National forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the Forest Service.

The public is currently being misled into thinking that our forests are ‘unhealthy’, and that they need to be ‘restored’ due to ‘beetle infestations’ and ‘insects and disease’.

All of this is a euphemism to drastically ramp up logging on the forests.

America’s national forests are not unhealthy. Some people may want forests to look a certain way, but that desire or perception ignores scientific research, which suggests that fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are key components of forest function and resiliency. If you want a healthy forest, these natural processes must be allowed to play out.

Efforts to ‘thin the threat’ and use thinning for ‘fire hazard reduction’ across Western landscapes is largely unsubstantiated in scientific literature.

Recent studies suggest forests with stands of ‘dead trees’ are at no more risk of burning – and possibly less – than thinned forests. Dead trees generally burn slower because they do not have oil-rich needles or resins.

To the contrary, thinning ‘live trees’ places fine fuels like needles and cones on the ground, and opens the forest canopy to greater solar penetration and wind, resulting in overall drier forest conditions and flammability.

How did the forests ever survive without logging?

The Forest Service is currently identifying ‘priority areas’ on the national forests that need to be treated (read logged). A provision of the 2014 Farm Bill gives the agency the ability to expedite logging projects, including in roadless areas, designed to reduce fuels and prevent the chance of “uncontrollable wildfires”.

Public involvement is simultaneously being minimized, and robust environmental analysis is unfortunately being short-changed.

Fire frequency and intensity in the West are predominantly climate and weather driven. An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows that drought, warm temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions drive wildfire intensity. Tree-density and beetle infestation does not drive fire intensity and behavior.

The predominantly mixed conifer forests of the West have evolved with fire. Wildfires are not ‘catastrophic’ but rather necessary for nutrient cycling, soil productivity and providing habitat for insects, birds and mammals. Wildfire is a natural disturbance event critical to forest function and resiliency. A more accurate term for Western landscapes is ‘fire-scapes’.

Building roads and logging in post-fire landscapes is also unnecessary and harmful. ‘Salvage logging’ impedes forest succession, can increase soil erosion, and impair streams, fish habitat and water quality. Scientists are discovering that ‘snag forests’ are one of the most biologically rich and diverse habitat types, rivaled only by old growth.

The Forest Service’s age-old war on forests

Politicians and the timber industry are assaulting America’s National Forests.

Managed forests are neither healthier, nor more resilient to wildfire. Beetle infestation and fire intensity are mainly climate and weather driven. Fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are natural processes important for forest function and resiliency.

The real catastrophe is the Forest Service continues to lead its century-old war on wildfire by supporting commercial logging and fire suppression to the detriment of American taxpayers and forest ecosystems.

Brett Haverstick is education and outreach director for Friends of the Clearwater, a grassroots advocacy group that works to protect the public wildlands, wildlife, and waters in the Clearwater basin of beautiful north-central Idaho.

The Wild Clearwater Country is the northern half of the Big Wild, which contains the largest remaining roadless, and undeveloped stretch of wildlands left in the lower 48 states. Only Alaska has more ecologically intact and wild country.

The Clearwater is a place of dense, moist forests of ancient fir and cedar, parted by crisp, cool streams. It’s a special place where you can listen to swift water flowing through intimate, deeply-cut canyons, and you can smell aromatic, spacious stands of ponderosa pine climbing the ridges above.

It’s a landscape where grey wolves, wolverines, lynx, bears, and mountain goats roam far-reaching ridgetops and lush, river-bottom valleys. Unlike many other places, the Clearwater still allows individuals to immerse themselves in solitude and inhale the soft breath of untrammeled wildness.

This irreplaceable landscape lies between the forests of the St. Joe River to the north, and the rapids of the Salmon River to the south, with the spine of the Bitterroot Divide to the east. Learn more.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.

One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable.

It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world.

Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals.

When I embarked on a six-month trip to visit farms around the world to research my forthcoming book, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life, the innovative farmers I met showed me that regenerative farming practices can restore the world’s agricultural soils.

In both the developed and developing worlds, these farmers rapidly rebuilt the fertility of their degraded soil, which then allowed them to maintain high yields using far less fertilizer and fewer pesticides.

Their experiences, and the results that I saw on their farms in North and South Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ghana and Costa Rica, offer compelling evidence that the key to sustaining highly productive agriculture lies in rebuilding healthy, fertile soil.

This journey also led me to question three pillars of conventional wisdom about today’s industrialized agrochemical agriculture: that it feeds the world, is a more efficient way to produce food and will be necessary to feed the future.

Myth 1: Large-scale agriculture feeds the world today

According to a recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, family farms produce over three-quarters of the world’s food. The FAO also estimates that almost three-quarters of all farms worldwide are smaller than one hectare – about 2.5 acres, or the size of a typical city block.

Only about 1% of Americans are farmers today. Yet most of the world’s farmers work the land to feed themselves and their families. So while conventional industrialized agriculture feeds the developed world, most of the world’s farmers work small family farms. A 2016 Environmental Working Group report found that almost 90% of US agricultural exports went to developed countries with few hungry people.

Of course the world needs commercial agriculture, unless we all want to live on and work our own farms. But are large industrial farms really the best, let alone the only, way forward? This question leads us to a second myth.

Myth 2: Large farms are more efficient

Many high-volume industrial processes exhibit efficiencies at large scale that decrease inputs per unit of production. The more widgets you make, the more efficiently you can make each one. But agriculture is different.

A 1989 National Research Council study concluded that “well-managed alternative farming systems nearly always use less synthetic chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of production than conventional farms.”

And while mechanization can provide cost and labor efficiencies on large farms, bigger farms do not necessarily produce more food. According to a 1992 agricultural census report, small, diversified farms produce more than twice as much food per acre than large farms do.

Even the World Bank endorses small farms as the way to increase agricultural output in developing nations where food security remains a pressing issue. While large farms excel at producing a lot of a particular crop – like corn or wheat – small diversified farms produce more food and more kinds of food per hectare overall.

Myth 3: Conventional farming is necessary to feed the world

We’ve all heard proponents of conventional agriculture claim that organic farming is a recipe for global starvation because it produces lower yields. The most extensive yield comparison to date, a 2015 meta-analysis of 115 studies, found that organic production averaged almost 20% less than conventionally grown crops, a finding similar to those of prior studies.

But the study went a step further, comparing crop yields on conventional farms to those on organic farms where cover crops were planted and crops were rotated to build soil health. These techniques shrank the yield gap to below 10%.

The authors concluded that the actual gap may be much smaller, as they found “evidence of bias in the meta-dataset toward studies reporting higher conventional yields.” In other words, the basis for claims that organic agriculture can’t feed the world depend as much on specific farming methods as on the type of farm.

Consider too that about a quarter of all food produced worldwide is never eaten. Each year the United States alone throws out 133 billion pounds of food, more than enough to feed the nearly 50 million Americans who regularly face hunger. So even taken at face value, the oft-cited yield gap between conventional and organic farming is smaller than the amount of food we routinely throw away.

Building healthy soils, gaining healthy profits

Conventional farming practices that degrade soil health undermine humanity’s ability to continue feeding everyone over the long run. Regenerative practices like those used on the farms and ranches I visited show that we can readily improve soil fertility on both large farms in the US and on small subsistence farms in the tropics.

I no longer see debates about the future of agriculture as simply conventional versus organic. In my view, we’ve oversimplified the complexity of the land and underutilized the ingenuity of farmers.

I now see adopting farming practices that build soil health as the key to a stable and resilient agriculture. And the farmers I visited had cracked this code, adapting no-till methods, cover cropping and complex rotations to their particular soil, environmental and socioeconomic conditions.

Whether they were organic or still used some fertilizers and pesticides, the farms I visited that adopted this transformational suite of practices all reported harvests that consistently matched or exceeded those from neighboring conventional farms after a short transition period.

Another message was as simple as it was clear: Farmers who restored their soil used fewer inputs to produce higher yields, which translated into higher profits.

Sustainable farming is the future

No matter how one looks at it, we can be certain that agriculture will soon face another revolution. For agriculture today runs on abundant, cheap oil for fuel and to make fertilizer – and our supply of cheap oil will not last forever.

There are already enough people on the planet that we have less than a year’s supply of food for the global population on hand at any one time. This simple fact has critical implications for society.

So how do we speed the adoption of a more resilient agriculture? Creating demonstration farms would help, as would carrying out system-scale research to evaluate what works best to adapt specific practices to general principles in different settings.

We also need to reframe our agricultural policies and subsidies. It makes no sense to continue incentivizing conventional practices that degrade soil fertility. We must begin supporting and rewarding farmers who adopt regenerative practices.

Once we see through myths of modern agriculture, practices that build soil health become the lens through which to assess strategies for feeding us all over the long haul.

Why am I so confident that regenerative farming practices can prove both productive and economical? The farmers I met showed me they already are.

David R. Montgomery is Professor of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington.

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

Brace yourselves, I’m about to lose it. The MSC have recently certified three major small fish fisheries in the North Sea as ‘sustainable operations.’ We are talking here about the harvest of small so-called “Low Value” species on industrial levels. The Science is sound. The thinking sadly, like in so many other areas within food and environment is fundamentally flawed, and frankly, smells a bit fishy. Before I go further, in mitigation of the sledging below, the MSC has worked closely with the Danish fleet to build a robust and fairly bullet proof sustainable future for the small species that they are landing – small in individual size, there is nothing small about the harvest – some 500,000 tonnes in total. That’s more than double the total annual UK white fish landings, to give you an idea of scale.

Fine, ok, so the fishery is clean, robust and above all sustainable. Now, lets look beyond the fishery. Once this 500,000 tonnes of fish is landed, it’s blast frozen and this tip top, hi grade, omega oil providing, precious life-giving amino-acid rich brain food protein supply is then shared around the world to people in need of a cheap source of high quality natural protein right? All over Europe, and the rest of the world, top restaurants are serving up bucket loads of this cheap and sustainably harvested super food… amazing! brilliant!…… But alas, it’s a fantasy. This “perfect example” of well-managed modern industrial fishing is feeding greed, environmental disaster, low animal welfare and generating millions in profits for the few. I’m sounding a bit anti capitalist hippy here I know, stay with me.

This precious resource is only subject to good management until it’s landed. After that, it becomes just another commodity and in this case highlights for me the very worst of food culture malpractice. The main use for these perfectly human-edible, tasty and above all sustainable and super nutritious catch is… fishmeal.

These small oily fish, this natural gold dust, is rendered into powder form and then used as additives. Some, tip top grade oils will be extracted along the way to go into dietary supplements – ironically – for human consumption but the vast majority of the tonnage will go into feed for animals for people to eat. Pigs are often (in intensive rearing units) fed a “tiny” percentage of this fishmeal in a pellet made of soya and cereals and plant oils at the very early stages of life so that the piglets can be weaned 14 days earlier than if they had been left suckling on the sow. The fishmeal replaces the essential amino acids in the mother’s milk. The pig industry – interestingly very much centred in Denmark – will tell you this is a good thing as it makes life easier for the mother sow. What they actually mean is that they can get her back into farrow sooner so she can get on with gestating the next batch of piglets. ASAP.

The biggest consumer though, of fishmeal, is aquaculture. We are talking fish farming here and yes, farming cold blooded creatures such as fish is FAR more efficient than farming warm blooded animals as they don’t waste precious energy keeping warm, they just get bigger. We are talking salmon here, mostly, and salmon farming is one of the worst culprits of environmental pollution within food production, although it has cleaned up its act quite rapidly of late.

Disease, and damage caused by the hi-intensity of fish ‘throughput’ in the majority of farms has partially been responsible for the decimation of wild stocks of salmon. It’s very well documented. Of course this is seen as acceptable because the world needs feeding, and fish farming is a good way to do that. Only it’s not is it? If we ate the fish that were harvested form the sea directly we could immediately do away with 500,000 tonnes of farmed Salmon right? But of course, salmon is valuable, salmon is plump, and it’s not full of bones. Global Atlantic salmon farming in 2010 was estimated at 2.4 million tonnes.

So, by my reckoning, just by eating the Danish fishmeal fish directly to human consumption we could cut environmentally dubious salmon aquaculture globally by 1/5^th. Actually, it’s probably better than that as there is a little thing called a food (or feed) conversion ratio. This is the amount of something required to create a similar amount of something else. If, we take the golden example of livestock farming as being a way of storing an overly abundant crop that cannot be used locally or transported easily elsewhere, then it’s a good thing; it prevents waste and efficiently stores some of the value for that food for later on. For example, a cow eats grass, and eventually you get beef. But of course you do not get 1kg of beef for every kilo of grass eaten. It’s the same with fish, exactly what the conversion ratio of wild fish to farmed fish is remains debatable – some say its 4 to 1, some as little as 1.5 to 1. The point is simply this: you get out less than you put it. It’s the same with all animal farming, to a greater or lesser extent we would be better off (environmentally) eating the feed resource that is being used to feed the animals.

We are told, of course, that people won’t eat the small fish. People want big, plump, boneless fish. I’m pretty sure that anyone who was hungry would happily eat a nice plate of crispy sprat, or sand eels – they are delicious after all. I’d like to blame industry here, I’d like to point the fiery finger of blame at the Danish fishing fleet, or the Scottish salmon farmers or the Intensive pig units. Anywhere. Anywhere would be better than admitting the hard truth: Once again, the problem here is willing complicity on behalf of the consumer. We do prefer the well-marketed salmon slabs to the small oily fish, or at least we think we do, but how many of us have actually tried the others? We are guilty, in the main, of wanting cheap pork, but would we really go without if the price were higher? Would anyone’s life simply not be worth living if they could only have bacon and salmon say, 10 times a year?

Yes, I applaud the MSC and Denmark for making their fishing industry so sustainable, scientific and efficient. But I don’t buy the bigger picture, the implied environmental soundness of fishmeal production and the systems it supports. Just because the fishmeal is sustainable doesn’t mean it’s not part of a broken system.

It’s the worst kind of green wash – the type that allows you to think it’s ok to spend your money on low welfare, environmentally damaging and highly unethical foods simply because you can afford to and someone has cleverly marketed it to you. Maybe I am wrong, maybe we shouldn’t be eating the small fish directly, maybe this long and convoluted system of passing that goodness from one animal to another for our eventual consumption further down the line is how things are meant to be. Maybe this wasp-waste part of oceanic eco web is the answer to our prayers – we can have cheap salmon and be sustainable. Spare me.

So, buy all means pop the cork for the MSC certification of the Danish fishmeal fleet, but make sure you are eating sand eels, sprats and pouting as the canapés, otherwise, you are not allowed to the party….

This Author

Tim is a private chef and food writer living in east Devon. After leaving River Cottage having held the reigns at the Rover Cottage Canteen in Axminster for four years he has continued to work within the sphere of sustainably produced, seasonal and tasty food. Ethos and Seasonality are at the core of his foodie musings, his fascination with environment and how our food production systems impact upon it are always central to the work he does, both in the kitchen and at the writing desk

Inspired by the Cook for Syria campaign – a collaboration of chefs and refugees – Claire Reid, head gardener at Hestercombe, Somerset, has launched Grow for Syria bringing together gardeners, producers and others moved to want to act to help Syrian refugees.

Although the new initiative is in its infancy, Claire is determined to make a difference hopes to see Grow for Syria really taking off over the next few months.

“I’ve found it really difficult watching the plight of refugees fleeing their homes to escape such awful conditions in Syria,” she says. “After talking with friends, we all agreed that we wanted to actually do something that wasn’t just making a payment to charity where we couldn’t see what good we were doing.

“Those conversations inspired me to set up Grow for Syria and to use my own skills to try and help vulnerable refugees who are living unimaginable hardships.

“The project aims to raise money and awareness for Help Refugees and support the amazing work that that organization carries out. We looked at our skill base (mainly all gardeners) and our friendship groups to see what we could achieve and how we could raise funds.

“A project called Cook for Syria had already really inspired me. They had collaborated with chefs and refugees to create a cook book of Syrian-based recipes. I loved the fact that the book was producing something positive and sharing cultures.

“The book has been a sell-out. I think that reaching out through food and gardening, basic everyday pleasures that bring people together, to build communities really works. And so Grow for Syria was born.”

It is estimated that 11 million Syrians have had to flee their homes since the civil war began in March 2011. Further to that there are around 13.5 million who are in desperate need of humanitarian aid within their own country. Many have faced atrocious conditions, extreme temperatures, walked across inhospitable terrain or braved crossing the ocean to find safety for themselves and their families. With little or no belongings left, let alone money to buy food, these refugees rely solely on the help of others and the generosity of people like Claire and those who make donations.

Acting as a garden adviser for individuals and offering consultation, Claire’s fee goes directly to charity. She’s also been busy contacting seed companies for donations: “Several companies where happy to give me their seeds. These packets have been handed on to various individuals and groups with the idea that they will sow and grow the seeds and then either arrange their own plant sales to sell on the plants, or pass the plants back to me to sell on,” she explains.

Local gardening clubs across the South West have also been involved by supplying leftover packets of seeds and extra pots of seedlings that they don’t need, and plants that are being divided, dug out, or propagated can all be sold in a plant sale for Help Refugees UK.

Claire adds: “It’s exciting. I’ve met some amazing people through the project, many of which feel the same as me. We have already had a seed swap and sale in Wiveliscombe in Somerset and we have a number events coming up across the South West over the next few months.”

On Sunday, 28^th May 2017, Grow for Syria will be attending the Stoke St Mary Soap Box Derby, and selling plants. Also Claire will be answering gardening questions for a donation.

On Sunday, 18^th June 2017 Jan Waters of JW Blooms and Claire representing Grow for Syria will be hosting a special Gardeners’ Question Time event with a panel of experts on hand to answer your questions. The panel includes Claire, head gardener at Hestercombe, Damien Mitchell, head gardener at the National Trust’s Lytes Cary, Sarah Venn, of Edible Bristol, Ashley Wheeler, vegetable grower at Trill Farm, and Danny Burlingham, head gardener at Forde Abbey.

For more info visit www.jwblooms.co.uk

You can follow Grow for Syria on Instagram @growforsyria

Otherwise if you want to help please get in touch by emailing Claire on clairereid1@gmail.com

This Author

Laura Briggs is the UK reporter for The Ecologist, you can follow her on Twitter @WordsbyBriggs

Brace yourselves, I’m about to lose it. The MSC have recently certified three major small fish fisheries in the North Sea as ‘sustainable operations.’ We are talking here about the harvest of small so-called “Low Value” species on industrial levels. The Science is sound. The thinking sadly, like in so many other areas within food and environment is fundamentally flawed, and frankly, smells a bit fishy. Before I go further, in mitigation of the sledging below, the MSC has worked closely with the Danish fleet to build a robust and fairly bullet proof sustainable future for the small species that they are landing – small in individual size, there is nothing small about the harvest – some 500,000 tonnes in total. That’s more than double the total annual UK white fish landings, to give you an idea of scale.

Fine, ok, so the fishery is clean, robust and above all sustainable. Now, lets look beyond the fishery. Once this 500,000 tonnes of fish is landed, it’s blast frozen and this tip top, hi grade, omega oil providing, precious life-giving amino-acid rich brain food protein supply is then shared around the world to people in need of a cheap source of high quality natural protein right? All over Europe, and the rest of the world, top restaurants are serving up bucket loads of this cheap and sustainably harvested super food… amazing! brilliant!…… But alas, it’s a fantasy. This “perfect example” of well-managed modern industrial fishing is feeding greed, environmental disaster, low animal welfare and generating millions in profits for the few. I’m sounding a bit anti capitalist hippy here I know, stay with me.

This precious resource is only subject to good management until it’s landed. After that, it becomes just another commodity and in this case highlights for me the very worst of food culture malpractice. The main use for these perfectly human-edible, tasty and above all sustainable and super nutritious catch is… fishmeal.

These small oily fish, this natural gold dust, is rendered into powder form and then used as additives. Some, tip top grade oils will be extracted along the way to go into dietary supplements – ironically – for human consumption but the vast majority of the tonnage will go into feed for animals for people to eat. Pigs are often (in intensive rearing units) fed a “tiny” percentage of this fishmeal in a pellet made of soya and cereals and plant oils at the very early stages of life so that the piglets can be weaned 14 days earlier than if they had been left suckling on the sow. The fishmeal replaces the essential amino acids in the mother’s milk. The pig industry – interestingly very much centred in Denmark – will tell you this is a good thing as it makes life easier for the mother sow. What they actually mean is that they can get her back into farrow sooner so she can get on with gestating the next batch of piglets. ASAP.

The biggest consumer though, of fishmeal, is aquaculture. We are talking fish farming here and yes, farming cold blooded creatures such as fish is FAR more efficient than farming warm blooded animals as they don’t waste precious energy keeping warm, they just get bigger. We are talking salmon here, mostly, and salmon farming is one of the worst culprits of environmental pollution within food production, although it has cleaned up its act quite rapidly of late.

Disease, and damage caused by the hi-intensity of fish ‘throughput’ in the majority of farms has partially been responsible for the decimation of wild stocks of salmon. It’s very well documented. Of course this is seen as acceptable because the world needs feeding, and fish farming is a good way to do that. Only it’s not is it? If we ate the fish that were harvested form the sea directly we could immediately do away with 500,000 tonnes of farmed Salmon right? But of course, salmon is valuable, salmon is plump, and it’s not full of bones. Global Atlantic salmon farming in 2010 was estimated at 2.4 million tonnes.

So, by my reckoning, just by eating the Danish fishmeal fish directly to human consumption we could cut environmentally dubious salmon aquaculture globally by 1/5^th. Actually, it’s probably better than that as there is a little thing called a food (or feed) conversion ratio. This is the amount of something required to create a similar amount of something else. If, we take the golden example of livestock farming as being a way of storing an overly abundant crop that cannot be used locally or transported easily elsewhere, then it’s a good thing; it prevents waste and efficiently stores some of the value for that food for later on. For example, a cow eats grass, and eventually you get beef. But of course you do not get 1kg of beef for every kilo of grass eaten. It’s the same with fish, exactly what the conversion ratio of wild fish to farmed fish is remains debatable – some say its 4 to 1, some as little as 1.5 to 1. The point is simply this: you get out less than you put it. It’s the same with all animal farming, to a greater or lesser extent we would be better off (environmentally) eating the feed resource that is being used to feed the animals.

We are told, of course, that people won’t eat the small fish. People want big, plump, boneless fish. I’m pretty sure that anyone who was hungry would happily eat a nice plate of crispy sprat, or sand eels – they are delicious after all. I’d like to blame industry here, I’d like to point the fiery finger of blame at the Danish fishing fleet, or the Scottish salmon farmers or the Intensive pig units. Anywhere. Anywhere would be better than admitting the hard truth: Once again, the problem here is willing complicity on behalf of the consumer. We do prefer the well-marketed salmon slabs to the small oily fish, or at least we think we do, but how many of us have actually tried the others? We are guilty, in the main, of wanting cheap pork, but would we really go without if the price were higher? Would anyone’s life simply not be worth living if they could only have bacon and salmon say, 10 times a year?

Yes, I applaud the MSC and Denmark for making their fishing industry so sustainable, scientific and efficient. But I don’t buy the bigger picture, the implied environmental soundness of fishmeal production and the systems it supports. Just because the fishmeal is sustainable doesn’t mean it’s not part of a broken system.

It’s the worst kind of green wash – the type that allows you to think it’s ok to spend your money on low welfare, environmentally damaging and highly unethical foods simply because you can afford to and someone has cleverly marketed it to you. Maybe I am wrong, maybe we shouldn’t be eating the small fish directly, maybe this long and convoluted system of passing that goodness from one animal to another for our eventual consumption further down the line is how things are meant to be. Maybe this wasp-waste part of oceanic eco web is the answer to our prayers – we can have cheap salmon and be sustainable. Spare me.

So, buy all means pop the cork for the MSC certification of the Danish fishmeal fleet, but make sure you are eating sand eels, sprats and pouting as the canapés, otherwise, you are not allowed to the party….

This Author

Tim is a private chef and food writer living in east Devon. After leaving River Cottage having held the reigns at the Rover Cottage Canteen in Axminster for four years he has continued to work within the sphere of sustainably produced, seasonal and tasty food. Ethos and Seasonality are at the core of his foodie musings, his fascination with environment and how our food production systems impact upon it are always central to the work he does, both in the kitchen and at the writing desk

Inspired by the Cook for Syria campaign – a collaboration of chefs and refugees – Claire Reid, head gardener at Hestercombe, Somerset, has launched Grow for Syria bringing together gardeners, producers and others moved to want to act to help Syrian refugees.

Although the new initiative is in its infancy, Claire is determined to make a difference hopes to see Grow for Syria really taking off over the next few months.

“I’ve found it really difficult watching the plight of refugees fleeing their homes to escape such awful conditions in Syria,” she says. “After talking with friends, we all agreed that we wanted to actually do something that wasn’t just making a payment to charity where we couldn’t see what good we were doing.

“Those conversations inspired me to set up Grow for Syria and to use my own skills to try and help vulnerable refugees who are living unimaginable hardships.

“The project aims to raise money and awareness for Help Refugees and support the amazing work that that organization carries out. We looked at our skill base (mainly all gardeners) and our friendship groups to see what we could achieve and how we could raise funds.

“A project called Cook for Syria had already really inspired me. They had collaborated with chefs and refugees to create a cook book of Syrian-based recipes. I loved the fact that the book was producing something positive and sharing cultures.

“The book has been a sell-out. I think that reaching out through food and gardening, basic everyday pleasures that bring people together, to build communities really works. And so Grow for Syria was born.”

It is estimated that 11 million Syrians have had to flee their homes since the civil war began in March 2011. Further to that there are around 13.5 million who are in desperate need of humanitarian aid within their own country. Many have faced atrocious conditions, extreme temperatures, walked across inhospitable terrain or braved crossing the ocean to find safety for themselves and their families. With little or no belongings left, let alone money to buy food, these refugees rely solely on the help of others and the generosity of people like Claire and those who make donations.

Acting as a garden adviser for individuals and offering consultation, Claire’s fee goes directly to charity. She’s also been busy contacting seed companies for donations: “Several companies where happy to give me their seeds. These packets have been handed on to various individuals and groups with the idea that they will sow and grow the seeds and then either arrange their own plant sales to sell on the plants, or pass the plants back to me to sell on,” she explains.

Local gardening clubs across the South West have also been involved by supplying leftover packets of seeds and extra pots of seedlings that they don’t need, and plants that are being divided, dug out, or propagated can all be sold in a plant sale for Help Refugees UK.

Claire adds: “It’s exciting. I’ve met some amazing people through the project, many of which feel the same as me. We have already had a seed swap and sale in Wiveliscombe in Somerset and we have a number events coming up across the South West over the next few months.”

On Sunday, 28^th May 2017, Grow for Syria will be attending the Stoke St Mary Soap Box Derby, and selling plants. Also Claire will be answering gardening questions for a donation.

On Sunday, 18^th June 2017 Jan Waters of JW Blooms and Claire representing Grow for Syria will be hosting a special Gardeners’ Question Time event with a panel of experts on hand to answer your questions. The panel includes Claire, head gardener at Hestercombe, Damien Mitchell, head gardener at the National Trust’s Lytes Cary, Sarah Venn, of Edible Bristol, Ashley Wheeler, vegetable grower at Trill Farm, and Danny Burlingham, head gardener at Forde Abbey.

For more info visit www.jwblooms.co.uk

You can follow Grow for Syria on Instagram @growforsyria

Otherwise if you want to help please get in touch by emailing Claire on clairereid1@gmail.com

This Author

Laura Briggs is the UK reporter for The Ecologist, you can follow her on Twitter @WordsbyBriggs

Fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing) is a particular method of oil and gas extraction. It uses intense water, air or chemical pressure to fracture rock formations and release trapped fossil fuels. Studies however have found that the practice can trigger medium-sized earthquakes, can affect the quality of surface and groundwater, and can lead to elevated emissions of methane – a potent greenhouse gas.

The extraction method has already been banned in countries such as Scotland and Germany, and dozens of municipalities across South America have declared themselves to be “free of fracking”.

But despite the risks, the Colombian government has moved ahead with an extensive programme of licensing.

“Colombia cannot give itself the luxury of not doing fracking” explained Juan Carlos Echeverry, the President of state oil company Ecopetrol. With Colombia’s conventional oil stocks dwindling, the promise of replenished reserves obtained through non-conventional extraction has repeatedly been trumpeted by the country’s oil and gas sector.

Exploratory drilling for non-conventional extraction is already underway in San Martin (Cesar province) and Anapoima in the province of Cundinamarca. In San Martin, American fossil fuel giant ConocoPhillips has teamed up with Canacol on the VMM-2 project. For months, local communities in San Martin have organised non-violently to protest the project, led by the Association Defending Water, Land & Ecosystems (Cordatec in Spanish). In September, they blockaded the entrance to the exploration site, preventing the entry of company equipment. In October, riot police moved to repress the protest, injuring 10 demonstrators.

The opposition to fracking has also taken place on a national level. The Alliance for a Colombia Free of Fracking – a coalition of environmental organisations, trade unionists and land defenders – recently signed an open letter calling on Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos to declare a moratorium on fracking, citing its multiple environmental, seismic and public health impacts. The letter also declares fracking activities to be in violation of Colombian constitutional principles that guarantee citizens the right to life, the right to water, and the right to a healthy environment.

Although the Colombian government has adamantly defended the strength of its own regulatory framework, the country’s own Comptroller has warned of irregularities, and has ordered the National Hydrocarbons Agency to “to refrain from signing contracts for the exploitation of non-conventional oil deposits”. The country’s Ministry of Environment is also set to release a study showing that the country is not ready to monitor or regulate non-conventional fossil fuel extraction.

In a country with over one hundred active socio-environmental conflicts, the expansion of fracking risks aggravating tensions. Colombia is still in the process of implementing a landmark peace agreement brokered in late 2016 between the government and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which drew five decades of civil war to a close.

Last October, Cordatec wrote that the government’s actions to push through fracking “demonstrate the real way in which the national government is building “territorial peace”. While it sits in Havana, negotiates and comes to an agreement with the FARC to put an end to 50 years of war, in benefit of multinational companies and economic interests…it uses violence against communities who defend life, water, land and ecosystems.”  

Approved exploration contracts for fracking overlap with the territories of Indigenous communities such as the Yupka, Wiwa and Wayúu peoples. They also cross the “Black Line” – an established demarcation of territories in the Sierra Nevada region that hold sacred value for the Kogi, Wiwa, Kankuamo and Aruaco peoples.

In addition to contravening the land rights of Colombia’s Native peoples, the Colombian Government’s issuance of contracts for fracking has prompted fears of possible human rights violations, given the oil industry’s historic record in the country. Since oil companies first arrived in Colombia at the turn of the century, numerous local communities have experienced gross ecological and social impacts, ranging from water depletion to brutal intimidation. Drummond, an American company party to five new fracking-related contracts, has previously been linked to paramilitary payoffs and violence in the northeastern region of Cesar.

The new fracking concessions also threaten a range of páramo ecosystems, including the Chingaza páramo, a unique water ecosystem that provides the capital city of Bogotá with four-fifths of its water. The Sumapaz páramo, the largest in the world, is also under threat. In other parts of the country, unique wetland ecosystems could also be at risk.

While the scale of Colombia’s fracking concessions is unprecedented in the region, the extractive practice is no newcomer to Latin America, with fracking ventures active in at least seven countries. Argentina, home to the second largest shale reserve in the world, has seen a flurry of extraction projects in northern Patagonia, with Royal Dutch Shell recently announcing major investments. Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Mexico have also seen the use of fracking.

These Authors

Sebastian Ordoñez Muñoz is senior international programmes officer (Latin America) at War on Want and Daniel MacMilllen Voskoboynik is coordinator at This Changes Everything UK

Frequently lost in the arguments over financial costs and benefits when it comes to pollution is the cost to human health.

Not only illness and respiratory problems but premature death. To put it bluntly: How many human lives should we exchange for corporate profit?

Two new studies by the World Health Organization should force us to confront these issues head on. This is no small matter – the two WHO studies estimate that polluted environments cause 1.7 million children age five or younger to die per year.

Indoor and outdoor air pollution, second-hand smoke, unsafe water, lack of sanitation, and inadequate hygiene all contribute to these 1.7 million annual deaths, accounting for more than one-quarter of all deaths of children age five or younger globally. A summary notes:

“[W]hen infants and pre-schoolers are exposed to indoor and outdoor air pollution and second-hand smoke they have an increased risk of pneumonia in childhood, and a lifelong increased risk of chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma. Exposure to air pollution may also increase their lifelong risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer.”

One of the two reports, Don’t pollute my future! The impact of the environment on children’s health, notes that most of humanity lives in environmentally stressed areas:

“92% of the global population, including billions of children, live in areas with ambient air pollution levels that exceed WHO limits. Over three billion people are exposed to household air pollution from the use of solid fuels.

“Air pollution causes approximately 600,000 deaths in children under five years annually and increases the risk for respiratory infections, asthma, adverse neonatal conditions and congenital anomalies. Air pollution accounts for over 50% of the overall disease burden of pneumonia which is among the leading causes of global child mortality.

“Growing evidence suggests that air pollution adversely affects cognitive development in children and early exposures might induce development of chronic disease in adulthood.” [page 3]

These types of calculations on health and mortality are absent from debates on environmental regulations. And not only is the human toll missing from cost/benefit analyses, but this pollution is actually subsidized.

Trump administration’s assault on the environment

These World Health Organization reports were published in the same month that the Trump administration mounted a full-scale assault on the US environment. Not only has the Trump administration proposed draconian cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and signaled its intention to rescind air-pollution rules for motor vehicles scheduled to come into force between 2022 and 2025, it has issued an executive order requiring a

“review [of] existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources.”

One of the targets of this order is the Clean Power Plan, which requires a 32% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants by 2030, compared to 2005 emission rates. The standard, implemented by the Obama administration, was already seen as inadequate.

The increased danger raised by President Donald Trump’s order was succinctly summed up by this headline on a Weather Underground article written by Jeff Masters: ‘Trump’s Executive Order Threatens to Wreck Earth as a Livable Planet for Humans‘.

Threats don’t get much graver than that, do they?

Given the gigantic size of the United States economy and the pollution thrown into the atmosphere, this is of serious concern to the entire world. The World Resources Institute estimates that the US accounts for almost 15% of Earth’s current greenhouse gas emissions, second only to China’s 20%.

Russia and the US emit more than twice the global average on a per capita basis, as does Canada, which, due to its heavy reliance on fossil fuel extraction, has the world’s largest per-person greenhouse gas footprint.

When greenhouse gas emissions are calculated on a cumulative basis, then the responsibility of the global North comes into sharper focus: The United States has accounted for 27% of all greenhouse gases emitted since 1850, and the countries of the European Union contributed another 25%.

Carbon dioxide is the biggest single contributor to global warming – which is why the US Environmental Protection Agency had sought to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant – but methane is also a significant contributor.

The EPA in 2016 issued an order requiring that owners and operators of oil and gas facilities provide data needed to help it determine how to best reduce methane and other harmful emissions. But the Trump administration has withdrawn the order to provide data.

Not everything can be reversed at the stroke a pen, however. The larger attack on the Clean Power Plan will likely take years to carry out, Dr. Masters wrote:

“The Clean Power Plan will be difficult to undo quickly. The plan was finalized by EPA in 2015, and is currently being reviewed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Under the new executive order, the Department of Justice will ask the court to suspend the case until the EPA can review and write a new version of the rule. (Before that happens, the court may still rule on the Plan as written, which will influence how the EPA can rewrite the rule.)

“Once the case is removed from the court, the EPA will have to legally withdraw the existing rule and propose a new rule to take its place, a process that could take years, as the new rule will have to be justified in court, and would likely be challenged in court by environmental groups.”

Hundreds of thousands of lives in the balance

Nonetheless, a fightback is essential. Lives are literally at stake, in large numbers, if regulations safeguarding air quality are reversed.

The EPA estimates that 160,000 premature deaths were prevented in 2010 by the Clean Air Act, and estimates that 230,000 lives will be saved and 120,000 emergency-room visits saved in 2020 if the act is left intact. The EPA said the benefits of the act “exceeds costs by a factor of more than 30 to one.”

This study, at least for the moment, hasn’t been expunged from the Internet by the Trump administration.

A separate study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) estimates that air pollution causes 200,000 early deaths each year in the United States alone.

The two biggest contributors to that death toll, the MIT report found, are emissions from road transportation and power generation, which together account for just more than half the total. One of the study’s authors, MIT professor Steven Barrett, said a person who dies from an air pollution-related cause typically dies about a decade earlier than he or she otherwise might have.

The Canadian government estimates that a 10% reduction in particulate-matter and ozone levels would result in a net social welfare benefit for Canadians of more than $4 billion. A separate study estimates that the cost to Canadian health care from air pollution will total $250 billion by 2031 without significant reductions.

This exercise can be repeated around the world. A 2015 World Health Organization study estimates that indoor and outdoor air pollution costs European economies as much as €1.2 trillion annually in deaths and diseases. This includes £54 billion and 29,000 deaths per year in Britain. For Australia, the cost from air pollution was estimated at $5.8 billion in 2010, a doubling in only five years.

Globally, air pollution could lead to nine million premature deaths and US$2.6 trillion in economic damage from the costs of sick days, medical bills and reduced agricultural output by 2060, according to an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development study.

Only a drastic reduction in emissions can reverse these costs in human health and the mounting dangers of global warming.

We’ll have to go well beyond current plans

Cap-and-trade schemes, promoted by North American liberals and European social democrats, simply don’t work. The European Union system, for example, issued so many free certificates that the price of pollution is a small fraction of the target price, and attempts by environmentalists to reduce the number of certifications are consistently rebuffed.

Moreover, cap-and-trade plans often allow ‘offsets’, whereby companies can buy emission credits from outside the program to ‘offset’ emissions above the allowable level, allowing polluters to substitute unverifiable reductions elsewhere for real reductions locally.

Nor are renewable energy sources, as vital as they are to any rational future, a substitute for reducing energy usage. Renewable energy is not necessarily clean nor without contributions to global warming.

Wind power and biomass, for example, have their own problems. The primary source of bioenergy is wood, which portends an increase in logging, counter to winning a struggle against global warming. Denmark and Britain are among the biggest users of biomass but must import wood to sustain that.

The turbines used to produce electricity from wind increasingly are built with the ‘rare earth’ element neodymium, which requires a highly toxic process to produce. Production of rare earths are environmentally destructive; increasing their extraction means more pollution and toxic waste.

The argument here certainly isn’t that a switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy as quickly as practical isn’t necessary; of course such a switch needs to be made. But if reversing pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions is the goal, then renewables are at most a partial measure.

The Paris Climate Summit ended with a surprise decision by the world’s governments to limit the rise of the global average temperature to 1.5 C above the pre-industrial revolution average instead of the previously intended limit of 2C. The difficulty here, however, is that even if every national goal were met, the Earth’s temperature would rise 2.2C to 3.4C by 2100 with more to come, and the Paris summit contains no mechanism to enforce these goals.

Adding to the difficulty of reducing fossil fuel usage sufficiently to meet the Paris summit’s goals (and which would also reduce the damage to human health) is the astounding total of subsidies for them. A 2015 study that attempted to quantify the size of these subsidies on a global basis estimated them at US$5.6 trillion!

That includes not only direct government subsidies through tax breaks and other programs, but damage to the environment – these are not inconsequential as the costs of air pollution and global warming transferred to society account for nearly two-thirds of that total.

‘Fracking’ (hydraulic fracturing) of rock to blast out natural gas alone accounts for billions of dollars of damages through contaminated water, health problems from the chemicals used in the process, air pollution, methane that contributes to global warming, disruption to agriculture and damage to roads from trucks. That the cost of those is transferred to society is another mammoth subsidy to the energy industry.

Overshooting Earth’s carrying capacity

The most recent estimate of planetary consumption is that humanity is using the equivalent of 1.6 Earths per year. By 2030, at present rates of increase, we’ll be consuming two Earths – that is, twice the capacity of our planet to sustain.

Then there is the matter of global warming. Two scientific studies issued in 2015 suggest that so much carbon dioxide already has been thrown in the air that humanity may have already committed itself to a six-meter rise in sea level. A separate 2015 study, prepared by 18 scientists, found that the Earth is crossing several ‘planetary boundaries’ that together will render the planet much less hospitable.

What is the price of making Earth uninhabitable? No amount of strip-mining the Moon or the asteroid belt will reverse mass die-offs on Earth.

Illusions that ‘green capitalism‘ will save us really must be abandoned. Beyond that capitalism requires constant growth (infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet) and discourages corporate responsibility because enterprises can offload their responsibilities onto society, every incentive is for more production.

Adding to that, capitalist economics discounts the future so much that future life is seen as nearly worthless. Thus, in this type of accounting, there is no cost for future pollution.

Authors Richard York, Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster put this plainly in a thoughtful May 2009 article in Monthly Review. They wrote:

“Where [orthodox economists] primarily differ is not on their views of the science behind climate change but on their value assumptions about the propriety of shifting burdens to future generations. This lays bare the ideology embedded in orthodox neoclassical economics, a field which regularly presents itself as using objective, even naturalistic, methods for modeling the economy.

“However, past all of the equations and technical jargon, the dominant economic paradigm is built on a value system that prizes capital accumulation in the short-term, while de-valuing everything else in the present and everything altogether in the future.”

As for the present day, capitalist enterprises aren’t going to guarantee jobs to workers displaced from energy-extraction industries, and if those workers don’t have any viable alternatives, it can’t be expected they will do anything other than join their bosses in fighting for their industry.

Thus any rational plan to drastically shrink fossil fuel extraction has to be able to provide alternative jobs. Nor do the costs in human lives discussed above factor into capitalist economic calculations.

The drastic changes that are necessary to reverse the human and environmental tolls of pollution will come with a hefty price tag. But the cost of continuing business as usual is much higher – a price our descendants will pay if we don’t move to an economic system that values life rather than only profits.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment‘, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, was recently published by Zero Books.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.