This week has seen Carbon Brief publish analyses of the Department of Energy, Business and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) energy use. The subsequent news reports have been focused on the UK’s collapsing coal industry and the consequent impact on the environment. It has been reported that the use of coal fell by a record 50% in 2016, principally as a result of increased domestic carbon taxes. The result, a drop in carbon emissions to 19^th century lows. To provide some perspective, UK windfarms generated more power than coal in 2016 – a real feat for the renewable energy industry. However, even with the decline it has been suggested that carbon emissions were still 381 million tonnes.

As more gas and coal plants are decommissioned, the reliance on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power is increasing. Energy storage technology will play a crucial role in the management of the demand for energy supplies in the UK and will contribute vastly to the reduction of the UK’s carbon emissions.

Store it or lose it

 Fundamentally, countries worldwide are actively making steps towards creating more energy efficient and yet cleaner cities. The UK is placing energy storage at the heart of its new Modern Industrial Strategy, due to its potential to support smart energy systems and the automotive sector. As the energy industry moves away from carbon-heavy production, the twin-approach of renewable energy and storage will be critical for delivering on the demand while securing the future of UK energy.

Energy storage has a central role to play in creating a new, evolved UK energy system and will make a significant contribution to decarbonising our energy supply as a whole. Falling costs of battery technology and the new opportunities opening up in this market mean that there is an ever-growing business case for investment in this area.

Storage systems can fulfil multiple roles within the energy market. Energy can be stored when prices are low and used on site when they are high to save consumers and businesses money on their bills. Given the potential of energy storage to stabilise energy supply during periods of high and low demand, suppliers and consumers would be ill-advised to ignore its significance.

Storage enables more renewable energy sources to be integrated into the UK’s overall power supply. This is in addition to helping to balance energy supply and demand more effectively and increasing energy security for an evolving power network.

The National Grid has made a significant move towards a future that embraces energy storage. By committing to support battery storage on a large scale, the increased investment will mean a reliable source of real-time energy to balance the entire grid.

Coupled with storage is the development of ‘microgrids’ across the UK. These mini-grids are a cost effective solution for rural areas where a lower population can justify the provision of electricity through a local distribution grid. Microgrids will mean that energy storage technology will become more crucial than ever in harnessing and utilising renewable energy for off-grid areas.

 Advancing renewables with batteries

 In the UK recently, a village in South Yorkshire recently announced that it is running a trial of solar technology that relies on smart batteries to store the renewable energy that is produced. This technology will allow the community to run on solar power 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

That said, energy storage is not a new concept. Large scale pumped hydro storage has been part of the UK’s energy system for many years. In fact, 3.523GW of electricity storage projects are currently operational of which the majority are pumped hydro. But, the introduction of lithium-ion batteries, coupled with falling costs and increased funding for research and development, means that the technology now has the potential to increase the UK’s capacity for energy storage.

In the past year, the consumption of natural gas rose by 12.5 per cent due to the increased need for electricity generation at the expense of coal. Consumption of bioenergy and waste rose by 7.4 per cent. Renewable energy is clearly on the rise but it’s about more than just harnessing the energy. Effective storage is just as imperative.  

By adding powerful cost-effective batteries to the grid, it is not only strengthened but can add value for both investors and consumers.

In the past, batteries have been too weak or too expensive. As a result, they didn’t last long enough to earn the revenue needed to pay off their initial investment value. Now, we have significantly more powerful batteries that are increasingly efficient. At the same time, the costs have fallen to a point where the technology is far more commercially viable.

When used alongside the grid, these batteries need to perform even faster. To meet the demands of the grid, batteries are now able to respond in less than one second to supply and demand peaks. 

As these technologies continue to prove their value, the industry will scale quickly. Looking at just how this technology has developed in the past five years, it’s clear that greater efficiency and performance improvements are imminent.

 As part of the Paris Agreement, towards the end of 2016 the UK pledged to play its part in keeping the global temperatures well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, and energy storage will be essential to achieving this target in 2017, by facilitating further renewables as part of the energy mix.

In addition, our journey towards a more connected and smarter future our energy requirements will continue to develop, storage will help to create a smart grid that can ensure energy is always available when and where it’s needed. Investment in energy storage will help the UK tackle the negative effects of climate change, and continue to boost its use of renewable sources for maximum impact.

This Author

Ian Larive is Investment Director, Low Carbon

The triggering of Article 50 earlier this week starts a new phase in the arguments about Brexit. The various negotiations that are now going to take place will in a big way determine what sort of country the UK becomes – and even whether it continues to exist at all.

Several different types of future are possible. The ones already on the political agenda are easy to outline:

(1) The UK does a deal with Trump’s America to become effectively the 51^st state – lowering environmental, labour, and corporate standards in order to get a deal done.

(2) The UK pursues the fantasy of ‘Empire 2.0′ but finds that Australia, Canada, India, Nigeria and the rest have all found different places in world trade that don’t require them to link back to Britain.

(3) The UK has a deal with the EU that creates a ‘soft Brexit’ that divides the Tory Party and ends up not changing much except for costing money and cutting Britain out of influencing the decision-making.

(4) The UK gets no deal at all. The subsequent public revolt, and Parliament or a new referendum, ends up choosing not to go ahead with Brexit. Loss of face for Theresa May and cries of anger from the hard Right but sighs of relief from many other people.

(5) England and Wales go ahead with Brexit but Scotland breaks away and Northern Ireland joins up with the Irish Republic, staying in the EU.

Those are the options being talked about now. But we have written a new report Brexit Trade published by Molly Scott Cato, a Green Member of the European Parliament, that puts forward a different alternative: an ‘alternative Brexit’.

We have assumed in our report that Brexit does go ahead and asked how it could be made a success if we face up to the reality that any trade deals done by the UK with larger economic blocs are bound to be one-sided once we are no longer negotiating as part of the EU. In these circumstances, the rational response is to see if the UK’s dependence on international trade can be reduced.

This in turn would depend on developing a UK economy with greater national self-reliance, deliberately building up economic sectors which can make substitutes for goods that would otherwise be imported.

This of course is what many Greens, Transition activists and others have argued for over many years: a less globalised, more localised, economy, based on thriving local communities; one that would reduce the power of unaccountable multinational corporations and make “taking back control” of the economy realistically possible.

Like most things, this would be a matter of balance. Of course we don’t advocate eliminating imports altogether. But it would involve abandoning the dogma that maximising international trade is necessarily a good thing, and recognising that globalisation needs to be tamed – in some ways democratised and in some ways reversed.

Our report sets this out, including the implications for the environment and migration, and the wider context of the arguments about neoliberalism and populism. We want to add a new flavour, a new colour, to the Brexit debate. Why not read our report for yourself: Brexit Trade

These Authors

Victor is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), and used to be a Green member of the London Assembly. Rupert chairs the Green House think-tank and was Green Party candidate for Cambridge at the 2015 general election.

Green House think-tank

http://www.greenhousethinktank.org/

When asked to name one of the great wildlife habitats of the world it is unlikely that many people would choose a series of woods and bogs by the M3 in Surrey.

But while herds of wildebeest might not sweep majestically through Camberley, the Thames Basin Heaths area (see map, right) does hold important numbers of birds such as woodlarks, Dartford warblers and nightjars, making it one of the most significant wildlife habitats in southern England.

However, the local MP for Surrey Heath, Michael Gove, is apparently not too impressed. The former British justice secretary and leading Brexit campaigner sees withdrawal from the EU as an opportunity to get rid of the very legislation which protects these birds.

For Gove, European environmental law “massively increases the cost and the regulatory burden for housing development”.

The presence of these species in his constituency has led the heaths to be designated a ‘Special Protection Area’ under the EU Birds Directive. Some parts of the heaths hold ecosystems which are deemed to be of such importance that they are classed as ‘Special Areas of Conservation’ under the EU Habitats Directive.

Natura 2000 sites must remain sacrosanct!

These areas form part of Natura 2000, a network of protected sites covering 18% of the European Union. It is the largest coordinated network of its type in the world. Many of these areas are not nature reserves or national parks, but areas of land in private ownership, making them vulnerable to exploitation.

European legislation recognises that wildlife is no respecter of national boundaries and that a community-wide effort is necessary to ensure the protection of vulnerable flora and fauna.

The Habitats Directive obliges governments to preserve Natura 2000 sites. Under Article 6.3, any project or plan taking place in one of these sites must be assessed to ensure it does not adversely affect the integrity of the scheme.

In the case of the Thames Basin Heaths this means that no property can be built within a 400m buffer zone of the special protection area, and all housing developments within 5km must include provision for a “suitable alternative natural green space“ – an area of open ground which people can use for recreation.

The aim is to prevent the heaths becoming overwhelmed with people and dogs, which is particularly important for species such as nightjars which nest on the ground and are vulnerable to disturbance.

But Gove has sided with the property developers. For him, these regulations are too great a burden. Some of what he says is fair: there is undoubtedly a need for more housing in the area – and it is equally true that providing ‘alternative green space’ requires thought and expenditure on the part of the developers, which may ultimately be passed on to the purchasers.

There’s no escaping the fact that environmental law can create a tension between construction and conservation.

However these EU directives exist to protect important areas from exactly these pressures. In many cases the legislation does not prevent development, but instead requires developers to think about how damage can be mitigated and, in some cases, habitat improved.

The RSPB cites a number of benefits to this approach, including the proven economic and health benefits of having sites rich in wildlife close to home.

The great repeal of environmental law

Despite David Davis’ promise that environmental protections will remain in place when the UK leaves the EU, wildlife protection after Brexit faces an uncertain future. The Great Repeal Bill is intended to incorporate existing European legislation into UK law, giving parliament the power to “amend, repeal or improve” laws at a later date.

However the environment secretary, Andrea Leadsom, has indicated that only about two-thirds of existing environmental law will be transposed into UK law, leaving groups such as the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust concerned about what will happen to the remainder.

The UK has a long history of proactive environmental legislation. Back in the 1950s, a backbench MP named Tufton Beamish introduced a private members bill which eventually passed into law as the Protection of Birds Act 1954. This was the forerunner of the Birds Directive and laid the foundations for the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which became the key source of domestic legal protection for UK plants and animals.

Speaking in the House of Lords in support of the bill, Beamish observed:

“Town and country, farmers and naturalists, we are all in it together. Provided there is unstinted cooperation between all ministers whose responsibilities touch on any aspect of this many-sided subject, there will be no problem in proving that good husbandry and higher material standards of living are consistent with careful protection of our wildlife and our countryside.”

As Britain leaves the EU, we must remember this ideal. If Andrea Leadsom really does want to ensure that we are “the first generation to leave our environment better than we found it” then we will need a robust legislative framework.

Laws which ensure our ecosystems are protected and improved should be celebrated – not treated as burdensome red tape.

Jeremy Robson is Principal Lecturer, College of Business Law & Social Sciences, Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University.

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

The rapidly-evolving nuclear power crisis escalated dramatically yesterday when US nuclear giant Westinghouse, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, filed for bankruptcy.

The Chapter 11 filing took place in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in New York City.

Westinghouse and its parent Toshiba are in crisis because of massive cost overruns building four ‘AP1000’ nuclear power reactors in the southern US states of Georgia and South Carolina.

The combined cost overruns for the four reactors now amount to about $1.2 billion and counting. And it has now emerged that they may never be finished at all. Whether the four reactors will be completed is now subject to an “assessment period”, according to Westinghouse.

The corporate mishap may also signal the end of new nuclear power in the US. No other reactors are under construction in the country and there is no likelihood of any new reactors in the foreseeable future. The US reactor fleet is one of the oldest in the world, with 44 out of its 99 reactors having been operated for four decades or more.

A $10 billion financial hole – and it’s getting deeper!

Toshiba says Westinghouse had debts totalling US$9.8 billion. Plans for new Westinghouse reactors in India, the UK and China are in jeopardy and will likely be cancelled. Bloomberg noted yesterday: “Westinghouse Electric Co., once synonymous with America’s industrial might, wagered its future on nuclear power – and lost.”

The same could be said about Toshiba, which is selling profitable businesses to stave off bankruptcy. Toshiba said yesterday it expects to book a net loss of $9.1 billion for the current fiscal year, which ends on Friday – a record loss for a Japanese manufacturer.

That projected loss is also well over double the estimate provided just last month, raising investor fears that the final figure may be greater still. “Every time they put out an estimate, the loss gets bigger and bigger”, said Zuhair Khan, an analyst at Jefferies in Tokyo. “I don’t think this is the last cockroach we have seen coming out of Toshiba.”

The BBC noted that Toshiba’s share-price has been in freefall, losing more than 60% since the company first unveiled the problems in December 2016. Toshiba president Satoshi Tsunakawa said at a news conference yesterday: “We have all but completely pulled out of the nuclear business overseas.”

Westinghouse is the major member of the Nugen consortium that’s set to build a massive three-reactor AP1000 nuclear complex at Moorside in the UK, next to the Sellafield site. The company has already stated that while it intends to progress the project through planning stages, it is unable to take on financing or construction and intends to sell its share.

Nugen’s other member, the French energy company Engie (formerly GDF Suez) has also gone on record as wanting to extricate itself from the Moorside project in favour of the ‘new energy’ economy based on renewable, storage and smart grid technologies.

It’s now looking increasingly probable that the Moorside project, given the state of the Nugen consortium and the massive failure of the AP1000 design, may never progress to construction.

The good news for the nuclear industry? The UK’s Office of Nuclear Regulation (ONR) today – with impeccable timing – accepted the AP1000 design as “suitable for construction in the UK“ and issued Westinghouse a Design Acceptance Certificate.

Is the nuclear game up at last?

A similar crisis is unfolding in France, which has 58 power reactors but just one under construction. French ‘EPR’ reactors under construction in France (Flamanville) and Finland are three times over budget – the combined cost overruns for the two reactors amount to about €12.7 billion and counting.

The French government is selling assets so it can prop up its heavily indebted nuclear utilities Areva and EDF. The French nuclear industry is in its “worst situation ever” according to former EDF director Gérard Magnin.

Meanwhile a simple comparison of decommissioning provision between France and Germany indicates that EDF has massively under-budgetted for its liabilities. Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission its 17 nuclear reactors (€2.2 billion each), but France has set aside only €23 billion to decommission its 58 reactors (€0.4 billion each).

When the real costs, for which EDF will be liable, come in, they could easily bankrupt the company. This in turn puts the UK’s Hinkley Point double EPR nuclear project, in which EDF is the main partner, in doubt.

The crisis-ridden US, French and Japanese nuclear industries account for half of worldwide nuclear power generation. Other countries with crisis-ridden nuclear programs or nuclear phase-out policies account for more than half of worldwide nuclear power generation.

Meranwhile renewable energy generation doubled over the past decade and strong growth, driven by sharp cost decreases, will continue for the foreseeable future.

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter.

What is the first thing that Leftists and concerned citizens should be doing, in the wake of Trump? The first step among today’s activists should be the same as the first step for drug addicts: awareness of the problem and acceptance of its seriousness. We need to acknowledge that there are major structural problems in our societies, and that all of us are enmeshed in them, regardless of who we vote for, what zip code we live in, or what we shop for.

We can start by not reacting emotionally, by not organizing protests simply to make us feel better. We can resist better by being calm, rational, and patient: reflecting on where we are as a culture, and how our blood-soaked history of capitalism and imperialism brought us here. Rather than reacting out of anger or sadness, serious activists should take a step back, reflect on the hydra-like nature of capitalism and how their own lives have become ensnared by it, and then begin to organize for the long game – beyond the legitimate grievances against Trump.

We can continue the fight by acknowledging our own complicity as US and European citizens in the ongoing global bloodbath: we use gas, oil, and coal far beyond our basic needs; we pay taxes which pay for the weapons of death our governments wield against weak, defenseless nations.

Between Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the many other not-so-covert operations worldwide, our country is directly responsible for tens of millions of deaths worldwide since WWII, not to mention the countless plants and animals killed from deadly toxins and resource extraction such as indiscriminant and unnecessary pesticide and herbicide use, nuclear radiation, DDT, Agent Orange, strip mining, habitat destruction, ocean acidification, and many, many more disgusting acts of cruelty against the planet and our fellow man. In short, the US, for certain, has become the fourth Reich, with a truly hegemonic, global reach.

A dignified silence, a brief respite to ignore the ignoble Trump administration, could work wonders: imagine if the mainstream media took a few days or a week of not reporting on Trump’s every breath and actually reported real issues, such as the fact that the UN is sounding the alarm about the worst famine crisis since World War Two. 

It is mainstream culture that has embraced who Trump is and what he stands for. It was our US media that slavishly and mind-numbingly ‘normalized’ Trump’s dangerous, irrational, and sociopathic behavior.

The US political system, with its tentacles entangled in the endless distraction of state primaries; using discriminatory policies against third parties; controlled by corporate conglomerates and lobbyists and with public discourse replaced by sensationalist, headline-seeking yellow journalism and sound bites, has denied us the soil in which democracy can grow.

Citizens have been reduced to spectators in elections, where every state is a contest – a trivial competition to be won for Team Red or Blue. There is very little mention that elections exist not just for parties to gain power, taxes to be apportioned, and for our representatives to pass necessary legislation, but that informed and spirited public debate is the wellspring of democracy, where novel ideas can take root and flourish. Yet capitalist exploitation, whether of the Team Red or Team Blue variety, continues to prevent people and communities from redesigning their lives and redefining progress to allow for a peaceful, egalitarian way of life.

Let’s take one recent example of the mis-education of liberals. Mainstream Democratic supporters still prattle on uselessly about possible Russian involvement in the election, although the likelihood is very low. What they fail to understand is that interfering is exactly what governments and foreign intelligence agencies are designed to do: meddle in each other’s affairs abroad, gather and keep secrets for blackmail and leverage over other countries, steal technology and military techniques, use black propaganda to shape national perceptions, etc. Never mind the innocuous pretensions to gathering information for “national security”. The CIA has murderously overthrown dozens of governments since WWII: please see William Blum’s Killing Hope for details.

Instead, we should call for a ban on all intelligence agencies, and for that matter, all nuclear weapons and energy, and all standing armies worldwide: killing is killing, no matter who is doing it, governments or terrorists. The dark arts which the intelligence communities specialize in are kept secret not to keep adversaries guessing about the sources and methods used, but because, exposed to the light of day, the public would never accept such outright, barbaric depravity.

This will require citizens and activists to look beyond our own borders, to see the levels and layers of devastation capitalism has reaped around the world. It will require us to understand that no country can stand alone, that all of our actions are interconnected, and that many of the products we use are ripped from the Earth’s body without any recompense, without any acknowledgment of the grievous injuries we cause. It will require people to learn about the civil war in South Sudan, which is driven by famine, of state repression in Lhasa, to learn about the Kings of Corruption in Argentina and Brazil.

Only an internationalist Left can begin to work towards fighting global warming, deforestation, ethnic wars, and desertification of the planet. Countries using xenophobia and nativism as their raison d’etre simply can’t develop enough solidarity for the many pressing crises of the 21^st century. This can only be done by enlarging a sense of care in our communities to include protection for peoples of all nations, plant and animal life, and future human generations. To survive, we must develop a Planetary Vision.

If the past year has taught us anything, it is that now, after the initial shocks of Brexit (triggered in the UK today) and Trump, we simply don’t have as much time as we previously thought we had. The pace of the unraveling is picking up, and Western governments are continuing to hollow out our social services and environmental regulations against the will of the people, all the while convincing the populace that their interests lie solely in provincial, domestic affairs, with little to no sympathy for international disasters, wars, droughts, etc.

As the pace of social disorientation continues to pick up, we have foolishly deepened our addictions to social media and our screen times, if only to shield us from the rising tides of inequality and social injustice. Digital technologies should be reevaluated as means to the ends of diminishing human suffering and increasing the planetary knowledge base, instead of ends in themselves, becoming the mass distractions of our age.

It’s quite late in the evening for capitalist governments. Their demise is in many ways overdue, but most people in the West haven’t learned to look down yet. Proper political reflection requires this – an unblinking, unflinching gaze at the carnage caused by our culture’s complicity and acquiescence towards industrialism, free-market ideology, and globalization. The mega-corporations, the Federal Government, and our military-industrial complex are not our friends.

The industrialized capitalist nations are headed for a cataclysm, and the worst shockwaves will fall upon the smaller, developing nations.

Can Western activists, concerned citizens, and academics look down, get off their treadmills, go beyond their specialized niches and lecture circuits and unite to form a global Left?

Once we collectively accept responsibility for the sorry state of our union, we can begin the healing process. The first step is always the hardest, but we can’t avoid the facts: our childlike dependency and unquestioning loyalty towards our corporate and political leaders must be broken, starting now. 

This Author

William Hawes is a writer specializing in politics and environmental issues. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, The World Financial Review, Gods & Radicals, and Countercurrents.org. He is author of the e-book Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and Empire. You can reach him at wilhawes@gmail.com

This article first appeared at counterpunch.org

The new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has defied science and common knowledge by claiming that carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to climate change.

This stance from President Trump’s appointee reflects an administration-wide disregard for climate change and caters to the bottom line of billionaire polluters, rather than protecting our public health.

Today, Trump solidified this trend. In a potential blow to America’s climate and public health safeguards, he signed an executive order initiating a repeal of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, while also ending the Interior Department’s moratorium on new coal mining on federal land.

Among other things, the executive order also instructs federal agencies to abandon their policy of factoring the impacts on climate change into government decisions.

And it orders the EPA and the Department of the Interior to dismantle Obama administration rules that reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector and regulate fracking on public land.

The landmark Clean Power Plan puts the US on a path toward seriously addressing climate change by building on and accelerating the transition to a clean energy future that is already underway in the power sector.

Americans’ strong support for clean energy

People across this country – in red and blue states alike – broadly support clean air, clean energy and climate action to protect the health of our communities and families. Not only that, but the US Supreme Court has made clear that the EPA has a legal responsibility under the Clean Air Act to protect the public from dangerous climate pollution that threatens our economy, security and public health.

Trump is inviting more super storms, deadly floods, epic droughts and uncontrollable wildfires with his order to dismantle the Clean Power Plan. At a moment when we desperately need accelerated investment in climate solutions, both at the national and international level, he is trying to block the rise of clean energy to benefit Big Oil and the coal industry. 

But Trump hasn’t stopped at attacking the Clean Power Plan. He’s also trying to dismantle the Department of the Interior’s moratorium on new coal leasing on federal lands.

This moratorium gives the federal Bureau of Land Management time to review outdated policies for managing billions of tons of federal coal and to ensure that taxpayers are getting a fair deal for coal mined on publicly owned land.

By repealing this common sense action, President Trump is ignoring the will of the public, as well as the current market demand for coal, which is at an all-time low. Meanwhile, the need for immediate action to address the threat of climate change could not be greater.

By cutting commonsense regulations that protect our air, water and climate from the oil and gas industry, Trump is taking aim at protections that deliver real benefits for American communities.

And by abandoning a policy that requires federal agencies to factor climate change into decision-making, Trump is allowing our federal government to walk blindfolded into the greatest challenge our society faces.

Corporate President versus The People

The theme is clear. Repeal after repeal, time after time, our president is siding with corporate polluters, especially coal and oil companies, over the health of millions of Americans and the realities of sound science.

He is wasting taxpayer resources and forcing agencies to spend valuable time preparing ineffective new rules to replace those he’s rolling back, which will do far more to protect polluters’ bottom lines than to protect our wellbeing.

Luckily, there’s a lot that can be done at the state level to advance clean energy and combat climate change in lieu of federal action. Earthjustice is already working at the state level to defend and advance clean energy policies, and we’ve teamed up with technology innovators, entrepreneurs, public health experts and community leaders to build a resilient network of clean energy champions.

Together, we will tackle the fossil fuel industry, one state at a time, by using the full strength of our nation’s bedrock environmental laws to protect our communities and secure our future. 

Trip Van Noppen leads Earthjustice’s staff, board and supporters to advance the mission of using the courts to protect our environment and people’s health.

This article was originally published by EarthJustice as part of its Capitol Watch series.

The Capitol Watch series

The 45th US president, Donald J. Trump, is bent on gutting environmental protections, and-with a polluter-friendly Congress at his side-he’ll likely do everything he can to dismantle our fundamental right to a healthy environment. The Capitol Watch blog series will shine a light on these political attacks from Congress and the Trump administration, as well as the work of Earthjustice and our allies to hold them accountable.

Coal mining on our lands comes with serious consequences that we can no longer afford. Earthjustice is preparing to file a lawsuit challenging the result of the executive order on behalf of a coalition of local, regional and national groups working to protect public lands, air and water quality and the health of the planet. Photo courtesy of Ecoflight.

Will our grandchildren look back, 50 years from now, at a time when human beings ate other animals as one in which their grandparents were “complicit in a bloodbath of unnecessary suffering”, a horror show of unremitting violence that is “wholly unimaginable” to them?

That’s the intriguing premise of Carnage, a new feature-length BBC film which depicts a 2067 utopia where humans no longer raise animals for consumption.

Carnage is a mockumentary, written and directed by comedian Simon Amstell, but let’s contemplate its premise seriously for a moment. Is a ‘post-meat’ world possible? Could we manage a transition to a society where farmed animals are liberated and granted equal status, free to live equally among humans?

There are some good reasons why this is an unlikely vision of the future. For a start, the number of animals slaughtered globally is on the increase. Although this includes hunting, poaching, and unwanted pets, by far the biggest point of interaction between humans and other animals is industrial farming.

The statistics are staggering: at least 55 billion animals are killed by the global farming industry each year, and this figure is growing every year. Despite marketing tales of animal welfare and ‘happy meat‘, factory farming means violence, discomfort and suffering on an enormous scale.

This is why Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a history of the human race, calls our treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms “perhaps the worst crime in history”.

Never mind the meat – just keep the blood off my plate!

If we turn to consumers’ willingness to eat meat, psychological research in this area appears to cast further doubt on the utopian vision of Carnage. Most people who eat meat express concern in relation to animal welfare, and experience unease when the death or discomfort of animals is associated with the meat on their plate.

Psychologists refer to this tension between beliefs and behaviour as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We want to reduce the discomfort of such dissonance, but human nature means we often seek the easiest ways of doing so.

So rather than changing behaviour, we change our thinking, and develop strategies like minimising the harm of the offending behaviour (animals don’t have the capacity to suffer like we do; they do not matter; they have a good life); or denying one’s responsibility for it (I am doing what everyone does; it is necessary; I was made to eat meat – it is natural).

Dissonance-reduction strategies often lead, paradoxically, to an increase in commitment to ‘morally troublesome behaviour‘ such as eating meat, to justify them. We then have to work harder to reduce dissonance, creating the need to defend one’s behaviour even more vigorously.

This commitment becomes habitual, and part of our shared routines, traditions and social norms. It’s a circular process that can end up with exaggerated and socially-polarised views, reflected perhaps in familiar attempts to publicly ridicule veganism. On this reading of the psychology research, change on the scale envisioned by Carnage seems unlikely.

The path to a world without meat

There are grounds for optimism, however. A first challenge comes from growing health concerns related to eating meat, and an accompanying lifestyle movement that embraces a ‘plant-based diet‘. Meat substitutes are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, as the tech industry recognises the potential market value of alternative protein sources.

This is matched by a resurgent concern for the welfare of nonhuman animals more generally. Examples include successful campaigns against captive orca whales and circus animals, the widespread questioning of the purpose of zoos, and a burgeoning legal movement defending the rights of animals in court.

This trend is strengthened by growing recognition of the emotional, cognitive and social complexity of nonhuman animals.

What might be the biggest factor of all, however, is the impact on the climate. Meat is an inefficient use of resources (as farm animals eat food that could go straight to humans), while cows famously fart out lots of methane.

The UN says the large-scale industrial farming of animals is one of “the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” A global reduction in meat consumption is one of the best ways to fight climate change. And, as pressure for resources rise, so too might cost, leading to less meat eating.

After half a century, could it be possible?

Taken in isolation, none of these trends suggests social change on the scale Carnage imagines. But together, they just might. It is a combination that could explain significant growth in the number of vegetarians and vegans for example.

This increase is especially marked among younger people – an important point to consider in relation to our imagined 50-year trajectory. And let’s face it, the need to do anything we can to collectively reduce carbon emissions and alleviate the worst effects of climate change is only going to become more pressing as we approach 2067.

The German government seems to have recognised this, recently banning meat from all official functions for environmental reasons. These trends suggest the interlocking psychological, social and cultural dynamics that keep us habitually and routinely eating meat might be beginning to loosen.

Films like Carnage also contribute to this unravelling, opening up our imagination to alternative futures. If you watch it, I hope it raises a few laughs, but also offers some (plant-based) food for thought. 

Watch Carnage here.

Matthew Adams is Principal Lecturer in Psychology, University of Brighton.

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

Will our grandchildren look back, 50 years from now, at a time when human beings ate other animals as one in which their grandparents were “complicit in a bloodbath of unnecessary suffering”, a horror show of unremitting violence that is “wholly unimaginable” to them?

That’s the intriguing premise of Carnage, a new feature-length BBC film which depicts a 2067 utopia where humans no longer raise animals for consumption.

Carnage is a mockumentary, written and directed by comedian Simon Amstell, but let’s contemplate its premise seriously for a moment. Is a ‘post-meat’ world possible? Could we manage a transition to a society where farmed animals are liberated and granted equal status, free to live equally among humans?

There are some good reasons why this is an unlikely vision of the future. For a start, the number of animals slaughtered globally is on the increase. Although this includes hunting, poaching, and unwanted pets, by far the biggest point of interaction between humans and other animals is industrial farming.

The statistics are staggering: at least 55 billion animals are killed by the global farming industry each year, and this figure is growing every year. Despite marketing tales of animal welfare and ‘happy meat‘, factory farming means violence, discomfort and suffering on an enormous scale.

This is why Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a history of the human race, calls our treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms “perhaps the worst crime in history”.

Never mind the meat – just keep the blood off my plate!

If we turn to consumers’ willingness to eat meat, psychological research in this area appears to cast further doubt on the utopian vision of Carnage. Most people who eat meat express concern in relation to animal welfare, and experience unease when the death or discomfort of animals is associated with the meat on their plate.

Psychologists refer to this tension between beliefs and behaviour as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We want to reduce the discomfort of such dissonance, but human nature means we often seek the easiest ways of doing so.

So rather than changing behaviour, we change our thinking, and develop strategies like minimising the harm of the offending behaviour (animals don’t have the capacity to suffer like we do; they do not matter; they have a good life); or denying one’s responsibility for it (I am doing what everyone does; it is necessary; I was made to eat meat – it is natural).

Dissonance-reduction strategies often lead, paradoxically, to an increase in commitment to ‘morally troublesome behaviour‘ such as eating meat, to justify them. We then have to work harder to reduce dissonance, creating the need to defend one’s behaviour even more vigorously.

This commitment becomes habitual, and part of our shared routines, traditions and social norms. It’s a circular process that can end up with exaggerated and socially-polarised views, reflected perhaps in familiar attempts to publicly ridicule veganism. On this reading of the psychology research, change on the scale envisioned by Carnage seems unlikely.

The path to a world without meat

There are grounds for optimism, however. A first challenge comes from growing health concerns related to eating meat, and an accompanying lifestyle movement that embraces a ‘plant-based diet‘. Meat substitutes are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, as the tech industry recognises the potential market value of alternative protein sources.

This is matched by a resurgent concern for the welfare of nonhuman animals more generally. Examples include successful campaigns against captive orca whales and circus animals, the widespread questioning of the purpose of zoos, and a burgeoning legal movement defending the rights of animals in court.

This trend is strengthened by growing recognition of the emotional, cognitive and social complexity of nonhuman animals.

What might be the biggest factor of all, however, is the impact on the climate. Meat is an inefficient use of resources (as farm animals eat food that could go straight to humans), while cows famously fart out lots of methane.

The UN says the large-scale industrial farming of animals is one of “the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” A global reduction in meat consumption is one of the best ways to fight climate change. And, as pressure for resources rise, so too might cost, leading to less meat eating.

After half a century, could it be possible?

Taken in isolation, none of these trends suggests social change on the scale Carnage imagines. But together, they just might. It is a combination that could explain significant growth in the number of vegetarians and vegans for example.

This increase is especially marked among younger people – an important point to consider in relation to our imagined 50-year trajectory. And let’s face it, the need to do anything we can to collectively reduce carbon emissions and alleviate the worst effects of climate change is only going to become more pressing as we approach 2067.

The German government seems to have recognised this, recently banning meat from all official functions for environmental reasons. These trends suggest the interlocking psychological, social and cultural dynamics that keep us habitually and routinely eating meat might be beginning to loosen.

Films like Carnage also contribute to this unravelling, opening up our imagination to alternative futures. If you watch it, I hope it raises a few laughs, but also offers some (plant-based) food for thought. 

Watch Carnage here.

Matthew Adams is Principal Lecturer in Psychology, University of Brighton.

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

Winning a Nobel Prize is like having your star added to the walk of fame. Nothing beats a Nobel for name recognition. But the Nobel prize for economics should be different. It was added to the list of awards long after the death of Alfred Nobel. “Against his death wish”, says the Swedish human rights lawyer and descendant Peter Nobel. He adds: “Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society’s well-being”.

That’s why the late Alfred Nobel might have liked the Leontief Prize for Economics more than the award given in his name. The Leontief Prize is given to the world’s economists that have contributed most to support just and sustainable societies. The prestigious award was made in honour of Wassily Leontief. Ironically, he was a Nobel laureate himself, as well as a former member of the Global Development And Environment Institute (GDAE) at Tufts University. This team still looks at how societies can pursue their economic and community goals in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner. Which is why the winners deserve more credit and attention than those that win a Nobel Prize for economics.

James Boyce and Joan Martinez-Alier

This year’s award, entitled Economics, Equity, and the Environment, recognises professors James Boyce and Joan Martinez-Alier for their ground-breaking theoretical and applied work that has effectively integrated ecological, developmental, and justice-oriented approaches into the field of economics.

“It is essential to address the ecological crisis generated by the old-paradigm economy,” said GDAE Co-Director Neva Goodwin. “James Boyce and Joan Martinez-Alier have highlighted the relationship between economic systems, resources (materials and energy) and social issues. Their particular focus on the intersections among economics, poverty, and inequality has strongly informed GDAE’s thinking on these issues.”

Dr James K. Boyce is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and director of the program on Development, Peacebuilding and the Environment at the Political Economy Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Oxford University. Dr Boyce’s current work focuses on strategies for combining poverty reduction with environmental protection, and on the relationships between inequality and environmental degradation. Since 2011 he has served as the president of Econ4: Economics for People, the Planet and the Future.

DrJoan Martinez-Alier is emeritus professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where he received his Ph.D. in 1976. During his long career, he has held positions at Oxford University, Stanford University, University of California-Davis, FLACSO, and Yale University. Most recently he has served as co-director of the EJAtlas and currently directs the EnvJustice Project at ICTA-UAB (2016-2021) on ecological distribution conflicts and the global movement for environmental justice. He has played a crucial role in the development of ecological economics, and served as a founding member and past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics.

During yesterday’s award-ceremony (28th March, 2017) at Tufts University in Medford, Joan Martinez-Alier stressed that even a non-growing industrial economy would require new supplies of fossil fuels and other materials from the commodity extraction frontiers because energy is not recycled and materials are recycled only in part. “The economy is not circular, but entropic: there are therefore many resource extraction and waste disposal conflicts, at different scales, such as those on responsibility for the excessive amount of greenhouse gases.”

Martinez-Alier spoke a lot about the EnvJustice project and the EJAtlas. And whilst he is now beyond the usual age for retirement, he still plans to expand this atlas, the global Vocabulary of Environmental Justice and the understanding of the alliance between the Global Environmental Justice Movement and the Degrowth (Décroissance, Post-Wachstum, Prosperity without Growth) movement in Europe. The main reason his contributions to the growing debate on the macro-economic sustainable degrowth alternative are so important? The currently dominant macro-economic model (based on the neoliberal ideology) offers no answer to the human induced sixth mass extinction of life on earth.

This Author

Nick Meynen is one of the Ecologist’s New Voices contributors. He writes articles and books on topics like environmental justice, globalization and human-nature relationships. When not wandering in the activist universe or when his Facebook page is dead, he’s probably walking in nature.

More info:

Announcement of the 2017 Leontief Prize Winners:

Dr Boyce’s latest book is Economics, the Environment, and Our Common Wealth (2013). His previous books include Reclaiming Nature: Environmental Justice and Ecological Restoration (2007); Natural Assets: Democratizing Environmental Ownership (2003); and The Political Economy of the Environment (2002).

Dr Martinez-Alier is the author of numerous renowned books and articles, including Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society (1987) and The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (2002). He also co-edited the textbook Ecological Economics from the Ground Up (2012) and the Handbook of Ecological Economics (2015).

Previous winners:

In addition to Amartya Sen and John Kenneth Galbraith, GDAE has awarded the Leontief Prize to Paul Streeten, Herman Daly, Alice Amsden, Dani Rodrik, Nancy Folbre, Robert Frank, Richard Nelson, Ha-Joon Chang, Samuel Bowles, Juliet Schor, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Stephen DeCanio, José Antonio Ocampo, Robert Wade, Bina Agarwal, Daniel Kahneman, Martin Weitzman, Nicholas Stern, Michael Lipton, C. Peter Timmer, Albert O. Hirschman (posthumous), Frances Stewart, Angus Deaton, James K. Galbraith, Duncan Foley, Lance Taylor, Amit Bhaduri, and Diane Elson.

Will our grandchildren look back, 50 years from now, at a time when human beings ate other animals as one in which their grandparents were “complicit in a bloodbath of unnecessary suffering”, a horror show of unremitting violence that is “wholly unimaginable” to them?

That’s the intriguing premise of Carnage, a new feature-length BBC film which depicts a 2067 utopia where humans no longer raise animals for consumption.

Carnage is a mockumentary, written and directed by comedian Simon Amstell, but let’s contemplate its premise seriously for a moment. Is a ‘post-meat’ world possible? Could we manage a transition to a society where farmed animals are liberated and granted equal status, free to live equally among humans?

There are some good reasons why this is an unlikely vision of the future. For a start, the number of animals slaughtered globally is on the increase. Although this includes hunting, poaching, and unwanted pets, by far the biggest point of interaction between humans and other animals is industrial farming.

The statistics are staggering: at least 55 billion animals are killed by the global farming industry each year, and this figure is growing every year. Despite marketing tales of animal welfare and ‘happy meat‘, factory farming means violence, discomfort and suffering on an enormous scale.

This is why Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a history of the human race, calls our treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms “perhaps the worst crime in history”.

Never mind the meat – just keep the blood off my plate!

If we turn to consumers’ willingness to eat meat, psychological research in this area appears to cast further doubt on the utopian vision of Carnage. Most people who eat meat express concern in relation to animal welfare, and experience unease when the death or discomfort of animals is associated with the meat on their plate.

Psychologists refer to this tension between beliefs and behaviour as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We want to reduce the discomfort of such dissonance, but human nature means we often seek the easiest ways of doing so.

So rather than changing behaviour, we change our thinking, and develop strategies like minimising the harm of the offending behaviour (animals don’t have the capacity to suffer like we do; they do not matter; they have a good life); or denying one’s responsibility for it (I am doing what everyone does; it is necessary; I was made to eat meat – it is natural).

Dissonance-reduction strategies often lead, paradoxically, to an increase in commitment to ‘morally troublesome behaviour‘ such as eating meat, to justify them. We then have to work harder to reduce dissonance, creating the need to defend one’s behaviour even more vigorously.

This commitment becomes habitual, and part of our shared routines, traditions and social norms. It’s a circular process that can end up with exaggerated and socially-polarised views, reflected perhaps in familiar attempts to publicly ridicule veganism. On this reading of the psychology research, change on the scale envisioned by Carnage seems unlikely.

The path to a world without meat

There are grounds for optimism, however. A first challenge comes from growing health concerns related to eating meat, and an accompanying lifestyle movement that embraces a ‘plant-based diet‘. Meat substitutes are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, as the tech industry recognises the potential market value of alternative protein sources.

This is matched by a resurgent concern for the welfare of nonhuman animals more generally. Examples include successful campaigns against captive orca whales and circus animals, the widespread questioning of the purpose of zoos, and a burgeoning legal movement defending the rights of animals in court.

This trend is strengthened by growing recognition of the emotional, cognitive and social complexity of nonhuman animals.

What might be the biggest factor of all, however, is the impact on the climate. Meat is an inefficient use of resources (as farm animals eat food that could go straight to humans), while cows famously fart out lots of methane.

The UN says the large-scale industrial farming of animals is one of “the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” A global reduction in meat consumption is one of the best ways to fight climate change. And, as pressure for resources rise, so too might cost, leading to less meat eating.

After half a century, could it be possible?

Taken in isolation, none of these trends suggests social change on the scale Carnage imagines. But together, they just might. It is a combination that could explain significant growth in the number of vegetarians and vegans for example.

This increase is especially marked among younger people – an important point to consider in relation to our imagined 50-year trajectory. And let’s face it, the need to do anything we can to collectively reduce carbon emissions and alleviate the worst effects of climate change is only going to become more pressing as we approach 2067.

The German government seems to have recognised this, recently banning meat from all official functions for environmental reasons. These trends suggest the interlocking psychological, social and cultural dynamics that keep us habitually and routinely eating meat might be beginning to loosen.

Films like Carnage also contribute to this unravelling, opening up our imagination to alternative futures. If you watch it, I hope it raises a few laughs, but also offers some (plant-based) food for thought. 

Watch Carnage here.

Matthew Adams is Principal Lecturer in Psychology, University of Brighton.

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