Friedrich von Hayek died in Freiburg, Germany, aged 92, on 23 March, 1992 – a few months after the Soviet Union voted for its own dissolution.

The funeral was attended by around one hundred family members and invited guests. It was a overcast and windy day. Vaclav Klaus, the finance minister and future prime minister of the former communist Czech Republic arrived late.

Hayek, the recipient of the Nobel Prize, had lived a fascinating life during a tumultuous period of history. He remained convinced of the “spontaneous order” of the free market and that inequality was an inescapable feature of human existence.

From his deathbed he told a reporter: “I believe in general that the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind”.

The Right Circumstances

His life is evidence of what a single man can achieve in the right circumstances, and as fellow neoliberal Antony Fisher would have said, the embodiment of the fact that ideas have consequences. He was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom by President George Bush Senior in 1991, for example, but had been too frail to attend in person.

In 1947, Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), an international group of economists, historians and philosophers; he was convinced the MPS was crucial to the triumph of neoliberalism around the world.

However, as his biographer Alan Ebenstein would note: “Hayek was virtually forgotten in England during the 1950s and ’60s. The London-based Institute of Economic Affairs [IEA]…became almost the only organisation that continued to promote him and his work in the country during this period.”

In the United States, Hayek would also be directly involved with the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.

These think tanks, each tied to the Koch family’s fossil fortune, would each play a role in the rise of climate denial during the 1980s and ‘90s.

Not For All Men

Hayek’s free market philosophy did not mean total freedom for all men though.

He was, during his life, a keen supporter of General Augusto Pinochet, whose death squads tortured and murdered thousands of citizens following the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile during a military coup in 1973.

“Don’t confuse totalitarianism with authoritarianism,” Hayek said of Pinochet. “I don’t know of any totalitarian governments in Latin America.

“The only one was Chile under Allende. Chile is now a great success. The world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time.”

Communism, therefore, was not despised because of the violence of revolution but instead because it posed a real threat to the private property of the wealthy.

Hayek believed that only people who were over the age of 45 should be allowed to vote, and that people receiving benefits should have the right withdrawn.

Neighbourhood Effects

However, Hayek also considered himself an environmentalist: he supported the World Wildlife Fund and the National Trust in the UK.

He had argued that it is “often impossible to confine the effects of what one does to one’s own land to this particular piece; and hence arises those ‘neighbourhood effects’ which will not be taken into account so long as the owner has to consider only the effects on his property. Hence also the problems which arise with respect to the pollution of air or water and the like.”

This statement should light the way for those who now claim to carry his flame.

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. 

Dolphins learn tricks from each other in the wild – as well as being trained to perform tricks in captivity, a 30 study has revealed.

The research, led by the Universities of St Andrews and Exeter and published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, focused on a scientific analysis of Adelaide’s famous tail walking dolphins.

It describes how tail walking was learned by a single dolphin called Billie and then copied by other dolphins in the local community, and, much like a pop fad, then faded out.

Social learning

Tail walking involves a dolphin rising vertically out of the water and then moving forward or backwards across it. The behaviour rarely occurs in the wild from this species but is a standard part of the routine in almost all dolphinaria.

Billie was rescued from a polluted creek in January 1988, spending several weeks in a dolphinarium, until released back in to the wild. It seems she learned tail walking by observing the performing dolphins and, when released, began performing this unique behaviour with regularity in the wild.

Billie’s tail walking would be nothing more than an interesting example of individual social learning if she alone had performed it, after having observed it during her short time in captivity. But soon other dolphins in the local community began performing the behaviour.

By 2011 nine dolphins had been observed tail walking in the wild. After 2011 the number of dolphins tail walking in the wild declined with the most prolific tail-walker dying in 2014, leaving only two remaining tail-walkers, both of whom performed the behaviour only sporadically.

Tail walking now seems destined to disappear from the community and thus can be considered a dying fad.

Cultural behaviours

The behaviour was tracked using thousands of hours of observation effort by citizen scientists, and its spread suggests a social function for copying in dolphin communities.

Cultural behaviours arise when individuals learn a specific behaviour from other members of their social group, which then spreads through the community. Sometimes cultural behaviours, such as foraging strategies, are passed between generations.

Fads are short-lived examples of socially learned behaviours which flourish for a short time and then disappear.

Dr Mike Bossley of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, lead author of the paper, noted that it was only because he had been studying the Adelaide dolphins for over 30 years that the significance of tail walking was recognised.

“I knew Billie’s history and was able to track her behaviour and that of the other dolphins in the community over an extended period. This enabled me to observe tail walking spread through the community and then its eventual fade away.”

Dr Luke Rendell, a University of St Andrews researcher and co-author who specialises on researching whale and dolphin cultural behaviour, said: “Once again we see the power of being able to study cetaceans over extended periods that mean something given their lifespans.

“Dr Bossley’s long-term commitment has afforded us a revealing insight into the potential social role of imitation in dolphin communities.”

Rapid spread

The existence of cultural behaviour has important implications for conservation.

Philippa Brakes, a co-author of the paper also from Whale and Dolphin Conservation, explained: “Understanding more about the social transmission of behaviour will help us predict how different species may respond to changes in their environment.

“The rapid spread of socially learnt behaviours can operate much faster than the intergenerational process of natural selection, which can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the type of behaviour transmitted.”

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from the University of St Andrews. The full paper can be read here. 

This is considered the most important year for international climate diplomacy since 2015 – the year the Paris Agreement was formed. Countries will have too decide on the rules and guidelines that will help to govern and implement the Paris Agreement from 2020 onward.

David Waskow from the World Resources Institute compares the Bangkok session to developing the legislature of a law that has been passed.

“These implementing guidelines, these rules and procedures for the [Paris] Agreement will really breathe life into it in a concrete sense. Without the rules the Paris Agreement stays an empty shell,” Waskow explained in a press conference last week.

Why is there an additional UN climate summit?

Negotiators in Bangkok will be continuing the unfinished discussion from the UN summit in Bonn, Germany, six months ago.

The Bangkok negotiations are a response to the insufficient progress on the Paris rulebook that is supposed to be finalised by the end of this year.

In December, environmental ministers and heads of state will gather in the UN Climate summit in Poland (the so-called COP24). Where they will have to agree on a full set of rules to govern the Paris Agreement. 

Why is this proving to be such a challenge?

Creating the international legal framework to implement the Paris Agreement is a huge task, and many technical issues remain unresolved between negotiating parties.

Therefore an additional week of diplomatic muscle flexing is underway as officials operate on borrowed time to meet the deadline.

Severe heat waves across the Northern Hemisphere this year have ensured that diplomats are definitely sweating as the pressure to achieve results increases.

With insufficient progress during the last climate summit in Bonn, and Poland hosting the upcoming summit this December, concerns have been raised that the coal-loving country might be reluctant to show the diplomatic leadership needed to complete the Paris Rulebook. The additional session in Bangkok hopes to compensate for this lack of leadership.

What are the expected outcomes from Bangkok?

The work on the table at Bangkok is referred to by negotiator as the “COP Package”: since many elements are strongly interlinked, and progress on one element of the Paris Agreement needs to be matched by progress on others, the only way all parties can agree on the Paris Rulebook is when they agree on a clear and full set of rules.

The Key element of this COP24 Package, and the questions that need answering in Bangkok, are:

• The Paris Rulebook: How will countries communicate their national climate plans for Paris? And how can parties design a clear mechanism for providing feedback and monitoring to these climate plans? 
• Finance: Will developed countries manage to gather the promised 100 billion USD in climate financial aid to developing countries by 2020? How will this financial aid be managed and increased over time?
• The Talanoa Dialogue: A mechanism that was set up during the last UN climate summit, the Talanoa Dialogue is an inclusive dialogue between governments, NGO’s, bussinesses and social groups, to ensure that as many voices and concerns from the global community are included to form the Rules for Paris. How this dialogue will be incorporated in the UN negotiations is still unclear.
• Pre-2020 Ambition: The Paris Agreement will effectively take effect from 2020 onward. Are countries doing enough before Paris effectively takes action? And what are the needs of countries before 2020 to implement th Paris Agreement and to increase their ambition over time? 

What if the Paris Rulebook is not agreed on by the end of the year?

There is no reason why we can’t have strong foundational rules to implement the Paris  Agreement by this year.

Some issues, however, won’t get totally resolved at the UN climate summit in Poland. 

“But the foundational dimensions can and ought to be clearly identified and adopted to accelerate the rapid and deep emissions cuts we need to see to transition to a low-carbon economy,” said Harjeet Singh from Action Aid International at the Bangkok conference.

On a practical level, setting the Rules for the Paris Agreement in 2018 is needed to provide direction, clarity, and to create the institutional structures to get it up and running by 2020.

If that happens, the Paris Agreement might actually be able to protect the current and future generations from runaway global warming.

This Author

Arthur Wyns is a tropical biologist and science journalist who writes about climate change, environment and migration. He reports from the UN negotiations and is the program manager of Climate Tracker, an organisation supporting environmental journalists worldwide to bring climate change into their national debates. Arthur tweets from @ArthurWyns

Councils across the UK invest over nine billion pounds in fracking companies through council pension funds, according to a new report.

The Greater Manchester Pension Fund invests the largest amount in the global fracking industry,  almost £1 billion. This is nearly double the amount of the next highest pension fund, West Yorkshire, with just over half a billion.

The councils with the highest percentage of their pension funds invested in fracking are Dumfries and Galloway, Greater Manchester and the London Borough of Merton,  each with about 6-7 percent of the total fund invested in fracking companies.

Lack of support

The news comes as the fracking industry is poised to drill for gas for the first time in seven years in the UK.

With councils ploughing billions into fracking companies, questions are being asked as to why councils are investing in this industry when UK public support for fracking is consistently low.

Many councils have voted against fracking developments in their areas, but council-run funds remain invested in the industry.

In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland fracking has effectively halted, but Councils there still oversee pension funds investing heavily in fracking companies.

The companies that councils are investing in include BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips. These companies are fracking in places like Argentina, Canada and Australia. BP, one of the companies involved, does not frack in the UK to avoid ‘the wrong type of attention’ but has huge fracking operations abroad.

Fuelling climate change

Matthew Brown, leader of Preston Council. commented: “It’s disappointing to see local authority pension funds being invested in the fracking industry. Fracking destroys local landscapes, threatens communities and fuels climate change across the globe.

“Council pension funds should be going to support clean fossil-free energy which will secure a good return for members and help tackle climate change.”

Sakina Sheikh, divestment campaigner with Platform commented: “The devastating fires and record temperatures this summer have brought the impacts of climate change home. Neither local communities nor our climate can afford for the fracking industry to win.

“Our councils are providing everyday support to the frackers, it’s time to stop. It’s time to divest from fossil fuels.”

Pension funds

Deirdre Duff, divestment campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said: “UK councils should know better than to invest in fracking companies. These companies are inflicting their fracking operations on communities around the world, and this can have significant impacts.”

“Many UK councils have rightly opposed fracking in their own area – however it is shocking that they still support the global fracking industry. We should remember too that the climate change caused by fracking will affect us all, no matter where the fracking is conducted.”

The data is released by 350.org, Platform and Friends of the Earth. It ranks council-run pension funds by their investments in companies involved in fracking.

Full divestment commitments have so far been made by two UK council pension funds, with a further five making partial commitments. The campaign to divest local council pensions has received backing from Unison and the TUC.  

Across the world 905 institutions, with total investments valued at $6.24 trillion USD, have committed to divest from fossil fuels. 

This Author

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

Fred Smith, founder of the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), was frustrated that oil companies were almost universally failing to recognise the climate agenda as a threat.

But he soon came up with a plan to rid organisations of the stigma of being publicly linked to oil companies in the campaign against climate science.

“It’s the Baptist and the bootlegger,” Smith told me.

“In counties that are dry, that means you can’t sell alcohol legally, there are still illegal sales of alcohol purveyed by people we call bootleggers.

“Then there’s a reformer who comes along and says, ‘this is ridiculous, we’re losing sales, we’re rewarding bad people, we’re selling adulterated alcohol, with tough consequences, let’s legalise, let’s get rid of the prohibition and legalise alcohol sales’.

And of course the bootleggers don’t like that because they’re enjoying a monopoly profit situation.”

Smith continued: “But they’re not very reputable so they’re not the ones who will lead the fight against prohibition repeal so they use the Baptists, fundamentalist Christians, who really do believe that if you allow drinking it might lead to dancing and things like that.

“So effectively you get that alliance, for very different reasons, of a moral intellectual group and an economic entity.” He concluded: “[This] is a part of, for good or bad, about almost every political change.”

Anti-climate gospel

Smith would call his contacts and friends at oil giant ExxonMobil and present the same argument. He also called big tobacco, pharmaceutical and car companies: “It’s Baptist-bootlegger,” he would say.

“We can provide the moral intellectual arguments that you find difficult to make and we can make them more if we have more resources to do it.”

The pitch seemed to work. Particularly on his close friend at the time John Blundell, a member of the Koch-elite.

Smith managed to secure financial support from the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation and the Claude R Lambe Charitable Foundations – both of which Blundell controlled.

The CEI called companies and trusts donating $10,000 or more “competitive allies”. These included the David H Koch Charitable Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Earhart Foundation.

The oil firm Texaco, the tobacco company Philip Morris and carmakers Ford were also major contributors.

The funding allowed Smith and his colleagues to preach the anti-climate gospel in the US, Europe and at the major conferences which were now taking place all over the world.

Smith explained that he would attack climate initiatives on three levels. First he would assert the science was “not proven”, then present the economic argument that the costs of mitigation were too high.

Finally, he argued that the bankrupt political process would prevent any effective action. His formula would be repeated by climate skeptics for the next 25 years – including in Lord Nigel Lawson‘s short book, An Appeal to Reason.

Apocalyptic warming

The CEI published a collection of papers titled The True State of the Planet as a “major challenge to the environment movement” with funding from the Olin Foundation.

One essay claimed that “scientific evidence argues against the existence of a greenhouse crisis, against the notion that realistic policies could achieve any meaningful climatic impact, and against the claim that we must act now if we are to reduce the greenhouse threat.”

The CEI would also be among the first think tanks to claim that “there is no scientific consensus to support the proposition that human activity will produce an apocalyptic warming of the Earth’s atmosphere”.

Smith even sent American politicians his Environmental Briefing Book for Congressional Candidates.

This made the remarkable, if often repeated claim, that “the likeliest global climate change is the creation of a milder, greener, more prosperous world”.  

The CEI was by 1994 no longer operating from a kitchen table, but turning over almost $6 million a year.

A third of the money came from major corporations that “appear to approve of the CEI’s opposition to environmental legislation”  

These included oil giant Texaco, tobacco king Philip Morris, and carmakers General Motors and Ford.

Blundell may well have been a huge help to Smith in securing Koch funding. But it was Smith’s inspiration that would make Blundell the most significant person in the history of Britain’s climate sceptic cause.

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. 

Sian Berry is replacing Caroline Lucas as co-leader of the Green Party alongside Jonathan Bartley, the party has confirmed.

Bartley and Berry jointly won 6,239 out of a total of 8,379 votes cast by the party membership. They have vowed to make the party the third biggest political party in Britain, and get a Green in every council chamber.

The party will stand as “the opposite of vapid, old school centrist politics”, they said, and promised to put forward “bright Green ideas” to answer the big challenges facing the country, including Brexit, climate change, housing and how automation is effecting the world of work.

They also promised “fiercer Green resistance” to projects such as fracking and the HS2 rail link, and to practices such as deportation and indefinite detention.

Berry has been a councillor at the London Borough of Camden since 2014. She was elected Green London Assembly member in 2016, when she also came third in the London mayoral race. Bartley has led the opposition on the London Borough of Lambeth since being elected a Streatham councillor in May this year.

Lucas, who co-led the party with Bartley since 2 September 2016, announced in May that she would not be standing in the party’s leadership contest.

Party is “buoyant” 

Leadership contenders Shahrar Ali and Leslie Rowe received 1,466 and 495 votes respectively. Amelia Womack was re-elected deputy leader of the party for a third term after winning 3,981 of 7,369 votes. She will continue work on women’s rights, including the campaign to make misogyny a hate crime, as well as work on sustainable communities and the environment.

Berry said: “We’re excited to take on leading a buoyant Green Party at this crucial time for our country and party. With Brexit on the horizon and our planet burning, the last thing people need is the stale centrism of the past, which brought us austerity and privatisation – and totally failed to tackle climate breakdown or give people real security and quality of life.”

The Green Party currently has 39,350 members, according to data published this week by the Commons Library. The Labour Party has around 540,000 members, while the Scottish National Party has just under 125,500, the Conservatives 124,000, and the Liberal Democrats around 99,200.

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. 

“Dissent is not a crime”. That is the battle cry of a group of six women campaigners defending their right to protest against a fossil fuel company which sought a wide-ranging injunction to restrict direct action at drilling sites.

Known locally as the “Surrey and Sussex Six”, the campaigners backed by Friends of the Earth opposed an injunction issued by UK Oil and Gas (UKOG), a company which plans to develop onshore oil drilling in the south east of England.

The injunction, which was described by campaigners as “draconian” and an attempt to stifle free speech and peaceful protest, was scaled back by a judge in the High Court on Monday but still granted to UKOG.

The decision was greeted with mixed reactions by activists who are seeking to appeal the court’s decision.

“It seems to me like anyone with money can take out an injunction to protect its commercial interests,” said Jacqui Hamlin (second from right in the picture), one of the six defendants in the High Court case against UKOG.

“People have been frightened into silence — what sort of society is that?”

“The right to protest and assemble is a cornerstone of our democracy. If the suffragette had protested in a manner that was acceptable to the authorities, would anything have changed?,” she asked.

Warning about the impact of such injunctions of people’s rights to protest and to free speech, three of the campaigners who fought the injunction told DeSmog UK about their hopes and fears for the future of their campaign.

Injunction

The injunction, which is addressed to “persons unknown” — an all-encompassing term used in a similar injunction granted to leading fracking company INEOS last year — was the most far-reaching in a series of similar court orders sought by onshore oil drilling and fracking companies over the past 12 months.

Although the most restrictive clauses were removed, the injunction outlaws a range of direct actions in order to protect UKOG’s commercial interests. This includes a ban on obstructing the entrances of the sites at Broadford Bridge in West Sussex and Horse Hill in Surrey as well as the highway leading to them, slow walking in front of vehicles, targeting contractors and blocking vehicles coming in and out of the sites.

But the judge reduced the scope of the injunction from four to two sites and excluded UKOG’s head office in Guilford. He also refused to grant the injunction against those “instructing or encouraging” protest, which could have acted as a blanket ban on publicising and promoting protest activities — fearing this would impede on free speech.

Language referring to those “watching” the site was also excluded from the injunction on the basis this could be an attempt to prevent people protesting outside the sites or monitoring the company’s activities, which are both lawful.

‘Chilling effect’

For Hamlin, the judge’s decision to grant the injunction to UKOG has opened up more questions than answers.

“The law is there to be respected and we respect the law,” she said, adding: “But I don’t do legal jargon very well and I am finding this very worrying.”

Hamlin said the injunction was complex and did not clearly set-out what opponents to UKOG could and couldn’t do but instead created a raft of legal details that campaigners would have to carefully analyse and understand in order to avoid breaching the court’s order.

“There will be people who will be too afraid of taking part in any more protests by fear or breaching the injunction and others like me who might get into situations without realising this breach some part of the injunction,” she said.

Vicki Elcoate (second from left in the picture), of Dorking, another member of the “Surrey and Sussex Six”, agreeds Describing herself as a seasoned activist, Elcoate, a Green party member, said the injunction “allowed some forms of protests and restricted others” and that campaigners will need time to understand what the ruling means in practice.

“The decision to grant the injunction remains very chilling for protesters because breaching an injunction is a very serious matter which can be punished by a significant fine or even a prison sentence. This is a real dissentive to protest,” she said.

Hamlin knows about the risks of protest.

In January 2017, she was arrested in Brockham, near UKOG’s Horse Hill site in Surrey, for slow walking and obstructing a lorry. Charges were eventually dropped but the memory of that day has stuck with her.

“Spending 14 hours in a cell is certainly no piece of cake and I don’t think anyone is prepared for that,” she told DeSmog UK. But despite the risks, Hamlin is not ready to give up just yet.

“I would certainly like to appeal the injunction. If it is legally robust, it should stand up to a bit of challenge — only what is flimsy will fall through,” she said.  

‘Clamp down strategy’  

A retired deputy head-teacher, Ann Stewart (third from left in the picture), became involved in the campaign against UKOG’s activities when the company put in a planning application to drill under the South Downs National Park at Markwells Wood near Chichester in West Sussex.

Although UKOG withdrew its application in May last year, Markwells Wood was included in the injunction despite the fact no direct action has ever taken place at the site.

“UKOG has pretended it was faced with an extremely dedicated campaign and lots of people ready to take direct action at the Markwells Wood site, but that is far removed from the reality here,” Stewart said.

“This was a sign of their efforts to suppress any effective opposition,” she added.

Elcoate said UKOG’s injunction was more evidence of the oil and gas industry’s willingness “to clamp down on protests and any opposition to its activities”.

“These injunctions are becoming more and more restrictive.They have become part of a strategy for some companies. But peaceful protest is a legitimate part of the democratic process,” she added.

“The government has said it was pro-fracking. But companies have no social licence to carry out these activities which are deeply unpopular. I think the government should go back to the drawing board. All that money and energy could be directed to promote a green, low-carbon economy rather than promote fossil fuels.”

The judge’s ruling on the injunction brought predictably contrasting responses from campaigners and the company.

In a statement, UKOG chief executive Stephen Sanderson, said he was pleased the judgement “firmly upholds the company’s collective human, legal and democratic right to conduct its lawful business without hindrance from the unlawful actions of activists whose intent is to cause physical, psychological and financial harm to our company, staff, contractors, supply chain and local residents.”

He warned that UKOG will seek “swift and appropriate redress from the High Court against activists who openly breach the injunction”.

He said the injunction “did not seek in any way to remove the right to peaceful protest, freedom of assembly, or freedom of expression” and that “those who wish to assemble and express their views peacefully and lawfully outside our sites will remain free to do so, as they have always been able to do”.

The campaigners certainly have no plans to give up their fight.

Commenting on the news of the injunction, the Weald Action Group, an umbrella network of organisations fighting against onshore oil drilling and fracking in the south east of England, said they were “going to fight on.”

“We do not believe that powerful private companies should be able to use the law to silence  and intimidate campaigners concerned about the dangers and damage to the environment and our communities”.

“Oil companies cannot be allowed to set the legal framework for protest in this way.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

This summer, the world is experiencing devastating climate change impacts: record heat in Pakistan and India have caused 4,000 deaths, flooding in the Philippines due to torrential downpour has caused 54,000 people to evacuate from their homes.

More and more countries are experiencing the worst of climate change. In Japan and South Korea, a heatwave has killed 200 people.

In Europe, record-breaking temperatures have destroyed farmers’ crops while the wildfires in Greece killed 92 people.

Feeling helpless

Scientists have said that climate change made this heatwave twice as likely.

Media reports about a recent scientific study  painted a doomsday scenario for the planet, saying that we are close to the tipping point of a “Hothouse Earth”, a point of no return where climate change will be uncontrollable.

I started working on climate change over 20 years ago and it’s been a long time since I’ve felt helpless about the impacts. But this year I’ve seen and experienced firsthand the impacts of climate change in a wealthy country, rather than in India, my birthplace.

While cycling through the British countryside I have met farmers who worry that they will lose their whole crop for the year.

In Bern, where I live, the Aare River recorded its highest temperature ever, 23.8C. This is dangerously close to the upper limit that many freshwater fish species can handle. On a mountaineering tour, we did not need our crampons because the glacier had receded so much. 

Business as usual 

What sealed my concern was a large article in the newspaper on the frontpage about farmers not being prepared to deal with climate change.

Switzerland, despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world and one that prides itself on  being prepared, has been caught off guard by climate change. Can you imagine farmers in poorer countries? What about farmers in India, about 60,000 of whom have already killed themselves because of crop-damaging temperature increase in the country?

Fossil fuel companies like Exxon and Shell have known about the dangers of climate change brought about by their products as far back as forty years ago. However, these companies have continued with business as usual and even seeded doubts on climate science through the media.

The climate change impacts we are experiencing today are a result of the fossil fuel industry’s neglect to act when they needed to and their willful deception, using climate deniers and the media to mask what the science said.

Rising up 

This reckless drive for profits at any cost has made fossil fuel companies the most profitable and powerful corporations in history. Their influence over our political processes keeps governments from constraining their climate-destroying operations.

Where governments fail, ordinary people are rising up to the challenge. Local communities have been leading the rapid transformation of our entire energy system to renewable energy from the bottom-up, taking control over their own energy.  

All over the world, people take action to stop fossil fuel projects in their tracks.

And people everywhere organise locally to remove the public acceptance and funding of the fossil fuel industry, to weaken their political influence.

This grassroots movement has already led over 900 institutions including major cities, universities, faith and medical groups, and the heirs to the Rockefeller oil fortune to pull their investments out of fossil fuels. 

Fossil free

While the majority of media coverage about the ‘hothouse’ report made it seem like we are on a hopeless and inevitable path to a dystopian catastrophe, the study itself clearly states that it is one possibility.

The scientists emphasise that it is within our power to stop this from happening and call for what the climate movement has long been advocating for: get out of fossil fuels as fast as possible and transition to 100% renewable energy.

This is exactly what the Fossil Free campaign is pushing for and what tens of thousands of people will demand at hundreds of actions around the world on 8 September.

The ‘Rise for Climate’ day of action will see people all over the globe take action in their local communities for a fossil-free world that puts people and justice before profits. 

The effects of climate change that we are already witnessing and the dire scenarios for our future can make me feel despair. But it’s also a motivation to fight and set us on a different path. Knowing that I am a part of a global movement of people who are prepared to do just that is what gives me hope that not all is lost. 

This Author

Payal Parekh is the Global Program Director at 350.org, leading the organization’s international campaigning and mobilisation work. She holds a Ph.D. in Oceanography from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. This article was first published by DeSmog UK. 

Fires have broken out on peatland inside palm oil concessions in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

The concessions belong to suppliers of some of the biggest household brands in the world including Mondelez, Nestlé and Unilever, new documentation from Greenpeace Indonesia shows. 

There has been a huge increase in the number of fire hotspots across Indonesia in 2018. As many as 9,819 fire hotspots have been identified this year so far, nearly three times the number identified in all of 2017 (3,488).

Major industries

The number of fire hotspots has been growing steadily throughout August, with Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) warning that the increasingly dry weather could see fires continue to increase through September.

One of the concessions, PT Sumatera Unggul Makmur (PT SUM), has burned every year since 2013. It belongs to Gama, a palm oil company closely connected to the world’s largest palm oil trader, Wilmar. 

Fire hotspots have also been recorded in concessions belonging to Bumitama and First Resources. All three producers have been supplying palm oil to major brands, including Mondelez, Nestlé and Unilever, via Wilmar and other palm oil traders and all three are members of the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil, the industry’s sustainability certification body.

As palm oil producers clear trees and drain marshes for new plantations, the dried out peat becomes dangerously susceptible to catching fire. 

Specialist prevention

Annisa Rahmawati, forest campaigner fo Greenpeace Southeast Asia, said: “People in Indonesia are sick and tired. The Indonesian Government promised to stop rogue companies but the palm oil industry still isn’t listening.

“It’s early days yet and we hope the fires don’t get worse, but the haze is already shutting down schools and putting people’s lives at risk.” 

Greenpeace Indonesia has its own Forest Fire Prevention team, which was established in 2016 and is made up of specially trained volunteers and former victims of forest fires and haze.

Prevention is the team’s central focus. They are trained to detect fires and put them out before they become more dangerous and widespread. They also investigate where there is potential for fires to break out, work to raise awareness of the importance of forest and peatland protection for local communities and extinguish fires whenever possible.

They working alongside a special firefighting team from the Ministry of Forestry and Environment, local communities and local NGOs and are supported by Greenpeace Russia’s forest fire experts.

Governmental negligence 

Arif Setiawan from Rasau Jaya in West Kalimantan has been impacted by the fires every year since 2008, which is why he joined the Greenpeace Forest Fire Prevention team. He said: 

“Out on patrol, the peatlands are dry. When the wind blew we watched the fire engulf land and vegetation. We can smell the smoke as it spreads to Pontianak, it’s been thick in recent weeks, and my hometown is close to the hotspots so it’s even worse there.

“When it’s this bad children stay at home. The sad thing is people are getting used to living life wearing masks.”

Last Saturday, Indonesia’s President, Joko Widodo, was found guilty of negligence by a Palangkaraya High Court for the Indonesian Government’s handling of the deadly 2015 fires. The Government is appealing the decision at the Supreme Court. 

Arie Rompas, one of the principal plaintiffs and forest campaign team leader of Greenpeace Indonesia, said: “Instead of appealing this verdict, the government needs to accept it messed up and fix the problem by bringing the palm oil industry to heel.

“President Jokowi must take charge of the situation and enforce the law against companies that don’t protect their land from fire.”

This Author

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

Dr Fred Singer is the architect of one of the most controversial episodes in climate science, accused of using the infirmity of an old man to discredit his life’s work on climate change.

He attended the Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in New Orleans during February 1990  where Dr Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was speaking.

Revelle helped to establish that carbon levels in the atmosphere were steadily rising and also taught science to a young Al Gore in the 1960s. As Revelle wrote in 1992: “There is a good but by no means certain chance that the world’s average climate will become significantly warmer during the next century.”

Singer approached him off the back of this statement, asking if the two men could collaborate on an article for The Washington Post.

Conned at death

That night Revelle suffered a heart attack and was rushed from the airport to a local hospital for a triple-bypass, and was not discharged until May that year.

Singer nevertheless continued to press the scientist to work on a journal article. “Whenever Singer sent him a draft, Revelle buried it under piles of paper on his desk. When Singer called, [Revelle’s secretary] would dig up the draft and put it on the top, and Revelle would bury it again,”  records American historian of Science at the University of Harvard professor, Naomi Oreskes, in her account of the episode.

“Some people don’t think Fred Singer is a very good scientist,” Revelle told his secretary.

Later that year Singer published his article, with Revelle named as second author, in the journal Cosmos. It stated boldly: “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.”

The words were copied and pasted from an earlier article published by Singer – and directly contradicted Revelle’s own publicly stated views.

Revelle died of a heart attack the following July. Family members, friends and students all claimed that Singer had pressured or tricked the dying scientist into signing off a journal article which presented an argument opposed to his own.

Silencing the critics

His student, Justin Lancaster, said in a written statement to a Harvard memorial symposium in memory of the late scientist: “Revelle did not write the Cosmos article and was reluctant to join it. Pressured rather unfairly at a very weak moment while recovering from heart surgery,Revelle finally gave in to the lead author.”

Not happy with these criticisms, Singer issued a ‘SLAPP’ lawsuit designed to silence and intimidate opponents. Lancaster was forced to issue a retraction or face an expensive and lengthy court trial.

While Lancaster has since recanted the retraction the damage remains, Singer successfully silenced the truth as he continued to wage a war against climate science.

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.