Last week, three environmental activists became the first people to be sent to jail for protesting against fracking. Their crime? Boarding some lorries heading for a nearby frack pad in Lancashire.

The sentencing represented a step-change in the battle between the local community and the fracking company, Cuadrilla Resources, which has been getting gradually more fraught over the past two years.

It also fits with a worrying trend of criminalising environmental protest in western democracies – from police violence against the Sioux at Standing Rock protesting against the Dakota Access pipeline in the US, to the forcible removal of anti-coal protestors from the Hambacher forest in Germany, and private security firms undertaking deep Facebook surveillance of fracking protestors in the UK.

Environmental protest

Given the stakes, how many mainstream journalists do you think were at the Lancashire fracking site the day of the now infamous action, which came in the middle of a month-long effort to draw attention to the plight of the people of Little Plumpton? None. Not one.

Fortunately, the media outlet I edit, DeSmog UK, and a handful of other independent journalists, were on hand to document, record, and photograph it all. Without these smaller, independent, outlets (and platforms like The Ecologist willing to publish the material), we wouldn’t have a record of the day protesting against fracking became a jailable offence in the UK.

It is illustrative of a broader problem facing environmental journalism in the UK and elsewhere that the burden for documenting this fell on those who often do their work for little money – or sometimes no pay at all.

How many times have you read a story about an environmental protest that seems to go out of its way to find the next Swampy, and then puts their quote next to a polished press release from a fracking or oil and gas company?

These articles, often from good journalists bound to their desks by circumstance, make it seem like it’s always just Greenpeace versus a legitimate business. In my experience, that is almost never the real story.

Trained professionals

Quality journalism on the UK’s vibrant activist scene requires sending reporters into the field to meet and get to know real local people with genuine concerns. Concerns that often get lost in mainstream news coverage.

And that’s exactly what DeSmog UK does. We’ve reported from the frontlines of some of the UK’s most significant fossil fuel resistances – from mine shutdowns, to anti-fracking protests, and coal extraction resistances.

It’s not ‘us’ versus ‘them’; independent media and the mainstream press can function as part of a happy reporting ecosystem. But we’ve found that when independent media is at the vanguard, giving activist voices a platform, the mainstream press is more comfortable at approaching and including them – and subsequently painting a more accurate picture of local concerns around fossil fuel extraction.

But embedding a reporter even for a few days is expensive – DeSmog UK’s most recent reports cost around £1,000 to produce. And communities across the UK are facing more of these threats than ever, whether it’s Cuadrilla Resources in Lancashire, INEOS in Scotland, or UK Oil and Gas in Sussex and Surrey.

Our reporters are not activists, but they understand activism. They are also trained professionals, and deserve to get paid.

With your help, we can send more reporters to more locations to do more reporting. In the process, we can act as a counterweight to media narratives that paint activists as outsiders – telling the real story of local people deeply concerned about the impact fossil fuel extraction has on their community.

This Author

Mat Hope is editor of DeSmog UK. The news website is crowdfunding on Indiegogo. Please donate what you can to keep their journalists reporting from the frontline of environmental activism.

On Tuesday 25 July 2017, four protestors stopped a convoy of lorries going to a fracking site in Lancashire. This week, three of the activists were sentenced to custodial sentences.

Residents of Little Plumpton have been fighting Cuadrilla Resources’ plans for years. What started as a handful of local residents bemused that a new fossil fuel industry was about to start in their village escalated into a resistance of national symbolic importance. 

Today’s ruling represents a trend of escalation between environmental protestors and the police — from mass arrests of Dakota Access pipeline protestors in the US, to UK police abusing their powers when going undercover in environmental movements, and mass online surveillance of fracking activists via Facebook.

Read DeSmog UK’s coverage of the Preston New Road fracking protests:

• How 25 Metres of Country Road Became England’s Fracking Frontline
• Revisiting the Resistance on England’s Fracking Frontline
• Fracking Month of Action Unites Local and National Campaigners in Lancashire

Rich Loizou, Simon Roscoe Blevins, and Richard Roberts all spent between two and four days on top of the lorries that were making their way to the Preston New Road fracking site.

All three were found guilty of a public nuisance offence by a jury on 22 August 2018. A fourth protestor, Julian Brock, pleaded guilty at a separate hearing so did not face trial. 

Breaking through a police convoy accompanying the lorries, they managed to climb on top vehicles as they passed the local anti-fracking camp at Maple Farm.

Blevins and Roberts were sentenced to 16 months, while Loizou was jailed for 15 months. They are to serve half of their sentences in jail, with the remainder on license. Brock, who pleaded guilty, received a 12 month suspended sentence. 

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

In October 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its landmark 1.5 degrees report. It’s likely to simultaneously communicate the terrible dangers and impacts of letting average global temperature rise exceed 1.5 degrees, while warning that drastic systemic change on a scale never seen before will be needed to prevent these temperature rises.

In the same year the term ‘Hothouse Earth’ first came into use – a dire prediction by some scientists that even if temperatures are stabilized at 2 degrees (the Paris Agreement commitments could mean up to 4 degrees of warming) there may already be so much warming in the system that irreversible tipping points could be crossed.

Forests, permafrost and oceans, which typically store carbon and methane, could suddenly release them, driving further temperature and sea level rises. This would make parts of the Earth uninhabitable – a terrifying prospect.

Planetary emergency

We are in a planetary emergency. We must rise up. We must play our part in seeking to stop climate change and bring about transformation. The challenge is so huge that it requires nothing less than system change – a radical overhaul of our energy, food, political and economic systems.

We have seen what action around the edges of our current political and economic system has achieved – and it is not enough. It has allowed runaway climate change, inequality and hunger. It has allowed false solutions like carbon offsets and REDD monoculture plantations to steal land from people while not reducing emissions. We need people power to push for system change.

Governments are influenced by intense lobbying by the powerful Dirty Energy industry, which fears threats to its profits. Fossil fuels, including oil, coal and gas, are the primary cause of global warming.

Even now, when we know so much about the dangers of climate change, more than 1,600 new coal plants are planned or under development in 62 countries. Some countries are even looking to expand into coal for the first time. The quantity of new conventional gas infrastructure Europe is planning is also staggering—it’s heading for a 58 percent increase in EU gas import capacity. Coal, gas and other fossil fuel technologies, including oil, fracking, tar sands and unconventional coal technologies, should be dead. 

Yet the exploration and exploitation of fossil fuels continues at a relentless pace. Indonesia, one of the world’s largest coal exporters, is plagued by the detrimental effects of coal and communities in Indonesia are uniting to stop coal mining. Bangladesh is also at risk, and the World Heritage Sundarbans area could be blighted by a coal plant.

Dirty energy

The fossil fuel industry is wrongly promoting gas as a ‘transition fuel’ solution. As a result communities in Northern Mozambique have seen a dash for gas which is, according to Friends of the Earth Mozambique, already “leaving entire communities landless, with no livelihood, and insufficient resettlement and compensation, if any. Many miles of pristine beaches will be irreversibly destroyed. Unique ecosystems such as mangroves and endangered species of sea life and ocean flora will be put at great risk of complete destruction.”

And oil and unconventional fossil fuels like tar sands also continue to wreak havoc on our climate and the environment. There is danger of a new tar sands frontier opening up in Nigeria, a country already devastated by oil companies who continue to abuse the people and environment with no sign of cleaning up. Togo is threatened with exploitation of offshore oil, as well, which would have dire impacts. Fracking (the extraction of oil or gas by fracturing underground shale rock) is a reality, or is threatened, in Argentina, Colombia, South Africa and the UK, even though some other governments have completely banned it.

Non-fossil fuel forms of Dirty Energy that need to go include nuclear power and large-scale hydropower, which have devastating impacts on people and the environment. Nuclear is dangerous. Despite this around 30 countries are considering, planning or starting nuclear power programs, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Ghana, Nigeria, Paraguay and Chile. 

Large scale hydro projects also fall under the Dirty Energy category. They frequently result in land grabbing, diverted rivers, and the undermining of water and food sovereignty. The impact of hydroelectric dams on climate change has also been underestimated – rotting vegetation in dam waters emit around a billion tonnes of greenhouse gases every year. I

n 2015, 57,000 large dams choked more than half the world’s major rivers. These projects also cost lives. In 2016 Berta Caceres was murdered for opposing the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras. In 2017 Berta Zúñiga was attacked for continuing her mother’s work. Madre Tierra/Friends of the Earth Honduras works alongside communities to resist large scale hydro projects.

Dangerous technologies

The influence of the Dirty Energy industry is backed by right-wing regimes, which deny climate change and promote fossil fuels while closing down political debate and restricting activists’ freedom to mobilize.

Friends of the Earth groups around the world are fighting Dirty Energy projects alongside communities. And we are tackling the influence of corporations who continue to push dirty energy – as an example of this Friends of the Earth Netherlands is taking Shell to court to stop its climate wrecking activities. This historic case could set a powerful legal precedent: if we win, one of the world’s biggest polluters will be stopped in their tracks.

Dirty Energy has been encouraging ‘climate deniers’ where it can, but promoting risky and potentially unworkable false solutions to climate change that offer alternative profit-making opportunities where it can’t. 

These ‘false solutions’ — untested, profit-driven techno-fixes — are dangerous distractions that risk diverting us from real solutions when there is no time left to waste. But governments and others are being seduced by the prospect of an easy-fix. The IPCC report will include 1.5 degree ‘pathways’ that assume the use of risky, unproven technologies that claim to suck carbon out of the atmosphere—such as Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).

Friends of the Earth International says no to these dangerous technologies and mechanisms. We can and must solve the climate crisis without creating new environmental catastrophes. There are pathways that can lead to a 1.5 degree future without reliance on BECCS and Dirty Energy, but these require enormous and radical change right now.

Community energy

The IPCC itself comes close to recognizing that the pace of change needed for a future below 1.5 degrees is nothing less than radical system change.

We need to usher in a new people-led energy system that works for everybody. Tackling climate change now, in a fair and just way, will enable us to avert catastrophe, at the same time as creating a better quality of life for everyone, in harmony with nature.

Communities around the world are already implementing solutions that challenge the system and bring us closer to the model of sustainable societies that we need. Friends of the Earth International communities, in Scotland, Denmark, Palestine and Ireland, are controlling their own energy generation, looking to clean sources such as wind and solar, and promoting their independence and economic well-being at the same time.

Governments in Scotland, Ireland and Victoria, Australia, joined those in France, Bulgaria and parts of the United States and Canada, with outright bans on fracking, in response to people power.

A real, fair and viable future, based on decentralized, people-centred community energy, and involving practices such as agroecology and community forest management, could and should become the new norm. Such alternatives must be scaled up, strengthened and replicated so that they are accessible to everyone, so that they benefit everyone, and so that they are commensurate with demand.

People power 

We need to act now, with justice, to ensure that developed countries are held to account for climate change. Just 10 percent of the world’s population are responsible for 50 percent of emissions, whilst the poorest 50 percent are responsible for only 10 percent. The rich must make the deepest emission cuts rapidly, and pay for emissions reductions and sustainable development in the global South.

It is deeply unfair that we risk exceeding 1.5 degrees and crossing tipping points—into irreversible climate change—because of longstanding inaction by the global North, which has benefited most from the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels that caused the climate crisis in the first place.

A safe and just pathway demands a radical and immediate shift away from fossil fuels everywhere and a huge flow of finance from the global North to the global South to fund the transition. 

Friends of the Earth International believes that only radical system change offers a pathway towards hope and out of despair. We need to — and can — transform our energy, food and economic systems to prevent temperature rises exceeding 1.5 degrees, and fend off climate catastrophe. But only if we do it now.

The global North must reduce its emissions to zero as soon as possible, while ensuring a Just Transition for workers and communities. The global North must cease all new fossil fuel projects, rapidly phase out existing reliance on fossil fuels, and stop funding fossil fuel extraction in the global South.

Energy revolution

The global South must forge clean, sustainable futures — free from the corporate control and Dirty Energy infrastructure that bring local pollution, land grabbing and human rights abuses, in addition to climate change. 

To win this climate justice fight we need to act together

We, the people, must oppose Dirty Energy, case by case, battle by battle, using all the tools and tactics at our disposal. We need to find innovative ways to defeat Dirty Energy. We need to connect the dots for a comprehensive fight, connect the fossil fuel headquarters with their operations and their financial backers.

People power is a powerful tool. This has been proven time and time again; in fracking bans in Victoria state, Australia, New York state, states across America, Ireland, France, Scotland, Bulgaria and provinces in Canada.

We need to act globally to support and protect people whose resistance is met with repression. We must usher in an energy revolution; just, sustainable, climate-safe energy for all. This transition must happen fairly. No country can be excluded or disadvantaged because they have not exploited their fossil fuels.

All over the world, the climate crisis is deepening. We must act now. The fight against #DirtyEnergy is growing, and calls for an energy transformation are getting louder. But time is short. Join Friends of the Earth International 6-13 October for our global Week of Action. Together we can fight the climate emergency.

This Author 

Sara Shaw is Friends of the Earth International’s Climate Justice and Energy program coordinator. Sara has worked on land grabs, as a lawer for refugees in the UK ad for a human rights NGO in Mexico City. This article was first published by Friends of the Earth. 

The think tank behind the pro-US free trade plan launched this week by leading Brexiteers went on a “lucrative” American tour to raise money for its Brexit work.

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and its trade policy chief, Shanker Singham, launched the “Plan A+” report in London on Monday with the backing of Boris Johnson and David Davis, as well as the European Research Group, an influential faction of Eurosceptic MPs led by Jacob Rees-Mogg.

An Unearthed investigation this summer revealed that IEA boss Mark Littlewood had been on what he described as a “lucrative” US tour in February to raise funds for the IEA’s new trade policy unit.

Donors’ privacy

The investigation also showed the IEA offering to broker access to senior ministers for an undercover reporter posing as representative of US agribusiness investors. IEA director Mark Littlewood said the think tank, which is registered as an educational charity, was in the “Brexit influencing game”.

The high-profile Plan A report has been widely touted as the arch-Brexiteers’ alternative to Theresa May’s Chequers plan. It calls for the UK to move away from the EU’s strict regulations to “capture the Brexit Prize” and strike free-trade deals with other countries, particularly the US.

This could see the UK forced to loosen environmental standards and accept controversial products such as chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-treated beef.

Sticking to EU rules for agri-food, as the Chequers plan demands, “means that the UK is severely constrained in its ability to change rules in the area of goods and agri-food, as well as in certain horizontal areas such as labour, and the environment,” the IEA report says.

An IEA spokeswoman declined to reveal who had funded the report, saying: “We respect the privacy of our donors and do not place a list of them in the public domain.”

She added that IEA reports are independent of their funders, saying: “We make independent editorial decisions and then seek funding. Any received funding does not, under any circumstances, influence the conclusions of reports and our rigorous peer-review process means we are confident that our output is independent and free from conflict of interest.”

However in a meeting at the IEA’s offices in June, Littlewood told an undercover reporter that if they sponsored a report on “green Brexit” for £42,500, they would be able to influence the “content” and “salience” of issues that were relevant to their business.

US fundraising

Littlewood sought funding for the IEA’s trade policy unit, which wrote the Plan A+ report, during a tour of the US in February. He later said he had visited various US think tanks explaining the benefits of a US-UK free trade deal “and almost saying to them, you know, I don’t think you guys have realised how big this opportunity is yet.”

The trip, which he later described as “lucrative”, included stops at conservative think tanks with links to “dark money” donors such as the Koch brothers, the reclusive oil and gas billionaires who have pumped millions of dollars into climate scepticism and other libertarian causes.

The IEA has an established US fundraising arm, American Friends of the IEA, which since 2010 has funnelled more than $500,000 donated in the US to support the UK think tank’s work, according to OpenDemocracy. During his US tour, Littlewood invited donations to the organisation.

In a speech at an event in Florida, Littlewood called for the UK to join Nafta – the free trade deal between the US, Canada, and Mexico – saying the idea had support from senior Cabinet figures.

At a Manhattan event hosted by the Atlas Network, which acts as an umbrella group for right-wing think tanks around the world, he described Brexit as an opportunity to “shred” EU regulations.

Koch brothers

At a meeting in Florida, he issued a “plea” for donations, adding: “I’m looking to establish in the next few weeks over in London a trade unit at the Institute for Economic Affairs that will have as its top priority pushing for US-UK free trade,” he said.

The following month, Shanker Singham, who has been nicknamed “Brexiteers’ brain”, left the Legatum Institute and joined the IEA.

Littlewood’s tour included a private fundraising breakfast with agriculture and energy tycoons in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The breakfast was organised by Michael Carnuccio, chair of the E Foundation, a pro-business Oklahoma think tank.

“We got a bunch of money people around the table, Mark did the speech… and we talked about what was possible,” Carnuccio told Unearthed’s undercover reporter. He added: “Some of them were ag [agriculture] guys… and some of them were in oil and gas, and then two of them were just big donors to this cause, freedom, free markets, capitalists,” he said.

Carnuccio said the E Foundation’s supporters had committed to donating $35,000 to the American Friends of the IEA.

Elsewhere on the tour, Littlewood was hosted by the Illinois Policy Institute, a think tank that ProPublica reports has received funding from conservative donors including the Koch brothers and the Mercer family. Greenpeace USA recorded $113,000 in donations to the institute from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2015-16.

The IEA boss was also hosted by the Mackinac Center, a Michigan-based think tank that has received millions of dollars from the Donors Capital Fund, which aims to provide anonymity for donors, as well as donations from libertarian foundations including those linked to the Koch, DeVos, Bradley and Scaife families, according to DeSmog.

The IEA’s spokeswoman told Unearthed it does not usually comment on the funding of other think tanks.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

The range of measures used to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) needs to be widened, with more focus on how we operate as a society such as eating meat, a study has concluded.

The research, by the European Climate Foundation and Climact, a climate and energy consultancy, stated that to be on a trajectory to net-zero by 2050, GHG emissions in Europe will need to be reduced by between 55 to 65 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2030.

This means a significant increase in ambition from the current EU 2030 target of 40 percent. The next 10 years are therefore critical, it said.

Trickle-down effect

Commercially-available solutions can already take Eurrope about 75 percent of the way to net-zero if deployed at scale, it said. The remaining 25 percent can be achieved based on known approaches and techniques for which further scaling up and commercialisation is needed. 

The researchers recommended more focus on how we operate as a society, for example, the introduction of circular economy principles so that products are designed to last longer, which can have major trickle-down effects on the entire value chain.

Meat consumption must be reduced by 25 percent (and at least halved by 2050) by 2030, without increasing consumption of dairy products, it stated.

Julien Pestiaux, partner at Climact, said: “What has really struck us during our research is how attainable the transition to zero emissions is: most of the tools we need are already available across all sectors, and using them will redirect the huge financial flows spent on fossil fuels back in to the European economy.”

The benefits of the transition “massively outweigh” the additional investments needed, particularly given that consumers are starting to understand circular economy principles, for example in relation to plastics, he added.

As reported by The Ecologist this week, the Labour party has committed to the target for UK emissions to be slashed to “net zero” by the middle of the century, boosting ambition from the current 80 percent set in the Climate Change Act, if they come to power.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She was formerly the deputy editor of the Environmentalist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

For twelve hours thirty Greenpeace volunteers occupied a palm oil refinery belonging to Wilmar International, the world’s largest palm oil trader.

Wilmar supplies major brands including Colgate, Mondelez, Nestlé and Unilever. 

The refinery, which is on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, was processing palm oil from major producers that are destroying rainforests in Kalimantan and Papua, Indonesia. 

False promises

Kiki Taufik, head of Greenpeace’s global Indonesia forests campaign said: “Wilmar has been promising to clean up its supply chain since 2013. Yet it is still buying palm oil from forest destroyers.

“It is not Greenpeace’s responsibility to police their supply chain. Wilmar should only buy palm oil from producers it can prove are clean. That is what Wilmar CEO Kuok Khoon Hong promised almost five years ago.” 

The Greenpeace team includes volunteers and climbers from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, the UK, France and Australia.

One group of  activists climbed the anchor chain of a tanker ship transporting palm oil and are preventing it from moving. Another group scaled the refinery and painted “DIRTY” in five-metre high letters on the storage tanks. 

Severe deforestation

In 2013, Wilmar became the first palm oil trader to adopt a ‘no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation’ policy.

But last week, a Greenpeace International investigation revealed that 25 palm oil producers had cleared 130,000ha of rainforest since 2015. Wilmar was buying from 18 of those palm oil groups; three supplied the refinery where the protest is taking place.

Only a fraction of the palm oil that Wilmar trades comes from its own plantations; more than 80 percent comes from other palm oil producers.  

Dal Payne, a climber from the UK taking part in the action said: “This refinery is loaded with Wilmar’s dirty palm oil and if we weren’t here it would be on its way to supermarkets all over the world. Hundreds of thousands of consumers have had enough of forest destruction.

“The message to brands like Unilever, Nestlé and Mondelez is simple: cut Wilmar off until it breaks all links with forest destroyers.”

Forest destroyers

Greenpeace is calling on Wilmar to prove that it no longer sources palm oil from forest destroyers. The first step is to requiring all producer groups in its supply chain to publish mill location data and concession maps for their entire operations and to cut off any that refuse.  

Wilmar International and other palm oil groups are regularly accused of exploiting workers, children and local communities. 

The plantation sector – palm oil and pulp – is the single largest driver of deforestation in Indonesia. Around 24 million hectares of rainforest was destroyed in Indonesia between 1990 and 2015, according to official figures released by the Indonesian government. 

Deforestation and peatland destruction are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to climate change. This has pushed Indonesia into the top tier of global emitters, alongside the United States of America and China.

Plantation development is a root cause of Indonesia’s forest and peatland fires. In July 2015, devastating blazes spread in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua. These fires produced a haze that affected millions of people across Southeast Asia.

Researchers at Harvard and Columbia Universities estimate that the smoke from 2015 Indonesian fires may have caused 100,000 premature deaths. The World Bank calculated the cost of the disaster at 16 billion US dollars.

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from Greenpeace.

Chemical analyses of some of the oldest pieces of Earth ever discovered suggest our planet was habitable as early as 4.1 billion years ago – 700 million years before the date of the earliest confirmed fossil.

It was thought that life on Earth must have evolved after 3.9 billion years ago, as during this time our planet was undergoing a period of intense meteorite impacts, known as the ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’, which was believed to have destroyed all potential for life.

However, earlier this year a study used a genetics-based ‘molecular clock’ to suggest that all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor that arose before the time of the Late Heavy Bombardment.

‘Goldilocks’ zone

Following that, this new research presents, for the first time, evidence that the environments necessary to support life were present on Earth’s surface during this period.

Dr Paul Savage, of the School of Earth and Environmental Studies at the University of St Andrews, said: “Understanding how, when and where life first arose on Earth is fundamental to understanding how life might evolve on other planets in the Universe, but also to understanding what our earliest ancestors were.”

The latest study, involving researchers at the University of St Andrews with colleagues at the University of Rochester, UCLA and the University of Oregon, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The research team found evidence for the existence of chemical sediments, such as cherts (silica-rich rock) and Banded Iron Formations on Earth before four billion years ago, implying that the niche for life on Earth existed much earlier than first fossil evidence currently suggests.

This implies Earth became habitable relatively early on in its history – providing evidence to suggest that other (exo)planets that exist in the ‘goldilocks’ zone could also support life very early in their existences – planets such as Mars.

Ideal niche

The Earth is continuously destroying old rocks (and along with them any fossil evidence of life), and forming new ones, in the process of plate tectonics.

This means even though the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, few bona fide terrestrial rocks still exist that are older than 2.5 billion years and, so far, no rocks that date from the first 500 million years of Earth’s history have been found.

The crust or its chemically weathered derivatives likely served as a niche for the origin of life. In particular, hydrothermal settings such as we find today at mid-ocean ridges, and/or chemical sediments such as chert are common candidates, as these should provide the energy and suitable environmental conditions for life.

Nevertheless, some evidence for Earth’s earliest inhabitants does exist, in the rare ancient rocks and minerals that we do have in our collection.

Because of the lack of any bona fide terrestrial rocks from before four billion years, there is no direct evidence of what Earth’s crust and surface environments looked like from before this time – hence there has, up to now, been no confirmation that the ideal niche(s) for life to thrive existed on the earliest Earth.

Studies have thus turned to (geo)chemical signatures within detrital zircons from this time. Zircons are extremely hardy minerals that can survive multiple periods of weathering untouched, and can be dated using the radiogenic isotopes of uranium.

Analysing the chemistry of these minerals can provide clues to the composition of the melts from which these zircons first formed, and hence the sort of crustal material that was being consumed to form such melts.

This Article

This article was based on a press release from the University of St Andrews.

Searching tweets for text or hashtags allowed researchers to gather information on popular ecological phenomena observed in the UK, such as the emergence of flying ants and starling murmurations.

To test how reliable and accurate Twitter is as a data source for scientific research, ecologists from the University of Gloucestershire compared their results directly to three previously published studies on winged ant emergence, autumnal house spider sightings, and starling murmurations.

These studies were based on primary data collected by citizen scientists during the same period. Their findings have been published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Citizen science

They found that the “Twitter-mined” data was able to replicate most temporal findings, such as date and time of ant mating flights or house spider sightings.

The researchers could also reproduce the sex ratio of house spiders by analysing the photos tweeters uploaded and, in some cases, received an indication of where in the house the spider was seen.

Professor Adam Hart from the University of Gloucestershire, who led the study, said: “The retrospective analysis of social media has been used widely to detect earthquakes or political sentiment, but not so much in ecological research.

Our study shows that passive citizen science, where we gain information and access to photos indirectly through Twitter or other social media channels such as Facebook and Flickr, can indeed generate robust and interesting data.”

All tweets have an automatic date and time stamp and people generally post on the same day of the actual sighting.  

Charismatic events

Hart added: “It is perhaps the immediacy of Twitter, the “urgency” of the phenomena and the desire to connect with other users that have produced so many usable tweets. The emergence of winged ants is also popular in the media and hashtags like #flyingantday often trend on Twitter”. 

Determining the exact location of a sighting proved more difficult as people rarely indicate it in their posts and it is not necessarily the same as the home location listed in their Twitter bio.

Twitter has recently launched the option of having latitude and longitude automatically added to tweets via “share precise location”, which could fill some of these gaps in the future. 

As for the observed starling murmurations, nine of ten tweets mentioned the geographical location, identifying places such as Blackpool, Aberystwyth, Brighton, the Somerset Levels and East Anglia. These aerial displays often become a hotspot for people wanting to watch them, and thus location is relevant to both tweeter and followers.

Hart concluded: “Twitter can provide a valuable tool for phenological studies of charismatic events and species. Dog owners noting ticks on their animals, or the timing of frog spawning or foxes mating are just some of the questions that could be explored.”

Robust methods

To encourage members of the public to participate in ecological studies, the researchers suggest promoting specific hashtags that make the search through Twitter archives easier.

There could also be a system that allows people to automatically record data by tweeting about it.

They stress that Twitter-derived data needs to be interpreted with care though as it can be difficult to validate. Thus, it should be compared directly with data gathered through other more robust methods.  

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from the British Ecological Society. The full paper is available here.

The environment movement in 1997 appeared to be at its most confident – and confrontational. 

In Britain, Greenpeace launched an audacious and effective international media campaign against Shell after the oil company was given permission by the British Government to sink a huge North Sea storage bouy into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Scotland.

Green activists sailed out and occupied the buoy for more than three weeks, creating a live media story that captured the hearts of the nation’s viewers.

Sea change

While the environmentalists overestimated the amount of oil pollution that would have been caused, the campaign was nonetheless successful. Shell decided to reuse much of the steel in constructing a new facility at Stavanger in Norway.

“There was a sea change in Shell in 1997 after Brent Spar,” a senior Shell executive me. “It was, ‘oh God, we’re just making a complete mess of the way we managed external issues’.”

He added: “The group hadn’t thought it necessary to consult or to discuss, you know, see what people thought about it, that sort of whole process of engagement was missing.”

The oil company had come to realise that it could no longer ignore the concerns of the public, even where the company genuinely felt it was doing the right thing.

Shareholder pressure

This revolution in thinking inside one of the six major global oil companies coincided with a concerted campaign by British environmental groups, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to exert pressure on Shell and BP shareholders so they would, in turn, force the oil companies to abandon the Global Climate Coalition.

The Coalition was a corporate lobby group set up to oppose immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It was formed in response to the creation of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1989.

Sir Martin Jacomb was chairman of the Prudential—an international financial services group—in March 1997 when the insurer held 3.8 percent of Shell’s shares. This made it Shell’s largest single investor.

Environmentalists turned up at the Prudential shareholders’ meeting, demanding the company support a resolution to the Shell annual general meeting.

This resolution would force the oil executives to produce a fully audited environmental report, and also conduct a detailed investigation into the company’s suspected involvement with the murders and human rights abuses that had taken place around the Ogoni oil fields in Nigeria.

Fuels

Sir Martin, a British American Tobacco banker, told the campaigners he was well aware of the dangers of climate change. “We are absolutely committed to sustainable development. There is no difficulty about that,” Sir Martin said.

“But the idea that one can stop global warming by stopping consumption of fossil fuels, when mankind depends on it, is unrealistic,” he continued. “We have got to find economic and sustainable ways of using such fuels.”

Contemporary news reports suggest that Prudential managers have met senior Shell executives “several times since controversy erupted over the Brent Spar oil platform and the Nigerian Ogoni oil fields”.

Sir Martin refused to bow to the pressure from the campaigners. “We will not be voting for the resolution. It implies interference with the board in the management of the company. We think it is very, very important not to dilute the responsibility of the board for conducting business seriously.”

But a remarkable victory was about to be delivered by the environmentalists’ offensive, which was designed to tear apart the powerful union of international oil monopolies within the Global Climate Coalition. And two decades later, Sir Martin would reappear in our story as a founding trustee of Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation.

This Author

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

Scientists are warning that 2019 could see the first major test of Indonesia’s new anti-fire measures, which have been criticised by some environmental groups for not going far enough.

Three years ago dramatic forest fires in Indonesia released huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, causing more than $16bn of damage to Indonesia’s economy and leaving much of south-east Asia coated in a thick, toxic, yellow haze.  

Since then the government led by President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, has made a great show of introducing measures to prevent fires, which are overwhelmingly caused by human activity, like land clearing for agriculture and palm oil plantations.

Causing drought

In 2016, President Jokowi announced a moratorium on developing on peatland and a raft of moves to protect rainforests. The Washington Post reported at the time that the developments “could be a major boon for both public health and the global climate”. Jokowi signed a three-year moratorium on new palm oil licenses last week.

Fires have been less dramatic in recent years, but this may be in part down to natural changes in weather patterns. There are concerns about whether the measures taken by authorities are being properly implemented.

This matters because researchers have told Unearthed that next year could see similar climate conditions to 2015, with an El Niño highly likely in the coming months, increasing the risk of fires in next year’s dry season.

El Niño refers to a period of high ocean surface temperatures in the Pacific ocean, creating warmer temperatures in the surrounding region and affecting weather in countries from South America to south-east Asia.   

As this Nasa blog post sets out, in El Niño years, “rain that is normally centred over Indonesia and the far western Pacific shifts eastward into the central Pacific”, causing drought and increasing the risk of fires in the country.

Dry season

This is exactly what happened in 2015, when an unusually strong El Niño helped spark unprecedented fires in Indonesia.

Use this map to see NASA satellite images of “hotspots” across the world from the last 24 hours.

Katia Fernandes, associate research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University tells Unearthed at the moment there is a high probability of an El Niño this winter. However, both because of its strength, or lack thereof, and the fact that it is due to peak in the middle of the country’s rainy season, from November to February, the impact of the coming El Niño is unlikely to be as dramatic as 2015.  

“We believe there will be an El Niño, but it will be a weak one,” she says. “It could create a drier fire season, though not on the scale of 2015, when a really strong El Niño led to intense drought.”

Fires typically occur in the dry season, which peaks around September and October.

Long, hot summer

This summer, some parts of the country have seen significant blazes, with Indonesia experiencing a similarly dry summer to Europe. 

This August, daily wildfire CO2 emissions from Indonesia were at the highest level since 2015, according to researchers at Copernicus CAMS Global Fire Assimilation System. In West Kalimantan, a southern province on the island of Borneo, forest fires have caused air pollution and forced an airport in the city of Pontianak to close. It was reported in local media last month that four people died in fires in the region.

Susan Minnemeyer head of GIS at Global Forest Watch, describes the situation in West Kalimantan as a return to “business as usual”, after two unusually wet summers.

“Without an El Niño, it’s an average dry season,” she says. “About a third of fires happening in Indonesia in the last month have been happening in West Kalimantan.”

Robert Field, an associate research scientist at Columbia University, spends a lot of time studying the climate in Indonesia. “There has been some fire in 2018, but nothing like 2015,” he tells me.

Palm oil industry

“By this time in 2015, you had widespread fires right across Kalimantan. Fire was getting into the peat underground and haze was spreading to neighbouring countries.”

As Field sets out, “peat is the distinguishing factor with fires in Indonesia”.

Much of the country is covered with the carbon-rich soil and agricultural development in recent years has had the effect of drying out this soil, making it more vulnerable to fires. This has huge consequences for the global climate. By October 2015, carbon emissions from fires that summer in Indonesia were on a par with Brazil’s annual emissions.

“In 2015, the main problem was caused by fires getting into the peat underground. Once the fires are underground they have [an] inexhaustible supply of fuel,” says Field. “They just don’t stop until monsoon season. My sense is that this hasn’t happened so far this summer.”

Field says the fires in 2015 appear to have galvanised authorities into taking significant steps to address future fires, from investing in local fire services to establishing new agencies. Previously, volunteer forces and NGOs had done much of the firefighting, a practise that continues today.

But for all the investment, Indonesia still faces the challenge of protecting the environment while maintaining a rapid expansion of industrial agriculture, led by the palm oil industry. Some argue that the government is not prepared for a repeat of the conditions seen three years ago.

Court case

A recent article published by the environment site Mongabay about this summer’s wildfires argued that despite the authorities embarking on a major peatland restoration project, “the fires this year have sprung up in regions that have been prioritised for peat restoration, suggesting the government’s policies have had little impact”.

At the same time, Indonesia’s top court is reviewing a lawsuit filed in 2016 by environmental activists calling on the government to pass regulations to prevent forest fires. 

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.