In the closing days of President Obama’s second term, he and leaders in the Executive Branch worked feverishly to articulate their views of the administration’s legacy – and to cement that legacy as much as possible.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the areas of energy, climate and environment, where, as EPA Administrator Gina McCarty had said since well before the election, the plan was to “run through the tape“ at the end of this administration.

Ordinarily, one might examine how an incoming administration and Congress could set new priorities or undo the actions of the previous administration. But this is no ordinary transition.

Not only are we confronted by Donald Trump’s less-than-consistent pattern of sound bites and tweets, but also the transition period has seen a daily stream of Cabinet nominees disagreeing with Trump, the dismissal of political norms and constitutional limitations regarding presidential conflict of interest, and even questions about the ability of an unfriendly foreign power to influence US policy. From the miasma, little is certain except that the Trump administration will seek a rapid reversal of course.

Ultimately, we must judge the legacy of the Obama administration by the tides of change set in motion by its actions. The Supreme Court may gut the Voting Rights Act, but the enduring impacts of its expansion of voting rights are not so easily erased. The 115th Congress may repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but it is difficult to see some of the linchpins of Obamacare, such as coverage for pre-existing conditions, disappearing from the expectations of the American people.

What then about clean energy? What can survive a worst-case policy, legal and legislative onslaught? What if the Clean Power Plan, the tougher fuel economy standards for our cars and trucks, the Paris climate accords, and other environmental achievements touted by the Obama administration go out the window?

The answer, from my perspective as the director of the University of Michigan’s Energy Institute, lies largely outside of Washington. It lies in the economic globalization from which Trump has profited as a businessman, yet railed against as a candidate. It lies in the ability of our states to act as the ‘laboratories of democracy’ in ways that states-rights advocates have long extolled. Ironies abound.

EPA in the crosshairs

In his recent article ‘The irreversible momentum of clean energy’, Obama notes that over the past eight years, CO₂ emissions from the energy sector fell by 9.5%. While the growth of renewable energy from wind and solar has played a part, the dominant contributor to this trend has been the displacement of coal by natural gas as the single largest fuel source for electricity production in the US.

That shift has been enabled by the dramatic increase in US oil and gas production from shale and other ‘tight’ geologic formations. It’s resulted in cheap and abundant natural gas, made cheap gasoline the norm for the past two years and vaulted the US to become the world’s top energy producer.

It’s still not clear whether the EPA Clean Power Plan – regulations designed to curb CO₂ emissions from power generators now held up in the courts – will survive legal challenges or what the Trump administration will do with it. Regardless, the continuing reduction of emissions from the power sector is here to stay for the foreseeable future. The demise of coal is a matter of economics, not policy or regulation.

But if the goals of the Clean Power Plan are sailing with the favorable wind of domestic energy supplies, the Jan. 13 action of the EPA to lock in vehicle fuel efficiency standards through 2025 might be seen to be sailing against the same wind.

Automakers, not surprisingly, complained and have already appealed to President-elect Trump to undo these. Consumers, enjoying cheap gasoline for the past two years, have continued to buy larger and less fuel-efficient vehicles. Why should we expect higher fuel economy standards to survive?

The reasons are threefold. The EPA’s determination, after a lengthy evaluation of technical and economic feasibility and appropriateness, is legally binding. Reversal by the next administration would require a similarly lengthy process to establish a different finding and appropriate regulatory response.

While dazzling electronic capabilities and more self-driving features capture most of the attention at auto and consumer electronics shows, there also has been a relentless advance in fuel-saving technologies and, most importantly, investment in their large-scale manufacture. Advances such as engine stop-start and higher efficiency internal combustion engines are now standard.

Ford introduced the lighter-weight, aluminum body F-150 for the 2015 model year. GM has begun to deliver the electric Chevy Bolt. The progressive increases in fuel economy standards that have just been locked down to 2025 may stretch automakers, but there is no reason to expect the pace of technological innovation in more efficient and environmentally friendly vehicles to abate.

The reason for that is the global marketplace. The US market represents about 20% of the global car market, and that share will likely decline as populations and economies grow elsewhere. Increasing urbanization will increase the need for ever-cleaner transportation, a trend automakers have recognized.

On 3rd January, Ford rolled out its plans for seven of the 13 new electrified vehicles it plans to introduce in the next five years. Today, more electric cars are being sold in China than in the rest of the world combined.

Automakers complain that US consumers are not willing to pay for better efficiency if it adds significant cost. However, consumer response to low energy prices suggests that vehicle size, not cost, has driven recent trends toward gas-guzzlers.

So meeting US efficiency and emissions standards by developing new technologies and products will continue to improve the global competitiveness of the auto industry. That isn’t going to change, no matter who occupies the White House. Unless, of course, that individual starts a trade war.

Economic clout of renewables

What about renewables for electricity generation? Can a Trump administration set back clean energy for a generation, as the Reagan administration did? The answer is simply no.

They may slow it down a bit by removal of tax incentives and disinvestment in federally funded R&D (both of which will attract significant opposition from many Republicans in Congress in wind-friendly states, for instance), but here the Obama legacy will not be uprooted. The reason is that we are at a much different place on the experience curve, both technologically and societally.

While wind and solar combined accounted for only 5.3% of US electricity generated in 2015, costs for these renewable sources of electricity have been cut roughly in half since 2008; installed solar capacity has increased 17-fold and wind capacity has increased three-fold.

Whether or not people install solar panels on their houses or support wind turbines in their own or somebody else’s backyard, these are no longer seen as exotic sources of energy. Just last month the nation’s first off-shore wind farm became operational, and given the proximity of 70% of America’s population to its coasts, this too may soon seem less exotic.

However, the real action on renewable power generation will likely be outside of Washington during the next administration. Twenty-nine states have Renewable Portfolio Standards, or mandates, for electricity generation in effect, with California’s ’50 percent by 2050′ being the most ambitious.

While the number of states with these renewable energy mandates has not changed much in the past eight years, the requirements in many of these have continued to be ratcheted up, with demonstrable economic benefit. Most notably in 2016, Michigan and Ohio successfully resisted attempts by Republican-controlled legislatures to eliminate their standards.

Part of the reason is that clean power is emerging as an important tool for economic development at the state level. The Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance includes some of the country’s largest and most respected corporations, and states that wish to attract or retain these employers are moving to ensure their clean energy supply needs can be met. While failure by states to ensure access to clean energy supplies may not yet have the same negative impact on recruitment and retention of businesses as passing ‘bathroom bills’, the future direction is clear.

In the end, the enduring clean energy legacy of the Obama administration may be that it got us ‘over the hump’ of thinking in terms of the false dichotomy of clean versus affordable energy.

While the revolution in domestic production of gas and oil relieved many of the economic pressures, the strong emphasis on clean energy development and deployment from the very beginning, including US$90 billion in clean energy investments and tax credits made under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, have ensured a cleaner energy trajectory for the nation.

The pace may change, but the ultimate direction will not.

Mark Barteau is Director, University of Michigan Energy Institute, University of Michigan.

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

In the closing days of President Obama’s second term, he and leaders in the Executive Branch worked feverishly to articulate their views of the administration’s legacy – and to cement that legacy as much as possible.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the areas of energy, climate and environment, where, as EPA Administrator Gina McCarty had said since well before the election, the plan was to “run through the tape“ at the end of this administration.

Ordinarily, one might examine how an incoming administration and Congress could set new priorities or undo the actions of the previous administration. But this is no ordinary transition.

Not only are we confronted by Donald Trump’s less-than-consistent pattern of sound bites and tweets, but also the transition period has seen a daily stream of Cabinet nominees disagreeing with Trump, the dismissal of political norms and constitutional limitations regarding presidential conflict of interest, and even questions about the ability of an unfriendly foreign power to influence US policy. From the miasma, little is certain except that the Trump administration will seek a rapid reversal of course.

Ultimately, we must judge the legacy of the Obama administration by the tides of change set in motion by its actions. The Supreme Court may gut the Voting Rights Act, but the enduring impacts of its expansion of voting rights are not so easily erased. The 115th Congress may repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but it is difficult to see some of the linchpins of Obamacare, such as coverage for pre-existing conditions, disappearing from the expectations of the American people.

What then about clean energy? What can survive a worst-case policy, legal and legislative onslaught? What if the Clean Power Plan, the tougher fuel economy standards for our cars and trucks, the Paris climate accords, and other environmental achievements touted by the Obama administration go out the window?

The answer, from my perspective as the director of the University of Michigan’s Energy Institute, lies largely outside of Washington. It lies in the economic globalization from which Trump has profited as a businessman, yet railed against as a candidate. It lies in the ability of our states to act as the ‘laboratories of democracy’ in ways that states-rights advocates have long extolled. Ironies abound.

EPA in the crosshairs

In his recent article ‘The irreversible momentum of clean energy’, Obama notes that over the past eight years, CO₂ emissions from the energy sector fell by 9.5%. While the growth of renewable energy from wind and solar has played a part, the dominant contributor to this trend has been the displacement of coal by natural gas as the single largest fuel source for electricity production in the US.

That shift has been enabled by the dramatic increase in US oil and gas production from shale and other ‘tight’ geologic formations. It’s resulted in cheap and abundant natural gas, made cheap gasoline the norm for the past two years and vaulted the US to become the world’s top energy producer.

It’s still not clear whether the EPA Clean Power Plan – regulations designed to curb CO₂ emissions from power generators now held up in the courts – will survive legal challenges or what the Trump administration will do with it. Regardless, the continuing reduction of emissions from the power sector is here to stay for the foreseeable future. The demise of coal is a matter of economics, not policy or regulation.

But if the goals of the Clean Power Plan are sailing with the favorable wind of domestic energy supplies, the Jan. 13 action of the EPA to lock in vehicle fuel efficiency standards through 2025 might be seen to be sailing against the same wind.

Automakers, not surprisingly, complained and have already appealed to President-elect Trump to undo these. Consumers, enjoying cheap gasoline for the past two years, have continued to buy larger and less fuel-efficient vehicles. Why should we expect higher fuel economy standards to survive?

The reasons are threefold. The EPA’s determination, after a lengthy evaluation of technical and economic feasibility and appropriateness, is legally binding. Reversal by the next administration would require a similarly lengthy process to establish a different finding and appropriate regulatory response.

While dazzling electronic capabilities and more self-driving features capture most of the attention at auto and consumer electronics shows, there also has been a relentless advance in fuel-saving technologies and, most importantly, investment in their large-scale manufacture. Advances such as engine stop-start and higher efficiency internal combustion engines are now standard.

Ford introduced the lighter-weight, aluminum body F-150 for the 2015 model year. GM has begun to deliver the electric Chevy Bolt. The progressive increases in fuel economy standards that have just been locked down to 2025 may stretch automakers, but there is no reason to expect the pace of technological innovation in more efficient and environmentally friendly vehicles to abate.

The reason for that is the global marketplace. The US market represents about 20% of the global car market, and that share will likely decline as populations and economies grow elsewhere. Increasing urbanization will increase the need for ever-cleaner transportation, a trend automakers have recognized.

On 3rd January, Ford rolled out its plans for seven of the 13 new electrified vehicles it plans to introduce in the next five years. Today, more electric cars are being sold in China than in the rest of the world combined.

Automakers complain that US consumers are not willing to pay for better efficiency if it adds significant cost. However, consumer response to low energy prices suggests that vehicle size, not cost, has driven recent trends toward gas-guzzlers.

So meeting US efficiency and emissions standards by developing new technologies and products will continue to improve the global competitiveness of the auto industry. That isn’t going to change, no matter who occupies the White House. Unless, of course, that individual starts a trade war.

Economic clout of renewables

What about renewables for electricity generation? Can a Trump administration set back clean energy for a generation, as the Reagan administration did? The answer is simply no.

They may slow it down a bit by removal of tax incentives and disinvestment in federally funded R&D (both of which will attract significant opposition from many Republicans in Congress in wind-friendly states, for instance), but here the Obama legacy will not be uprooted. The reason is that we are at a much different place on the experience curve, both technologically and societally.

While wind and solar combined accounted for only 5.3% of US electricity generated in 2015, costs for these renewable sources of electricity have been cut roughly in half since 2008; installed solar capacity has increased 17-fold and wind capacity has increased three-fold.

Whether or not people install solar panels on their houses or support wind turbines in their own or somebody else’s backyard, these are no longer seen as exotic sources of energy. Just last month the nation’s first off-shore wind farm became operational, and given the proximity of 70% of America’s population to its coasts, this too may soon seem less exotic.

However, the real action on renewable power generation will likely be outside of Washington during the next administration. Twenty-nine states have Renewable Portfolio Standards, or mandates, for electricity generation in effect, with California’s ’50 percent by 2050′ being the most ambitious.

While the number of states with these renewable energy mandates has not changed much in the past eight years, the requirements in many of these have continued to be ratcheted up, with demonstrable economic benefit. Most notably in 2016, Michigan and Ohio successfully resisted attempts by Republican-controlled legislatures to eliminate their standards.

Part of the reason is that clean power is emerging as an important tool for economic development at the state level. The Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance includes some of the country’s largest and most respected corporations, and states that wish to attract or retain these employers are moving to ensure their clean energy supply needs can be met. While failure by states to ensure access to clean energy supplies may not yet have the same negative impact on recruitment and retention of businesses as passing ‘bathroom bills’, the future direction is clear.

In the end, the enduring clean energy legacy of the Obama administration may be that it got us ‘over the hump’ of thinking in terms of the false dichotomy of clean versus affordable energy.

While the revolution in domestic production of gas and oil relieved many of the economic pressures, the strong emphasis on clean energy development and deployment from the very beginning, including US$90 billion in clean energy investments and tax credits made under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, have ensured a cleaner energy trajectory for the nation.

The pace may change, but the ultimate direction will not.

Mark Barteau is Director, University of Michigan Energy Institute, University of Michigan.

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

One Earth, One Humanity, One Future, the theme of the gathering to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Resurgence, is one that has been conveyed by poets, philosophers and spiritual teachers throughout the ages. One of its most beautiful expressions is found in the celebrated speech attributed to Chief Seattle of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes of what is now the state of Washington in the north-west of the USA:

This we know:
all things are connected
like the blood
that unites one family…
Whatever befalls the earth,
befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life;
he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
he does to himself.

The same idea is at the very core of the Earth Charter, that remarkable declaration of 16 fundamental principles to build a just, sustainable and peaceful world. The Preamble of the Earth Charter states:

We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future… We must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny.

The time-honoured notions of the web of life and the Earth community, or community of life, are fully consistent with a new conception of life that has emerged in science over the last 30 years. In my recent book The Systems View of Life, co-authored with Pier Luigi Luisi, I offer a grand synthesis of this new scientific understanding of life.

A new conception of life
At the forefront of contemporary science, the universe is no longer seen as a machine composed of elementary building blocks. We have discovered that the material world is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships; that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. The view of the human body as a machine and of the mind as a separate entity is being replaced by one that sees not only the brain, but also the immune system, the bodily tissues, and even each cell as a living, cognitive system.

Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather as a cooperative dance in which creativity and the constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. And with the new emphasis on complexity, networks, and patterns of organisation, a new science of qualities is slowly emerging.

I call this new science ‘the systems view of life’ because it involves a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns and context. In science, this way of thinking is known as ‘systems thinking’, or ‘systemic thinking’. Thinking in terms of relationships is crucial for ecology, because ecology – derived from the Greek oikos, meaning ‘household’ – is the science of the relationships among various members of the Earth Household.

To present the systems view of life properly would take a whole course. In fact, I am now teaching such a course online in a series of 12 lectures. I call it ‘Capra Course’. Here I can give you only a few highlights.

Living networks
One of the most important insights of the systemic understanding of life is the recognition that networks are the basic pattern of organisation of all living systems. Ecosystems are understood in terms of food webs (i.e. networks of organisms); organisms are networks of cells, organs and organ systems; and cells are networks of molecules.

The network is a pattern that is common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks. Indeed, at the very heart of the change of paradigm from the mechanistic to the systemic view of life we find a fundamental change of metaphor: from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network.

Closer examination of these living networks has shown that their key characteristic is that they are self-generating. In a cell, for example, all the biological structures – the proteins, the enzymes, the DNA, the cell membrane, and so on – are continually produced, repaired and regenerated by the cellular network. Similarly, at the level of a multicellular organism, the bodily cells are continually regenerated and recycled by the organism’s metabolic network.

Living networks continually create or recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. In this way they undergo continual structural changes while preserving their web-like patterns of organisation. This coexistence of stability and change is indeed one of the key characteristics of life.

Life in the social realm can also be understood in terms of networks, but here we are not dealing with chemical processes: we are dealing with processes of communication. Social networks, as you know, are networks of communications. Like biological networks, they are self-generating, but what they generate is mostly non-material. Each communication creates thoughts and meaning, which give rise to further communications, and thus the entire network generates itself.

Mind and consciousness
One of the most important, and most radical, philosophical implications of the systems view of life is a new conception of the nature of mind and consciousness, which finally overcomes the Cartesian division between mind and matter that has haunted philosophers and scientists for centuries.

In the 17th century, René Descartes based his view on the fundamental division between two independent and separate realms – that of mind, which he called the ‘thinking thing’ (res cogitans), and that of matter, the ‘extended thing’ (res extensa).

Following Descartes, scientists and philosophers continued to think of the mind as some intangible entity and were unable to imagine how this ‘thinking thing’ is related to the body. The decisive advance of the systems view of life has been to abandon the Cartesian view of mind as a ‘thing’, and to realise that mind and consciousness are not things, but processes.

This novel concept of mind was developed during the 1960s by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who used the term ‘mental process’, and independently by the biologist Humberto Maturana. Their central insight is the identification of cognition, the process of knowing, with the process of life. Cognition, according to Maturana, is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks. In other words, cognition is the very process of life.

The self-organising activity of living systems, at all levels of life, is mental activity. The interactions of a living organism – plant, animal or human – with its environment are cognitive interactions. Thus life and cognition are inseparably connected. Mind – or, more accurately, mental activity – is immanent in matter at all levels of life. For the first time, we have a scientific theory that unifies mind, matter and life.

Systemic problems 
– systemic solutions
I want to emphasise that my synthesis of the systems view of life is not only theory, but that it has very concrete applications. In the last part of our book, titled Sustaining the Web of Life, we discuss the critical importance of the systems view of life for dealing with the problems of our multifaceted global crisis.

Today, it is becoming more and more evident that none of these problems – energy, environment, climate change, economic inequality, violence and war – can be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are all interconnected and interdependent. As Pope Francis puts it in his remarkable encyclical Laudato si’,

our common home is falling into serious disrepair… [This is] evident in large-scale natural disasters as well as social and even financial crises, for the world’s problems cannot be analyzed or explained in isolation… It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected.

These systemic problems require corresponding systemic solutions – solutions that do not solve any problem in isolation, but deal with it within the context of other related problems. Systemic solutions, therefore, tend to solve several problems simultaneously, whereas systemic problems have harmful consequences in several different areas.

Let me take agriculture as an example. If we changed from our chemical, large-scale industrial agriculture to organic, community-oriented, sustainable farming, this would contribute significantly to solving three of our biggest problems:

• It would greatly reduce our energy dependence, because we are now using one fifth of our fossil fuels to grow and process food.
• The healthy, organically grown food would hugely improve public health, because many chronic diseases – heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and so on – are linked to our diet.
• Organic farming would contribute significantly to alleviating climate change, because an organic soil is a carbon-rich soil, which means that it draws CO2 from the atmosphere and locks it up in organic matter.

This is just one example of a systemic solution. Over the last few decades, the research institutes and centres of learning of the global civil society have developed and proposed hundreds of such systemic solutions all over the world. Resurgence has been at the forefront of documenting and discussing these solutions for the last 50 years with the unique blend of science, art, philosophy, spirituality and activism that has become its hallmark. Happy anniversary, Resurgence!

This article is based on a paper prepared for the One Earth, One Humanity, One Future gathering at Worcester College, Oxford in September 2016.

Fritjof Capra, physicist and systems theorist, is a founding director of the Centre for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. He is a Fellow of Schumacher College and a member of the Council of Earth Charter International. His books include The Tao of Physics (1975), The Web of Life (1996), and The Hidden Connections (2002). He is co-author, with Pier Luigi Luisi, of the multidisciplinary textbook The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Cambridge University Press, 2014), on which his new online course (www.capracourse.net) is based.

What the unelected far-right Prime Minister announced in her big speech this week was that for the UK, BREXIT = TRUMPISM.

She also shamelessly announced that the ‘victorious’ Murdoch Brexit campaign were telling yet another bare-faced lie, again and again, when they said we would NOT leave the Single Market.

We are now in the middle of a far-right unelected coup, driven by Murdoch and Dacre.

In Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, she describes how a US far-right neoliberal clique is forcing through the destruction of the welfare state in country after country, whenever there is a major crisis like the fall of the Berlin Wall or Brexit.

This is now happening here in the UK.

What May and Hammond announced this week, is that if the EU does not cave in and agree to Britain getting all the benefits of free access to EU markets for our corporations, with NONE of the social responsibilities towards our workers and environment, then they will turn the UK into a European offshore version of a South Asian economy.

Britain’s future: Airstrip One?

So what does all this mean?

• Turning Britain into an even greater immoral thieving tax-haven than we already are. They would give away billions to the rich 1% owned corporations by abolishing Corporation Tax.
• This will be funded by further massive slashing of public services and the placing of all of remaining tax burden on employees and the poor.
• This would also be a disaster for all working people across Europe, as it would force their governments to do the same or face loss of all their corporations HQs to the UK.
• They are abolishing what remains of social housing in the UK.
• They are seeking to abolish whole swathes of environmental and health protections.
• They want to flood Britain with GMO foods and corporate pesticides.
• They are ensuring fossil fuel and nuclear corporations get massive help from taxpayers, whilst slapping taxes on renewable energies.
• All the leading Brexiters and their billionaire media puppet masters want to destroy action on the climate emergency.
• They want to abolish totally the NHS and have a 100% privatised NHS.
• They want to slash help for the poor in the UK and slash international development aid for the poorest in the world.
• They want ‘free trade’ treaties that abolish the right of the UKs elected government to implement any future environmental regulations and make illegal for the elected UK government to implement any nationalisations of key industries like health or railways or Post Office.
• They want to abolish all our international human rights treaty protections and remove all UK government actions from international legal oversight and appeal.
• They want to destroy what remains of the trade unions and workers rights.
• They want to abolish all welfare safety net provisions for the poor, the unemployed, the disabled.
• They want to slash the number of elected MPs, whilst they are packing the House of Lords with hundreds of more right wing corporate donors.
• They are attacking the right to vote by bringing in new requirements for US style voter ID laws and more difficult voter registration laws that mean hundreds of thousands of poorer voters and students are falling off the voter rolls.
• They want to abolish public education and hand it over to for-profit corporations.
• They want to abolish all planning regulations and end the Green Belt and build on our public open spaces.
• They are facilitating Murdoch’s disastrous fascist monopoly on our prostituted media, by letting him take over all of Sky, potentially turning it into another Fox News, which would take a ball and chain to what remains of our battered prostituted democracy; he has also just been allowed to take over yet another chain of UK radio stations, the TalkSport chain.

So of course this massive announcement that the Brexit campaign sold us a pack of lies, and its implications, got front page cover on the BBC the morning after the speech?

Erm … NO!!! Despite all of the tabloids crowing about May’s announcement of their betrayal of their promises on Single Market Membership, there was absolutely nothing on BBC front page!!

We must remember the Murdoch coup that took place at the BBC five years ago, when the Tories appointed two Murdoch editors to be in charge of BBC News!!

So what can we do?!

The Greens and LibDems came out fighting. But shamefully Labour caved in immediately and ridiculously spoke about how the PM had taken their concerns on board by allowing a vote in Parliament.

And today we learn that Jeremy Corbyn has disastrously asked his MPs to vote in favour of allowing the Prime Minister to submit her Article 50 notification to the EU in March – even though the only hope of preventing the massive jump to the extreme right she is planning is to delay Article 50 for as long as possible.

What’s needed is what the Lib Dems and Greens are calling for. Britain deserves a second referendum on the final Brexit Deal – as the first flawed referendum was based on a total pack of lies and deceit by the Brexit Campaign. Alternatively if Article 50 can be delayed for long enough, we may get a chance to vote again in a general election.

And to get that second referendum, or pre-Brexit election, we need Jeremy Corbyn to stand up to the mark! Or failing that, resign and let a new progressive Parliamentary leadership emerge that’s willing to fight Murdoch and the far-right’s UK Brexit coup with fire in its belly!

LibDem leader Tim Farron and Green co-leaders Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley have shown us they have the right stuff. And now Clive Lewis, Labour’s shadow business secretary who shares Corbyn’s popular political vision, has come out firmly against his leader on this vital issue, supported by an estimated 60-80 other Labour MPs. There is also widespread concern in the Tory Party at the deeply worrying moves we are seeing.

The UK now needs its loyal parliamentarians to defend the rights, freedoms and prosperity of the British people as never before. The alternative is too dreadful to contemplate.

Yes we Can!

Donnachadh McCarthy is an environmental campaigner and author.

Book: ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought‘ is available as an E-book and paper (100% recycled).

Free ebook version of The Prostitute State, which explains in detail how Murdoch and the UK’s five far-right media billionaires are trashing the UK’s democracy, is available to Occupiers, Fractivists, Momentum / Green Party members, students and others who cannot afford to buy a copy by emailing contact@3acorns.co.uk.

It’s not the metaphorical political meltdown of Belgium that neighbouring governments fret about, but a nuclear meltdown. The Netherlands, Luxemburg and Germany have all asked Belgium’s government to close its most risky reactors with immediate effect. The city of Aachen and 30 other major cities and districts are also suing Belgium for not closing them. The German government no longer trusts the Belgian Nuclear Safety Agency and wants permission for its own agency to do safety checks. So far, foreign pressure is falling on deaf ears.

Belgians have even more reasons to worry. On 10 January 2017 a new emergency plan was presented in a commission in Belgium’s Parliament. The evacuation perimeter was conveniently halved to 10km to avoid an evacuation of Belgium’s second and third cities in case of a meltdown. Nuclear Transparency Watch, a European organisation created by Members of the European Parliament of all political colours, called Belgium’s plans totally inadequate and incoherent.inad

So rather than signing agreements with Belgium about sharing information, where are the economic sanctions for Belgium? There are both EU and UN regulations that could shut the reactors down, as more than a million people requested a year ago. Belgium’s neighbours have reasons to get tough.

Belgium is your backyard

Belgium’s recent nuclear history reads like a mirror of Germany’s, where the highest court decided that Merkel’s decision to speed up the nuclear phase-out after the Fukushima incident was justified. Belgium did just the opposite. The Belgian government reversed a nuclear phase-out law from 2003 only a year after the Japanese reactors exploded, pushing retirement back from 2015 to 2025. The last bill to postpone retirement with 10 years was approved at the end of 2016. The Government can ‘take comfort’ at the fact that 2017 started better than 2016: unlike last year when only a week incidents after which the first incident (in which one person got severely injured) took place with an unexpected shutdown as result.

Yes, the protesting former president of the European Parliament Martin Schulz was born and raised close to Belgium’s border and yes, I was born and raised 15 km from four nuclear reactors in Doel, in the city of Antwerp (half a million people). But before you call us NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) activists: our backyard contains six to seven million people that in the event of a nuclear meltdown would never be able to go home again. Depending on the wind direction on the day of a meltdown, a radioactive cloud will poison and kill many additional people in London, Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin as well. The possibility of that scenario has increased in recent years.

Cracks, extortion and sabotage

In 2012 it became known that the mantle around the old Tihange 2 reactor shows signs of erosion. Further research in 2015 concluded that there are thousands of cracks of up to 15 cm. Later that year, 10 security incidents were recorded in Tihange in just six weeks, leading Belgium’s nuclear safety agency to suspend four members of staff and raise serious questions about the safety culture. In 2015, Belgian’s nuclear plants spent longer in shutdown or “maintenance” than in being operational.

Who said nuclear energy was a reliable source of energy?

But it is the Doel plant that reads like the script of an apocalyptic Hollywood blockbuster, part one. The plant was sabotaged in 2014. The sabotage was found before things spiralled out of control, but the culprit(s) remain unknown. A year later, police found hidden cameras that followed the movements of a nuclear researcher, raising alarming questions about criminals extorting staff. Research also revealed a staggering number of cracks in the mantle that is supposed to keep the Doel 3 reactor in check: 13,047. The cracks are on average 1 to 2 cm wide, but the largest ones are up to 18cm. And with 35 years of operational history, the researched Doel 3 is the second “youngest” of Doel’s four reactors. Belgium’s nuclear safety agency concluded after the tests in Tihange and Doel that the erosion of the mantle was due to normal reactor activity. They can thus be expected to be present in all plants in the world of similar age and to keep multiply through normal reactor use.

The economic and terrorist threats

In terms of potential economic impacts, Doel is by far number 1 in Europe. The major Fukushima disaster knocked 2 to 10% from Japan’s GDP, but when Doel goes into meltdown, the cost is estimated to be 200% of the GDP of Belgium. In such a scenario, GDP won’t really mean much. Most of Flanders and the capital of Europe will become inhabitable zones, sending millions of refugees to France, The Netherlands, Germany and the UK. Will they open their borders for a flood of immigrants from Belgium?

And then there’s terrorism. For the last two years, Belgian authorities have claimed we are living under emergency level 3, just one notch below the State of Emergency that France is living under. This means a terrorist threat is “serious” and an attack “probable”. France has already experienced a series of undeclared drone flights over various nuclear power stations. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists later explained that the danger of that is not about drones carrying small explosives and crashing on the plant because in theory a nuclear plant can cope with a jumbo jet crash (although this has never been tested). But drones can easily carry AK47s and drop them inside the territory of the plant, even at night.

In another scenario laid out by the atomic scientists, drones can attack the power lines and then the diesel generator back-up system. It requires a bit more organisation than driving a truck into a crowd, but less than teaching a terrorist team how to fly a jumbo jet, hijack several at the same time and fly them into the two WTC towers and the Pentagon. As we have learned the hard way in recent years, Belgium also happens to be a favourite hide-out for terrorists. Belgium’s authorities want us to believe that the terrorist risk has never been so high, but they don’t want you to connect that with our nuclear plants and with unexplained drone flights over nuclear plants.

Corrupted centralised power plants

All this raises the question: is it still smart to count on a few vulnerable centralised power plants? And what about the waste of state money that seems to come hand-in-hand with nuclear power? Bulgaria wasted 1,221 billion euro on a plant that never materialized. Bulgaria is also still spending money to deal with the legacy of uranium mining, even though the last mine closed in 1992. When I visited the surroundings of the now closed Buhovo mine, stones of a size that would fit a child’s hand showed radiation 100s of times above normal. They were ready to be picked up and played with at a popular local picnic place.

Conflicts against nuclear power plants and the formulation of constructive alternatives are popping up outside Europe as well: from India to Japan. So are the conflicts and externalised costs around the uranium that now feeds most of our reactors, from Niger to Namibia. Although there’s one other country that has become the EU’s main supplier: Russia. But as environmental justice, geopolitical weakening or financial debacles don’t seem to stop the nuclear addiction: will it have to take another meltdown? Policymakers seem to have forgotten that our countries signed up to the precautionary principle, which the EU still has in its Treaty. Maybe it’s time that the Germans, who are kicking nuclear out of their country, march once more on Belgium. As a Belgian citizen I do kindly request to come in peace and only armed with the renewable energy solutions that swept your country.

This Author

Nick Meynen was the organiser of a 72km long anti-nuclear energy march from Doel to Brussels. He works for the ENVJUSTICE project and writes articles and books on environmental issues.

Dear Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party,

We are a volunteer group in Cumbria made up from all walks of life from scientists, tourist trade, doctors, nurses, teachers, and nuclear workers.

We oppose the planned Moorside nuclear development in Cumbria and feel that you may be underestimating the strength of feeling against plans for the ‘biggest nuclear development in Europe’ on 1,500 acres of greenfields and floodplain next to Sellafield.

When you appeared on the Andrew Marr show last weekend you missed the chance to condemn the project with the painfully equivocal response: “I want to see a mix, I want to see a greater emphasis in the long-term on renewables in the way Germany and other countries have done but we do have nuclear power stations, we do have a nuclear base at the moment and that will continue for a long time.”

So I would like to draw to your attention that the North West Evening Mail is running a poll on the issue. Unlike the official government and industry consultations this poll offers the option to say ‘NO!’ – and 85% of the 2,321 people voting so far have done just that.

There is also an ongoing 38 Degrees petition to: “Stop Moorside the ‘biggest nuclear development in Europe’.” Despite the virtual media block on the resistance to Moorside (all media attention has been on the pylon route) this poll to Stop Moorside has attracted 11,769 signatures and rising.

‘Weaker containment, less redundancy in safety systems, fewer safety features’

Campaigners have raised funds to commission reports independent of government and industry. A report by the Edinburgh Energy and Environment Consultancy makes shocking reading. Construction has so far commenced on ten AP1000s, six in the US and four in China, and another three are scheduled to begin soon.

Of these two of the ten have been suspended, presumed abandoned, and the other eight are all running several years late and hugely over cost. Not a single one has ever been completed.

But the EEEC report highlights a completely separate problem: the design is intrinsically unsafe.

A design objective of the AP1000 was also to be less expensive than other designs, by using less equipment than competing designs. The design decreases the number of components, including pipes, wires, and valves. The AP1000 has: fewer safety-related valves, fewer pumps, less safety-related piping, less control cable, and less seismic building volume.

Westinghouse claims that this enhances safety because there are fewer active components to go wrong. In contrast the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) says that “the Westinghouse AP1000 has a weaker containment, less redundancy in safety systems, and fewer safety features than current reactors.”

There is a great deal of uncertainty about how these passive approaches would actually work in practice, and since, like the EPR reactor proposed for Hinkley Point C, there are no operating AP1000s anywhere in the world, there is no operating experience to draw from.

Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, of US-based Fairewinds Associates, has repeatedly warned that the AP1000 design suffers from a design flaw which makes it vulnerable to a very large release of radioactivity following an accident if there were just a small failure in the steel containment vessel.

In that event gases released from the reactor would be sucked through existing ‘pinhole’ containment flaws in the AP1000 Shield Building due to the ‘chimney effect’, potentially leading to the rapid venting huge amounts of radioactivity to the environment.

Help to relieve Cumbria of this intolerable burden!

Cumbria already has the intolerable burden of Sellafield. Adding to that burden with Moorside would be genocidal, the school gates at Beckermet would be just 700 metres from the “biggest nuclear development in Europe” which would be next to Sellafield already the biggest and most dangerous nuclear site in Europe.

Please, please, set aside the siren voices that are working hard to convince you that outright opposition to the Moorside nuclear complex would be a vote-loser in the forthcoming by-election.

Instead listen to the voices of resistance – which include many Labour voters previously encouraged by your rational, well-informed scepticism of the nuclear industry and its taxpayer-funded spin doctors.

All our local knowledge is consistently informing us that the Moorside monstrosity is deeply unpopular across the community, and that the pro-nuclear brigade represent a small if highly vocal minority. Your firm and outspoken opposition to the project would galvanise and inspire nuclear opponents, and give them a compelling reason to vote Labour in the Copeland by-election!

Yours sincerely,

Marianne Birkby, Radiation Free Lakeland.

Marianne Birkby is spokesperson for Radiation Free Lakeland (RFL). RFL is a voluntary organisation of local activists giving their own time and expertise freely. Any donations go directly to campaigning for nuclear safety.

Petition: ‘Lock the Gate on Drigg!‘ (nuclear waste storage site adjacent to Sellafield).

Petition: ‘Stop Moorside!‘

This article is an extended version of one originally published by Radiation free Lakeland.

Having run many environmental campaigns over many years I know very well the importance of getting the facts right.

With that basic principle in mind I was surprised to hear a radio broadcast on January 4th suggesting that in relation to its campaign against fracking for shale gas and shale oil, that Friends of the Earth had got some basic points wrong.

The allegation was that a leaflet explaining some of the health and pollution risks of fracking had made factual errors.

I spoke to Craig Bennett, Chief Executive at Friends of the Earth, to find out what had happened. I used to do his job some years ago and was very interested to know what the campaigners had to say.

I quickly discovered that reality differed somewhat from the headlines that screamed about Friends of the Earth’s alleged errors.

As it happens, the campaign group hadn’t got anything wrong and the reason that the radio broadcast, and a number of newspaper articles appearing around the same time, said otherwise was down to that impression being created by a public body with a remit to independently adjudicate the veracity of claims made by companies and charities.

Has the ASA itself been politicised?

The public body in question is the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), and it looks very much as if, on fracking, it has been engaged in political activities itself. The chronology of events went like this …

During December the ASA assured Friends of the Earth in writing that they were planning to make an informal resolution on complaints they had received about claims made on fracking. They said that at that point the ASA “will not give details of the complaint or state that you breached the Code.” Since Friends of the Earth’s claims had not been ruled to be false, the ASA should not of course say that it had breached its code.

The ASA had by then closed their case on the Friends of the Earth leaflet without a ruling as ‘informally resolved‘ – because no final decision had been made by the ASA Council on the statements, or their accuracy. As Craig Bennett explains:

“Friends of the Earth agreed not to reuse an old leaflet, or repeat some specific wording, because the case was taking time away from vital campaigning – we are, after all, talking about an out-of-date leaflet from two years ago which we weren’t using anyway. But, one thing is certain, we continue to stand by our facts. Indeed, the scientific evidence against fracking is stronger than ever.”

Having established that the case would be closed with no ruling, the ASA went on to say that “The ASA publishes basic details of the complaints it investigates on its website, www.asa.org.uk. Your company name, the industry sector and the medium in which the advertising appeared will be published on Wednesday 28 December in a list with other advertisers that have co-operated in resolving complaints. It will not give details of the complaint or state that you breached the Code.”

A carefully timed media coup by the ASA?

It was in other words to be a non-story. There was no ruling that Friends of the Earth had made errors. Outline information only, with “no details”, was to be published alongside a number of other cases with no statement that the code had been breached.

During the Christmas holidays, however, the campaign group was told that the ASA had decided to move the publication date to Wednesday 4th January – as it happens the day before fracking company Cuadrilla moved onto a site in Lancashire where they are now preparing to try to frack.

Then on Tuesday 3rd January Friends of the Earth started getting press enquires, asking whether the group had admitted to being wrong about health, water and property price claims in its leaflet. A BBC journalist forwarded an extract of what they said was an ASA press release.

This was especially strange as the ASA said they hadn’t put out a press release, yet what the BBC shared, and what I saw, looked very much like one. A flurry of publicity followed, including that piece I heard on the radio on January 4th.

The effect was to create a media blitz that drowned out any campaigning by anti-fracking activists that might have been broadcast that morning to accompany Cuadrilla’s first day of operations on its new site in Lancashire.

The compromised chairman of the ASA – fracking ‘task force’ supremo Chris Smith!

As if this wasn’t fishy enough, I discovered a major conflict of interest at the ASA. The Chairman of the ASA is none other than Lord Chris Smith – who is also the chair of the industry funded Task Force on Shale Gas. This is a remarkable and clear conflict of interest and makes the facts of what happened in relation to the Friends of the Earth case all the more fascinating.

The conflict deepens when one realizes how the Task Force was evidently influential in helping the ASA form its initial views in relation to the Friends of the Earth case.

While the ASA evidently ignored, or at least failed to appreciate, the strong scientific and technical backing to the Friends of the Earth claims (many of which were supported by experts) the ASA quoted an industry source in defence of their broad view that the campaigners had got it wrong. That source? Yes – none other than Chris Smith’s Task Force on Shale Gas!

And so it was that Cuadrilla, the UK’s largest fracking company, gained helpful air cover at a crucial moment – cover derived from an ASA intervention coming in part from misleading information from a pro-fracking body. A body chaired by the same man who chairs the ASA. All a coincidence?

Scandal and intrigue

While you ponder that question, have a look at some of the claims that Friends of the Earth didn’t get wrong. These were the ones that caused such a furore, and as you hear more from that Task Force and Cuadrilla in the months ahead, you might like to bear these in mind.

• “Fracking involves pumping millions of litres of water containing a toxic cocktail of chemicals deep underground … Up to 80% never returns to the surface and could end up in your drinking water.”
• “A hospital near a US fracking site reports asthma rates three times higher than average.”
• “25% of fracking chemicals could cause cancer. Also, more than 75% of fracking chemicals could affect your skin, eyes and respiratory system. Whilst 50% could affect your nervous, immune and cardiovascular systems.”

Now, astonishingly in my opinion, the chief executive of the ASA, Guy Parker, has personally stepped into the fray with an ‘opinion piece‘ published on the ASA website, in which he succeeds only in digging his organisation even deeper into a hole of its own making. He writes:

“We told Friends of the Earth that based on the evidence we’d seen, specific claims it made in its anti-fracking leaflet about the effects of fracking on the health of local populations, drinking water or property prices, or claims with the same meaning, cannot be repeated.”

Trouble is, insists Craig Bennett, that statement is “factually wrong”. All the claims are true and based on solid evidence. Friends of the Earth was never told those claims were wrong, says Craig. Instead it volunteered to avoid them in future to put a swift end to the dispute. “There is so much new evidence on fracking now with even more up to date and persuasive information, and that’s where we wanted to focus our campaigning!”

The real questions here – all scrupulously avoided by Guy Parker in his ‘opinion piece’ – concern the extraordinary conflict of interest of the ASA’s own chairman, Lord Smith; the ASA’s uncritical acceptance of his industry-biased evidence; and the ASA’s unprecedented use of the case to attack one of the UK’s leading anti-fracking campaign groups at this critical time; and to do so in breach of its promise to “not give details of the complaint or state that you breached the Code.”

Reassured by the independence of the ASA and its ability to act in the public interest? I’m not.

Dr. Tony Juniper is environmentalist and writer and former chief executive of Friends of the Earth (England, Wales & NI). Among many other things he is the co-chair of the advisory board of the Belantara Foundation, and a trustee of the Resurgence Trust. His latest book ‘What’s really happening to our Planet?‘ was published by Dorling Kindersley in June 2016. Website: www.tonyjuniper.com. Twitter: @tonyjuniper.

European, Brazilian and US scientists have delivered a new map of humanity’s mark on the world.

Roads now fragment the terrestrial landscape and divide it into 600,000 significant patches – and only 7% of the roadless areas are larger than 100 square kilometres.

More than half of the patches are less than 1 sq km and four-fifths are less than 5 sq km. The implication is that humans are getting everywhere, and bringing with them noise, pollution, damage to wildlife and biological invaders.

About the only regions in which roads are few are the tundra, the deserts and the rock- and ice-covered highlands. The temperate and mixed forests of the world are the most divided by roads.

Pierre Ibisch, of Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development in Germany, and colleagues report in Science that they used citizen science and internet datasets, and reviewed 282 studies, to make the maps.