestuous – relationship between Government and UK Nuclear will come up trumps for NuGen.

But if it doesn’t there will be no public sympathy for a consortium that has walked open-eyed into a remote green field site well documented as being ‘less than optimum’ for new-build in construction, infrastructure and transmission terms.

Nugen has made its bed and should now lie in it or, as the other saying suggests, get out of the Cumbrian kitchen if it can’t stand the financial heat.

Martin Forwood is the Campaign Coordinator of CORE, Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment.

This article was originally published on the CORE website.

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson – who has close personal and company ties to Russia and President Vladimir Putin – is widely touted as President-elect Donald Trump’s top pick to become the next secretary of state, with the decision likely coming this week.

The news comes amid reports that Congressional members and senior US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials say they have intelligence showing Russia attempted to tip the balance of the November US presidential election in favor of President-elect Donald Trump by hacking into email systems and giving those emails to Wikileaks.

Though the evidence presented to the US public so far lacks smoking gun documentation, however President Barack Obama has called for a complete investigation of the matter before he leaves the White House on 20th January, and many are alarmed that a geopolitical adversary may have interfered with the US electoral process.

Trump, though – who has signaled a potential sea change in the US-Russia geopolitical relationship – is not among them, as indicated in his choice of Tillerson for top US diplomat.

President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov offered support for the prospective appointment today stating before journalists: “On account of his work as the head of one of the largest oil companies, he had contacts with our representatives more than once. He fulfills his responsibilities in a highly professional manner.”

And this is ‘draining the swamp’?

But the news has caused alarm among environmentalists. “If the goal is to drain the swamp in DC, Tillerson might not be your man; Exxon’s business plan continues to require raising the level of the ocean to the point where Foggy Bottom will be well underwater”, said 350.org founder Bill McKibben in a press release.

“But this is certainly a good way to make clear exactly who’ll be running the government in a Trump administration – just cut out the middleman and hand it directly to the fossil fuel industry.”

Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and the previous Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative board chair, described the choice as a “grave error”:

“The nomination of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson for secretary of state, coupled with that of Scott Pruitt for EPA, shows that President-elect Trump is creating a government of, by, and for the oil and gas industry. Never before have we seen such a concentration of extreme wealth and privilege in a single cabinet.

“The secretary of state must also be a champion for action on climate change, building on last year’s agreement by nearly 200 countries in Paris that offers our last, best hope for averting truly devastating climate impacts. US leadership on climate change has greatly increased our standing in the world.

“!In sharp contrast, Mr. Tillerson has spent 40 years at Exxon, a company whose current business model hinges on the failure of this historic international effort. He has disparaged and downplayed the science on climate change, and his company is even currently under investigation for defrauding the public and shareholders for decades about the dangers of climate change caused by fossil fuels.

“The conflicts of interest with this secretary of state pick abound. You wouldn’t hire the CEO of a tobacco company to serve as surgeon general. So why would you pick the leader of an oil and gas corporation to spearhead a position tasked with national security and global climate action?”

Exxon ‘not a US company’, says Exxon

Exxon, the top US producer of oil and gas and a well-documented funder of climate science denial, actually leases more land in Russia than it does in the US.

“Exxon boosted its Russian holdings to 63.7 million acres in 2014 from 11.4 million at the end of 2013, according to data from U.S. regulatory filings”, reported Bloomberg in March 2014. “That dwarfs the 14.6 million acres of rights Exxon holds in the US, which until last year was its largest exploration prospect.”

Exxon, though headquartered in Irving, Texas near Dallas, is a sprawling ‘private empire’ with assets spread across the globe. When asked about building more US refineries to protect the US economy and consumers from fuel shortages, former CEO and chairman Lee Raymond put Exxon’s view of itself and its loyalty to the US bluntly.

“I’m not a US company, and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the US”, Raymond is quoted as saying in the 2012 book Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll.

In June, Tillerson attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum after taking a two-year hiatus from attending the event, which is the top business meeting held annually in Russia. Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian state oil company Rosneft and currently the subject of US sanctions, served as the keynote speaker.

Offshore drilling, fracking, LNG

Exxon and Rosneft have maintained close business relations, so much so that Putin gave the Order of Friendship Award to Tillerson in 2013. In terms of business ties, what has that ‘friendship’ entailed?

The two oil companies had intended to tap into Russia’s bounty of over 191 billion acres of offshore Arctic oil as part of their joint venture. However, that was before the US sanctioned Russia for its incursion in Crimea, which has temporarily halted the drilling plans. The two companies also co-run the Arctic Research and Design Center for Continental Shelf Development in Russia, in which Exxon maintains a 33.33% stake.

Since 1996, Exxon has also taken part in the Sakhalin Consortium, which centers around pumping oil offshore from Russia’s Sakhalin Island. Exxon and Rosneft also co-own acreage in Texas’ Permian Basin shale patch, and until recently dropping the joint venture, they co-owned 20 offshore drilling plots in the Gulf of Mexico.

Beyond the Gulf, Exxon maintains a joint venture with Rosneft to do offshore drilling in Alaska’s Point Thompson in the state’s North Slope territory.

In Russia, Exxon also co-owns a stake in the proposed Sakhalin liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Sakhalin, which would see that gas exported to the global market. However, the plant opening was delayed when sanctions hit, pushing it back at least two years according to an April 2015 announcement.

Exxon also has a joint venture with Rosneft in the Bazhenov Shale basin in Siberia, into which Exxon poured $300 million. Exxon owns a 49% stake and Rosneft 51% in that venture, which is to explore hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) possibilities in the field. If exploration bears fruit, Rosneft would hold a 66.67% interest in drilling the field while ExxonMobil would maintain a 33.33% stake.

“This agreement combines the strengths of our two companies”, Tillerson said when the two companies announced the dealin June 2012. “ExxonMobil has technology leadership in tight oil and unconventional reserves development and Rosneft brings direct knowledge and experience of Western Siberia’s geology and conventional production.”

If drilling proves technologically feasible, Bazhenov could become the most prolific shale field in the world.

Lobbying against Russian sanctions

As soon as sanctions are lifted in Russia, which Trump has said he would do, Exxon has said it will return to the Russian Arctic.

Buzzfeed has reported that a bill is now making its way through Congress which would make it much more difficult for the next president to reverse those sanctions, which were put in place through a series of executive orders. Exxon is very interested in the fate of that bill. As Buzzfeed reported:

“We have not lobbied on the bill,” Alan Jeffers, spokesperson for ExxonMobil, told BuzzFeed News. “Our activities on the bill constitute monitoring of congressional activities.”

That was this summer before Congress was again in session. Yet the bill’s language has already been changed in a way that would make Exxon’s dealings in Russia much easier, as it essentially exempts the exective order sanctioning Rosneft and other Russian energy companies.

With Tillerson heading the State Department, this kind of international energy policy may become much more common.

Steve Horn is a Research Fellow for DeSmogBlog and a freelance investigative journalist.

This article was originally published by DeSmogBlog. This version contains some additional reporting by The Ecologist.