Monthly Archives: July 2018

Barack Obama admits Paris Accord targets ‘not enough to avoid catastrophe’

Wine production in Europe has fallen to 50-year lows due to the impacts of extreme weather events that include hail, frost, drought and rot. No one knows this better than Adrian Bridge, CEO of the Fladgate Partnership, a company that owns some of the biggest names in port including Taylor, Croft and Fonseca. 

Inviting former President Barack Obama to Porto was undoubtedly intended to make heads turn. Obama’s administration was instrumental in bringing the Paris Accord into being, but here in Porto he acknowledged that “the targets set by the Paris Accord are not enough to avoid catastrophe.”

Obama talked extensively about the linkages between extreme weather impacts and migration, and how these ultimately connect to conflict. His overall message echoed that of the Porto Protocol: the only way to solve this crisis is to work together.

Financial resources

Adrian Bridge is keen to promote the need for action and sharing of ideas that can reduce losses that are already threatening many businesses.

Making the point that we need solutions, he stated that his “company … had a vineyard completely wiped out in a single hour, after we had this hail storm at the end of May… we had 12 percent annual rainfall in one hour.

“That event cost our business about €400,000 by the time you count all the erosion, infiltration, damage to buildings and so on and so forth.”

In wine regions such as Burgundy, cannons firing silver iodide into storm clouds have been put in place to convert the crop-destroying hailstones into rain. To work, this requires an integrated response between different farmers and a commitment in terms of land and resources. 

Is it worth it? Bridge says, “Running a system of seeding clouds costs a whole lot less than [€400,000]. As a big company, we can do it. Smaller farmers alongside us who don’t have the financial resources would benefit… well great! That is great!”

Rising temperatures

Adrian Bridge is a determined character with a great deal of success in the wine trade. His attitude is geared to action and cooperation reaching beyond his own business to other industries where experience and learning can be shared.

He says, “Instead of thinking in silos of wine industry and wine solutions, hopefully, we can learn from other industries and we can be a platform that gets lots of people to join from various different industries.”

Obama echoed this sentiment of cooperation stating, “..adaptation is going to be required for winemakers, for example, to share best practices in terms of how they can sustain their industry in the face of rising temperatures.” 

Obama continued, “But I think it would also be important for the industries that are being effected to publicise the impacts that a changing climate already has. Because one of the challenges in the climate change debate has always been, that… it is not an immediate catastrophe.”

“What businesses can do is to start putting a figure in terms of the losses that are current, or, the expenses required for adaptation. Because that information already exists, it’s just no one does it.”

New measurement

“The reason that it is important to start attaching a price to losses, or expenses to adapting to a warmer climate, is because one of the main arguments against doing something about climate change is that it is going to cost too much, or it is going to have an impact on our economic competitiveness.”

“Now, if you can say, ‘ah listen, in Miami, we are in the middle of a beautiful sunny day’ and you start to see floods because the ocean is literally coming up through the ground, two feet high in residential neighbourhoods.

“If that is going to cost, eventually 20 billion or 100 billion or half a trillion dollars of property damage, then why would we not spend 50 billion dollars to start implementing more clean energy strategies?

“You then get it cost-benefit analyses to support change. That, I think, is something that is very important.”

Also speaking at Climate Change Leadership summit was top UN diplomat and Director General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova: “There is a new kind of index, a new measurement, which is called the Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) for UNESCO World Heritage sites to be established.” 

Common memory

Bokova highlighted how the CVI would list the most vulnerable sites around the world, many include vineyards like Champagne or the Douro, but also places such as Venice, and how the preservation of these sites is a way of protecting our cultural identities and culture. 

Bokova cautioned against complacency at this point in time: “This is the scariest part of global warming, the fact that we won’t be able to undo the damage done.

“That we won’t be able to extricate Venice or New Orleans from the sea. Their disappearance will be a net loss, regardless of what mountainside civilisations will someday rise.”

“We must take very serious measures because climate is not only destroying our livelihoods, our economies, the lives of future generations. It is not only causing conflict, migration and wars. We know that populations move because of climate, destruction, desertification, loss of water resources.”

“The worst part, of course, I speak from the point of view of UNESCO and the World Heritage, is that climate will just make our common history disappear, our common memory and at the end of the day, our diverse identities.”

Do more!

This one-day event in Porto brought together world-class speakers and an audience curious to learn more about climate change. The issue still remains, how do we move from being a talk-shop to a do-shop?

In March 2019 the Porto Protocol will move into what Bridge believes is the do-phase. A two-day conference where solution providers and stakeholders from the wine industry and many others will converge into a rich exchange of ideas focussed on overcoming the future challenges of climate change.

On a hot evening at Taylor’s Port Cellars on the banks of the Douro, Adrian Bridge, says exactly what every CEO around the world should be saying: 

“The point is to do more tomorrow than you are doing today. So if you haven’t started to change your business to help mitigate climate change, it is time to start and start now! If you are already doing a lot, do more!”

This Author

Nick Breeze has been interviewing a wide range of people in both climate change and the wine industry for over a decade. He is currently part of a new initiative at wine-weather.com and writes for SecretSommelier.com and envisionation.co.uk. He can be followed on Twitter at @NickGBreeze.

Barack Obama admits Paris Accord targets ‘not enough to avoid catastrophe’

Wine production in Europe has fallen to 50-year lows due to the impacts of extreme weather events that include hail, frost, drought and rot. No one knows this better than Adrian Bridge, CEO of the Fladgate Partnership, a company that owns some of the biggest names in port including Taylor, Croft and Fonseca. 

Inviting former President Barack Obama to Porto was undoubtedly intended to make heads turn. Obama’s administration was instrumental in bringing the Paris Accord into being, but here in Porto he acknowledged that “the targets set by the Paris Accord are not enough to avoid catastrophe.”

Obama talked extensively about the linkages between extreme weather impacts and migration, and how these ultimately connect to conflict. His overall message echoed that of the Porto Protocol: the only way to solve this crisis is to work together.

Financial resources

Adrian Bridge is keen to promote the need for action and sharing of ideas that can reduce losses that are already threatening many businesses.

Making the point that we need solutions, he stated that his “company … had a vineyard completely wiped out in a single hour, after we had this hail storm at the end of May… we had 12 percent annual rainfall in one hour.

“That event cost our business about €400,000 by the time you count all the erosion, infiltration, damage to buildings and so on and so forth.”

In wine regions such as Burgundy, cannons firing silver iodide into storm clouds have been put in place to convert the crop-destroying hailstones into rain. To work, this requires an integrated response between different farmers and a commitment in terms of land and resources. 

Is it worth it? Bridge says, “Running a system of seeding clouds costs a whole lot less than [€400,000]. As a big company, we can do it. Smaller farmers alongside us who don’t have the financial resources would benefit… well great! That is great!”

Rising temperatures

Adrian Bridge is a determined character with a great deal of success in the wine trade. His attitude is geared to action and cooperation reaching beyond his own business to other industries where experience and learning can be shared.

He says, “Instead of thinking in silos of wine industry and wine solutions, hopefully, we can learn from other industries and we can be a platform that gets lots of people to join from various different industries.”

Obama echoed this sentiment of cooperation stating, “..adaptation is going to be required for winemakers, for example, to share best practices in terms of how they can sustain their industry in the face of rising temperatures.” 

Obama continued, “But I think it would also be important for the industries that are being effected to publicise the impacts that a changing climate already has. Because one of the challenges in the climate change debate has always been, that… it is not an immediate catastrophe.”

“What businesses can do is to start putting a figure in terms of the losses that are current, or, the expenses required for adaptation. Because that information already exists, it’s just no one does it.”

New measurement

“The reason that it is important to start attaching a price to losses, or expenses to adapting to a warmer climate, is because one of the main arguments against doing something about climate change is that it is going to cost too much, or it is going to have an impact on our economic competitiveness.”

“Now, if you can say, ‘ah listen, in Miami, we are in the middle of a beautiful sunny day’ and you start to see floods because the ocean is literally coming up through the ground, two feet high in residential neighbourhoods.

“If that is going to cost, eventually 20 billion or 100 billion or half a trillion dollars of property damage, then why would we not spend 50 billion dollars to start implementing more clean energy strategies?

“You then get it cost-benefit analyses to support change. That, I think, is something that is very important.”

Also speaking at Climate Change Leadership summit was top UN diplomat and Director General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova: “There is a new kind of index, a new measurement, which is called the Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) for UNESCO World Heritage sites to be established.” 

Common memory

Bokova highlighted how the CVI would list the most vulnerable sites around the world, many include vineyards like Champagne or the Douro, but also places such as Venice, and how the preservation of these sites is a way of protecting our cultural identities and culture. 

Bokova cautioned against complacency at this point in time: “This is the scariest part of global warming, the fact that we won’t be able to undo the damage done.

“That we won’t be able to extricate Venice or New Orleans from the sea. Their disappearance will be a net loss, regardless of what mountainside civilisations will someday rise.”

“We must take very serious measures because climate is not only destroying our livelihoods, our economies, the lives of future generations. It is not only causing conflict, migration and wars. We know that populations move because of climate, destruction, desertification, loss of water resources.”

“The worst part, of course, I speak from the point of view of UNESCO and the World Heritage, is that climate will just make our common history disappear, our common memory and at the end of the day, our diverse identities.”

Do more!

This one-day event in Porto brought together world-class speakers and an audience curious to learn more about climate change. The issue still remains, how do we move from being a talk-shop to a do-shop?

In March 2019 the Porto Protocol will move into what Bridge believes is the do-phase. A two-day conference where solution providers and stakeholders from the wine industry and many others will converge into a rich exchange of ideas focussed on overcoming the future challenges of climate change.

On a hot evening at Taylor’s Port Cellars on the banks of the Douro, Adrian Bridge, says exactly what every CEO around the world should be saying: 

“The point is to do more tomorrow than you are doing today. So if you haven’t started to change your business to help mitigate climate change, it is time to start and start now! If you are already doing a lot, do more!”

This Author

Nick Breeze has been interviewing a wide range of people in both climate change and the wine industry for over a decade. He is currently part of a new initiative at wine-weather.com and writes for SecretSommelier.com and envisionation.co.uk. He can be followed on Twitter at @NickGBreeze.

Barack Obama admits Paris Accord targets ‘not enough to avoid catastrophe’

Wine production in Europe has fallen to 50-year lows due to the impacts of extreme weather events that include hail, frost, drought and rot. No one knows this better than Adrian Bridge, CEO of the Fladgate Partnership, a company that owns some of the biggest names in port including Taylor, Croft and Fonseca. 

Inviting former President Barack Obama to Porto was undoubtedly intended to make heads turn. Obama’s administration was instrumental in bringing the Paris Accord into being, but here in Porto he acknowledged that “the targets set by the Paris Accord are not enough to avoid catastrophe.”

Obama talked extensively about the linkages between extreme weather impacts and migration, and how these ultimately connect to conflict. His overall message echoed that of the Porto Protocol: the only way to solve this crisis is to work together.

Financial resources

Adrian Bridge is keen to promote the need for action and sharing of ideas that can reduce losses that are already threatening many businesses.

Making the point that we need solutions, he stated that his “company … had a vineyard completely wiped out in a single hour, after we had this hail storm at the end of May… we had 12 percent annual rainfall in one hour.

“That event cost our business about €400,000 by the time you count all the erosion, infiltration, damage to buildings and so on and so forth.”

In wine regions such as Burgundy, cannons firing silver iodide into storm clouds have been put in place to convert the crop-destroying hailstones into rain. To work, this requires an integrated response between different farmers and a commitment in terms of land and resources. 

Is it worth it? Bridge says, “Running a system of seeding clouds costs a whole lot less than [€400,000]. As a big company, we can do it. Smaller farmers alongside us who don’t have the financial resources would benefit… well great! That is great!”

Rising temperatures

Adrian Bridge is a determined character with a great deal of success in the wine trade. His attitude is geared to action and cooperation reaching beyond his own business to other industries where experience and learning can be shared.

He says, “Instead of thinking in silos of wine industry and wine solutions, hopefully, we can learn from other industries and we can be a platform that gets lots of people to join from various different industries.”

Obama echoed this sentiment of cooperation stating, “..adaptation is going to be required for winemakers, for example, to share best practices in terms of how they can sustain their industry in the face of rising temperatures.” 

Obama continued, “But I think it would also be important for the industries that are being effected to publicise the impacts that a changing climate already has. Because one of the challenges in the climate change debate has always been, that… it is not an immediate catastrophe.”

“What businesses can do is to start putting a figure in terms of the losses that are current, or, the expenses required for adaptation. Because that information already exists, it’s just no one does it.”

New measurement

“The reason that it is important to start attaching a price to losses, or expenses to adapting to a warmer climate, is because one of the main arguments against doing something about climate change is that it is going to cost too much, or it is going to have an impact on our economic competitiveness.”

“Now, if you can say, ‘ah listen, in Miami, we are in the middle of a beautiful sunny day’ and you start to see floods because the ocean is literally coming up through the ground, two feet high in residential neighbourhoods.

“If that is going to cost, eventually 20 billion or 100 billion or half a trillion dollars of property damage, then why would we not spend 50 billion dollars to start implementing more clean energy strategies?

“You then get it cost-benefit analyses to support change. That, I think, is something that is very important.”

Also speaking at Climate Change Leadership summit was top UN diplomat and Director General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova: “There is a new kind of index, a new measurement, which is called the Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) for UNESCO World Heritage sites to be established.” 

Common memory

Bokova highlighted how the CVI would list the most vulnerable sites around the world, many include vineyards like Champagne or the Douro, but also places such as Venice, and how the preservation of these sites is a way of protecting our cultural identities and culture. 

Bokova cautioned against complacency at this point in time: “This is the scariest part of global warming, the fact that we won’t be able to undo the damage done.

“That we won’t be able to extricate Venice or New Orleans from the sea. Their disappearance will be a net loss, regardless of what mountainside civilisations will someday rise.”

“We must take very serious measures because climate is not only destroying our livelihoods, our economies, the lives of future generations. It is not only causing conflict, migration and wars. We know that populations move because of climate, destruction, desertification, loss of water resources.”

“The worst part, of course, I speak from the point of view of UNESCO and the World Heritage, is that climate will just make our common history disappear, our common memory and at the end of the day, our diverse identities.”

Do more!

This one-day event in Porto brought together world-class speakers and an audience curious to learn more about climate change. The issue still remains, how do we move from being a talk-shop to a do-shop?

In March 2019 the Porto Protocol will move into what Bridge believes is the do-phase. A two-day conference where solution providers and stakeholders from the wine industry and many others will converge into a rich exchange of ideas focussed on overcoming the future challenges of climate change.

On a hot evening at Taylor’s Port Cellars on the banks of the Douro, Adrian Bridge, says exactly what every CEO around the world should be saying: 

“The point is to do more tomorrow than you are doing today. So if you haven’t started to change your business to help mitigate climate change, it is time to start and start now! If you are already doing a lot, do more!”

This Author

Nick Breeze has been interviewing a wide range of people in both climate change and the wine industry for over a decade. He is currently part of a new initiative at wine-weather.com and writes for SecretSommelier.com and envisionation.co.uk. He can be followed on Twitter at @NickGBreeze.

Could rewilding uplands save the British countryside?

Flourishing flora and fauna, the return of wild boars and beavers, and thriving nature-based economies. Or obliterated traditional scenery and communities with the hearts ripped out of them. Rewilding certainly evokes a passionate response from either side of the argument.

“Rewilding” is the idea that ecosystems can be restored by nature taking care of itself. It seeks to reinstate natural processes and missing species, allowing them to shape landscape and habitats.

Rewilding should also give communities the opportunity to create nature-based economies, such as tourism aimed at allowing people to reconnect with nature.

Harvesting subsidies

Debates around the concept have come to the fore recently as Brexit means that the UK can shape its own agricultural policy, instead of being bound by that of the EU.

Some conservationists argue that sheep farming on upland areas is largely unprofitable, so there could be an opportunity to use these areas to restore nature and create new livelihoods that are not based on farming.

According to George Monbiot, Guardian columnist and vociferous supporter of rewildling, EU farming subsidies have left the countryside empty of both wildlife and people.

The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) pays people per hectare for the land they own, he points out, and since UK landholdings are relatively large, it is currently possible to make a living by “harvesting subsidies”.

Upland landowners look like they are farming sheep, but the actual industry is “collecting public money”, he said. The sheep then scour the hillsides, eating all the plants, leaving behind only course and wiry grass. “Sheep in this country have done more ecological damage than all the building that has ever happened,” he claimed.

Rewilding on the other hand, would drive nature-based tourism, creating more jobs and bringing in more income than traditional industries, allowing shops and schools to reopen. “We could have a totally different economy, as well as a totally different ecology,” he said.

Monbiot stressed that he did not advocate blanket rewilding, but would like to see at least ten per cent of Britain’s uplands restored in this way. He was backed by author Mark Cocker, who said: “England is the 28th most denatured country in the world. How long before we admit that this can’t go on?”

Lowland benefits better

On the other side of the debate was Rory Stewart, MP for Penrith in the Lake District, the English constituency with the largest percentage of uplands, and former environment minister. He argued that rewilding should take place in the lowlands, giving the example of Knepp in Sussex.

The owners of this farm decided to allow nature to take over in 2001. They report that the land has since seen the return of multiple species of bird, insect and mammal; cattle that self-medicated by eating hedgerows and a stable income for themselves, from running wildlife safaris, accommodation and selling beef from the cattle living wild on their land.

Rewilding should take place close to cities and populated areas because the value for natural capital and health would be greater, he said.

“Far more benefits will be produced for populations if we rewild the green belt. If we replanted trees all around London, the benefits would be extraordinary.

Polarised opinions

“Schoolchildren will be able to get out into that environment, and the air quality benefits that would follow would be astonishing. Doing it in the uplands achieves none of these benefits,” he said.

Minette Batters, president of the National Farmers’ Union, said that the UK was a farmed landscape, “whether we like it or not”. “You can’t just stand back and hand over to nature,” she said.

Audience votes taken before and after the debate revealed a drop in those supporting rewilding, from 61 percent to 52 percent, while those against rose from 13 percent to 39 percent.

The debate had certainly influenced some changes of heart, with the proportion of the audience who were undecided falling from 26 percent to nine percent.

Whether it should take place in the uplands, lowlands or nowhere at all, the debate about rewilding is certainly not going to go away.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and the former deputy editor of the environmentalist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

China opts out of UN’s aviation emissions pilot deal

China has opted-out  from the first stage of a UN programme to offset the aviation industry’s greenhouse gas emissions, in what could be a significant blow to global efforts to tackle climate change.

In 2016 delegates from 191 countries at the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) agreed a landmark deal to reduce emissions from the aviation industry.

It was reported by media at the time – and industry analysts since – that China would participate from the beginning. A cached version of the ICAO website from January this year lists China as a participant

Negotiating tactic

But now China, the world’s biggest CO2 emitter, is no longer listed among the states participating in the first voluntary phase of the deal on the ICAO’s website.

Speaking to Unearthed an ICAO spokesperson stated that: “China clarified its participation position in the ICAO Council Chamber when the CORSIA SARPs were adopted,” which took place a week ago. ICAO did not provide further comment.

Experts had long cast doubt on whether China would participate in the agreement but the move could be seen as a major set-back.

China is responsible for around 12 percent of international aviation activity and attention will now turn to whether China remains on the sidelines. Experts said the move could be a negotiating tactic.

Tim Johnson, director of the Aviation Environment Federation, told Unearthed: “It would be obviously worrying if this turns out to be a permanent decision to withdraw as China’s emissions are significant.

Carbon reduction

“But it could opt-in to the scheme at any time before it begins. Given it has had raised objections with the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) throughout the process, it seems likely that it’s seeking to keep it options open as the final negotiations take place.”

Unearthed understands that China has previously objected to the amount of influence that member states have over which environmental projects will be eligible for the credits that will be used to offset emissions. It is thought that China wants its domestic projects to be included.

It is not yet clear if China will withdraw from the later stages of the agreement or the reporting requirements that commence next year.

Aviation, like shipping, is not included in the landmark Paris Agreement, but it is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions, but when other greenhouse gases are taken into account, it could be significantly higher. If it grows as the industry predicts it will, then aviation could consume more than a quarter of the world’s carbon budget to keep temperature rise within 1.5C by 2050.

The Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) was designed to tackle this by requiring airlines to offset their emissions by funding carbon reduction projects in other sectors. From 2020, it aims to offset global aviation emissions by 80 percent until 2035.

Permitted to withdraw

Although ICAO lauded the deal as “historic” when it was agreed in 2016, key decisions have been delayed and it has been beset by criticism from environmentalists who believe offsetting is not a long-term solution and could be used to justify airport expansion.

Some experts emphasise that emissions can be cut from the aviation industry through other means.

Brad Schallert, WWF’s deputy director of international climate cooperation told Unearthed: “Sometimes industry and government communications overemphasize that CORSIA is the flagship approach that industry will use to reduce emissions.

“It’s certainly important, but it can’t be an excuse for not making other emissions reductions, such as through innovating in technology or using more sustainable fuels.”

China is legally permitted to withdraw from the first phase which begins in 2021. Currently 72 states are now signed up for this stage, covering 76 percent of international aviation activity, down from 88 percent with China’s inclusion.

It is not clear whether China will participate in the later phases from 2024 and 2027 onwards, but as the scheme is voluntary until 2027, China could rejoin at a later date.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

Ireland’s government ‘using fake data to pretend dairy emissions aren’t rising fast’

Emissions from Ireland’s rapidly expanding dairy sector have shot up in recent years, in direct conflict with government policy. But the government continues to use bunk data to assert that this is not the case.

On 26 April 2018, Minister Creed told the Dáil: “In the five-year period 2012-2016, dairy cow numbers have increased by 22 percent and corresponding milk production by 27 percent while emissions increased just 8 percent, demonstrating a level of decoupling is occurring.”

This point was amplified by one of Creed’s senior officials, Jack Nolan, at a parliamentary joint committee hearing, when he claimed: “S​ince 2015 we have increased milk output by 13.5 percent, whereas emissions have only increased by 1.6 percent. Massive efficiency gains are happening at the moment”.

‘Simply indefensible’

Junior Agriculture Minister, Andrew Doyle in December 2017 made the same point about apparent dramatic decoupling of dairy output from carbon emissions.

All these claims are refuted by data compiled by Ireland’s Environment Protection Agency (EPA). This indicates that carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from dairy rose by a massive 24 percent from 2012 to 2016,​ which closely tracks the 22 percent increase in national dairy cow numbers and a 27 percent milk production hike in the same period.

An Taisce, Ireland’s national trust, became aware of the statements being made within the parliament and wrote to Creed on May 4th last, pointing out the erroneous data and requesting that he formally correct the Dáil record.

In response, Creed admitted to An Taisce that his claim of ‘only’ eight percent emissions increases arising from a 27 percent increase in dairy output “is the growth in total agricultural emissions and reflects that while dairy numbers (and emissions) are increasing, other sub-sectors of agriculture are contracting”. It is, the minister added, “valid to consider the sector as a whole in presenting this data”.

However, An Taisce told DeSmog UK that the minister’s response was “simply indefensible”​By not correcting his statement, “it seems the minister is now willing to mislead the Dáil and the public, even when called out. This is unacceptable. We now publicly call on the minister to correct the Dáil record as a matter of urgency”.

Image removed.
Source: Ireland Environmental Protection Agency

Switched focus

The reason officials like Creed are prepared to go to such lengths to present a rosy picture of agricultural emissions is that rapid expansion of the national dairy herd is de facto  government policy, even though it flatly contradicts the Irish state’s EUand Paris Agreement obligations to slash carbon emissions.

Recent EPA projections showed that, instead of meeting its EU obligations to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020, Ireland would “at best” achieve a negligible one percent cut versus 2005 levels. Agricultural emissions, meanwhile, continue to spiral, hence the pressure on ministers to massage the figures to present a ‘good news story’ on dairy emissions.

More pressure was ratcheted on Irish government inaction with the publication earlier this month by Climate Action Network Europe of its ranking of EU countries in terms of their ambition and progress in tackling climate change. Ireland was ranked 2nd worst in the EU, only ahead of coal-dependent Poland in the rankings.

Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar is clearly uneasy at the growing reputational damage arising from what he admits is its status as a climate “laggard”. He told the European Parliament earlier this year that he was “not proud of Ireland’s performance” on climate, but domestically, the grip of the powerful agri-industrial lobby on government policy remains unshaken.

Having failed to manage emissions, it appears at least some in the Irish government have switched focus to concentrate on managing climate change messaging instead.

This Author

John Gibbons is a volunteer member of An Taisce’s climate change committee. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Can some industrial farming systems be beneficial for the environment?

The development of farming as a pillar of human civilization has been fascinating, to say the least. Agriculture might not seem like an obvious place for industrial technology to take hold, since family-owned farms still represent a commanding majority of the United States farming community. But even the smallest and most community-focused farms have a lot to gain from industrial farming systems.

Adapting some of the most cutting-edge technologies might seem impractical — and some of them represent stumbling blocks and learning curves of their own.

But despite the growing pains, it’s clear that some aspects of industrial farming can help reduce the daily labour and planning burdens faced by any farmer, no matter the size of their operation, and even help us improve our stewardship of the planet while we’re at it.

Mapping Technologies

Farmers are always under a lot of pressure to deliver the quantities of food we need at the right price. But generations of poor soil management and a lack of concern for biodiversity and crop rotation have highlighted the need to engage in modern agriculture with a different mindset. Farmers need to operate with the needs of the natural world in mind as well as our own.

Modern geographical and geospatial mapping technologies have tons of possible applications for the modern farmer. With the help of some location-aware computer programs, even more traditional farmers have better tools than ever when it comes to appraising soil structure and nutrient levels as well as current and future weather conditions and moisture levels.

Intelligent computer analysis of your surroundings yields “prescriptive” map data of all kinds, including appropriate amounts of seed, pesticide and fertilizer levels, ideal planting times and suggestions for land optimisation, including which patches of earth should get used and which should be held over until the next planting season.

Aerial Monitoring

The demand for free-range practices and other ethics-minded farming techniques means you might have cattle and livestock covering a larger area than before.

Aerial drones have emerged as a welcome ally for farmers, giving them an aerial overview of where their herds are located and delivering some needed peace of mind.

And drones can help out with a myriad other tasks around the farm complex, too, including monitoring the progress of parasite infestations, as needed, as well as general crop yields — all without the need to physically walk what might be, in some cases, many football fields’ worth of land.

Anaerobic Digesters

One of the most vitally important sustainability hurdles to clear in agriculture involves the dispossession of animal waste.

As research has shown, methane emissions from herds of cattle have a massively deleterious effect on the planet.

A decade ago, manure represented about 37 percent of all human output of methane and about 64 percent of all human output of ammonia (which contributes to acid rain). This trend will only worsen if it continues unchecked.

The anaerobic digester is one emergent farming technology that’s not really cutting-edge at all. It involves converting food and animal waste into electrical energy.

It might just revolutionise how farms of all sizes meet their energy needs, dispose of environmentally harmful waste and bring down the carbon footprint of the entire agriculture industry.

In addition to producing electricity from the resulting biogas, extreme promise has also been demonstrated by smaller-scale anaerobic digesters for farmers in New York state in producing a nutrient-rich “effluent” for use on farmland that does the same job as manure, except without the environmental concerns. Expect little downside as this technology comes of age and permeates the industry.

Growing Pains

It’s true that all of the technology we’re rolling into the agriculture industry comes at a cost. For the most part, the technologies we’ve just been discussing reduce the workload of the average farmer, helping them do themselves, or with limited field hands, the work that used to require scores of employees.

If there’s a word of caution here, it concerns the proprietary nature of some of these technological innovations. There’s also the matter of price.

Some modern, computer-aided farming machines will set a US farmer back hundreds of thousands of dollars, potentially, even as they slash the amount of labor and planning required for a successful harvest. It’s delivering efficiency and profitability that farmers likely wouldn’t have imagined just a couple decades ago.

But the cash required isn’t the only sort of buy-in required here. You’re also buying into a technology ecosystem, same as any other industry.

The computers powering your land use optimization software and your semi-autonomous tractors are proprietary technology — and when something goes wrong, you might not be able to tinker with it the way you could tractors of yesteryear.

At the same time, even when farmers find themselves somewhat dependent on dealers and manufacturers for field service and troubleshooting, these types of relationships can sometimes reduce, rather than add to, your stress levels.

It might mean leasing or renting equipment when you need it without buying outright. It also likely means some kind of included service or maintenance package.

It’s in your next-gen tractor supplier’s best interests as well as your own to keep this equipment running at peak efficiency — and that might mean regular, routine maintenance.

Including maintenance in the cost of a lease is a practical proposal, since conducting repairs after a piece of equipment has already failed might cost you 2.5 times more than preemptive maintenance would.

Community Endeavor

There’s another possibility here — one that comes in equal parts from the potential of high-tech farming equipment and from the possible difficulty of bringing that technology into the fold.

Over the next couple of decades, it’s likely that local and regional farms will engage more frequently in resource pooling, co-investment and equipment sharing than they ever have before.

It’s about sharing the burden of buy-in, but it’s also about reducing some of the duplication of effort among separate agricultural enterprises — duplication that results in waste and unnecessary expense.

Farmers are already amazing at what they do. But it’s not just about producing as much food as possible. Agriculture jobs now demand that the work is done with an eye toward the future rather than remaining fixed on the present.

With the insights that new technologies bring us, farmers be able to feed the world more effectively and keep our planet healthy at the same time.

This Author

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

Sheffield tree protectors have changed the nation’s view of street trees

In Sheffield Town Hall, there’s a plaque commemorating the Kinder Trespass – a local action that led to a major national change in the people’s access to land.

The city was also the location of the nation’s first suffrage society – beginning the campaign that would take the first crucial steps towards women being recognised as equal citizens with men.

But I’m sure that the Save Sheffield Trees campaigners weren’t thinking so big when they started, years ago now, to protest, and then stop – sometimes with their bodies and at risk to their liberty –  the felling of thousands  of healthy street trees.

Farcical attempts

They were thinking about the health impacts on the people of their city, about the loss of personal and community history (particularly but not only with the war memorial trees), about the loss of refuges for nature – and about the unique, wonderful character of many of the threatened trees.

They started with the local and now news of their actions has spread around, fuelled by the dictatorial ineptitude of Sheffield Council and its multinational contractor Amey (notably the now infamous 5am Rustlings Road raid).

And they have become the focus, the impetus, and sometimes the inspiration, for campaigners around the nation and beyond to identify the problem of the felling of healthy street trees in their communities, often for narrow financial savings for councils and contractors, to the great cost of the rest of us.

A Sheffield street tree, the Chelsea Road elm, finished second in a national Tree of the Year competition on the BBC.

As I’ve charted the increasingly farcical attempts of Amey and Sheffield Council to destroy the public good in the city in the interest of private profit, I’ve had people from around the country getting in contact to say “the same is happening to street and park trees in my community – what can I do?”

Stepped up

They’ve been excited to see the publicity the issue has got in Sheffield and wondered how they can get the same.

That’s not easy – the passion with which the Labour council has lined up behind its multinational contractor and sought to victimise the tree protectors, including a Green councillor elected on a manifesto of supporting residents protecting the trees, is unlikely to be replicated anywhere.

And the cost to the protectors in stress (the threat of prison and swingeing fines), time and energy, is not something you’d wish on anyone. But the impacts of the conflict in South Yorkshire have been felt far beyond the city.

It has clearly been a driving force for national non-government organisations – notably Trees for Cities and the Woodland Trust – to really step up their efforts to chart the beneficial impacts of street trees and campaign for their retention.

And even charities that haven’t necessarily been known for their campaigning sides, from the Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust to Butterfly Conservation, have stepped up to the plate to defend the city’s trees.

Tree tsar

And its has inspired new campaign groups around the nation – one that I’ve noticed being particularly active is South Tyneside Tree Action Group, but there are many more.

In Bristol, a similar campaign started in 2006 has taken a different path, with the council being far more cooperative and prepared to learn from civil society.

In the way of the media, the innovative, world-leading  tree strategy that has emerged has got less media attention than the conflict in Sheffield, but it forms an important balance to it, showing what is possible.

The Sheffield case has galvanised the national media to look beyond South Yorkshire. The Sunday Times ran a huge piece including a league table of councils around the country and their record on street trees.

Michael Gove, seeing a groundswell when it rolled towards him, has even appointed a “tsar” with responsibility to protect street trees.

Legal expenses

The personal cost to campaigners in Sheffield has been high, but one of the rewards is to see a new national awareness of the value of street trees to human wellbeing, and new structures, institutions and practices, growing up to protect them.

In Sheffield we’ve lost thousands of healthy street trees, which cannot be replaced – and the council, despite slightly softer rhetoric, is showing no sign of getting the value of street trees. But the rest of the nation is.

We’re better off as a result. And Sheffield will have to catch up eventually – and there could even be a plaque in the town hall, beside the Kinder Trespass one, commemorating their efforts.

But in the meantime, again this week peaceful protectors are being taken to court by the council, which is trying to extend the injunction against them for a further three years.

If you’re grateful to what they’ve done please extend them a helping hand if you can. Legal expenses just keep adding up.

This Author

Natalie Bennett is a member of Sheffield Green Party and former Green Party leader.

India’s enormous solar power plan: is it for real?

Last week, in an almost offhand remark, India power minister RK Singh said the country would hold a colossal 100GW solar tender in the near future.  

Anyone familiar with Indian politics was likely skeptical — and for good reason.

Grandiose promises with no detail or follow through are par for the course, particularly when elections loom, as they do next year.

So is this just another great sounding target, like India’s 2030 EV announcement in 2017, with nothing concrete to back it up?

Update: Yeah, the solar super tender probably isn’t happening. That’s what Singh reportedly told journalist Twesh Mishra shortly after the event at which he made the announcement.

What first seemed like a casual commitment of the kind Indian politicians are prone to, was later echoed by the secretary of the ministry of new and renewable energy at an event in Germany, suggesting there could be something actually happening behind the scenes.

But still… 100GW?

To give you a sense of scale: 100GW is 4x the size of the Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world. It’s nearly twice the amount of solar power China installed last year (an all time record). It’s even slightly more than the UK’s total installed electricity capacity (fossil and renewable).

And that’s all in one go.

What is a solar tender?

Essentially it’s an invitation for parties to submit bids to develop solar power projects, with a maximum of 100GW available in this case. Interested installers will submit bids for chunks of the 100GW, likely with a ceiling tariff and the most competitive bids will be selected.

India already has a huge 10GW tender due next month, bigger than any tender they’ve done previously.

India’s solar PV installations have been growing rapidly since 2016 – the country now has about 25W of cumulative solar capacity installed, with utility solar installations growing 72% year-on-year between April 2017 and March 2018. 

The government could be making a splashy statement without doing its policy homework, as it did with its 2030 EV announcement

In that period, renewable energy generation accounted for about 33% of the growth in generation, as new coal installations plummeted and plant load factors for coal hovered around 60%.

There is another 10GW of solar that is under construction, and the government seems confident about exceeding the country’s Paris Agreement solar pledge (100GW by 2022), though industry is slightly more guarded. Rooftop solar in particular (which is supposed to account for 40GW of the 100GW 2022 target) is moving very slowly, with just 2.4 GW installed as of March 2018.

Chinese panels

So far there are no details about said 100 GW tender — over what timeframe, what local manufacturing or solar storage conditions etc. But a few other developments in the solar universe might be relevant.

In early June, China put the brakes on its solar installation industry, leading analysts to predict a glut and price drop in solar modules and components that would benefit installing countries, including India.

In mid-June, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that Softbank had decided to invest $60-100 billion in the Indian solar generation business. Softbank refused comment, but the company has already made forays into solar PV component manufacturing in India. Singh’s 100GW remark explicitly mentioned storage and manufacturing as part of the tender. Coincidence? Perhaps.

So perhaps, this month’s developments have prompted India to double down on its solar programme, looking to capitalize on the Chinese glut to attract Chinese manufacturing capacity to India? India has been trying (and failing) to boost its domestic solar manufacturing industry.  

Tim Buckley of IEEFA said: “Hopefully the 100GW tender won’t be all for 12-18 months delivery, maybe it will involve a year-long preparation and then be for a staggered delivery over say 5 years, so permanent supply chain logistics can be put in place. An emphasis on battery storage and local module supply manufacturing would be sensible add-on initiatives to get maximum ‘Made in India’ impact.”

Overpromise?

That’s the positive scenario. The contrarian view would be that the government is again making for a splashy statement without doing its policy homework, as was clearly the case with the 2030 EV announcement.

After the initial hype created by that announcement, the government has tried to play down the target, refused to acknowledge the need for an EV policy and has had to slow down its procurement of EVs for government use in order to get state governments on board.

After all, things aren’t all hunky dory for the Indian solar industry at the moment. The threat of import duties on Chinese panels still looms large, and the confused roll out of the new Goods and Services tax regime has impacted developers.

In the commercial rooftop segment, distribution companies have not been cooperating fearing the loss of high paying customers, and in the residential rooftop segment, there is a lot of red tape to negotiate to take advantage of the capital subsidies on offer. Shouldn’t these speed bumps be evened out first?

Mega projects

100GW of utility-scale solar would require a lot of land (2000 sq. km., assuming  5 acres/MW), always at a premium in one of the world’s most densely populated countries.

India’s bureaucracy and politicians are famous for being enamoured of ‘mega’ projects — ten years ago it was mega (and then ultra-mega) coal plants and mega dam projects. Now it is mega solar projects.

The true beauty of solar is its scalability and versatility. To neglect rooftop and decentralized solar to focus on huge utility projects could harm the industry in the long run.

Utility scale solar has an important role to play, but due to its land requirements sensible siting policies and obtaining consent from and incentivizing local communities are important — not just from a social justice perspective, but to ensure that the project is ultimately successful and adheres to timelines. We have the example of coal’s troubles with local communities to show us how badly things can go wrong.

These challenges are easily side-stepped through mechanisms that involve community members, allow for multi-purpose use of the land beneath panels etc.

A 100 GW tender that incentivizes local manufacturing and storage and takes measures to avert land conflict through community benefit sharing would truly be a game changer for India. It would also be the equivalent of India throwing down the gauntlet to other countries and staking its claim to succeed China as the driver of the next phase of the clean energy revolution.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

Rethinking community organising

“There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal.”  Murray Bookchin, Forms of Freedom.

The term “community organising” has become such a part of the modern political landscape on the left that it is easy to forget that it has a relatively recent history and a specific origin.

Indeed, it has become the default term to describe all manner of movement-building and activism on the left. Especially as progressive young people flocked to the profession since Barack Obama popularised it a decade ago. 

It originally referred to a very specific model, however – one that remains heavily influential today.

Handbooks for organisers

The modern community organising tradition in the United States can largely be traced back to a single person. Saul Alinsky started out organizing in 1930s Chicago in the Back of the Yard neighborhood, an area known for the horrific working conditions of the Union Stock Yard described in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle.

Over the next several decades of work, he developed a model called congregation-based or institution-based community organising, which involves professional organisers working through existing faith and community institutions to build power and win issues in a community.

Alinsky’s impact on modern organising is hard to overstate. He founded the Industrial Areas Foundation, a community organising network and training organisation that exists in cities across the US to this day.

Mentees of Alinsky’s and trainees who passed through the IAF went on to found the other three major community organising networks in the country: DART, Gamaliel, and Faith in Action (formerly PICO) – as well as countless affiliated and non-affiliated local groups.

Alinsky’s books Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971) have long been the go-to handbooks for organisers.

The philosophy laid out therein, along with other training materials and exercises Alinsky developed, has influenced generations of community activists and is still taught in many organising trainings today.

Given the breadth of impact and continued precedence of Alinskyist organising, it is worth critically examining some of its basic tenets and their limitations.

Organiser as outsider—the need to de-professionalise organising

One fiercely debated concept is who counts as an ‘organiser’. The Alinskyist model imagines the typical community organiser as a necessarily an outsider, someone who can view a community’s problems with critical distance without the baggage and bias of those who belong it.

The organiser, for Alinsky, is a removed professional who should be able to organise anywhere and whose focus is to develop and build power for others, in a role he sometimes referred to as that of creator or god.

The people whom the organiser seeks to develop in the community are called ‘leaders’, and are interested in building power for themselves and improving their community’s situation.

Thorough critiques of this model already exist, but suffice it to say that it creates a strange dynamic where often white, often better-educated, often better-resourced, often younger people are going into communities they’re not from and getting paid to organise the people in those communities, who are then expected to become trained in organising themselves and shoulder a lot of the work. 

Except they’re called ‘leaders’, never ‘organisers’, and are not employed by the network.

Think twice

Simply because the practice has been criticised does not mean that it has ceased, especially in the years since community organising took off among leftist millennial college grads looking for meaningful work.

I should know: I was one of them.

I attended the week-long initiation training for one of the big four national networks with a large group of both organisers and leaders a few years ago, and I remember someone asking our trainer what the difference was between the two roles. “The only difference,” our trainer joked, “is that one of them gets paid.”

I’m not arguing, as some on the left do, that you can or should organise only in your own community: such arguments verge on nativist, segregationist thinking that can easily turn into the kind of dark municipalism we discussed in our last piece.

I am arguing, however, that we should think twice about who gets paid to organise as a profession and how we move towards a system that is structured differently.

Limitations and lack of existing institutions

Alinskyist organising is called institution-based or congregation-based community organising because it is designed around organising within existing institutions, usually faith-based ones.

Alinsky and later organisers in his tradition insist on the value of institutions, and I agree.

We need structures through which we can be intentional about how labour and power is shared, through which we can hold one another accountable, and through which we can create lasting alternatives to the domineering institutions that presently govern our lives.

Alinsky insists on organising only through existing institutions, however. The rationale is that congregations and community institutions are already organized—they have an internal structure, division of labor, a gathering place, buy-in from the community—and so they are much easier to move into action on an issue than starting from scratch.

There are two significant problems with this approach, one which has always been present and one which has increasingly become an obstacle in more recent decades.

Morally flexible

The first issue with working through existing institutions is that the institutions in question often have some very questionable values.

Misogyny, homophobia, classism, and racism are ingrained in the history and fabric of many faith traditions, and especially the first two are still formally written into many faith doctrines to this day (as is classism, if you count prosperity gospel traditions).

Even more deeply, such institutions are often built around extremely rigid hierarchies that are antithetical to the construction of a free, equal, and democratic society.

It doesn’t help that the Alinskyist model brings no shared set of values or educational framework of its own to the table to help people question some of these deeply ingrained assumptions.

The model is issue-based, and Alinsky famously advocated being apolitical and willing to be morally flexible on almost any question if it helped win the issue at hand.

Reproductive rights

This perspective is part of a core training point in Alinskyist organising – ”the world as it is” versus “the world as it should be.”

It’s framed as pragmatism: we don’t live in the world as it should be, we live in the real world, and we have to act according to those rules to get what we want.

At training, this was always explained as a necessary strategy in order to achieve the world as it should be, but I frequently found myself looking around and wondering what that “world as it should be” would look like absent a shared set of values or a means to grow past our various blind spots.

Such “pragmatism” also constricts what is politically possible, as it means you end up working off of the lowest common denominator between competing ideologies for fear of alienating member institutions.

We couldn’t co-sponsor anything to do with gender or reproductive rights, much less work on the issues ourselves, and I was told in no uncertain terms not to bring up the question of gay marriage or Israel-Palestine with certain pastors.

Crumbling institutions 

To return to the question of institutions, this doesn’t mean that I think these institutions are beyond repair or that I’m advocating abandoning them altogether.

I am a practicing Catholic who has remained so because from a personal standpoint, I still find beauty and community in elements of my tradition, and I believe in the possibility of redemption and transformation.

Faith is an incredibly powerful motivator and unifier, and faith traditions certainly have a place in a vibrant public sphere – but even the most progressive and open faith tradition should not itself constitute the public sphere.

From an organising standpoint, we have to ask ourselves if these types of institutions are capable of laying the groundwork—much less becoming the central foundation—for a radically different, systemically transformed society.  

The more recent and increasingly prevalent problem with organising through existing institutions is that those institutions are crumbling.

Abandoned buildings

I was employed as a community organiser in Detroit, where I still live and organise (though now in my own neighborhood and not for pay).

The effects of neoliberalism are most visible in the negative, in the absences and gaping holes it leaves in our communities.

Detroit, like many Rust Belt cities, is a place where such absence takes a very literal form.

Austerity measures and economic pressures have forced public parks, recreation centers, public schools, and community businesses to close, while foreclosures have forced many residents out of their homes.

Overgrown lots and abandoned buildings take the place of once-vibrant community institutions, and once-active block clubs are either shadows of their former selves or no longer exist at all.

Transformational vehicle

In downtown Detroit and in other American cities that are wealthier and more gentrified, meanwhile, the destruction of public space takes a different form with the privatisation of every public space from parks to schools to plazas.

The main plaza in downtown Detroit where all the city avenues meet is now Quicken Loans plaza, patrolled by private security guards who waste no time telling protestors and loiterers to leave.

Where community and faith institutions still exist, their membership is on the decline. Church participation is waning among younger generations, even in Detroit where it’s still more a part of life than in many other cities, and severe economic pressures on the working poor mean that free time to participate in any kind of community is scarce.

Other factors we’ve touched on in earlier articles —suburbanisation, car culture, the atomisation of society—play a role as well.

So if these institutions don’t exist like they used to and are not suited to being the kind of transformational vehicle we need, how are we supposed to radically transform society?

Working through the existing political system is insufficient

This brings me to the next limitation of Alinskyist organising, the element perhaps most often critiqued on the left: radical transformation is not really the goal.

Capitalism gets a wide variety of treatments in modern training depending on the individual trainer, but a coherent critique that demands its replacement altogether is largely absent.

Much of Alinsky’s and his followers’ writings display an obsession with Athenian democracy and with the American founding fathers: representative democracy and the US political system is often portrayed as an essentially unproblematic system that has simply been corrupted and must be restored by making its people into active citizens again.

‘Winning’ is framed as getting elected representatives to acquiesce to your demands, rather than changing the way our political and economic systems are structured.

The short-sighted focus on picking only concrete and winnable issues means never getting at underlying systemic problems that require longer campaigns or that cannot be solved at all within the constraints of the current system.

Immediate needs

At its core, the institution-based community organising model rests on extracting concessions from the system as it is—but the system as it is is fundamentally broken.

There is no sustainable future under capitalism and no mechanism to stop the ravages of capitalism under representative democracy. If we’re going to stop the crises of our time, we need to move in a different direction altogether.

Of course, even if our goal is total structural transformation, we still have the need for oppositional politics in the meantime. We have to survive long enough to make it to the revolution, and we have to create space within the current system for alternatives to breathe and grow.

But if oppositional politics can best be accomplished by organising through institutions, and those institutions are either defunct or not suited to transformational politics, then even just extracting wins from the current system requires building new institutions.

All of this means that our energies as organisers are better suited toward building genuine alternatives. By building community-based, grassroots institutions, we can simultaneously prefigure the kind of society we’re working towards and meet immediate needs in the here and now.

Alinsky’s legacy

We’ve written about what these institutions might look like here and here. Constructing grassroots democratic institutions of our own allows us to simultaneously engage in survival politics in the short term and lay the groundwork for a different type of society in the long term.

We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater; we can use some of the tools Alinsky contributed to build these new institutions.

The concept of the one-on-one, a conversation between organiser and community member designed to build a relationship and unearth the community member’s motivations and stake in the work, remains a valuable organising tool.

So too do some of Alinsky’s other contributions — the importance of communicating using language and analogies that make sense for the audience and context, for example, and using humor and ridicule in actions against political opponents.

Modern organisers are indebted to Alinsky’s legacy in many dimensions. But his model must be transcended if we are going to build a radically transformed, just, and free democratic society together.

These Authors

The Symbiosis Research Collective is a network of organisers and activist-researchers across North America, assembling a confederation of community organisations 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. Twitter: @SymbiosisRev

This article was written by Katie Horvath (@katesville7).