The progress of the Trade Bill through Parliament is due to resume after a lengthy pause. An amendment tabled by Anna Soubry and Ken Clarke, two rebel Tory MPs, has been blocking the way.

Theresa May, the Prime Minister, and Liam Fox, the secretary of state for International Trade, are now confident they can beat the amendment, which calls for the UK to remain in a customs union with the EU after Brexit.

The bill as a whole is aimed at transposing EU trade deals into UK law, and is providing multiple headaches for the besieged Mr Fox. Some of the countries in trade deals with the EU aren’t too happy at seeing the same deal seamlessly flipped into UK law.

Big business

Fox is viewing these moves as simply a matter for the UK to decide, seemingly forgetting that a trade deal involves two countries’ governments. South Korea and Chile have both raised objections and expressed a desire to renegotiate terms with the UK.

Opposition MPs and campaigners see the Trade Bill as a chance of achieving a long desired aim – democratising the process by which trade deals are agreed.

A trade deal is an international treaty, is barely subject to any democratic process: the decision to start negotiating with any one country, and the basis of any agreement, is entirely a decision for the department for International Trade.

We want our elected representatives to have more of a say – given the huge influence of trade deals and their impact on so much more than simple border checks and tariff rates.

The negotiators are appointed by the secretary of state and work to a mandate set by the secretary of state. MPs have little or no influence. Lobbyists from big business, however, do seem to have the ear of the minister. 

Useless system

During negotiations, MPs and the public are kept completely in the dark. The deal is ‘laid before Parliament’ only once negotiators have agreed a final text.

The Government has 21 sitting days after it was laid to ratify the text. If the House of Commons agrees a resolution against ratification in those 21 days, then the government must explain why it wishes to ratify and gets a second chance to lay the deal before Parliament.

Indeed, this process can be repeated as often as the government wishes to pursue ratification of a deal. Parliament would have to have a monthly vote against any trade deal – indefinitely – to stop it from being implemented.

There is no record of a negative resolution ever being tabled in the House of Commons – let alone one being successful.

One might think that this bizarre and useless system dates back to the very beginning of parliament – but in fact it was introduced with the Constitutional Reform and Governments Act 2010, under Gordon Brown’s Labour government.

Democratise trade

In fact, UK representatives have more influence over trade deals while we are fully a part of the European Union. – at least now our 73 MEPs have a vote on ratifying trade deals.

The latest trade deal to get the nod from the European Parliament – the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) – is a mega deal between the EU and Canada. It is doing the rounds getting national ratifications at present.

Lithuania and Finland have both debated and voted through the deal in the last few months.

The UK parliament is set to have a debate on CETA this Tuesday. This is a break with convention. It is a response to calls for trade democracy. But it is still only as a gesture, and does not set a precedent. 

The vote is likely to be an easy win for CETA and Fox. 

Take back control

The politics of Brexit will dominate proceedings: Remainers want to keep the UK as close to the programme of the EU as possible, Brexiters want to secure any and every chance of promoting the free trade dogma so many of them are so fond of.

But we need legislation in place to properly democratise trade deals into the future. The hope in this story revolves around an amendment, NC3, which has been tabled by Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, and others.

This motion demands a basic democratic role for MPs. It calls for a consultation with stakeholders before a mandate is drafted for negotiators. MPs would be given the right to feed into the mandate. Parliament would then have the right to vote down any trade deal if it is deemed to be unsatisfactory. It also provides for openness and transparency during negotiations.

You’d be hard pressed to find a milder and more reasonable set of demands.

I refuse to join the ranks of those who claim to know exactly what people were voting for in the referendum on June 2016. But I’m pretty sure I’m right when I say people didn’t want to take back control in order to gift it all to Mr Fox.

Genetically engineered

The stakes are high. Fox is insistent that a trade deal with the US is a panacea for many ills. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Donald Trump has had a 500 page document composed outlining many of the trade barriers US industry would like to see removed in any future deals that the US makes. And 48 pages are dedicated to the relationship with the EU. Food safety standards come in for a lot of attention. 

The US wants changes to pesticide maximum residue limits. It claims EU rules on this are commercially unviable.

The EU currently has a maximum residue level on diphenylamine of 0.01 ppm on apples and has removed authorisation for its use. The US wants the EU to accept a level 100 times greater in order that it may export apples to Europe.

The US wants to end the right of EU member states to ban genetically engineered plants, including the ban on cultivating biotechnology seed in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

Nutrition labelling

The US questions EU certification of Animal Welfare on official sanitary certificates, claiming such measures do not advance food safety or animal health objectives.

Recently Trump has also proclaimed a desire to charge more for pharmaceuticals in the UK and EU markets.

With big state backed purchasers of drugs, European countries have the clout to demand lower prices – not low enough, but lower than otherwise. In the US, privately owned smaller health care providers are more at mercy of the huge pharmaceutical corporations.

Trump wants to see more parity between buyers in that market, which will almost certainly see price hikes for the NHS.

Also in the document are questions over government subsidies for Airbus, EU restrictions on the transfer of personal data of its citizens outside the EU, the Fuel Quality Directive (which requires fossil fuel suppliers to reduce the lifecycle greenhouse gas intensity of transport fuel by six percent by 2020 and to report on the carbon intensity of these fuels) Country of Origin Labelling, and health and nutrition labelling.

Trading relations

All these, the US concludes, impede the flow of goods across the Atlantic in our direction. 

There’s more. It’s a huge document. But you get the picture. Fox flew out to Washington to negotiate away the steel tariffs that Trump inflicted on US imports a few weeks previously. He came back empty handed.

Boris Johnson went to Washington to try to save the Iran nuclear deal, with similar edifying results.

Anyone thinking this or future governments can break the ‘America First’ mantra of Trump is impressively naïve. We need the checks and balances of MPs scrutiny and votes.

Otherwise we face a situation of Fox and co playing about with future trading relations that will be set in place for years in not decades to come. And Fox is not fantastic. 

We have just a few short weeks to campaign for the strongest support for the progressive amendment, NC3. Global Justice Now is providing a platform for such a campaign. Please check it out.

This Author

Guy Taylor is a trade campaigner for Global Justice Now.

The progress of the Trade Bill through Parliament is due to resume after a lengthy pause. An amendment tabled by Anna Soubry and Ken Clarke, two rebel Tory MPs, has been blocking the way.

Theresa May, the Prime Minister, and Liam Fox, the secretary of state for International Trade, are now confident they can beat the amendment, which calls for the UK to remain in a customs union with the EU after Brexit.

The bill as a whole is aimed at transposing EU trade deals into UK law, and is providing multiple headaches for the besieged Mr Fox. Some of the countries in trade deals with the EU aren’t too happy at seeing the same deal seamlessly flipped into UK law.

Big business

Fox is viewing these moves as simply a matter for the UK to decide, seemingly forgetting that a trade deal involves two countries’ governments. South Korea and Chile have both raised objections and expressed a desire to renegotiate terms with the UK.

Opposition MPs and campaigners see the Trade Bill as a chance of achieving a long desired aim – democratising the process by which trade deals are agreed.

A trade deal is an international treaty, is barely subject to any democratic process: the decision to start negotiating with any one country, and the basis of any agreement, is entirely a decision for the department for International Trade.

We want our elected representatives to have more of a say – given the huge influence of trade deals and their impact on so much more than simple border checks and tariff rates.

The negotiators are appointed by the secretary of state and work to a mandate set by the secretary of state. MPs have little or no influence. Lobbyists from big business, however, do seem to have the ear of the minister. 

Useless system

During negotiations, MPs and the public are kept completely in the dark. The deal is ‘laid before Parliament’ only once negotiators have agreed a final text.

The Government has 21 sitting days after it was laid to ratify the text. If the House of Commons agrees a resolution against ratification in those 21 days, then the government must explain why it wishes to ratify and gets a second chance to lay the deal before Parliament.

Indeed, this process can be repeated as often as the government wishes to pursue ratification of a deal. Parliament would have to have a monthly vote against any trade deal – indefinitely – to stop it from being implemented.

There is no record of a negative resolution ever being tabled in the House of Commons – let alone one being successful.

One might think that this bizarre and useless system dates back to the very beginning of parliament – but in fact it was introduced with the Constitutional Reform and Governments Act 2010, under Gordon Brown’s Labour government.

Democratise trade

In fact, UK representatives have more influence over trade deals while we are fully a part of the European Union. – at least now our 73 MEPs have a vote on ratifying trade deals.

The latest trade deal to get the nod from the European Parliament – the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) – is a mega deal between the EU and Canada. It is doing the rounds getting national ratifications at present.

Lithuania and Finland have both debated and voted through the deal in the last few months.

The UK parliament is set to have a debate on CETA this Tuesday. This is a break with convention. It is a response to calls for trade democracy. But it is still only as a gesture, and does not set a precedent. 

The vote is likely to be an easy win for CETA and Fox. 

Take back control

The politics of Brexit will dominate proceedings: Remainers want to keep the UK as close to the programme of the EU as possible, Brexiters want to secure any and every chance of promoting the free trade dogma so many of them are so fond of.

But we need legislation in place to properly democratise trade deals into the future. The hope in this story revolves around an amendment, NC3, which has been tabled by Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, and others.

This motion demands a basic democratic role for MPs. It calls for a consultation with stakeholders before a mandate is drafted for negotiators. MPs would be given the right to feed into the mandate. Parliament would then have the right to vote down any trade deal if it is deemed to be unsatisfactory. It also provides for openness and transparency during negotiations.

You’d be hard pressed to find a milder and more reasonable set of demands.

I refuse to join the ranks of those who claim to know exactly what people were voting for in the referendum on June 2016. But I’m pretty sure I’m right when I say people didn’t want to take back control in order to gift it all to Mr Fox.

Genetically engineered

The stakes are high. Fox is insistent that a trade deal with the US is a panacea for many ills. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Donald Trump has had a 500 page document composed outlining many of the trade barriers US industry would like to see removed in any future deals that the US makes. And 48 pages are dedicated to the relationship with the EU. Food safety standards come in for a lot of attention. 

The US wants changes to pesticide maximum residue limits. It claims EU rules on this are commercially unviable.

The EU currently has a maximum residue level on diphenylamine of 0.01 ppm on apples and has removed authorisation for its use. The US wants the EU to accept a level 100 times greater in order that it may export apples to Europe.

The US wants to end the right of EU member states to ban genetically engineered plants, including the ban on cultivating biotechnology seed in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

Nutrition labelling

The US questions EU certification of Animal Welfare on official sanitary certificates, claiming such measures do not advance food safety or animal health objectives.

Recently Trump has also proclaimed a desire to charge more for pharmaceuticals in the UK and EU markets.

With big state backed purchasers of drugs, European countries have the clout to demand lower prices – not low enough, but lower than otherwise. In the US, privately owned smaller health care providers are more at mercy of the huge pharmaceutical corporations.

Trump wants to see more parity between buyers in that market, which will almost certainly see price hikes for the NHS.

Also in the document are questions over government subsidies for Airbus, EU restrictions on the transfer of personal data of its citizens outside the EU, the Fuel Quality Directive (which requires fossil fuel suppliers to reduce the lifecycle greenhouse gas intensity of transport fuel by six percent by 2020 and to report on the carbon intensity of these fuels) Country of Origin Labelling, and health and nutrition labelling.

Trading relations

All these, the US concludes, impede the flow of goods across the Atlantic in our direction. 

There’s more. It’s a huge document. But you get the picture. Fox flew out to Washington to negotiate away the steel tariffs that Trump inflicted on US imports a few weeks previously. He came back empty handed.

Boris Johnson went to Washington to try to save the Iran nuclear deal, with similar edifying results.

Anyone thinking this or future governments can break the ‘America First’ mantra of Trump is impressively naïve. We need the checks and balances of MPs scrutiny and votes.

Otherwise we face a situation of Fox and co playing about with future trading relations that will be set in place for years in not decades to come. And Fox is not fantastic. 

We have just a few short weeks to campaign for the strongest support for the progressive amendment, NC3. Global Justice Now is providing a platform for such a campaign. Please check it out.

This Author

Guy Taylor is a trade campaigner for Global Justice Now.

The progress of the Trade Bill through Parliament is due to resume after a lengthy pause. An amendment tabled by Anna Soubry and Ken Clarke, two rebel Tory MPs, has been blocking the way.

Theresa May, the Prime Minister, and Liam Fox, the secretary of state for International Trade, are now confident they can beat the amendment, which calls for the UK to remain in a customs union with the EU after Brexit.

The bill as a whole is aimed at transposing EU trade deals into UK law, and is providing multiple headaches for the besieged Mr Fox. Some of the countries in trade deals with the EU aren’t too happy at seeing the same deal seamlessly flipped into UK law.

Big business

Fox is viewing these moves as simply a matter for the UK to decide, seemingly forgetting that a trade deal involves two countries’ governments. South Korea and Chile have both raised objections and expressed a desire to renegotiate terms with the UK.

Opposition MPs and campaigners see the Trade Bill as a chance of achieving a long desired aim – democratising the process by which trade deals are agreed.

A trade deal is an international treaty, is barely subject to any democratic process: the decision to start negotiating with any one country, and the basis of any agreement, is entirely a decision for the department for International Trade.

We want our elected representatives to have more of a say – given the huge influence of trade deals and their impact on so much more than simple border checks and tariff rates.

The negotiators are appointed by the secretary of state and work to a mandate set by the secretary of state. MPs have little or no influence. Lobbyists from big business, however, do seem to have the ear of the minister. 

Useless system

During negotiations, MPs and the public are kept completely in the dark. The deal is ‘laid before Parliament’ only once negotiators have agreed a final text.

The Government has 21 sitting days after it was laid to ratify the text. If the House of Commons agrees a resolution against ratification in those 21 days, then the government must explain why it wishes to ratify and gets a second chance to lay the deal before Parliament.

Indeed, this process can be repeated as often as the government wishes to pursue ratification of a deal. Parliament would have to have a monthly vote against any trade deal – indefinitely – to stop it from being implemented.

There is no record of a negative resolution ever being tabled in the House of Commons – let alone one being successful.

One might think that this bizarre and useless system dates back to the very beginning of parliament – but in fact it was introduced with the Constitutional Reform and Governments Act 2010, under Gordon Brown’s Labour government.

Democratise trade

In fact, UK representatives have more influence over trade deals while we are fully a part of the European Union. – at least now our 73 MEPs have a vote on ratifying trade deals.

The latest trade deal to get the nod from the European Parliament – the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) – is a mega deal between the EU and Canada. It is doing the rounds getting national ratifications at present.

Lithuania and Finland have both debated and voted through the deal in the last few months.

The UK parliament is set to have a debate on CETA this Tuesday. This is a break with convention. It is a response to calls for trade democracy. But it is still only as a gesture, and does not set a precedent. 

The vote is likely to be an easy win for CETA and Fox. 

Take back control

The politics of Brexit will dominate proceedings: Remainers want to keep the UK as close to the programme of the EU as possible, Brexiters want to secure any and every chance of promoting the free trade dogma so many of them are so fond of.

But we need legislation in place to properly democratise trade deals into the future. The hope in this story revolves around an amendment, NC3, which has been tabled by Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, and others.

This motion demands a basic democratic role for MPs. It calls for a consultation with stakeholders before a mandate is drafted for negotiators. MPs would be given the right to feed into the mandate. Parliament would then have the right to vote down any trade deal if it is deemed to be unsatisfactory. It also provides for openness and transparency during negotiations.

You’d be hard pressed to find a milder and more reasonable set of demands.

I refuse to join the ranks of those who claim to know exactly what people were voting for in the referendum on June 2016. But I’m pretty sure I’m right when I say people didn’t want to take back control in order to gift it all to Mr Fox.

Genetically engineered

The stakes are high. Fox is insistent that a trade deal with the US is a panacea for many ills. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Donald Trump has had a 500 page document composed outlining many of the trade barriers US industry would like to see removed in any future deals that the US makes. And 48 pages are dedicated to the relationship with the EU. Food safety standards come in for a lot of attention. 

The US wants changes to pesticide maximum residue limits. It claims EU rules on this are commercially unviable.

The EU currently has a maximum residue level on diphenylamine of 0.01 ppm on apples and has removed authorisation for its use. The US wants the EU to accept a level 100 times greater in order that it may export apples to Europe.

The US wants to end the right of EU member states to ban genetically engineered plants, including the ban on cultivating biotechnology seed in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

Nutrition labelling

The US questions EU certification of Animal Welfare on official sanitary certificates, claiming such measures do not advance food safety or animal health objectives.

Recently Trump has also proclaimed a desire to charge more for pharmaceuticals in the UK and EU markets.

With big state backed purchasers of drugs, European countries have the clout to demand lower prices – not low enough, but lower than otherwise. In the US, privately owned smaller health care providers are more at mercy of the huge pharmaceutical corporations.

Trump wants to see more parity between buyers in that market, which will almost certainly see price hikes for the NHS.

Also in the document are questions over government subsidies for Airbus, EU restrictions on the transfer of personal data of its citizens outside the EU, the Fuel Quality Directive (which requires fossil fuel suppliers to reduce the lifecycle greenhouse gas intensity of transport fuel by six percent by 2020 and to report on the carbon intensity of these fuels) Country of Origin Labelling, and health and nutrition labelling.

Trading relations

All these, the US concludes, impede the flow of goods across the Atlantic in our direction. 

There’s more. It’s a huge document. But you get the picture. Fox flew out to Washington to negotiate away the steel tariffs that Trump inflicted on US imports a few weeks previously. He came back empty handed.

Boris Johnson went to Washington to try to save the Iran nuclear deal, with similar edifying results.

Anyone thinking this or future governments can break the ‘America First’ mantra of Trump is impressively naïve. We need the checks and balances of MPs scrutiny and votes.

Otherwise we face a situation of Fox and co playing about with future trading relations that will be set in place for years in not decades to come. And Fox is not fantastic. 

We have just a few short weeks to campaign for the strongest support for the progressive amendment, NC3. Global Justice Now is providing a platform for such a campaign. Please check it out.

This Author

Guy Taylor is a trade campaigner for Global Justice Now.

The progress of the Trade Bill through Parliament is due to resume after a lengthy pause. An amendment tabled by Anna Soubry and Ken Clarke, two rebel Tory MPs, has been blocking the way.

Theresa May, the Prime Minister, and Liam Fox, the secretary of state for International Trade, are now confident they can beat the amendment, which calls for the UK to remain in a customs union with the EU after Brexit.

The bill as a whole is aimed at transposing EU trade deals into UK law, and is providing multiple headaches for the besieged Mr Fox. Some of the countries in trade deals with the EU aren’t too happy at seeing the same deal seamlessly flipped into UK law.

Big business

Fox is viewing these moves as simply a matter for the UK to decide, seemingly forgetting that a trade deal involves two countries’ governments. South Korea and Chile have both raised objections and expressed a desire to renegotiate terms with the UK.

Opposition MPs and campaigners see the Trade Bill as a chance of achieving a long desired aim – democratising the process by which trade deals are agreed.

A trade deal is an international treaty, is barely subject to any democratic process: the decision to start negotiating with any one country, and the basis of any agreement, is entirely a decision for the department for International Trade.

We want our elected representatives to have more of a say – given the huge influence of trade deals and their impact on so much more than simple border checks and tariff rates.

The negotiators are appointed by the secretary of state and work to a mandate set by the secretary of state. MPs have little or no influence. Lobbyists from big business, however, do seem to have the ear of the minister. 

Useless system

During negotiations, MPs and the public are kept completely in the dark. The deal is ‘laid before Parliament’ only once negotiators have agreed a final text.

The Government has 21 sitting days after it was laid to ratify the text. If the House of Commons agrees a resolution against ratification in those 21 days, then the government must explain why it wishes to ratify and gets a second chance to lay the deal before Parliament.

Indeed, this process can be repeated as often as the government wishes to pursue ratification of a deal. Parliament would have to have a monthly vote against any trade deal – indefinitely – to stop it from being implemented.

There is no record of a negative resolution ever being tabled in the House of Commons – let alone one being successful.

One might think that this bizarre and useless system dates back to the very beginning of parliament – but in fact it was introduced with the Constitutional Reform and Governments Act 2010, under Gordon Brown’s Labour government.

Democratise trade

In fact, UK representatives have more influence over trade deals while we are fully a part of the European Union. – at least now our 73 MEPs have a vote on ratifying trade deals.

The latest trade deal to get the nod from the European Parliament – the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) – is a mega deal between the EU and Canada. It is doing the rounds getting national ratifications at present.

Lithuania and Finland have both debated and voted through the deal in the last few months.

The UK parliament is set to have a debate on CETA this Tuesday. This is a break with convention. It is a response to calls for trade democracy. But it is still only as a gesture, and does not set a precedent. 

The vote is likely to be an easy win for CETA and Fox. 

Take back control

The politics of Brexit will dominate proceedings: Remainers want to keep the UK as close to the programme of the EU as possible, Brexiters want to secure any and every chance of promoting the free trade dogma so many of them are so fond of.

But we need legislation in place to properly democratise trade deals into the future. The hope in this story revolves around an amendment, NC3, which has been tabled by Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, and others.

This motion demands a basic democratic role for MPs. It calls for a consultation with stakeholders before a mandate is drafted for negotiators. MPs would be given the right to feed into the mandate. Parliament would then have the right to vote down any trade deal if it is deemed to be unsatisfactory. It also provides for openness and transparency during negotiations.

You’d be hard pressed to find a milder and more reasonable set of demands.

I refuse to join the ranks of those who claim to know exactly what people were voting for in the referendum on June 2016. But I’m pretty sure I’m right when I say people didn’t want to take back control in order to gift it all to Mr Fox.

Genetically engineered

The stakes are high. Fox is insistent that a trade deal with the US is a panacea for many ills. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Donald Trump has had a 500 page document composed outlining many of the trade barriers US industry would like to see removed in any future deals that the US makes. And 48 pages are dedicated to the relationship with the EU. Food safety standards come in for a lot of attention. 

The US wants changes to pesticide maximum residue limits. It claims EU rules on this are commercially unviable.

The EU currently has a maximum residue level on diphenylamine of 0.01 ppm on apples and has removed authorisation for its use. The US wants the EU to accept a level 100 times greater in order that it may export apples to Europe.

The US wants to end the right of EU member states to ban genetically engineered plants, including the ban on cultivating biotechnology seed in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

Nutrition labelling

The US questions EU certification of Animal Welfare on official sanitary certificates, claiming such measures do not advance food safety or animal health objectives.

Recently Trump has also proclaimed a desire to charge more for pharmaceuticals in the UK and EU markets.

With big state backed purchasers of drugs, European countries have the clout to demand lower prices – not low enough, but lower than otherwise. In the US, privately owned smaller health care providers are more at mercy of the huge pharmaceutical corporations.

Trump wants to see more parity between buyers in that market, which will almost certainly see price hikes for the NHS.

Also in the document are questions over government subsidies for Airbus, EU restrictions on the transfer of personal data of its citizens outside the EU, the Fuel Quality Directive (which requires fossil fuel suppliers to reduce the lifecycle greenhouse gas intensity of transport fuel by six percent by 2020 and to report on the carbon intensity of these fuels) Country of Origin Labelling, and health and nutrition labelling.

Trading relations

All these, the US concludes, impede the flow of goods across the Atlantic in our direction. 

There’s more. It’s a huge document. But you get the picture. Fox flew out to Washington to negotiate away the steel tariffs that Trump inflicted on US imports a few weeks previously. He came back empty handed.

Boris Johnson went to Washington to try to save the Iran nuclear deal, with similar edifying results.

Anyone thinking this or future governments can break the ‘America First’ mantra of Trump is impressively naïve. We need the checks and balances of MPs scrutiny and votes.

Otherwise we face a situation of Fox and co playing about with future trading relations that will be set in place for years in not decades to come. And Fox is not fantastic. 

We have just a few short weeks to campaign for the strongest support for the progressive amendment, NC3. Global Justice Now is providing a platform for such a campaign. Please check it out.

This Author

Guy Taylor is a trade campaigner for Global Justice Now.

June 23, 1988 marked the date on which climate change became a national issue.

In a landmark testimony before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Dr. James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies, stated: “Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.

“In my opinion, the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

Misinformation campaign

Hansen’s testimony made clear the threats posed by climate change and attributed the phenomenon to human exploitation of carbon energy sources.  

Its impact was dramatic, capturing headlines in The New York Times and other major newspapers.  

As politicians, corporations and environmental organisations acknowledged and began to address this issue, climate change entered into the political arena in a largely nonpartisan fashion.

Yet despite decades of public education on climate change and international negotiations to address it, progress continues to stall. Why?

One reason for the political inaction is the gaping divide in public opinion that resulted from a deliberate – and still controversial – misinformation campaign to redirect the public discussion on climate change in the years following Hansen’s testimony.

Dramatic shift

Four years after Hansen testified to Congress, 165 nations signed an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

They committed themselves to reducing carbon emissions to avoid dangerous disruption of the Earth’s climate system, defined as limiting future temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius.

The signatories have now held 25 annual UNFCCC conferences dedicated to developing goals, timetables and methods for mitigating climate change, the most consequential of which are encompassed in the Paris Agreement of 2015.

But as of today, not one single major northern industrial country has fulfilled its commitments under the Paris treaty and the nonprofit Climate Action Tracker has rated the United States’ plan to achieve the Paris goals critically insufficient.

Last year, President Trump, advised by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, pulled the U.S. out of the international Paris Agreement on Climate Change, marking the dramatic shift away from one-time Republican support for action on global warming.

No meaningful action

There have been more than 600 congressional hearings on climate change, according to my calculations, and numerous attempts to pass binding limits on carbon emissions.

Despite those efforts, the United States has yet to take meaningful action on the problem – a discrepancy compounded by President Donald Trump’s decision last year to withdraw from the treaty altogether

In the three decades since Dr. Hansen’s testimony, the scientific certainty about the human causes and catastrophic effects of climate change on the biosphere and social systems has only grown stronger.

This has been documented in five Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports, three U.S. National Climate Assessments and thousands of peer-reviewed papers.  

Yet CO2 levels continue to rise. In 1988, atmospheric CO2 levels stood at 353 parts per million, or ppm, the way to measure the concentration of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere.  As of June 2018, they have the highest monthly average ever recorded.

Public opinion

The effects of these increased concentrations are just as Hansen and others predicted, from disastrous wildfires in the western US and massive hurricanes associated with historical flooding to extended droughts, rising sea levels, increasing ocean acidification, the pervasive spread of tropical diseases and the bleaching and death of coral reefs.

Future generations will look back on our tepid response to global climate disruption and wonder why the world did not act sooner and more aggressively.  

One answer can be found in the polarisation of public opinion over climate change in the United States.  The latest Gallup Poll shows that concern about climate change now falls along partisan lines, with 91 percent of Democrats saying they are worried a great deal or fair amount about climate change, while only 33 percent of Republicans saying the same.

Clearly, a massive gap between Republicans and Democrats has emerged regarding the nature and seriousness of climate change.  This has led to an extreme political conflict over the need for climate action and helps to explain Congress’s failure to pass meaningful legislation to reduce carbon emissions.

The current political stalemate is no accident.  Rather, it is the result of a well-financed and sustained campaign by vested interests to develop and promulgate misinformation about climate science. 

Promoting uncertainty

My scholarship documents the coordinated efforts of conservative foundations and fossil fuel corporations to promote uncertainty about the existence and causes of climate change and thus reduce public concern over the issue. Amplified by conservative media, this campaign has significantly altered the nature of the public debate.

These findings are supported by recent investigative news reports showing that since the 1970s, top executives in the fossil fuel industry have been well aware of the evidence that their products amplify climate warming emissions.

Indeed, industry scientists had conducted their own extensive research on the topic and participated in contemporaneous scientific discussions. 

The American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group, even circulated these research results to its members. By 1978, a senior executive at ExxonMobil had proposed creating a worldwide “CO2 in the Atmosphere” research and development program to determine an appropriate response to growing evidence of climate change.

Unfortunately, that path wasn’t taken. Instead, in 1989, a group of fossil fuel corporations, utilities and automobile manufacturers banded together to form the Global Climate Coalition.

The group was convened to prevent the U.S. adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In its public statements, the coalition’s official position was to claim global warming was real but that it could be part of a natural warming trend. 

Public outrage

The corporate drive to spread climate misinformation continued beyond fighting Kyoto. In 1998, API, Exxon, Chevron, Southern Co. and various conservative think tanks initiated a broad public relations campaign with a goal of ensuring that the “recognition of uncertainties of climate science becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’’

While that coalition disbanded in 2001, ExxonMobil reportedly continued to quietly fund climate misinformation, funneling donations through conservative, “skeptic” think tanks such as the Heartland Institute, until 2006, when the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists exposed its funding scheme.

ExxonMobil – the nation’s largest and wealthiest company – continues to work with the  self-described public-private partnership of corporations and conservative legislators to block climate change policies.

ExxonMobil’s conduct – promoting uncertainty about climate science it knew to be accurate – has generated public outrage and led New York’s attorney general to initiate an investigation into whether the company has illegally misled the public and its investors about the risks of climate change.  This trend in litigation has expanded, and there are now several ongoing climate litigation suits.

While important, lawsuits cannot fully address the larger issues of corporate social and political responsibility to acknowledge and address climate change. Just as Congress investigated efforts by the tobacco industry to dupe the public into believing its products were harmless in the 1990s, I believe a full and open inquiry is needed now to unmask the vested interests behind scientific misinformation campaigns that continue to delay our efforts to mitigate a global threat.

Hidden funding

At a minimum, the US needs to change the system of hidden funding, in which companies such as ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers use pass-through organizations to camouflage donations to climate denial efforts. 

Current US tax rules for nonprofit organisations, including climate-denying think tanks, do not require them to reveal their donors, enabling them to support large-scale political activities while remaining unaccountable.

American voters deserve to know who is behind climate disinformation efforts, and revising nonprofit reporting laws is a good place to begin.

In my view, the central concern here is nothing less than the moral integrity of the public sphere. The Declaration of Independence states that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But when vested interests with outsize economic and cultural power distort the public debate by introducing falsehoods, the integrity of Americans’ deliberations is compromised.

So it is with the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to distort public discourse on the urgent subject of climate change. If corporations and public relations firms can systematically alter the national debate in favour of their own interests and against those of society as a whole, then democracy itself is undermined.

I believe Congress can and should act to investigate this issue fully. Only then can we restore trust and legitimacy to American governance and fulfill our society’s moral duty to address climate change at a scale commensurate with its significance.

This Author

Robert Brulle is Professor of Sociology, Drexel University. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Our mammal ancestors relied on the cover of darkness to escape their dinosaur predators and competitors for their first 100 million years on planet Earth. Only after the meteor-induced mass extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago could these nocturnal mammals explore the many wondrous opportunities available in the light of day.

Fast forward to the present, and the honeymoon in the sun may be over for mammals. They’re increasingly returning to the protection of night to avoid the Earth’s current terrifying super-predator: Homo sapiens.

My colleagues and I have made the first effort to measure the global effects of human disturbance on the daily activity patterns of wildlife. In our new study in the journal Science, we documented a powerful and widespread process by which mammals alter their behavior alongside people: Human disturbance is creating a more nocturnal natural world.

Human impact

Many catastrophic effects of humans on wildlife communities have been well-documented: We are responsible for habitat destruction and overexploitation that have imperiled animal populations around the world.

However, just our presence alone can have important behavioral impacts on wildlife, even if these effects aren’t immediately apparent or easy to quantify.

Many animals fear humans: we can be large, noisy, novel and dangerous. Animals often go out of their way to avoid encountering us. But it’s becoming more and more challenging for wildlife to seek out human-free spaces, as the human population grows and our footprint expands across the planet.

My collaborators and I noticed a striking pattern in some of our own data from research in Tanzania, Nepal and Canada: animals from impala to tigers to grizzly bears seemed to be more active at night when they were around people. Once the idea was on our radar, we began to see it throughout the published scientific literature.

Global increase in nocturnality

It appeared to be a common global phenomenon; we set out to see just how widespread this effect was. Might animals all over the world be adjusting their daily activity patterns to avoid humans in time, given that it is becoming harder to avoid us in space?

To explore this question, we conducted a meta-analysis, or a study of studies. We systematically scoured the published literature for peer-reviewed journal articles, reports and theses that documented the 24-hour activity patterns of large mammals.

We focused on mammals because their need for plenty of space often brings them into contact with humans, and they possess traits that allow for some flexibility in their activity.

We needed to find examples that provided data for areas or seasons of low human disturbance – that is, more natural conditions – and high human disturbance.

For example, studies compared deer activity in and out of the hunting season, grizzly bear activity in areas with and without hiking, and elephant activity inside protected areas and outside among rural settlement.

Nocturnal behaviour

Based on reported data from remote camera traps, radio collars or observations, we determined each species’ nocturnality, which we defined as the percentage of the animal’s total activity that occurred between sunset and sunrise.

We then quantified the difference in nocturnality between low and high disturbance to understand how animals changed their activity patterns in response to people.

For each species, researchers compared the animals’ active periods when people are nearby to when people aren’t around. 

Overall, for the 62 species in our study, mammals were 1.36 times as nocturnal in response to human disturbance. An animal that naturally split its activity evenly between the day and night, for example, would increase its nighttime activity to 68 percent around people.

While we expected to find a trend toward increased wildlife nocturnality around people, we were surprised by the consistency of the results around the world.

Human disruption

Eighty-three percent of the case studies we examined showed some increase in nocturnal activity in response to disturbance. Our finding was consistent across species, continents and habitat types.

Antelope on the savanna of Zimbabwe, tapir in the Ecuadorian rainforests, bobcats in the American southwest deserts – all seemed to be doing what they could to shift their activity to the cover of darkness.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the pattern also held across different types of human disturbance, including activities such as hunting, hiking, mountain biking, and infrastructure such as roads, residential settlement and agriculture.

Animals responded strongly to all activities, regardless of whether people actually posed a direct threat. It seems human presence alone is enough to disrupt their natural patterns of behavior.

People may think our outdoor recreation leaves no trace, but our mere presence can have lasting consequences.

Future of human-wildlife coexistence

We don’t yet understand the consequences of this dramatic behavioral shift for individual animals or populations. Over millions of years, many of the animals included in our study have evolved adaptations to living in the daylight.

Sun bears, for example, are typically diurnal and sun-loving creatures; in undisturbed areas less than 20 percent of their activity occurred at the night.

But they increased their nocturnality to 90 percent in areas of the Sumatran forest where intensive forest research activity created a disturbance.

Such diurnally adapted animals may not be as successful at finding food, avoiding predators or communicating in the darkness, which could even reduce their survival or reproduction.

However, because our mammalian ancestors evolved under the cover of darkness in the time of the dinosaurs, most mammal species possess traits that allow for some flexibility in their activity patterns.

Seeking solitude

As long as animals are able to meet their needs during the night, they may actually thrive in human-dominated landscapes by avoiding daytime direct encounters with people that could potentially be dangerous for both parties.

In Nepal, for example, tigers and people share the exact same trails in the forest at different times of day, reducing direct conflict between humans and these large carnivores.

Dividing up the day, through what researchers call temporal partitioning, may be a mechanism by which people and wildlife can coexist on an ever more crowded planet.

An increase in nocturnality among certain species may also have far-reaching consequences for ecosystems, reshaping species interactions and cascading through food webs.

In California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, coyotes are becoming more nocturnal in areas with human recreation. By analyzing coyote scat, scientists have linked this behavioral change to dietary shifts from diurnal to nocturnal prey, with implications for small mammal communities and for competition with other predators.

We’re not alone

Working on this study reminded me that people aren’t alone on the planet. Even if we don’t see large mammals while we’re out and about during the day, they may still be living alongside us, asleep while we are awake, and vice versa.

In areas where threatened species live, managers may consider restricting human activity to certain times of the day, leaving some daylight just for wildlife.

And it is likely that we need to preserve wilderness areas entirely free of human disturbance to conserve the most vulnerable and sensitive mammal species.

Not all animals are willing or able to just switch to a nocturnal lifestyle around people. Those that try to avoid human disturbance entirely may be most vulnerable to the consequences of the expanding human footprint.

This Author

Kaitlyn Gaynor is a PhD candidate in environmental science at the school of policy and management, University of California, Berkeley. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Climate change is here, no matter what the current US presidential administration has to say on the matter. The planet is hotter than it has ever been before, sea levels are rising and humans, plants and animals are all feeling the heat — and it’s all backed by science.

Just look at the 2017 hurricane season — three massive superstorms all within a few weeks of one another that devastated Texas, Florida and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, and much of the island still doesn’t have electricity more than nine months later.

One ecosystem that is facing the biggest change is the thousands of miles of waterfront that lines the oceans and seas of our primarily water-covered world. These shorelines are at risk, but they can also help slow climate change — if humans help them adapt.

Living shorelines

To try to prevent shoreline erosion, we usually resort to things like building up seawalls or jetties and other manmade structures. While these are useful tools to prevent erosion, it doesn’t foster the development of a sustainable or growing ecosystem.

Living shorelines can help prevent erosion caused by tides and storms by creating healthy, living ecosystems in these areas. Instead of using concrete, these constructs use things like sand, oyster shells and other natural materials. These prevent the sand from washing away while creating an area where natural flora and fauna can thrive.

Even concrete can be useful in these situations — just not as walls. Concrete barriers designed to allow water and fauna to move through them can help slow wave movement and reduce natural erosion.

Modifying waterways

The work to preserve these living shorelines isn’t all on land — it’s in the water, as well. Dredging, or using underwater excavators to modify the ocean floor near the shoreline, can remove sediment, reclaim polluted waterways and even increase waterway depth near the shore. It can also reverse natural shoreline erosion by taking the sand and sediment that has washed off the beach and returning it to its natural place.

Dredging isn’t the perfect solution to prevent shoreline erosion — there aren’t enough dredgers in the world to patrol every beach and shoreline — but it can be a solid tool to correct damage that has already occurred, and to prevent more shoreline damage in the future.

For areas that suffer from eutrophication, or an excess collection of nutrients, dredging can even help restore those shorelines.

That could prevent detrimental red tide or algae blooms that occur when the water temperature rises every year. In areas such as the Gulf of Mexico near the Mississippi River Delta, which is contaminated with runoff from the cities and farms along the river’s length, dredging can remove sediment that is collecting pollutants.

Carbon sequestration

A healthy ecosystem is good for more than just preventing shoreline erosion — it could reduce the impact of climate change, thanks to a technique called carbon sequestration.

The plants growing in these living shorelines both help convert carbon dioxide to oxygen and store carbon dioxide during photosynthesis.

If we can restore the shoreline ecosystems, the growing plants could slow down the effects of climate change.

There are 124 living shorelines in North Carolina alone. Those shorelines alone are enough to offset more than 64 metric tons of CO2 every year. That’s the equivalent of 7,500 gallons of gasoline burned.

North Carolina has 850 miles that can be converted to living shorelines. Even 10 percent of that is enough to offset the CO2 created by burning over 100,000 gallons of gasoline.

Swimming and tanning

If 85 miles of shoreline is enough to offset that much carbon, imagine what we could do with living shorelines on the 372,000 miles of coastline that exist throughout the world?

Even if we subtract the miles of beaches commercial operations use, it still leaves hundreds of thousands of miles of shoreline we can convert into carbon-absorbing shorelines to help reverse climate change.

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating — climate change is real, and it is rapidly worsening. Just look at the weather — states across the US are reporting record highs every week, and hurricanes are getting more intense and dangerous than ever before. These problems are due in part to the massive amount of carbon dioxide we’re putting into the atmosphere every single day.

Everyone loves a day at the beach, but we might love it a little bit more if those beaches were reversing climate change. Rising oceans are only one part of climate change, and it will affect both the people and the flora and fauna that live on these changing coasts.

By creating these living shorelines, we can do so much more than just prevent shoreline erosion — we can start to undo all the damage we have done to the environment. Beaches are good for more than just hotels, swimming and tanning. These shorelines can help change the world, one square foot at a time.

This Author

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

At least half of the large-scale infrastructure projects being proposed today are a bad idea, argues a leading scientist who has spent nearly forty years studying building around the world.

“And when I say ‘bad’, I don’t just mean bad for the environment,” says Distinguished Professor Bill Laurance from James Cook University in Australia. “I mean bad for economies, bad for societies, and bad for project investors.”

Professor Laurance has summarised decades of research on the costs and benefits of big infrastructure projects – such as major highways, railroads, hydropower dams and industrial mines – in an article in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Just plain foolish

“It’s vital to understand the realities because we’re living in the most explosive era of infrastructure expansion in human history,” said Laurance.

“Most new infrastructure projects are occurring in developing nations, which direly need smart development and investment. But many proposed projects are just plain foolish.

“For starters, widespread corruption completely distorts things. Projects that should never proceed get approved because government decision-makers are being paid off by project proponents.

“And the economic benefits of big projects are often grossly unfair—a few power brokers and their cronies are becoming fabulously wealthy, while most people see little benefit or even fall behind. That’s not smart development.”

He added: “In environmental terms, we’re seeing new projects tear into the most vulnerable ecosystems on the planet.

Hidden risks

“For example, in parts of the Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America, our research team is seeing Chinese-backed roads, dams, and mines happening in places that no rational investor should be touching.

“Investors assume they understand the risks and rewards of big projects. But far too often there are shoals of hidden risks, and projects that sound highly promising can turn into shipwrecks.

He concluded: “Just look around. You see big projects failing all the time. Nations are incurring big debts, investors are losing money, the environmental damage is appalling, and most of all, the average person isn’t getting ahead.

“The vital thing is to slow down the big projects. Delay them so there’s time for vital information to be disclosed and the public to debate the merits of each project.

“When the public understands what’s happening—what’s really happening—you’ll see a lot of bad projects disappear.”

This Author

Catherine Harte is a contributing editor to The Ecologist. This story is based on a news release from James Cook University, Australia. 

A huge motive for the systems approach is to explain why our social structures go wrong: systems we’ve created, but which turn against us.

This is nowhere more evident than with international politics and economics, which have caused so much damage, to environment and society alike. Understandably, we aspire to order and stability…but not in some form which entrenches injustice.

Over recent decades, we’ve grown accustomed to a certain world order, which today is suddenly challenged – from multiple, maybe contradictory directions. 

Exploitation of nature

We’re entering unfamiliar territory, which opens up many possibilities – some bad, but others potentially good.  We need to understand Trump, the EU, the rise of Asia, what all this signifies, and how we might transition to a just and sustainable world.

So let’s explore some tools from systems theory.

Here, I specially want to emphasise the hidden ecological dimension which underpins all issues of international order/disorder.

Both nationalism and liberalism typically fail to recognise this – but if we take this into consideration we may find a way through the impasse.

Game theory offers an interesting insight into the – often unintended – logic unleashed by our decisions. Each strategy attracts rewards, called ‘payoffs’. What the theory usually fails to articulate is how the payoffs are funded by the exploitation of nature, we’ll return to this in a moment.

Improved efficiency

A purely competitive situation is called ‘zero-sum’.  One side gains exactly what the other loses (+1-1=0).  An example is the ‘mercantilist’ policy, which prevailed under nascent capitalism  during the 16th-18th centuries.

Governments strove for a trade surplus at all costs.  Logically, it’s not possible for everyone to achieve this at the same time – so the result is to unleash a highly conflictual politics.

The founders of liberal theory sought a way to avoid this. Their goal was laudible: to replace all-out nationalism/conflict with tolerance and cosmopolitanism.

If only you could show that co-operation is a win-win situation, unlike zero-sum, which is win-lose. Early 19th-century economist David Ricardo believed he’d solved this problem. 

Free trade generates an ‘extra’ value, derived from the improved efficiency when each country specialises in producing what it ‘does best’, rather than vainly seeking to produce everything. He called this comparative advantage.

Someone’s anvil

But this goal was hard to attain in practice. The reason is explored through another insight from game theory: the prisoners’ dilemma (PD): although a co-operative strategy would objectively benefit all parties, it’s generally too dangerous for one party to be first to implement it.

The system therefore remains locked in a bad equilibrium which benefits no-one, but is extremely hard to escape. Accordingly, right through the 19th century and first half of the 20th, capitalist countries remained competitive, economically and militarily.

Around the turn of 19th -20th centuries, there occurred a major phase-change: the advent of what’s known as imperialism, part of which was a feverish colonial expansion.

Most obviously, this seemed to augur even more intense competition. A quote from Goethe, popular with early imperialists, nicely depicts both the zero-sum situation and the PD: ‘Be hammer or anvil’.

You either do the bashing, or you get bashed. Goethe wasn’t advocating this, he just found a poetic way to express it! You may not relish hammering others, but it’s the only way to avoid being someone else’s anvil.

International game

The Malthusian interpretation of ‘limits’ perfectly fits this argument, depicting a resource ‘pot’ whose size is constant.

Funnily enough, the early imperialists – from around 1900 – thought in quite an ecological way. One of them,  Halford Mackinder, spoke of “human history as part of the life of the world organism,” within which “nature in large measure controls”.

They respected nature’s limits…as an incentive to grab those finite resources for themselves!

Predictions of intensified conflict were confirmed by two World Wars. Nonetheless, Ricardo’s promise of escaping the zero-sum trap remained tempting.

But to achieve this, it seemed, the ‘pot’ for the international game must no longer be finite: it would need to grow. This is actually one of the main incentives for economic ‘growth’.

So let’s consider – what would be the source of the enlarged pot?

Joint hegemony

Supposedly, the greater efficiency of specialisation under conditions of free trade. But actually – I would say –  it is the intensified plunder of nature. We can see this in two ways:

First, economically. The Ricardian model liquidates any localism and self-sufficiency: it implies an extreme alienation and loss of place, destruction of natural commons and of all the ways in which societies traditionally stewarded resources and shielded them from unbridled depletion.

And there’s social depletion too, because you’d be wiping out whole communities and cultures which grew up around particular productive traditions.

Added to this, is the immense environmental cost of transportation, if balanced economies are dismantled and everyone has to import everything.

Second, politically. If imperialist states could co-operate instead of fighting each other, they could exploit the global South – and its resources – more intensively through a kind of joint hegemony.

Ultimate enforcement

The advent of such a collective dominance was anticipated by one of the most astonishing contributions to the critique of imperialism, from around 1900: the work of J.A. Hobson.

Hobson predicted the advent of a parasitic alliance/federation of the Western States to control a world order in which semi-colonial countries performed the labour and imperialists reaped the benefits.

This order was effectively realised post-World War II, when the North/West gradually – via the Bretton Woods system – introduced free trade, leading eventually to full-scale globalisation from the 1980s onwards.

Although there’s nothing wrong with trade if it’s really free, globalisation actually meant something altogether different: privatising commons and public goods – such as water – so they could be bought by global conglomerates, privatising ideas – ‘intellectual property’ – with the same result, getting the South to pursue a phoney comparative advantage in poor working conditions and lax environmental rules.

This takes us to the tragedy of Obama.  The only way he could imagine to preserve the cosmopolitan project, was a fuite en avant toward the ultimate enforcement of open world economy.

Food sovereignty

The nightmare result is seen in treaties like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), negotiated secretly with Europe, which would virtually outlaw any local defence against the corporate plunder of nature.

In this way, the good face of socio-political liberalism had become so much subordinated to market fundamentalism, and the enslavement of the globe to the parasitic Western federation, that progressives couldn’t really defend it.  Hence the backlash: Trump, exclusion, xenophobia in Europe.

Our task today is to rescue tolerance and cosmopolitanism from this debacle, and establish them on a new basis. Luckily, such a basis exists in social movements.

An example could be grassroots campaigns for ‘food sovereignty’ which, while not a finished concept, open up a fascinating debate.

Alternative pathway

This is interrogating sovereignty in new ways, and is no longer about exclusionist nationalism or dominating nature within a national territory. Rather, it is about autonomy and a rediscovered, non-exclusionary, localism. 

From the narrow standpoint of economic liberalism, it’s hard to find any escape from conflict over scarce resources, other than an inexhaustible environmental ‘pot’.

But if we transcend this, the way forward becomes clear: commons approaches to stewarding and preserving nature – rather than depleting it – unleash an abundant free energy which opens up an alternative pathway to win-win solutions.

This Author

Dr Robert Biel teaches political ecology at University College London and is the author of The New Imperialism and The Entropy of Capitalism. He specialises in international political economy, systems theory, sustainable development and urban agriculture.

 

Vartan Melkonian was taken to the Lebanon by his refugee parents.  His mother died until he was eight and he was taken to the Birds’ Nest Orphanage. From there he was subjected to living rough in the slums of Beirut.

“I can only look at it dispassionately from an adult point of view now,” Vartan told The Ecologist. “At that age, you accept it is your life. You are constantly on the lookout for the authorities, but that seemed normal then. You make decisions crucial to your own existence.”

Life as a child on the streets was an everyday struggle for Vartan. What may be seen as beautiful moments for most, were times of worry for him.

Musical beginnings

“People take moments of pleasure by looking at the sunset. For us, for me, it was the worst time of the day, there was nowhere to go.

“We, the children of the streets, were often chased away with sticks and stones, even by the police, so we were not seen on the street, as if we were some sort of living plague.”

Vartan taught the other street boys how to harmonise in order to raise money by busking. Later, he moved from job to job working as an illegal fisherman, and then becoming a mechanic. When he fled the civil war in Lebanon in 1972, Vartan’s life changed.

“When I was in Lebanon I used to play the guitar, and I thought I was really good. Arriving in the UK in the early 70s, I went to Kings Cross Station and I saw a busker playing the guitar and my eyes widened. I thought ‘I know nothing!’ It was like being born again at the age of 26.”

He added: “My first experience of the UK was overwhelming; it was like entering into a heaven.”

Real struggle

Vartan’s musical beginnings from teaching harmony and playing the guitar stood him in good stead, and from being entirely self-taught, he went on to become a singer and producer in the West End. 

It was when he wrote a symphony that was eventually performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that his life changed for good.

Since that moment he has gone on to conduct all over the world in some of the grandest music halls.

Aside from this huge achievement, he has also became a spokesman for the UN, working as a humanitarian ambassador for street children.

He said: “I feel sorry for people who have not lived on the street and found food in the rubbish bins, and cooked spiders legs on the beach and experienced that struggle.

“That’s when you really appreciate what you have. Then every day I feel it’s a blessing, we are guests and we have to behave like guests. I am very grateful and I ask others to be grateful.

Investing in children

“I look with wonder at my own children and the way they come back from school and throw their back packs down on the floor and ask ‘what’s for dinner?’ Being a child on the streets really impacts your life, but it gives me great pleasure to see my children having such comforts.

“Children are like money. Money has no power to do bad or evil on its own. It cannot be bad or good, only the authorities have that choice to use it for bad or good. Children are not to be seen as trouble, but as future investments.

“They have as much potential as anyone else. It’s up to authorities to use it.”

Vartan doesn’t bat an eyelid when he’s rubbing shoulders with the likes of George Clooney and the Prince of Wales because, he said, when you have nothing, that’s when your imagination is at its greatest.

Proud of his past

“When you don’t have things, your imagination flourishes and when you achieve something, you’ve already lived it. For me, I’d already experienced the marble staircases of palaces in my dreams.

“Street children have lived in a different world than those in a sheltered life and I am so grateful to have lived on the streets.”

Now Vartan can look back and be proud of where he came from, and spread the message that orphans and refugees are to be nurtured.

He said: “When my daughter was about six years old, we were driving in the car with her friend. The friend said to her, ‘my daddy’s in the Army’. To which my daughter said proudly, ‘my daddy’s an orphan’.”

This Author

Laura Briggs is a freelance reporter. She tweets @WordsbyBriggs. Find out more about World Refugee Day.