Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was born to pioneering American anthropologist Lorna Marshall and husband Laurence K. Marshall. Between 1949 and 1956, she took part in three expeditions to live with and study the Ju/’hoansi !Kung San, the “Bushmen” of the Kalahari Desert in what is now Namibia, Botswana and the western part of South Africa.During these trips, Thomas kept a journal which she later drew on when writing her first book, The Harmless People. 

Her book, The Hidden Life of Dogs – which was published in 2000 – spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her latest book, the Hidden Life of Life: a Walk through the Reaches of Time, shows the unity of all life on earth over the eons of biological evolution – that all of nature’s wonderful diversity descend from something like a virus, a little string of molecules somewhere in the water.

She ends the book with the pre-contact San (“Bushmen”) with whom I lived for some years, because they are our ancestors, and showed the way of life of our species for thousands of years. 

Curtis Abraham (CA): What is your new book Hidden Life of Life: A Walk through the Reaches of Time all about?

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (EMT): The basic theme of Hidden Life of Life is that species other than ours are far more like ours than most of us believe. For instance, in the past even scientists took the position that animals did not have consciousness. To assume that animals do have such things as memory, emotions and consciousness was known as ‘Anthropomorphism’ and was thought to be sentimental unscientific folly. 

The book begins with the earliest type of life-forms – archaea and bacteria – each of which has its own domain, then deals with the third domain, which includes everything else – from amoebas to humans. In this book I try to avoid anthropodenial in every way possible, and it’s drawn some criticism already.

CA: What is anthropodenial?  

EMT: The Dutch primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal has coined a new word – ‘anthropodenial’ which means presenting another life-form as if it did not have human characteristics.

The anthropodenial position was held by the general public to some degree. For example, you couldn’t call an animal ‘he’ or ‘she’, for instance. An animal was ‘it’.  A friend who wrote about a bird who laid an egg was told by her editor that she had to call the bird ‘it’ instead of ‘she’ despite the fact that male birds aren’t known to lay eggs! My friend called the bird ‘she’ despite the editor.

CA: Why do you think the scientific community was/is reluctant to acknowledge anthropomorphism? Didn’t Charles Darwin write a whole book on The Expressions and Emotions in Man and Animals?

EMT: It’s true that Darwin had no doubt that other species had consciousness, thoughts, and emotions, and I don’t know why his position wasn’t upheld in more recent times.

Nor is there a formal explanation of why scientists later didn’t seem to agree. A scientist friend involved with such matters told me that because these mental qualities were more or less impossible to measure, and that scientists required proof, they were obliged to take a guess, and took the more conservative position that other species did not have mental abilities that could compare to ours. I would agree that this looks like human narcissism, and I feel quite sure that not all scientists agreed.

CA: What scientific evidence do you present in the new book that supports anthropomorphism?

EMT: Anthropomorphism is kind of like racism, in that it’s been ubiquitous ever since I can remember. Scientists more or less agreed that anthropomorphism was wrong, that other life-forms didn’t have consciousness.

In other words, scientists were in a state of anthropodenial. Things like thoughts are hard to prove, and scientists need proof. Maybe they didn’t really believe that, but only recently has the wrongness been challenged.

Perhaps the best evidence that anthropomorphism exists is the big backlash that’s erupting against this – it’s about time this happened.

It was a while before scientists began to investigate the mental abilities of other life-forms. By ‘mental’ I don’t mean that everything has brains – mimosa trees and the paramecium have a certain amount of awareness and memory.

Many books have been published in recent years showing that animals – and other life-forms – have plenty of consciousness, a fact that’s slowly leaking down to the general public. 

CA: It is largely the Western intellectual world that has been distancing humanity from the rest of nature over the past centuries. Surely, indigenous peoples like the Amis or San or Arawak didn’t initially view the world this way?

EMT: People who have actual, daily experience with the natural world – and deal with it on an hourly basis – are infinitely better informed than those of us who don’t have such experience.

But I’m not just speaking of the white western intellectuals – some of whom are the scientists, after all – but others like farmers deal with nature but they tend to see it as an enemy and go about erasing as much of it as possible.

For example, wild animals are shot, and non-agricultural plants are viewed as weeds. While indigenous people such as the San blend into the natural world as part of their daily lives and thus have a better, more realistic grasp of what goes on there.

CA: Would you say we owe a great debt to Jane Goodall in that she immediately recognized the individuality of her study animals, which went counter to the prevailing scientific procedure of the day, and named her chimps instead of giving them numbers?

EMT: We certainly owe a great debt to Jane Goodall, but as for recognising the individuality of her animals study, I’d say that almost anyone who has done similar work did the same thing, if only it’s because the individuality [of the animals] is so obvious.

I participated in Katy Payne’s study of infrasound in elephants. Elephants make infrasonic calls to one another that might be detectable at distances as far as ten kilometres – these calls aided in travel and mating.

Katy discovered it and we spent a long time in Namibia’s Etosha Park, and knew we were supposed to give numbers to the elephants. In fact, the park authorities demanded that we do, and forbade our giving them names.

But this seemed not only ridiculous but also needlessly difficult.  It’s much easier to remember a name than a number, so of course we named all the elephants. Anyway, Katy’s publication didn’t require either names or numbers – she wrote about the sounds they make, not their behaviour as individuals.

CA: You also have a fondness and respect for microscopic life?

EMT: Yes, the new book also deals with early type of animals that are almost microscopic, one of which – Turritopsisdohrni, a form of jelly fish – literally lives forever unless eaten by a fish.

This isn’t unique to T. dhorni – several other life-forms have similar abilities. It deals with my favourite kind of small animal – the waterbear, evidently much the same as it was for millions of years, surviving all the extinctions, and will be here long after we’re gone. They are now found almost everywhere in any little ecosystem that’s wet – I found mine in a swamp.

CA: In the book you also bring home the fact that we humans do not appreciate the wonders and miracles of creatures we feel are lesser to us, either in terms of physical size and/or ecological importance and/or those that are aesthetically pleasing to our eyes? Why this attitude?

EMT: Like most other species, we see ourselves as the most important species – the only worthwhile species. We imagine that God made us in his image that we’re supposed to dominate the Earth.

We imagine that we are at the topmost rung of the evolutionary ladder, a ladder that we invented, with our characteristics as the important ones, which renders other species as lower.  If dogs made an evolutionary ladder, dogs would be at the top, with acute sense of smell being the defining reason.   

CA: How can this change?

EMT: The only thing I can think of that might help is to give more publicity to tiny creatures. I tried to do that in Tamed and Untamed, the book I wrote with Sy Montgomery, a collection of the columns we wrote for the Boston Globe that explores the minds, lives, and mysteries of animals such as octopuses, lions and snails.

CA: What have you observed from the world of plants and trees? 

EMT: Plants don’t have brains but they know things – they sense sunlight, they sense gravity, they sense the other plants near them, they inform each other about parasite attacks, and communicate with pheromones or through their roots. They also cooperate with fungi, giving sugars to the fungus and receiving minerals in return.

CA: In pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa, indigenous peoples had a sort of understanding with the wildlife they encountered. But in modern times we see – for example – herding communities in east Africa poisoning wildlife such as lions that prey on their cattle. What has been your experience with the San (“Bushman”) in southern Africa?

EMT: From the San’s long history as hunter-gatherers we can learn what it’s like to live in the natural world. For instance, the people we knew – having lived among pre-contact San – had a truce with lions.

Both hunted the same game in the same way, both needed to live near a source of water, the people used the day and the lions used the night, and they didn’t hunt or attack each other.

Why? A possible reason is that their enormous area had no surface water, they both had to depend on waterholes, and if one group bothered the other, one group would have to move, but every water source was already home to other groups of people and other groups of lions-best to avoid the need to move.  Here, the subject reflects the purpose of the book—the lions had as much sense as the people did, and the no-hunt arrangement was quite possibly made by the lions. 

CA: How did your early experiences with the San during the 1950s affect your appreciation for the natural world?

EMT: I’d say that the experience with the San set my life in a great direction. [One] advantage I gained from the experience was a sense of the natural world.  

I was on the road to that understanding before I went there – but wow – what the San knew about their world was mind-bending.  They had acquired an overwhelming amount of botanical, zoological, astronomical and climate knowledge, which few have equalled to this day.

This came from flawless observation – as it still does – to all who live in the natural world. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of their observation was their arrow poison, perhaps the deadliest in the world.

On drop can kill you and there’s no antidote. It’s found in the larvae of Diamphidia beetles and their Lebistina parasite. Many of us – not me – see the natural world as something to view, nice scenery. It’s much more than that.

CA: In The Hidden Life of Life, you allude to the shortcomings of science and scientists vis-à-vis anthropomorphism, for example. Has modern science and its practitioners been a disappointment for you?

EMT: I have been somewhat critical of science in the way science has been involved with such things as anthropomorphism. And I’m critical of science-speak, in that most of what many scientists write is incomprehensible to most people.

However, I have utmost respect for science and scientists. I do make a point of the importance of science, and the Coda at the end of The Hidden Life of Life gives an example.

I think the idea that other species didn’t have thoughts, emotions, memory etc wasn’t meant to be a provable, scientific finding—it was just a kind of assumption on the conservative side, because such things as thoughts can’t really be proved and scientists have this habit of proving things.

CA: The Hidden Life of Life is part of the Animalibus series of Penn State. Tell me more about this series.

EMT: I’m so glad to be part of Penn State’s Animalibus series. Its important contribution is publishing books that counter anthropodenial. One fabulous book they published is Among the Bone Eaters by Marcus Baynes-Rock.  I wrote a foreword for it, a great honour, and it’s riveting. 

This Author

Curtis Abraham is a freelance writer and researcher on African development, science, the environment, biomedical/health and African social/cultural history. He has lived and worked in sub-Saharan Africa for over two decades with his work appearing in numerous publications including New Scientist, BBC Wildlife Magazine, New African and Africa Geographic.

The Hidden Life of Life: a Walk through the Reaches of Time is published by The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania, March 2018.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was born to pioneering American anthropologist Lorna Marshall and husband Laurence K. Marshall. Between 1949 and 1956, she took part in three expeditions to live with and study the Ju/’hoansi !Kung San, the “Bushmen” of the Kalahari Desert in what is now Namibia, Botswana and the western part of South Africa.During these trips, Thomas kept a journal which she later drew on when writing her first book, The Harmless People. 

Her book, The Hidden Life of Dogs – which was published in 2000 – spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her latest book, the Hidden Life of Life: a Walk through the Reaches of Time, shows the unity of all life on earth over the eons of biological evolution – that all of nature’s wonderful diversity descend from something like a virus, a little string of molecules somewhere in the water.

She ends the book with the pre-contact San (“Bushmen”) with whom I lived for some years, because they are our ancestors, and showed the way of life of our species for thousands of years. 

Curtis Abraham (CA): What is your new book Hidden Life of Life: A Walk through the Reaches of Time all about?

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (EMT): The basic theme of Hidden Life of Life is that species other than ours are far more like ours than most of us believe. For instance, in the past even scientists took the position that animals did not have consciousness. To assume that animals do have such things as memory, emotions and consciousness was known as ‘Anthropomorphism’ and was thought to be sentimental unscientific folly. 

The book begins with the earliest type of life-forms – archaea and bacteria – each of which has its own domain, then deals with the third domain, which includes everything else – from amoebas to humans. In this book I try to avoid anthropodenial in every way possible, and it’s drawn some criticism already.

CA: What is anthropodenial?  

EMT: The Dutch primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal has coined a new word – ‘anthropodenial’ which means presenting another life-form as if it did not have human characteristics.

The anthropodenial position was held by the general public to some degree. For example, you couldn’t call an animal ‘he’ or ‘she’, for instance. An animal was ‘it’.  A friend who wrote about a bird who laid an egg was told by her editor that she had to call the bird ‘it’ instead of ‘she’ despite the fact that male birds aren’t known to lay eggs! My friend called the bird ‘she’ despite the editor.

CA: Why do you think the scientific community was/is reluctant to acknowledge anthropomorphism? Didn’t Charles Darwin write a whole book on The Expressions and Emotions in Man and Animals?

EMT: It’s true that Darwin had no doubt that other species had consciousness, thoughts, and emotions, and I don’t know why his position wasn’t upheld in more recent times.

Nor is there a formal explanation of why scientists later didn’t seem to agree. A scientist friend involved with such matters told me that because these mental qualities were more or less impossible to measure, and that scientists required proof, they were obliged to take a guess, and took the more conservative position that other species did not have mental abilities that could compare to ours. I would agree that this looks like human narcissism, and I feel quite sure that not all scientists agreed.

CA: What scientific evidence do you present in the new book that supports anthropomorphism?

EMT: Anthropomorphism is kind of like racism, in that it’s been ubiquitous ever since I can remember. Scientists more or less agreed that anthropomorphism was wrong, that other life-forms didn’t have consciousness.

In other words, scientists were in a state of anthropodenial. Things like thoughts are hard to prove, and scientists need proof. Maybe they didn’t really believe that, but only recently has the wrongness been challenged.

Perhaps the best evidence that anthropomorphism exists is the big backlash that’s erupting against this – it’s about time this happened.

It was a while before scientists began to investigate the mental abilities of other life-forms. By ‘mental’ I don’t mean that everything has brains – mimosa trees and the paramecium have a certain amount of awareness and memory.

Many books have been published in recent years showing that animals – and other life-forms – have plenty of consciousness, a fact that’s slowly leaking down to the general public. 

CA: It is largely the Western intellectual world that has been distancing humanity from the rest of nature over the past centuries. Surely, indigenous peoples like the Amis or San or Arawak didn’t initially view the world this way?

EMT: People who have actual, daily experience with the natural world – and deal with it on an hourly basis – are infinitely better informed than those of us who don’t have such experience.

But I’m not just speaking of the white western intellectuals – some of whom are the scientists, after all – but others like farmers deal with nature but they tend to see it as an enemy and go about erasing as much of it as possible.

For example, wild animals are shot, and non-agricultural plants are viewed as weeds. While indigenous people such as the San blend into the natural world as part of their daily lives and thus have a better, more realistic grasp of what goes on there.

CA: Would you say we owe a great debt to Jane Goodall in that she immediately recognized the individuality of her study animals, which went counter to the prevailing scientific procedure of the day, and named her chimps instead of giving them numbers?

EMT: We certainly owe a great debt to Jane Goodall, but as for recognising the individuality of her animals study, I’d say that almost anyone who has done similar work did the same thing, if only it’s because the individuality [of the animals] is so obvious.

I participated in Katy Payne’s study of infrasound in elephants. Elephants make infrasonic calls to one another that might be detectable at distances as far as ten kilometres – these calls aided in travel and mating.

Katy discovered it and we spent a long time in Namibia’s Etosha Park, and knew we were supposed to give numbers to the elephants. In fact, the park authorities demanded that we do, and forbade our giving them names.

But this seemed not only ridiculous but also needlessly difficult.  It’s much easier to remember a name than a number, so of course we named all the elephants. Anyway, Katy’s publication didn’t require either names or numbers – she wrote about the sounds they make, not their behaviour as individuals.

CA: You also have a fondness and respect for microscopic life?

EMT: Yes, the new book also deals with early type of animals that are almost microscopic, one of which – Turritopsisdohrni, a form of jelly fish – literally lives forever unless eaten by a fish.

This isn’t unique to T. dhorni – several other life-forms have similar abilities. It deals with my favourite kind of small animal – the waterbear, evidently much the same as it was for millions of years, surviving all the extinctions, and will be here long after we’re gone. They are now found almost everywhere in any little ecosystem that’s wet – I found mine in a swamp.

CA: In the book you also bring home the fact that we humans do not appreciate the wonders and miracles of creatures we feel are lesser to us, either in terms of physical size and/or ecological importance and/or those that are aesthetically pleasing to our eyes? Why this attitude?

EMT: Like most other species, we see ourselves as the most important species – the only worthwhile species. We imagine that God made us in his image that we’re supposed to dominate the Earth.

We imagine that we are at the topmost rung of the evolutionary ladder, a ladder that we invented, with our characteristics as the important ones, which renders other species as lower.  If dogs made an evolutionary ladder, dogs would be at the top, with acute sense of smell being the defining reason.   

CA: How can this change?

EMT: The only thing I can think of that might help is to give more publicity to tiny creatures. I tried to do that in Tamed and Untamed, the book I wrote with Sy Montgomery, a collection of the columns we wrote for the Boston Globe that explores the minds, lives, and mysteries of animals such as octopuses, lions and snails.

CA: What have you observed from the world of plants and trees? 

EMT: Plants don’t have brains but they know things – they sense sunlight, they sense gravity, they sense the other plants near them, they inform each other about parasite attacks, and communicate with pheromones or through their roots. They also cooperate with fungi, giving sugars to the fungus and receiving minerals in return.

CA: In pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa, indigenous peoples had a sort of understanding with the wildlife they encountered. But in modern times we see – for example – herding communities in east Africa poisoning wildlife such as lions that prey on their cattle. What has been your experience with the San (“Bushman”) in southern Africa?

EMT: From the San’s long history as hunter-gatherers we can learn what it’s like to live in the natural world. For instance, the people we knew – having lived among pre-contact San – had a truce with lions.

Both hunted the same game in the same way, both needed to live near a source of water, the people used the day and the lions used the night, and they didn’t hunt or attack each other.

Why? A possible reason is that their enormous area had no surface water, they both had to depend on waterholes, and if one group bothered the other, one group would have to move, but every water source was already home to other groups of people and other groups of lions-best to avoid the need to move.  Here, the subject reflects the purpose of the book—the lions had as much sense as the people did, and the no-hunt arrangement was quite possibly made by the lions. 

CA: How did your early experiences with the San during the 1950s affect your appreciation for the natural world?

EMT: I’d say that the experience with the San set my life in a great direction. [One] advantage I gained from the experience was a sense of the natural world.  

I was on the road to that understanding before I went there – but wow – what the San knew about their world was mind-bending.  They had acquired an overwhelming amount of botanical, zoological, astronomical and climate knowledge, which few have equalled to this day.

This came from flawless observation – as it still does – to all who live in the natural world. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of their observation was their arrow poison, perhaps the deadliest in the world.

On drop can kill you and there’s no antidote. It’s found in the larvae of Diamphidia beetles and their Lebistina parasite. Many of us – not me – see the natural world as something to view, nice scenery. It’s much more than that.

CA: In The Hidden Life of Life, you allude to the shortcomings of science and scientists vis-à-vis anthropomorphism, for example. Has modern science and its practitioners been a disappointment for you?

EMT: I have been somewhat critical of science in the way science has been involved with such things as anthropomorphism. And I’m critical of science-speak, in that most of what many scientists write is incomprehensible to most people.

However, I have utmost respect for science and scientists. I do make a point of the importance of science, and the Coda at the end of The Hidden Life of Life gives an example.

I think the idea that other species didn’t have thoughts, emotions, memory etc wasn’t meant to be a provable, scientific finding—it was just a kind of assumption on the conservative side, because such things as thoughts can’t really be proved and scientists have this habit of proving things.

CA: The Hidden Life of Life is part of the Animalibus series of Penn State. Tell me more about this series.

EMT: I’m so glad to be part of Penn State’s Animalibus series. Its important contribution is publishing books that counter anthropodenial. One fabulous book they published is Among the Bone Eaters by Marcus Baynes-Rock.  I wrote a foreword for it, a great honour, and it’s riveting. 

This Author

Curtis Abraham is a freelance writer and researcher on African development, science, the environment, biomedical/health and African social/cultural history. He has lived and worked in sub-Saharan Africa for over two decades with his work appearing in numerous publications including New Scientist, BBC Wildlife Magazine, New African and Africa Geographic.

The Hidden Life of Life: a Walk through the Reaches of Time is published by The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania, March 2018.

Many people do their part to make the world a greener place. They recycle, they take shorter showers, and they bring their own bags to the grocery store. But the home isn’t the only place where environmental initiatives can make a difference.

Businesses should take some responsibility for positive change, too. And, fortunately, there are so many ways for a company to do so, whether they’re working in their local communities or helping developing areas to begin their own green programs. Here’s how to do it:

A business’s green pursuits typically start within their own walls. This is especially true for companies whose employees follow their own stringent set of eco-friendly guidelines at home. 

Public transportation

It’s easy for other organisations to begin through decreasing waste in their supply closets: how much of your office must-haves are refillable or recycled? Swap one-time-use pens for those with refillable ink, and use as many recycled paper products as possible.

Send as much correspondence via email as possible, rather than printing and mailing. Even consider hiring a green cleaning service to prevent harmful chemicals from being in your building.

To take this effort a step further, you could organise a waste audit, too. The University of Montana led their own review to see if new recycling bins in their residence halls made a difference or not.

They weren’t sure if students from faraway areas knew the local recycling process, so they made an effort to increase awareness and, in turn, boost usage of the new bins. Your company might audit office supply usage to see which departments are wasteful and use that information to come up with a more sustainable usage plan.

Another way companies can go green is through encouraging their employees to bike or walk to work or try to take public transportation. Facebook has even offered a $10,000 bonus to employees for moving closer to the corporate office to reduce the number of employees who drove to work.

Country’s ecosystem

There are plenty of other sustainable changes to make to an office environment, and many of them are similar to the ones you can make at home. It’s clear how an environmentally friendly effort within your business would improve the community outside of your company’s walls, too. 

A business with the means can have a hand in environmentally friendly practices abroad, too. This is especially true when a company’s pursuits have them building business outlets in developing nations, where operations might be cheaper. It’s vital to give back and help the local area to build infrastructure that promotes green practices as industry expands there.

WebpageFX, a digital marketing agency located in Harrisburg, PA improves developing areas through their FXBuilds program. Through FXBuilds, they give back to communities around the world by providing access to clean water, vaccines, shelter, education and other basics available to Americans that aren’t always accessible abroad.

Shane Jones, Director of Earned Media at WebpageFX, said: “We feel that, by doing our part to improve the quality of life for people in developing countries, we can also improve the way those people impact their local environments. For example, the restrooms FXBuilds has helped to install in countries around the world are likely to improve local environments by reducing the amount of waste runoff nearby.”

Ensuring that business initiatives abroad meet production standards at home is another way to stimulate positive environmental change. In Brazil, eight multinational organisations have banded together to see how their businesses affect the country’s ecosystem. Well-known brands like Walmart and Pepsi Co. are part of the effort.

Industrial practices

Walmart has focused its efforts on preventing deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. They supply some of their beef from Brazil, and many ranchers cut down trees to create pasture space for their cattle. With this in mind, Walmart hopes to remove deforestation from its supply chain completely. It’s clear how this would have a positive effect on a developing community.

Every business’s ability reduce its impact on a developing nation will vary, of course. But having an awareness of how our industrial practices affect communities abroad is a great place to start.   

Taking care of the earth benefits everyone. It makes employees feel good about the place they work and the values it holds. It gives the local community longevity with more sustainable practices in place. And it helps developing nations to come into an international market with the best foundations in place.

In other words, instilling environmentally friendly practices within your office can spur positive change in so many realms. The effort to put them in place is more than worth it.  

This Author

Emily Folk is a conservation and sustainability writer and the editor of Conservation Folks.

The world’s first national inquiry into the human rights impacts of climate change takes a crucial leap forward on Monday (26 March) as the Philippines Commission on Human Rights hears evidence at a two-day hearing in Manila.

ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and 44 of the world’s biggest producers of fossil fuel products have been summoned by the commission to answer charges of endangering people’s lives and livelihoods by knowingly contributing to dangerous climate change.

Sam Hunter Jones, a lawyer at ClientEarth, said: “This is a huge moment in the fight to make fossil fuel producers pay their fair share of climate change costs.

Biggest producers

“These companies have made life increasingly dangerous for the people of the Philippines and around the world, and there is mounting evidence that they have known the risks of their activities for at least the past 50 years.

“Climate change threatens human rights – including people’s rights to life, food, water, sanitation, housing and health. Climate change must be viewed through this lens, and the Philippines investigation promises to set an important global precedent.

Hunter Jones added: “We call on these multinationals to participate fully in the hearing and hope that the Commission will find that governments and companies must act now to protect people from extreme weather and rising seas.”

The complaint was originally made by Greenpeace Southeast Asia, along with 13 other NGOs and 18 individuals. They claim the companies knew about the devastating impact of their business but did not cut emissions to protect people.

Hunter Jones concluded: “It is now time for the world’s biggest producers of fossil fuel products to explain how they will lend their weight to the most important challenge of our time.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague.

For many, the defining political sensation of our day is disorientation. We often feel torn apart in every direction. Even if we grasp the profound depth of the problems we face, navigating this seismic landscape towards something better always seems beyond us.

Complete ecological catastrophe looms into view – an unsettled future that is nevertheless approaching far too quickly. Climate change is our most obvious doom, without the democratic power – political or economic – to change course. Biodiversity collapse, soil degradation, and deforestation are comparable threats of similar causes.

Even as revolutionary new technologies appear – with the potential to free our lives from drudgery and connect us to one another in ways we had never imagined possible – our undemocratic economy has deployed them as tools of disruption.

Collective action

Dreams of a post-scarcity technological future darken into one of permanent unemployment, while governments and companies develop unprecedented power for surveillance and propaganda. In a time when decisive marshalling of the public sphere for the public interest is more needed than ever, the state remains under near-total elite control.

And even as promising social movements are emerging from the UK, Latin America, Spain, Greece, Kurdistan, and elsewhere, reactionary movements of racism and hate are also on the rise. Our newfound uncertainty – amid refugee crises and economic restructuring – has fed vicious nationalist resurgences everywhere from Italy to India to America.

How do we navigate this frightening and, yes, confusing new world? Even retrospectives on powerful movements of the past can be sources of despair. After all, it is tempting to think, how important and lasting could their achievements be if we’ve still been brought to this moment?

But it is worth recognising the truly extraordinary things that mass movements of previous generations have accomplished. Monarchy-toppling revolutions, international labour organising, decolonial struggles, the world-wide feminist movement – each has changed the world and each provides us with a wealth of practices and experiences for the present moment.

The international labour movement was built on the simple idea that even in a world where working people are ruled by others, they will always have the power to withhold their labour. Its strength came from the kinds of collective actions that anyone could participate in, which over time were scaled up to win sweeping changes for the lives of ordinary people.

Oppressive and authoritarian

Decolonial movements challenged and overthrew colonial apparatuses that had the weight and brutality of world empires behind them.

Feminist and antiracist movements across the world have demonstrated the ways in which social domination is rooted in the most intimate spheres of life and showed that a successful framework for social change must recognise the deeply entwined nature of the personal and the political. They have begun to reweave the entire social fabric of labour, families, and relationships.

Our situation may seem hopeless, but we have a rich inheritance of ideas and practices from which we can draw. Monarchies have been overthrown, dictators pulled down. The world has been shaken on its very foundations by popular movements before, and rebuilt anew. As Ursula Le Guin reminds us: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”

Of course, each of the movements above had its flaws and limitations. Unions were often extremely hierarchical and can exclude women, and in the US, people of color.

Many decolonial movements became oppressive and authoritarian as they captured but failed to transform the state—and as their leaders became pawns of Western corporations and institutions.

Successes and limitations

Some strands of the radical feminist movement failed to address racism, classism, and imperialism: others were co-opted by capitalist forces and drained of any revolutionary potential.

These limitations prove illustrative as well, however. They have demonstrated that imperialism, ecological destruction, patriarchy, and class society share a common root—the problem of hierarchy.

Hierarchies between societies, genders, class, and ethnicities make it impossible for some to participate in the political process.

The institutionalisation of radical democracy, where everyone gets a say, is thus essential to creating lasting change. Only real democracy has the potential to simultaneously challenge the injustices of our day and assemble the building blocks of a liberated society.

Drawing from past movements’ successes and limitations, we need a new framework to address today’s challenges. We believe that a convergent evolution towards just such a new framework is happening right now, emerging from the experiments and struggles of our time.

Economic institutions

Leftists and environmentalists coming from backgrounds as diverse as the Kurdish freedom movement, black nationalism, the Mexican anti-colonial struggle, student debt strikers, and labor organising are shifting toward a politics of counterpower: rather than seeking to capture the state, they are building new popular institutions of genuine democracy within the existing system, to carve out space for survival and self-determination.

There are many names for this approach – communalism, radical municipalism, solidarity economies, democratic confederalism, Abahlalism – and many iterations around the world, from Rojava, Syria to Jackson, Mississippi to Barcelona, Spain to Cape Town, South Africa.

The movements share a commitment to radical democracy and inclusion, a focus on building local, resilient institutions, a skepticism of the state, and a determination to confront hierarchy in all its forms.

We argue that these strategies are promising not only because of their incredible individual work, but because when these clusters of community councils, assemblies, land trusts, and cooperatives are woven together into a coherent movement, they may begin to both proliferate and scale up.

Ultimately, they can supplant existing neoliberal political and economic institutions and grow into the foundation of an entirely new society capable of weathering the storm ahead.

Theoretical reflection

This column is the first in a biweekly series by The Symbiosis Research Collective, a publishing collective and study group comprised of activist-intellectuals who are brought together around questions of how to achieve such social and ecological transformation.

In 2017, some of our founding members won first place in the Next System Project’s competition for the essay Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and Beyond. Since then, we have been organising for a movement to revolutionise society through confederal direct democracy in North America.

Our goal is to help people build a new world right in the cities, towns, and neighborhoods where they already live. To that end, we are dedicating the next phase of our work to organising a gathering of municipalist and communalist projects in order to launch a confederation that can connect existing projects and seed new ones.

This project is guided by the spirit that only through lasting alliances can we actualise the vision of an egalitarian, free, and ecological society we so desperately need.

Effective movement-building requires the ongoing dialogue of theoretical reflection, practice, and debate. Over the coming months, we’ll be publishing reflections on a given theme in a bi-weekly series.

Some topics include the history of ecology and revolution, organising how-tos on radical municipalist chapters, energy democracy, alternative education, workers’ movements, and much more.

Ultimately, we aim to fit these pieces into a coherent guide to inspire others to join us in the growing radical municipalist movement. We’re honored and thrilled to have this column appear in The Ecologist.

These Authors

The Symbiosis Research Collective is a network of organizers and activist-researchers across North America, assembling a confederation of community organizations that can build a democratic and ecological society from the ground up. We are fighting for a better world by creating institutions of participatory democracy and the solidarity economy through community organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.

Theresa May’s government finally confirmed its intention to end coal burning in power station in 2025 this January. This coal phaseout is long-overdue.

But the decision contains three dangerous loopholes: firstly, the government does not seek to end coal mining in the UK; secondly, it would allow plants to continue burning coal if large amounts of wood are cofired despite science showing that this is far from climate friendly and thirdly, the government is determined to compensate for the end of coal burning with a significant expansion in gas power station capacity.

Read our news story about the huge global slump in construction of new coal plants.

Amber Rudd, the then secretary of state for energy and climate change,  announced “proposals to close coal by 2025 – and restrict its use from 2023” on the eve of the 2015 UN Climate Conference in Paris.

Electricity bill

What the Government committed to at that time was nothing more than holding a consultation. Worryingly, the emphasis was firmly on replacing coal with gas.

Still, it was the first time that a government anywhere had announced plans to end coal burning in power stations – though it is worth remembering that only 78 out of 195 countries in the world were burning coal for electricity in 2014, and that several countries, from Zambia to Switzerland, had ended coal power before then.

It took the government until January this year to publish its actual decision. By then it had been overtaken by several other European countries, with the French president having announced an end to coal burning in power stations as early as 2021 or 2022.

Meantime, UK coal electricity continued its steep decline: between 2011 and 2016, coal electricity fell by 72 percent, thanks largely to a trebling of electricity generation from wind and solar power and a reduction in electricity use due to greater efficiency.

Although the Government’s full 2017 energy statistics are yet to be published, coal burning clearly declined further last year. Perversely, coal power stations are being kept open artificially until 2025 – with the help of subsidies – funded through a surcharge on everybody’s electricity bill. 

The very fact that the Government has confirmed its intention to end coal burning for electricity in 2025 is a great success, thanks to years of persistent campaigning by climate activists and environmental NGOs.

Burning coal

After all, this is a Government which has axed almost all new onshore wind and solar subsidies, cut support for energy efficiency by 58 percent since 2012, handed North Sea oil companies £1.2 billion in tax rebates in 2017/18 alone, and is endeavouring to open up large swathes of the country to fracking. 

Yet – while acknowledging an important milestone for climate campaigners – a critical assessment of what exactly has been decided is vital: Sadly, the coal phaseout announcement itself comes with several dangerous loopholes.

Firstly, the phaseout does not extend to mining coal. In Pont Valley, County Durham, Banks Group is set to open up a new opencast coal mine. Campaigners recently occupied the site.

The same company is trying to get planning permission for another such mine in Druridge Bay, Northumberland. The first new deep coal mine in three decades is proposed in Cumbria. Operations at existing opencast coal mines – the biggest of them at Ffos-y-Fran near Merthyr Tydfil – are continuing with no end in sight. 

Secondly, instead of mandating the closure of all coal power stations, the government wants to only close those coal-burning units whose CO2 emissions exceed 450 kg/MWh – which is less than half what burning coal for electricity emits.

Worst impacts

This matters because it allows energy companies to continue burning coal indefinitely provided they co-fire it with large amounts of wood – wrongly considered carbon neutral under flawed carbon accounting mechanisms. 

The UK is the world’s biggest importer of wood pellets, most of which come from the southern US, where carbon-rich forest ecosystems inside a global biodiversity hotspot are being clearcut, increasingly to make pellets which are then shipped across the Atlantic.

More than 800 scientists recently signed a letter which warns: “Even if forests are allowed to regrow, using wood deliberately harvested for burning will increase carbon in the atmosphere and warming for decades to centuries – as many studies have shown – even when wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas. The reasons are fundamental and occur regardless of whether forest management is ‘sustainable’.”

Yet the UK government – like others – continues to ignore the science. Cutting down trees and whole forests and burning the wood in power stations is classified as ‘low-carbon’, even though scientists have pointed out time and time again that it is commonly no better for the climate than burning coal, when considered over a generation or longer.

Climate science shows that we need to steeply reduce CO2 emissions now if we are to have any hope of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

Coal phaseout

So far, Drax power station has converted three of its six units to biomass and is about to convert a fourth one, albeit only to operate at a low capacity. EPH is converting the previously mothballed Lynemouth power station to biomass. Those conversions depend on previously guaranteed ‘renewable electricity’ subsidies. Again, this is paid out of a surcharge on our electricity bills). This is £1.5 million per day in the case of Drax. 

Whether or not the ‘biomass loophole’ in the coal phaseout will lead to more biomass being burned in the UK depends on future subsidies decisions.

Regardless of what happens in the UK, this loophole sends a dangerous message to governments around the world, especially those that signed up to the Powering Past Coal Alliance launched by the UK and Canada at the Bonn Climate Summit in 2017, which commits signatories to work towards a coal phaseout.

Worryingly, nine of the countries which signed up to that Alliance also committed themselves to greatly increasing biomass burning in a misguided Vision Statement called “Scaling-up the low carbon bioeconomy” – the UK being one of them.

The third problem is that the government is still making a coal phaseout contingent on new gas power stations being built.

Hands of frackers

The government’s expressed optimism about “energy security” being guaranteed should not distract from the fact that a get-out clause is proposed which would allow a coal phaseout to be suspended if not ‘enough’ new gas capacity is built.

The government has scaled back its “ambitions” for new gas power capacity from 26 GW envisioned by George Osborne in 2012 – to 5.5 GW now foreseen.

But any new gas power stations are incompatible with the aim of keeping global warming to within 1.5oC, set out in the Paris Agreement.

Furthermore, the hype around such a new gas demand will play into the hands of frackers. Drax is in the process of applying for planning permission to replace its two remaining coal units with what would be the UK’s largest gas power station by far.

RWE, Eggborouh Power Ltd – owned by the Czech company EPH – and SSE have put forward large gas power proposals, too. So far, just one new gas plant – far smaller than those now proposed – has been built since 2013.

Genuinely low-carbon

Now, however, energy companies are pushing for high subsidies for gas and the caveats contained in the coal-phaseout announcement may just give them enough leverage to obtain those. 

The UK’s coal phaseout thus serves as a case study for the importance of holistic energy campaigning: while we need to celebrate successes against one form of dirty energy, campaigners must be vigilant about false solutions pushed to replace it.

A meaningful response to the climate crisis does not just require an end to coal but a rapid transition towards genuinely low-carbon renewable energy that does not involve burning carbon, coupled with a shift towards much lower energy use. 

This Author

Almuth Ernsting helped to found Biofuelwatch in 2006 and has been researching and campaigning on a broad range of issues related to the impacts of different forms of bioenergy since then, including biofuels for transport and wood-bsased bioenergy. She lives in Edinburgh.

Theresa May’s government finally confirmed its intention to end coal burning in power station in 2025 this January. This coal phaseout is long-overdue.

But the decision contains three dangerous loopholes: firstly, the government does not seek to end coal mining in the UK; secondly, it would allow plants to continue burning coal if large amounts of wood are cofired despite science showing that this is far from climate friendly and thirdly, the government is determined to compensate for the end of coal burning with a significant expansion in gas power station capacity.

Read our news story about the huge global slump in construction of new coal plants.

Amber Rudd, the then secretary of state for energy and climate change,  announced “proposals to close coal by 2025 – and restrict its use from 2023” on the eve of the 2015 UN Climate Conference in Paris.

Electricity bill

What the Government committed to at that time was nothing more than holding a consultation. Worryingly, the emphasis was firmly on replacing coal with gas.

Still, it was the first time that a government anywhere had announced plans to end coal burning in power stations – though it is worth remembering that only 78 out of 195 countries in the world were burning coal for electricity in 2014, and that several countries, from Zambia to Switzerland, had ended coal power before then.

It took the government until January this year to publish its actual decision. By then it had been overtaken by several other European countries, with the French president having announced an end to coal burning in power stations as early as 2021 or 2022.

Meantime, UK coal electricity continued its steep decline: between 2011 and 2016, coal electricity fell by 72 percent, thanks largely to a trebling of electricity generation from wind and solar power and a reduction in electricity use due to greater efficiency.

Although the Government’s full 2017 energy statistics are yet to be published, coal burning clearly declined further last year. Perversely, coal power stations are being kept open artificially until 2025 – with the help of subsidies – funded through a surcharge on everybody’s electricity bill. 

The very fact that the Government has confirmed its intention to end coal burning for electricity in 2025 is a great success, thanks to years of persistent campaigning by climate activists and environmental NGOs.

Burning coal

After all, this is a Government which has axed almost all new onshore wind and solar subsidies, cut support for energy efficiency by 58 percent since 2012, handed North Sea oil companies £1.2 billion in tax rebates in 2017/18 alone, and is endeavouring to open up large swathes of the country to fracking. 

Yet – while acknowledging an important milestone for climate campaigners – a critical assessment of what exactly has been decided is vital: Sadly, the coal phaseout announcement itself comes with several dangerous loopholes.

Firstly, the phaseout does not extend to mining coal. In Pont Valley, County Durham, Banks Group is set to open up a new opencast coal mine. Campaigners recently occupied the site.

The same company is trying to get planning permission for another such mine in Druridge Bay, Northumberland. The first new deep coal mine in three decades is proposed in Cumbria. Operations at existing opencast coal mines – the biggest of them at Ffos-y-Fran near Merthyr Tydfil – are continuing with no end in sight. 

Secondly, instead of mandating the closure of all coal power stations, the government wants to only close those coal-burning units whose CO2 emissions exceed 450 kg/MWh – which is less than half what burning coal for electricity emits.

Worst impacts

This matters because it allows energy companies to continue burning coal indefinitely provided they co-fire it with large amounts of wood – wrongly considered carbon neutral under flawed carbon accounting mechanisms. 

The UK is the world’s biggest importer of wood pellets, most of which come from the southern US, where carbon-rich forest ecosystems inside a global biodiversity hotspot are being clearcut, increasingly to make pellets which are then shipped across the Atlantic.

More than 800 scientists recently signed a letter which warns: “Even if forests are allowed to regrow, using wood deliberately harvested for burning will increase carbon in the atmosphere and warming for decades to centuries – as many studies have shown – even when wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas. The reasons are fundamental and occur regardless of whether forest management is ‘sustainable’.”

Yet the UK government – like others – continues to ignore the science. Cutting down trees and whole forests and burning the wood in power stations is classified as ‘low-carbon’, even though scientists have pointed out time and time again that it is commonly no better for the climate than burning coal, when considered over a generation or longer.

Climate science shows that we need to steeply reduce CO2 emissions now if we are to have any hope of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

Coal phaseout

So far, Drax power station has converted three of its six units to biomass and is about to convert a fourth one, albeit only to operate at a low capacity. EPH is converting the previously mothballed Lynemouth power station to biomass. Those conversions depend on previously guaranteed ‘renewable electricity’ subsidies. Again, this is paid out of a surcharge on our electricity bills). This is £1.5 million per day in the case of Drax. 

Whether or not the ‘biomass loophole’ in the coal phaseout will lead to more biomass being burned in the UK depends on future subsidies decisions.

Regardless of what happens in the UK, this loophole sends a dangerous message to governments around the world, especially those that signed up to the Powering Past Coal Alliance launched by the UK and Canada at the Bonn Climate Summit in 2017, which commits signatories to work towards a coal phaseout.

Worryingly, nine of the countries which signed up to that Alliance also committed themselves to greatly increasing biomass burning in a misguided Vision Statement called “Scaling-up the low carbon bioeconomy” – the UK being one of them.

The third problem is that the government is still making a coal phaseout contingent on new gas power stations being built.

Hands of frackers

The government’s expressed optimism about “energy security” being guaranteed should not distract from the fact that a get-out clause is proposed which would allow a coal phaseout to be suspended if not ‘enough’ new gas capacity is built.

The government has scaled back its “ambitions” for new gas power capacity from 26 GW envisioned by George Osborne in 2012 – to 5.5 GW now foreseen.

But any new gas power stations are incompatible with the aim of keeping global warming to within 1.5oC, set out in the Paris Agreement.

Furthermore, the hype around such a new gas demand will play into the hands of frackers. Drax is in the process of applying for planning permission to replace its two remaining coal units with what would be the UK’s largest gas power station by far.

RWE, Eggborouh Power Ltd – owned by the Czech company EPH – and SSE have put forward large gas power proposals, too. So far, just one new gas plant – far smaller than those now proposed – has been built since 2013.

Genuinely low-carbon

Now, however, energy companies are pushing for high subsidies for gas and the caveats contained in the coal-phaseout announcement may just give them enough leverage to obtain those. 

The UK’s coal phaseout thus serves as a case study for the importance of holistic energy campaigning: while we need to celebrate successes against one form of dirty energy, campaigners must be vigilant about false solutions pushed to replace it.

A meaningful response to the climate crisis does not just require an end to coal but a rapid transition towards genuinely low-carbon renewable energy that does not involve burning carbon, coupled with a shift towards much lower energy use. 

This Author

Almuth Ernsting helped to found Biofuelwatch in 2006 and has been researching and campaigning on a broad range of issues related to the impacts of different forms of bioenergy since then, including biofuels for transport and wood-bsased bioenergy. She lives in Edinburgh.

Theresa May’s government finally confirmed its intention to end coal burning in power station in 2025 this January. This coal phaseout is long-overdue.

But the decision contains three dangerous loopholes: firstly, the government does not seek to end coal mining in the UK; secondly, it would allow plants to continue burning coal if large amounts of wood are cofired despite science showing that this is far from climate friendly and thirdly, the government is determined to compensate for the end of coal burning with a significant expansion in gas power station capacity.

Read our news story about the huge global slump in construction of new coal plants.

Amber Rudd, the then secretary of state for energy and climate change,  announced “proposals to close coal by 2025 – and restrict its use from 2023” on the eve of the 2015 UN Climate Conference in Paris.

Electricity bill

What the Government committed to at that time was nothing more than holding a consultation. Worryingly, the emphasis was firmly on replacing coal with gas.

Still, it was the first time that a government anywhere had announced plans to end coal burning in power stations – though it is worth remembering that only 78 out of 195 countries in the world were burning coal for electricity in 2014, and that several countries, from Zambia to Switzerland, had ended coal power before then.

It took the government until January this year to publish its actual decision. By then it had been overtaken by several other European countries, with the French president having announced an end to coal burning in power stations as early as 2021 or 2022.

Meantime, UK coal electricity continued its steep decline: between 2011 and 2016, coal electricity fell by 72 percent, thanks largely to a trebling of electricity generation from wind and solar power and a reduction in electricity use due to greater efficiency.

Although the Government’s full 2017 energy statistics are yet to be published, coal burning clearly declined further last year. Perversely, coal power stations are being kept open artificially until 2025 – with the help of subsidies – funded through a surcharge on everybody’s electricity bill. 

The very fact that the Government has confirmed its intention to end coal burning for electricity in 2025 is a great success, thanks to years of persistent campaigning by climate activists and environmental NGOs.

Burning coal

After all, this is a Government which has axed almost all new onshore wind and solar subsidies, cut support for energy efficiency by 58 percent since 2012, handed North Sea oil companies £1.2 billion in tax rebates in 2017/18 alone, and is endeavouring to open up large swathes of the country to fracking. 

Yet – while acknowledging an important milestone for climate campaigners – a critical assessment of what exactly has been decided is vital: Sadly, the coal phaseout announcement itself comes with several dangerous loopholes.

Firstly, the phaseout does not extend to mining coal. In Pont Valley, County Durham, Banks Group is set to open up a new opencast coal mine. Campaigners recently occupied the site.

The same company is trying to get planning permission for another such mine in Druridge Bay, Northumberland. The first new deep coal mine in three decades is proposed in Cumbria. Operations at existing opencast coal mines – the biggest of them at Ffos-y-Fran near Merthyr Tydfil – are continuing with no end in sight. 

Secondly, instead of mandating the closure of all coal power stations, the government wants to only close those coal-burning units whose CO2 emissions exceed 450 kg/MWh – which is less than half what burning coal for electricity emits.

Worst impacts

This matters because it allows energy companies to continue burning coal indefinitely provided they co-fire it with large amounts of wood – wrongly considered carbon neutral under flawed carbon accounting mechanisms. 

The UK is the world’s biggest importer of wood pellets, most of which come from the southern US, where carbon-rich forest ecosystems inside a global biodiversity hotspot are being clearcut, increasingly to make pellets which are then shipped across the Atlantic.

More than 800 scientists recently signed a letter which warns: “Even if forests are allowed to regrow, using wood deliberately harvested for burning will increase carbon in the atmosphere and warming for decades to centuries – as many studies have shown – even when wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas. The reasons are fundamental and occur regardless of whether forest management is ‘sustainable’.”

Yet the UK government – like others – continues to ignore the science. Cutting down trees and whole forests and burning the wood in power stations is classified as ‘low-carbon’, even though scientists have pointed out time and time again that it is commonly no better for the climate than burning coal, when considered over a generation or longer.

Climate science shows that we need to steeply reduce CO2 emissions now if we are to have any hope of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

Coal phaseout

So far, Drax power station has converted three of its six units to biomass and is about to convert a fourth one, albeit only to operate at a low capacity. EPH is converting the previously mothballed Lynemouth power station to biomass. Those conversions depend on previously guaranteed ‘renewable electricity’ subsidies. Again, this is paid out of a surcharge on our electricity bills). This is £1.5 million per day in the case of Drax. 

Whether or not the ‘biomass loophole’ in the coal phaseout will lead to more biomass being burned in the UK depends on future subsidies decisions.

Regardless of what happens in the UK, this loophole sends a dangerous message to governments around the world, especially those that signed up to the Powering Past Coal Alliance launched by the UK and Canada at the Bonn Climate Summit in 2017, which commits signatories to work towards a coal phaseout.

Worryingly, nine of the countries which signed up to that Alliance also committed themselves to greatly increasing biomass burning in a misguided Vision Statement called “Scaling-up the low carbon bioeconomy” – the UK being one of them.

The third problem is that the government is still making a coal phaseout contingent on new gas power stations being built.

Hands of frackers

The government’s expressed optimism about “energy security” being guaranteed should not distract from the fact that a get-out clause is proposed which would allow a coal phaseout to be suspended if not ‘enough’ new gas capacity is built.

The government has scaled back its “ambitions” for new gas power capacity from 26 GW envisioned by George Osborne in 2012 – to 5.5 GW now foreseen.

But any new gas power stations are incompatible with the aim of keeping global warming to within 1.5oC, set out in the Paris Agreement.

Furthermore, the hype around such a new gas demand will play into the hands of frackers. Drax is in the process of applying for planning permission to replace its two remaining coal units with what would be the UK’s largest gas power station by far.

RWE, Eggborouh Power Ltd – owned by the Czech company EPH – and SSE have put forward large gas power proposals, too. So far, just one new gas plant – far smaller than those now proposed – has been built since 2013.

Genuinely low-carbon

Now, however, energy companies are pushing for high subsidies for gas and the caveats contained in the coal-phaseout announcement may just give them enough leverage to obtain those. 

The UK’s coal phaseout thus serves as a case study for the importance of holistic energy campaigning: while we need to celebrate successes against one form of dirty energy, campaigners must be vigilant about false solutions pushed to replace it.

A meaningful response to the climate crisis does not just require an end to coal but a rapid transition towards genuinely low-carbon renewable energy that does not involve burning carbon, coupled with a shift towards much lower energy use. 

This Author

Almuth Ernsting helped to found Biofuelwatch in 2006 and has been researching and campaigning on a broad range of issues related to the impacts of different forms of bioenergy since then, including biofuels for transport and wood-bsased bioenergy. She lives in Edinburgh.

Theresa May’s government finally confirmed its intention to end coal burning in power station in 2025 this January. This coal phaseout is long-overdue.

But the decision contains three dangerous loopholes: firstly, the government does not seek to end coal mining in the UK; secondly, it would allow plants to continue burning coal if large amounts of wood are cofired despite science showing that this is far from climate friendly and thirdly, the government is determined to compensate for the end of coal burning with a significant expansion in gas power station capacity.

Read our news story about the huge global slump in construction of new coal plants.

Amber Rudd, the then secretary of state for energy and climate change,  announced “proposals to close coal by 2025 – and restrict its use from 2023” on the eve of the 2015 UN Climate Conference in Paris.

Electricity bill

What the Government committed to at that time was nothing more than holding a consultation. Worryingly, the emphasis was firmly on replacing coal with gas.

Still, it was the first time that a government anywhere had announced plans to end coal burning in power stations – though it is worth remembering that only 78 out of 195 countries in the world were burning coal for electricity in 2014, and that several countries, from Zambia to Switzerland, had ended coal power before then.

It took the government until January this year to publish its actual decision. By then it had been overtaken by several other European countries, with the French president having announced an end to coal burning in power stations as early as 2021 or 2022.

Meantime, UK coal electricity continued its steep decline: between 2011 and 2016, coal electricity fell by 72 percent, thanks largely to a trebling of electricity generation from wind and solar power and a reduction in electricity use due to greater efficiency.

Although the Government’s full 2017 energy statistics are yet to be published, coal burning clearly declined further last year. Perversely, coal power stations are being kept open artificially until 2025 – with the help of subsidies – funded through a surcharge on everybody’s electricity bill. 

The very fact that the Government has confirmed its intention to end coal burning for electricity in 2025 is a great success, thanks to years of persistent campaigning by climate activists and environmental NGOs.

Burning coal

After all, this is a Government which has axed almost all new onshore wind and solar subsidies, cut support for energy efficiency by 58 percent since 2012, handed North Sea oil companies £1.2 billion in tax rebates in 2017/18 alone, and is endeavouring to open up large swathes of the country to fracking. 

Yet – while acknowledging an important milestone for climate campaigners – a critical assessment of what exactly has been decided is vital: Sadly, the coal phaseout announcement itself comes with several dangerous loopholes.

Firstly, the phaseout does not extend to mining coal. In Pont Valley, County Durham, Banks Group is set to open up a new opencast coal mine. Campaigners recently occupied the site.

The same company is trying to get planning permission for another such mine in Druridge Bay, Northumberland. The first new deep coal mine in three decades is proposed in Cumbria. Operations at existing opencast coal mines – the biggest of them at Ffos-y-Fran near Merthyr Tydfil – are continuing with no end in sight. 

Secondly, instead of mandating the closure of all coal power stations, the government wants to only close those coal-burning units whose CO2 emissions exceed 450 kg/MWh – which is less than half what burning coal for electricity emits.

Worst impacts

This matters because it allows energy companies to continue burning coal indefinitely provided they co-fire it with large amounts of wood – wrongly considered carbon neutral under flawed carbon accounting mechanisms. 

The UK is the world’s biggest importer of wood pellets, most of which come from the southern US, where carbon-rich forest ecosystems inside a global biodiversity hotspot are being clearcut, increasingly to make pellets which are then shipped across the Atlantic.

More than 800 scientists recently signed a letter which warns: “Even if forests are allowed to regrow, using wood deliberately harvested for burning will increase carbon in the atmosphere and warming for decades to centuries – as many studies have shown – even when wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas. The reasons are fundamental and occur regardless of whether forest management is ‘sustainable’.”

Yet the UK government – like others – continues to ignore the science. Cutting down trees and whole forests and burning the wood in power stations is classified as ‘low-carbon’, even though scientists have pointed out time and time again that it is commonly no better for the climate than burning coal, when considered over a generation or longer.

Climate science shows that we need to steeply reduce CO2 emissions now if we are to have any hope of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

Coal phaseout

So far, Drax power station has converted three of its six units to biomass and is about to convert a fourth one, albeit only to operate at a low capacity. EPH is converting the previously mothballed Lynemouth power station to biomass. Those conversions depend on previously guaranteed ‘renewable electricity’ subsidies. Again, this is paid out of a surcharge on our electricity bills). This is £1.5 million per day in the case of Drax. 

Whether or not the ‘biomass loophole’ in the coal phaseout will lead to more biomass being burned in the UK depends on future subsidies decisions.

Regardless of what happens in the UK, this loophole sends a dangerous message to governments around the world, especially those that signed up to the Powering Past Coal Alliance launched by the UK and Canada at the Bonn Climate Summit in 2017, which commits signatories to work towards a coal phaseout.

Worryingly, nine of the countries which signed up to that Alliance also committed themselves to greatly increasing biomass burning in a misguided Vision Statement called “Scaling-up the low carbon bioeconomy” – the UK being one of them.

The third problem is that the government is still making a coal phaseout contingent on new gas power stations being built.

Hands of frackers

The government’s expressed optimism about “energy security” being guaranteed should not distract from the fact that a get-out clause is proposed which would allow a coal phaseout to be suspended if not ‘enough’ new gas capacity is built.

The government has scaled back its “ambitions” for new gas power capacity from 26 GW envisioned by George Osborne in 2012 – to 5.5 GW now foreseen.

But any new gas power stations are incompatible with the aim of keeping global warming to within 1.5oC, set out in the Paris Agreement.

Furthermore, the hype around such a new gas demand will play into the hands of frackers. Drax is in the process of applying for planning permission to replace its two remaining coal units with what would be the UK’s largest gas power station by far.

RWE, Eggborouh Power Ltd – owned by the Czech company EPH – and SSE have put forward large gas power proposals, too. So far, just one new gas plant – far smaller than those now proposed – has been built since 2013.

Genuinely low-carbon

Now, however, energy companies are pushing for high subsidies for gas and the caveats contained in the coal-phaseout announcement may just give them enough leverage to obtain those. 

The UK’s coal phaseout thus serves as a case study for the importance of holistic energy campaigning: while we need to celebrate successes against one form of dirty energy, campaigners must be vigilant about false solutions pushed to replace it.

A meaningful response to the climate crisis does not just require an end to coal but a rapid transition towards genuinely low-carbon renewable energy that does not involve burning carbon, coupled with a shift towards much lower energy use. 

This Author

Almuth Ernsting helped to found Biofuelwatch in 2006 and has been researching and campaigning on a broad range of issues related to the impacts of different forms of bioenergy since then, including biofuels for transport and wood-bsased bioenergy. She lives in Edinburgh.

Theresa May’s government finally confirmed its intention to end coal burning in power station in 2025 this January. This coal phaseout is long-overdue.

But the decision contains three dangerous loopholes: firstly, the government does not seek to end coal mining in the UK; secondly, it would allow plants to continue burning coal if large amounts of wood are cofired despite science showing that this is far from climate friendly and thirdly, the government is determined to compensate for the end of coal burning with a significant expansion in gas power station capacity.

Read our news story about the huge global slump in construction of new coal plants.

Amber Rudd, the then secretary of state for energy and climate change,  announced “proposals to close coal by 2025 – and restrict its use from 2023” on the eve of the 2015 UN Climate Conference in Paris.

Electricity bill

What the Government committed to at that time was nothing more than holding a consultation. Worryingly, the emphasis was firmly on replacing coal with gas.

Still, it was the first time that a government anywhere had announced plans to end coal burning in power stations – though it is worth remembering that only 78 out of 195 countries in the world were burning coal for electricity in 2014, and that several countries, from Zambia to Switzerland, had ended coal power before then.

It took the government until January this year to publish its actual decision. By then it had been overtaken by several other European countries, with the French president having announced an end to coal burning in power stations as early as 2021 or 2022.

Meantime, UK coal electricity continued its steep decline: between 2011 and 2016, coal electricity fell by 72 percent, thanks largely to a trebling of electricity generation from wind and solar power and a reduction in electricity use due to greater efficiency.

Although the Government’s full 2017 energy statistics are yet to be published, coal burning clearly declined further last year. Perversely, coal power stations are being kept open artificially until 2025 – with the help of subsidies – funded through a surcharge on everybody’s electricity bill. 

The very fact that the Government has confirmed its intention to end coal burning for electricity in 2025 is a great success, thanks to years of persistent campaigning by climate activists and environmental NGOs.

Burning coal

After all, this is a Government which has axed almost all new onshore wind and solar subsidies, cut support for energy efficiency by 58 percent since 2012, handed North Sea oil companies £1.2 billion in tax rebates in 2017/18 alone, and is endeavouring to open up large swathes of the country to fracking. 

Yet – while acknowledging an important milestone for climate campaigners – a critical assessment of what exactly has been decided is vital: Sadly, the coal phaseout announcement itself comes with several dangerous loopholes.

Firstly, the phaseout does not extend to mining coal. In Pont Valley, County Durham, Banks Group is set to open up a new opencast coal mine. Campaigners recently occupied the site.

The same company is trying to get planning permission for another such mine in Druridge Bay, Northumberland. The first new deep coal mine in three decades is proposed in Cumbria. Operations at existing opencast coal mines – the biggest of them at Ffos-y-Fran near Merthyr Tydfil – are continuing with no end in sight. 

Secondly, instead of mandating the closure of all coal power stations, the government wants to only close those coal-burning units whose CO2 emissions exceed 450 kg/MWh – which is less than half what burning coal for electricity emits.

Worst impacts

This matters because it allows energy companies to continue burning coal indefinitely provided they co-fire it with large amounts of wood – wrongly considered carbon neutral under flawed carbon accounting mechanisms. 

The UK is the world’s biggest importer of wood pellets, most of which come from the southern US, where carbon-rich forest ecosystems inside a global biodiversity hotspot are being clearcut, increasingly to make pellets which are then shipped across the Atlantic.

More than 800 scientists recently signed a letter which warns: “Even if forests are allowed to regrow, using wood deliberately harvested for burning will increase carbon in the atmosphere and warming for decades to centuries – as many studies have shown – even when wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas. The reasons are fundamental and occur regardless of whether forest management is ‘sustainable’.”

Yet the UK government – like others – continues to ignore the science. Cutting down trees and whole forests and burning the wood in power stations is classified as ‘low-carbon’, even though scientists have pointed out time and time again that it is commonly no better for the climate than burning coal, when considered over a generation or longer.

Climate science shows that we need to steeply reduce CO2 emissions now if we are to have any hope of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

Coal phaseout

So far, Drax power station has converted three of its six units to biomass and is about to convert a fourth one, albeit only to operate at a low capacity. EPH is converting the previously mothballed Lynemouth power station to biomass. Those conversions depend on previously guaranteed ‘renewable electricity’ subsidies. Again, this is paid out of a surcharge on our electricity bills). This is £1.5 million per day in the case of Drax. 

Whether or not the ‘biomass loophole’ in the coal phaseout will lead to more biomass being burned in the UK depends on future subsidies decisions.

Regardless of what happens in the UK, this loophole sends a dangerous message to governments around the world, especially those that signed up to the Powering Past Coal Alliance launched by the UK and Canada at the Bonn Climate Summit in 2017, which commits signatories to work towards a coal phaseout.

Worryingly, nine of the countries which signed up to that Alliance also committed themselves to greatly increasing biomass burning in a misguided Vision Statement called “Scaling-up the low carbon bioeconomy” – the UK being one of them.

The third problem is that the government is still making a coal phaseout contingent on new gas power stations being built.

Hands of frackers

The government’s expressed optimism about “energy security” being guaranteed should not distract from the fact that a get-out clause is proposed which would allow a coal phaseout to be suspended if not ‘enough’ new gas capacity is built.

The government has scaled back its “ambitions” for new gas power capacity from 26 GW envisioned by George Osborne in 2012 – to 5.5 GW now foreseen.

But any new gas power stations are incompatible with the aim of keeping global warming to within 1.5oC, set out in the Paris Agreement.

Furthermore, the hype around such a new gas demand will play into the hands of frackers. Drax is in the process of applying for planning permission to replace its two remaining coal units with what would be the UK’s largest gas power station by far.

RWE, Eggborouh Power Ltd – owned by the Czech company EPH – and SSE have put forward large gas power proposals, too. So far, just one new gas plant – far smaller than those now proposed – has been built since 2013.

Genuinely low-carbon

Now, however, energy companies are pushing for high subsidies for gas and the caveats contained in the coal-phaseout announcement may just give them enough leverage to obtain those. 

The UK’s coal phaseout thus serves as a case study for the importance of holistic energy campaigning: while we need to celebrate successes against one form of dirty energy, campaigners must be vigilant about false solutions pushed to replace it.

A meaningful response to the climate crisis does not just require an end to coal but a rapid transition towards genuinely low-carbon renewable energy that does not involve burning carbon, coupled with a shift towards much lower energy use. 

This Author

Almuth Ernsting helped to found Biofuelwatch in 2006 and has been researching and campaigning on a broad range of issues related to the impacts of different forms of bioenergy since then, including biofuels for transport and wood-bsased bioenergy. She lives in Edinburgh.