How do you fancy being plunged into the grim abyss of the latest climate science only to be politely asked if you are interested in going to jail?
Hundreds of people across the UK have recently had this experience while attending talks about the Extinction Rebellion.
Led by the group Rising Up, Extinction Rebellion is breaking the mould of traditional communication about ecological crisis. It argues that it’s time to tell people the truth and ask them to act accordingly.
‘Biological annihilation’
Scientists are increasingly breaking ranks to emphasise the existential threat we are facing.
Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research for twenty years and a senior advisor to the European Union, said: “Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action and accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.”
The Extinction Rebellion is urging people to face up to this hellish reality, particularly the “biological annihilation” of this mass species extinction event.
We acknowledge the grief and fear this can cause. But our experience suggests that working through those painful feelings can lead to a new determination to do whatever it takes to make this a lesser catastrophe and to save what we can.
So what does it take? We don’t lack imagination or ideas – there are many policy solutions out there – but what do we lack is political will in a democracy captured by the interests of profit.
Conscientious protetors
We can turn to the social sciences for information on how to generate political will. The evidence is overwhelming: change comes when people are willing to commit acts of peaceful civil disobedience.
They must be disruptive and sacrificial and whilst a critical mass is needed, it is a relatively low number of people. Fifty people in jail for a short time, such as a week on remand, is likely to bring the ecological crisis into the public consciousness.
A few thousand arrests in a short space of time could cause a political crisis. Just a tiny percent of the population in active support of a rebellion would probably see an end to this destructive political system.
Consider the power this would give to individuals. We can choose to be one of a relatively small number of people who are willing to stand up in a principled way and help decisively change the direction of humanity.
The Extinction Rebellion talk is online. We are presenting evidence and a plan. We are asking you to please watch it and then ask yourself if you are willing and able to offer your service.
Dr Kate Marvel from NASA’s Goddard Institute said: “To be a climate scientist is to be an active participant in a slow-motion horror story.
“As a climate scientist, I am often asked to talk about hope […] Audiences want to be told that everything will be alright in the end […] The problem is, I don’t have any. We need courage, not hope.”
Our societies have mostly been organised to maximise capitalist accumulation for the benefit and privilege of elites and corporations. In the parallel exploitation of women and nature, both are seen as infinite and elastic resources – free, readily available, to be appropriated without resistance.
This historical and ongoing exploitation is possible through the reproduction of mutually-reinforcing structures of oppression: patriarchy, capitalism, class oppression, racism, (neo)colonialism and heteronormativity.
Patriarchy is the system that benefits men as a social group through the oppression and exploitation of women. It is founded on the sexual division of labour and nurtured by the biological determinism of socially constructed gender roles.
Women’s work
The sexual division of labour organises women’s work in the private sphere (home) and also in agricultural and urban production and markets.
Women workers are concentrated in areas of work that are an extension of care – such as health and education – and that are low paid, precarious and informal, or for which they are paid less than men for the same work.
Patriarchy relies on women’s time, energy and (re)productive capacities to ‘make up’ for the destruction and privatisation of nature.
Nature and the commons are commodified, privatised and extracted on a scale that is catastrophic to the environment, natural cycles and ecological functions, and the communities whose livelihoods depend on them. This is especially true in times of crises and austerity, when women’s unpaid physical and emotional labour is essential for family and community.
In the same way that transnational corporations, industrial agriculture and dirty energy systems control and exploit nature and our territories, so too are women’s rights over their bodies, lives and work controlled by regressive laws, traditional practices and societal institutions (including education, family, religion and the judiciary).
Frontline resistance
Due to their perceived “natural” role, women are disproportionately affected by social and environmental injustice and the multiple interconnected crisis, such as climate change and hunger. This is especially so for women of colour, peasant and indigenous women, migrants, working class and LBTQ women.
We have to work harder and longer hours to produce sufficient food, maintain livelihoods, and protect our territories. Women’s wisdom and our potential role as food producers and practitioners of agroecology are attacked and denied by the capitalist system.
Despite this, women are fighters, not victims. Largely as a consequence of our historical connection to the production and reproduction of life in the territories in which we live and struggle, women are collectively taking the lead in grassroots environmental justice struggles to challenge unjust economic models.
Women are standing at the frontline of resistance to defend nature. We are protagonists in the defense of our territories and the fight for autonomy over our work, lives and bodies – our primary territory.
For Friends of the Earth International, the fight to dismantle patriarchy and all structures of oppression within our own organisations, structures and societies is crucial to the system change needed to face the current deep-rooted and interconnected social and environmental crises affecting climate, food, and biodiversity.
Radical transformation
System change means creating societies based on peoples’ sovereignty and environmental, social, economic and gender justice.
We seek freedom from patriarchy and all forms of oppression that exploit and devalue women, peoples and the environment. We are working towards a radical transformation of our societies, of relationships between people, and of the relationship between people and nature.
We believe that grassroots, anti-capitalist feminism is key to this transformation, both as a conceptual-ideological-political framework and as collective praxis and movement.
We aim to show in practice that feminism can and is constructed from the grassroots up, that it is relevant to all women and men who resist oppression, and that it is representative of regional diversity and different realities.
Our grassroots, anti-capitalist feminism has a class perspective and is rooted in women’s collective experience in societies in which our bodies are marked by mutually reinforcing oppressions.
Powerful alliance
We have a strong and holistic political vision of justice and system change, and we build solutions together as women, as peoples, as an international federation and with our allies, including La Vía Campesina and World March of Women.
We are proactively supporting women’s leadership and protagonism in our structures, as well as spaces for women to build their collective power.
We are challenging power structures in a world in which violence and the threat of violence are used to control women who challenge their socially constructed responsibility for unpaid, invisible care and domestic work.
In this same world, women’s millennial knowledge of ecological cycles, of seeds, of medicinal plants, of how to nurture biodiversity and the forests is unrecognised and ignored.
We are supporting each other to collectively recognise the power relations that we reproduce and, in this way, to transform our federation and our societies, together with our allies. We are fighting together for a just world on a living planet.
The UK government has been lobbying to weaken new EU rules designed to reduce toxic emissions from waste incinerators, less than a year before it is set to exit the union, leaked notes show.
Unearthed understands that it’s not yet been decided whether the new rules will apply in the UK following Brexit, as it will be subject to negotiations. UK incinerators have been heavily criticised for driving local air pollution.
Leaked notes taken by a delegate and seen by Unearthed state that the UK led a successful push in negotiations to retain a loophole in the draft regulations on emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx), the pollutant linked to the dieselgate scandal.
The loophole
The EU is debating new rules that would force incinerators to reduce dangerous NOx emissions by 25% by 2024. Current legal limits allow daily average NOx emissions of 200mg/Nm3. Member states will vote on the proposed rules early next year.
While the UK supported a 10 percent emissions reduction, representatives pushed an extra clause that will allow many existing incinerators to meet a standard that is 20 percent higher than the new proposed limit (180 mg/Nm3 rather than 150mg/Nm3) if one of the technologies used to reduce toxic emissions is not “applicable” to the plant.
The extra clause refers to so-called selective catalytic reduction (SCR), a technology not currently used by most EU incineration plants, including all plants in the UK. It gives plants the opportunity to exempt themselves from meeting the stricter standard by arguing they cannot install this particular technology. It is not yet known how widely this loophole will be used.
One expert told Unearthed that plants “will always find arguments” for why they can use the loophole, which won’t apply to new facilities.
The UK also opposed tighter monitoring rules for toxic mercury emissions, the notes state. However, other member states were in favour of the stricter monitoring, which is included in the final draft conclusions.
Weaken standards
Responding to the notes, shadow environment minister David Drew MP said: “We seem to be going in completely the wrong direction. Instead of working to secure cleaner air for public health and better recycling for the sake of the environment, the government is increasing our reliance on incinerators and therefore the noxious particulate matter that is released into the atmosphere.”
A government official denied the new clause amounted to a weakening of standards.
Speaking to Unearthed, a spokeswoman for the environment department (DEFRA) said: “It is categorically untrue to claim that the UK has been lobbying to weaken new EU rules on toxic emissions from waste incinerators.”
At the meeting in Spain in April, which brought together 90 experts from across the EU, the UK’s opposition was largely based on economic concerns, sources said.
One delegate, speaking to Unearthed on condition of anonymity, said: “The UK were being quite forthright and persistent and talked a lot about economics. Most of the time they were either speaking to weaken the standards or they were silent.”
Energy-from-waste
A source from a different delegation, who agreed that the UK had opposed the NOx and mercury measures, told Unearthed: “We know that lower NOx levels can now be reached – well below 180 [mg/Nm3; the level agreed] – but the UK just wanted less ambition.
“In some cases, such as with mercury monitoring, there were even few objections from industry.” The source also requested anonymity to discuss the negotiations.
Some experts believe that forcing incinerators to fit the new SCR technology can increase greenhouse gas emissions. It can also be very expensive.
Others believe that plants can meet lower emissions standards without SCR technology, by instead using SNCR, the technique used by most European plants.
The use of incinerators – otherwise known as energy-from-waste plants – to burn rubbish and create energy has surged in recent years. Almost 40 percent of the UK’s local authority waste is now burned, increasing to 80% in parts of London.
Plastic waste
Incineration is now predicted to overtake recycling in England, with councils burning three times as much waste as in 2010. Last year it generated 6,187GWh, around two percent of the UK’s energy.
One major waste firm recently publicly backed the practice, amid concerns about shrinking landfill space and the risk that Brexit could leave the UK struggling to export the 3.5m tonnes of waste it currently sends to Europe as fuel.
The rise in incineration comes as the industry gets to grips with a global waste crisis, following a decision in January by China – previously the biggest importer of the world’s plastic waste – to close its doors to most household recycling.
An Unearthed investigation has since shown that British packaging is now ending up in illegal dump sites on the other side of the world, as the industry struggles to find new destinations for waste.
The government is considering launching an incineration tax in the Budget on Monday, as part of a raft of measures to tackle plastic waste, following a consultation that drew an unprecedented 162,000 responses this summer.
Nine months ago Theresa May launched the government’s 25 year environment plan, which pledged to cut pollution from industry and reduce the environmental impact of waste.
The plan pledged to halve the effects of air pollution on health within 12 years and meet legally binding air pollution targets, including for NOx. It also pledged to cut terrestrial emissions of mercury in half by 2030.
EU member states will vote on the new rules early next year, and if passed they will be phased in by 2024.
The regulations will be part of a Best Available Techniques Reference (BREF) document, which sets out environmental performance standards for plants under the Industrial Emissions Directive.
The NOx loophole could only be used by existing waste incinerators, where SCR technology is not used. Most plants in the EU use a different technology, selective non-catalytic reduction (SNCR).
Very seriously
Environmental consultant Peter Gebhardt, who was also present at the talks in April, told Unearthed: “I think in cases where an operator use SNCR at an existing plant, they will always find arguments that SCR is not applicable.
“This is why I think that no plant will change the abatement system from SNCR to SCR due to conclusions in the new WI BREF.”
He added: “With the SNCR technique even values below 100 mg/m3 [NOx emissions] are achievable”.
The UK’s waste trade body said that using SCR is very expensive and can lead to higher carbon emissions.
Libby Forrest, policy and parliamentary affairs officer for the Environmental Services Association told Unearthed: “The UK EfW sector takes emissions reduction very seriously.
Expressed wishes
“Most plants operate well below the NOx limit. The SNCR technology used to control NOx emissions is generally associated with higher NOx emissions than SCR technology, but leads to increased thermal efficiency.
“Higher efficiency means you get more energy, which increases the carbon benefit of EfW because you’re displacing a greater amount of non-renewable baseload power.”
Back in 2015, when the EU was agreeing new BREF rules for large coal plants, the UK also voiced opposition to stronger standards on NOx, mercury and sulphur dioxide, but ultimately voted in favour.
Anti-incineration campaign group UKWIN told Unearthed: “It is clearly outrageous that, at a time when citizens are demanding better air quality, our representatives have been going against the expressed wishes of the people they are meant to represent and acting to the detriment of the environment they are tasked with protecting.”
This Article
This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.
London, Birmingham, Bangor, Coventry and Edinburgh will be among 115 cities around the world taking action on climate change today as part of European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) Climate-KIC’s annual Climathon.
The event is an award-winning 24-hour hackathon that unites students, entrepreneurs, big thinkers, technical experts and app developers in tackling the defining climate challenges of their cities.
City-level action is needed to address climate change at speed and scale. Cities are already contributing over 70 percent of global carbon emissions and are growing rapidly, with 70 percent of the world’s population expected to live in cities by 2050. Together, cities hold the world’s biggest lever for slowing down global warming
Sustainable design
Teams hosted by local authorities, universities and NGOs from across the world including Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Sydney, Edinburgh and London will bring people together to solve local climate challenges – from sustainable food in Paris, to air pollution in Coventry, waste-management in Lagos, and smart mobility in Shanghai.
London teams will work on the problem of plastics. A major issue for the UK capital, attendees will be challenged to use sustainable design principles to help eliminate single-use plastic in London. A bold but achievable task.
Awareness is growing that unless we recast the role of plastics in our lives our seas will have more plastic than fish by 2050, which among other things, will reduce the ability of oceans to act as carbon sinks.
It is less well known that on current trajectories, petroleum-based plastics could contribute 15 per cent of global CO2 emissions by 2050 – overtaking aviation. Many businesses are looking at the opportunities that come with solving these problems. Up to 95 percent of material and energy value is lost in Europe, through single-use.
Climate-KIC already supports several London-based start-ups focused on plastics, including Skipping Rocks Lab, makers of the ubiquitous Ooho! seaweed-based water bottle ‘bubbles’ whose crowdfunding campaign went viral. The start-up has just teamed up with Just Eat to trial seaweed-based packaging for fast food packaging.
Innovative solutions
Another, Chrysalix Technologies, has developed a patented sustainable alternative to the petrochemicals that go into making plastics – a solution that has the potential to generate £25 billion of value for every 100M tonnes of unwanted, unrecycled waste wood that is used in their process.
In London last year one team developed a wearable device called ‘Co-Pilot’, initially aimed at cyclists providing real-time information on connected vehicles around them while another group devised an accommodation search engine enabling the user to determine their ideal area to live – based on sustainable transport provisions.
Other solutions developed in previous years have included a Cork-based transport app that awards citizens discounts in local stores based on the carbon savings they make and sustainable drainage systems to avert floods in Manchester.
Elliot Bushay from Climathon London said: “We are all very excited to see what teams come up with this year. We have had some amazing ideas grow and develop from Climathon and I have no doubt we will get some innovative ideas to solve the single-use plastic issue here in London during the day.”
Climathon, which had its first hackathon in the run up to the historic COP21 negotiations in Paris, has since grown to be the biggest international climate change hackathon in world history.
Climate crisis
In 2017, more than 100 cities in 44 countries across 6 continents hosted Climathons worldwide, with a total reach of 33 million people.
Winning Climathon 2017 teams from across the UK were invited to present their ideas to Minister of Climate Change and Clean Growth Claire Perry earlier this year.
Kirsten Dunlop, CEO, EIT Climate-KIC said: “The recent IPCC report has thrown down the gauntlet to governments and cities across the world. The challenges of meeting a 1.5 degree target are so immense that it is difficult to comprehend the scale and scope of collective transformation required.
“We have ten years to set radical changes in motion definitively across all sectors and, most crucially, in our own minds and everyday choices.”
Mark Watts, executive director, C40, a key partner of EIT Climate-KIC said: “For more than a decade, mayors of the world’s greatest cities have been working together to deliver the boldest possible climate action to help create the sustainable, low carbon and prosperous cities of the future. But they can’t do it alone. The solutions to the climate crisis will be forged in cities, by citizens, start-ups, community groups, families and neighbours.
Future generations
Watts continued: “It is crucial to find new and innovative ways to connect these citizens with each other and with city halls. The EIT Climate-KIC Climathon offers an innovative approach to deliver that and ensure new ideas and commitment to a better future for the next generation will be nurtured by mayors, city leaders and businesses.
“Only by working together will we deliver on the highest ambitions of the Paris Climate Agreement.”
This Author
Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from EIT Climate-KIC. Follow the Climathon from 26 October 2018 on social media via the #Climathon hashtag on Twitter and Facebook.
ExxonMobil money was being refined through the London-based offices of free market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) before sloshing into the pockets of British journalists – including one admired environmental correspondent – during the ‘90s and early 2000s.
Richard D North was editor of the radical Vole magazine, the first environment editor hired by the left-liberal Independent newspaper, and “was one of the most respected environment correspondents in the 1980s.” But then, inexplicably, he had a change of heart and by 1995 had “become an apologist for industry”.
Some years later, he wrote an article for the Evening Standard arguing there was no hope of averting climate change so we should now accuse politicians of using the issue as “a tax-raising wheeze”. North was described at the end of the article as a fellow of the IEA.
ExxonMobil grant
A set of accounts that I discovered buried deep in the digital archive at Companies House revealed that a £21,000 stash was being handled for the author. “The ExxonMobil Fund is a research grant for Richard North” explained accounts filed by the IEA.
North confirmed via email: “Exxon’s grant… was given towards general and continuing work I had been engaged on for several years. It was not for any specific project, but simply toward on-going research I did on broad themes around capitalism, free markets, intellectual property, consumerism, climate change and corporate social responsibility.”
This work included his book, Rich is Beautiful. North said: “I am afraid I don’t intend to get into an explanation of how I earn my living and how much corporate funding I have had. My job is to play fair by my readers, and I have always done that.”
Blame fuels
Rich is Beautiful is a curious book published by the Social Affairs Unit – an offshoot of the IEA and funded by British American Tobacco. In his book, North argues that Exxon should not be blamed for the fact that fossil fuels are causing climate change but instead we should look to the drivers and customers that choose its products.
It’s a deeply pessimistic prognosis based on Hayek’s claims that shoppers send ‘signals’ to producers through money, allowing industry to abdicate all responsibility for the environmental impacts of their production.
North wrote: “It is for the people who drive cars to worry about their emissions, not for the oil companies who supply their fuel… Nor is it remotely clear why, say, oil firms should invest in renewable energy systems.
“Oil firms did not ‘cause’ global warming, and they have no obligation to ‘cure’ it… Bullying oil companies to get involved must merely mean making them do something they don’t want to do, which will mean that a politician (or an NGO – Non-Governmental Organisation – campaigner) is insisting on the right to spend shareholders’ money.”
Corporations over campaigners
In the book, the journalist is entirely frank about taking money from vested interests. He explains: “I prefer corporations to campaigners… If I was offered a weekend in New York, I’d take it if the tickets were business class, and refuse if the tickets were tourist (even though I believe that more space equals more global warming, mile for mile).”
However, it would be wrong to assume that North merely took this cynical view to earn a corporate dime. Instead, it appears to reflect a deep malaise and disgust at fellow human beings.
He wrote, in his book about beauty: “I am inclined to think that the poor in the rich world are either stupid or lazy or both, and may soon constitute an embarrassing troubling underclass.”
He then concludes: “On a bad day, people seem ‘needy’ and whining and self-pitying… I am often afflicted with an intense dislike of my fellow man. Sprawling, raucous, mewling and semi-naked as they are, I find them terribly low.”
An amateur psychologist might suggest that this horror at the grotesqueness of humankind was, in fact, a symptom of self-loathing, and would assume this was the result of living off corporate donations and betraying his own values.
The IEA, in this instance at least, acted as a conduit to funnel oil money to an environmental journalist who was willing to raise various doubts about climate change and our ability to avert the crisis – when this would come at the cost for his sponsors in the oil industry.
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.
A government proposal to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership risks a ‘race to the bottom’ in food and financial standards post-Brexit, campaigners have warned.
The deal also poses threats to the NHS and other public services, and would leave Britain at the mercy of a ‘corporate court’ system which would allow overseas business to sue the British government in secret courts for regulations which they believe damage their profits.
Responding to a consultation from the Department for International Trade which proposes acceding to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, campaign groups War on Want, Global Justice Now and Trade Justice Movement also suggested that signing the TPP ‘jumps the gun’ in terms of public debate about how close we stay to the EU’s common rulebook post Brexit, and would make a European customs union far more difficult to agree.
Corporate systems
The new briefing finds the TPP would entrench the ‘corporate court’ system that gives multinational corporations special powers to bully and sue governments; undermine food standards – threatening to allow chlorine chicken and steroid-fed beef into the UK, lowering the quality of food and jeopardising farmers’ livelihoods; and undermine public services across the world – threatening the NHS and the ability of the developing countries in the deal to build their own public services
It would also give more power to big tech companies to use and abuse our data, and prevent developing countries from building their digital sectors, which are vital for their development and move Britain closer to a US-style system of deregulation that would make it harder to work closely with the EU
Jean Blaylock, from War on Want, said: “We are right in the middle of a huge political debate about how close the UK stays to its EU trade relationships post-Brexit.
“Parliament has not yet made a decision on this issue. So it’s completely premature for the Department for International Trade to suggest we should join a trade deal which would make it near impossible to keep our current standards and continue to be aligned to the EU rulebook.
“Our fear is that this is an attempt to prejudge that decision and force post Brexit UK down the road of a deregulated US-style economic regime which we know Dr Fox supports.”
Nick Dearden, from Global Justice Now, said: “The hard Brexiteers believe that Brexit can achieve all manner of miracles – but the idea of Britain as a pacific state is surely far fetched even for them.
“Here in Europe we defeated a very similar deal to this – called TTIP – because we didn’t want big business to have more control over our laws, our public services and our societies. Liam Fox obviously hopes enough people are looking the other way so he can begin to sign us up to something equally toxic. But if he’s serious, we’ll fight this deal every step of the way.”
This Author
Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from War on Want.
Environmental charity Surfers Against Sewage is calling on the chancellor, Philip Hammond, to tackle the creation and use of avoidable single-use plastic in his forthcoming Autumn Budget on Monday, including the introduction of a plastic tax and support for a world class inclusive Deposit Return Scheme for all drinks bottles.
Hugo Tagholm, chief executive of Surfers Against Sewage, said: “The future health of our oceans and marine life cannot be traded for the convenience culture of today so we need a budget that drives action to make us single-use plastic free. Aggressively cutting the volume of avoidable and pointless plastics is critical in reversing the terrifying scale of plastic pollution currently suffocating our environment from our cities to the ocean.
“Runaway plastic emissions have to be tackled through ambitious and progressive policies that truly stop plastic particulate from being belched out from factories. It doesn’t stop at coffee cups and cutlery – business needs wholesale reform to decouple its profits from finite fossil fuels used to make products that last just minutes but pollute for centuries.
Deposit system
“Eliminating society’s plastic footprint and creating a truly circular economy will require bold and brilliant policies, innovation and sustainable alternatives.”
“Plastic production is set to quadruple by 2050, fuelled by new fossil fuel exploration such as fracking. The government must act with urgency to ensure that manufacturers are truly responsible for the full life-cycle of all of the plastic they produce. 100 percent recyclable should equate to 100 percent recycled.”
SAS has campaigned successfully for the introduction of the 5p plastic bag charge, which has already reduced the circulation of plastic bags by nine billion. It also recently delivered a petition representing the voices of over 325,000 citizens to the prime minister, Theresa May, calling for the introduction of a comprehensive deposit return system (DRS) on plastic beverage bottle and containers.
A DRS is a proven mechanism to trap plastic in the recycling economy rather than on our beaches and in the wider environment. The government will soon be consulting on the design of the English DRS system.
SAS will be calling for it to be fully inclusive of beverage bottle sizes and materials to create a truly world-class and effective system that will protect the environment, create jobs, reduce carbon emissions and prevent littering.
Earlier this year, Surfers Against Sewage, alongside 27 major environmental organisations, issued a joint response to the Treasury’s single-use plastic consultation.
The group called for a plastics tax to incentivise use of recycled plastics, reduce volumes of the most environmentally-damaging and non-recyclable plastics and polymers, and to extend producer responsibility so that producers and retailers are accountable for the full ‘end of life’ costs of the single use plastics they put on the market.
This Author
Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Surfers Against Sewage.
Anti-Trident protestors blockaded all entrances at one of Britain’s nuclear weapons factories, AWE Burghfield in West Berkshire, yesterday.
The direct action halted traffic to and from the site in the morning. The protest is highlighting the role AWE Burghfield plays in the maintenance and replacement of Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system.
The Burghfield bomb factory, administered by the Atomic Weapons Establishment, builds and maintains nuclear warheads.
Increasing groundswell
The Trident Ploughshares activists have blocked access to the site with a car with two people locked to it at one point and with a line of people with their arms in lock-on tubes at another.
Separately, campaigners from local CND group Hereford Peace Council will today travel to Parliament on a ‘peace train’, bringing with them petitions from thousands of supporters who want the government to get rid of its nuclear weapons and join the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Kate Hudson, CND general secretary, said: “I congratulate all of the protestors for drawing attention to the fact that people from across the country object to the government’s plans to spend billions of pounds on a new nuclear weapons system.
“These actions are part of an increasing groundswell of activity against these weapons of mass destruction which do nothing to keep us safe. Economists, defence experts and anyone with common sense are all coming to a consensus that these weapons are expensive, useless and irrelevant in the face of today’s security threats.
“Most of the world don’t have nuclear weapons and indeed 122 countries voted for a UN treaty which would ban all nuclear weapons. It’s time for the government to side with this majority of countries who want a safer and more peaceful world, rather than the small number – led by a dangerous President Trump – who are recklessly pursuing nuclear Armageddon.”
This Author
Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The free marketeer Julian Morris and his team at the International Policy Network (IPN) think tank continued to lead the charge against climate science in the autumn of 2003 – all the while secretly receiving generous funding from ExxonMobil.
In October 2003, Morris unleashed a vitriolic attack on the Kyoto Protocol along the familiar theme that the restrictions on fossil fuels would strangle economic growth.
He said: “Kyoto would slow economic growth in the EU and in Russia without providing any substantive benefits. If Russia does not ratify, Kyoto will not come into force, so both Russia and EU countries will grow more rapidly and then can look for alternative solutions to climate change.”
Warm Welcome
He was warmly received when he spoke at the Mont Pelerin Society – an international group of free market economists, historians and philosophers founded by Friedrich von Hayek – meeting the following year and presented the case for “removing barriers to adaptation as a cost effective strategy to addressing problems associated with the climate.”
Morris also conducted a brilliant ambush in persuading the Liberal-left and broadly environmentalist Guardian to reproduce the IPN allegation that the scientific analysis in the influential 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report was “flawed”.
The Arctic study had already suffered delays from the US State Department until after the 2004 US election cycle – pitting the Republican George Bush against Democrat John Kerry – because its findings were so significant that the administration feared voters would react by electing a president who was promising effective action on the environment.
However, the deniers in the US were able to cite a report from a respectable-sounding British think tank, reported by a respected left British paper, in order to shoot this serious and alarming report down in flames. Tim Radford, the Guardian journalist who published the article, confirmed he did not know the IPN was funded by Exxon at the time of the story.
Morris Attacks
Then, in November, Morris echoed the extreme criticisms made by Myron Ebell, director of the Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), of Sir David King – the then chief scientific advisor to the British government. He called King “an embarrassment to himself and an embarrassment to his country.”
Later that month, Morris attacked Prime Minister Tony Blair for his attempt to use his presidency of the forthcoming G8summit of world leaders to put greenhouse emissions reductions at the centre of the discussions.
The IPN activists also attended the 10th international United Nations COP climate change negotiations in Argentina, translating its reports into Spanish for the occasion.
Bate was advertised as an expert available to discuss the conference by the Koch-affiliated American Enterprise Institute in the United States.
He published an article, titled “Climate Alarmism and the Poor”, in which he attacked the IPCC for allowing developing countries longer to reduce emissions.
“These countries will rightly resist any international efforts to curb their use of energy,” he argued. “What we must do is invest in new technologies with them, not export our anti-energy regulations.”
Exxon Funding
The IPN boasted in its end of year accounts that it had “sponsored, coordinated and enabled affiliates to participate in policy events in Australia, Austria, Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Denmark, France, Ghana, Hungary, India, Iceland, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, the UK and the USA.”
This represented extraordinary good value for the funders of the think tank. During 2004, ExxonMobil piped $115,000 to the US IPN, of which £65,656 flowed through to the London office, which in turn spent £35,511 on its “Climate Change and Sustainable Development” programme.
Morris was personally paid £69,284 in “fees and expenses”, although this cash would not have come from Exxon alone but also from the other corporate sponsors and donors.
The Exxon cash continued to spill into the IPN offices during 2005, with a donation of $130,000 made to the US partner organisation. Moreover, the charity also accepted $25,000 from the Koch-dominated Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
And, a further $130,000 poured in from the Earhart Foundation, which was founded by an oil company that would become part of Exxon and was also, decades earlier, a generous supporter to Hayek and his pioneering free market think tanks.
Morris, working in the office in London, began to have his £69,284 salary paid directly from the US wing of his charity. Okanski, his wife, was paid an additional £28,000-wage and expenses of £4,448 for the year.
Unprecedented Influence
This was a British think tank that recently enjoyed unprecedented and unrivalled influence on the government, secretly banking hundreds of thousands from US oil interests while actively trying to influence international negotiations about climate change: the single most important and controversial debate of the era.
Morris refused throughout to name his funders. But, in the end, Exxon would reveal its support for the think tank through its corporate giving reports in the US.
That year Mother Jones named and shamed the IPN among 40 groups funded by Exxon, many of which attacked the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report. The progressive American magazine stated that “as the world burns think tanks and journalists funded by ExxonMobil are out to convince you global warming is a hoax”.
During the course of the year, Exxon had funnelled $2.9 million to 39 different US groups, including the CEI and the IPN, all of which are accused of “spread[ing] misleading information about climate change”.
In a short diary article published in December 2005, Simon Bowers reported in the Guardian that Morris called the newspaper to deny reports in another newspaper that the IPN had claimed climate change, was a myth having been paid $250,000.
Morris told the Guardian that both claims were “simply not true”, only to concede later that the think tank had received Exxon cash and that a contributor to an IPN publication “may have” referred to “a European myth about climate change.”
Perhaps Morris was unaware of the huge glut of funding from the American oil giant, or perhaps he got his facts confused.
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.
Oceans researcher and campaigner Alex Rogers first experienced the full visual impact of ocean plastic pollution in 2015: “I was diving in Honduras in 2015 at Utila in the Bay Islands and there were all these beautiful coral reefs, but as we came around the island we were faced with a raft of rubbish stretching out as far as you could see: plastic bottles, expanded polystyrene, fibreglass, every kind of human waste you could imagine … I have never witnessed such a huge quantity of debris. It was horrific.”
Not that it was his first brush with ocean plastic. That had come three years earlier, when he and his team were exploring seamounts in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Antarctica.
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“We were taking samples from deep-sea corals and sediments at depths of up to 1,500 metres, in one of the most remote places in the world, and we were finding all these plastic fibres. My initial reaction was, ‘Fantastic – here’s my next paper!’ But a microsecond later I was thinking, ‘But it’s terrible – if this stuff is here, it must be everywhere.’”
Destructive fishing
But while marine plastics are indeed a horrific and truly global problem, they are by no means the only human assault on the health of our oceans and their wildlife. Indeed they aren’t even the most serious.
Rogers said: “The number one problem for the oceans has to be climate change because of the sheer scale and scope of the disruption it threatens – to ocean chemistry, ocean circulation, ocean ecosystems, polar sea ice and ice caps, and the knock-on effects on the planet as a whole. And these changes will be completely irreversible over human timescales.”
Next comes over-fishing, and destructive fishing: entire ecosystems hoovered up by industrial fishing fleets, and seabeds trashed by trawling.
One example: “In the 1960s Russian and Japanese fleets discovered huge stocks of fish over seamounts in the Pacific – the Emperor Seamounts chain – and just started hauling them in without even knowing what was there. The stocks crashed. Soon New Zealand, Australian and EU fleets began deep-sea trawling. One population after another was collapsed, with huge damage to habitats.
“They went for them with bottom trawlers gouging up the seabed and with massive impacts on target species like orange roughy, which grows very slowly, does not mature until it’s 30 or 40 years old, and lives up to 150 years with a very low level of natural mortality. A whole industry ramped up incredibly quickly with no scientific research to even show what was there, or the population dynamics.
“Finally the science has caught up, but not fast enough to stop the damage. And even though catches are much more sustainable now, almost all the fish are taken by bottom trawling, which is about the most destructive industrial fishing method there is.”
Microplastic pollution
While stocks last!
Pollution comes in at number three – including plastics, along with the whole gamut of toxic chemicals, heavy metals and so on that work their way into the oceans once they have served their human purpose. “We know for sure that plastics are a serious hazard, but we still don’t know how bad. We are looking at three main impacts: entanglement of animals, for example in fishing nets; ingestion, which in extreme cases can completely block cetaceans’ digestive tracts, for example; and toxicity.
“Plastics attract and concentrate persistent organic pollutants like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from seawater, and they often contain toxic additives in their own right – such as phthalates, flame retardants and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs, which came in as replacements for PCBs) – and now they are being found in whale tissues.
“Lots of organisms eat microplastic particles, mistaking them for food, so the fear is that they will keep on recycling persistent organic pollutants back into the food chain long after we thought we were rid of them.”
Rogers was recently appalled to discover environmentally harmful chemicals in his supermarket shower gel – oxybenzones, best known as ultraviolet light blockers in sunscreens recently banned from commercial sale in Hawaii from 2021 because of the harm they do to coral reefs.
“At first I was really surprised to see that substance. But then I found that oxybenzones are everywhere – not just in sunscreens and shower gels, but also in shampoos, hair conditioners, make-up, mascara, and even in some foods. The concentrations may be low, but it still goes down the plughole and gets into the environment and into drinking water”.
New research
Rogers continued: “People are using multiple products. It gets into them through their skin, and the impacts of different pollutants can combine. People assume the stuff they buy is benign – if it’s on sale it must be OK. But it’s not. We all need to be aware of all these chemicals and avoid them.”
Amid this litany of oceanic gloom, there is actually some good news – at least, reason to hope that coral reefs and the marine life they support may be better than feared at surviving the warmer oceans caused by global warming.
New research, some of it Rogers’, shows that coral ecosystems extend much deeper than had previously been realised, into cool waters that may serve as biodiversity refuges even as surface waters heat up. These discoveries are now causing oceanographers to rethink their division of the sea into depth zones, with a new mesophotic zone, from 40 metres deep down to 150 metres, that is far more important than previously realised.
“Most of our knowledge of coral reefs comes from scuba-diving depths down to 40 metres, which scientists call the altiphotic – shallow, sun-bathed coral depths. Then below that we have the mesophotic, where there’s still enough light for some light-harvesting corals and algae, but lower temperatures and less disturbance.
“What we have found is that many species inhabit both zones, but the top 40 metres is suffering the most from human activities.”
Deep sea
Rogers explained: “So what we need to know is this: if the altiphotic gets significantly disturbed, can it repopulate from the mesophotic? And that’s how it looks. For example, in Chagos, which has suffered intense coral bleaching, we saw only 10 percent coral cover in the top 10–15 metres. But out of sight at 40–60 metres, in places there was still 100 percent coral cover. So it’s looking like really good news.
“If key species can survive at these depths, that’s very encouraging. But we should still be worried – coral reefs remain highly vulnerable and threatened by climate change and ocean acidification. Another danger is that fishers are increasingly targeting this zone.”
Go down deeper still, and more surprises are lurking in the newly defined rariphotic, which extends from 150 metres down to 300 metres. Its existence as a distinct zone was first revealed in Curaçao by Carole Baldwin of the Smithsonian Institution, who realised that this zone, considered ‘deep sea’ under the old definitions, contained many species from families typically associated with shallow water.
So the Nekton mission – funded by the Nekton Foundation, of which Rogers is chief scientist – decided to take a look in Bermudan waters.
Rogers said: “We have seen the same thing in Bermuda. For example, we found moray eels at 250 metres. The most common rariphotic fish were rough-tongued bass and saddle bass, again from families mainly found in shallow waters. But life on the rariphotic seabed is also distinctive – we have been finding entire new ecological communities at mesophotic and rariphotic depths that have remained undiscovered until now.”
New species
Rogers continued: “Key finds include more than 40 new species of photosynthetic algae that have found a safe refuge from herbivorous fish, which range to a depth of 60 metres, and extensive coral gardens. The corals look like gigantic bedsprings in gigantic fields, along with sea fanssandagiant sponges, each with myriad other animals living on them in fractal fashion. They are known as black corals, but they are actually white.
“In Bermuda we found one entirely new species of black coral, and three new records – species never previously seen there. And we have found dozens of new species living on them, including a dozen or more tanaids –crustaceans that look like mini-lobsters.
“DNA analysis shows that algae of the same genus are found in Australia, with a common ancestor some 5 million years ago – roughly the same time that the Isthmus of Panama rose up and separated the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. We think these algal communities exist over a wide area of the tropics that has not yet been examined.
“Researchers have often focused on obvious, colourful species like corals and fish, but when you look harder you find other, less showy species that have previously been ignored but still have their tales to tell.”
In fact, Rogers added, there are discoveries to be made pretty much wherever you look in the deep ocean: “Whenever we move into a new area, we expect to find new species. So far we have only explored 0.0001 percent of the pelagic zone (the waters from the surface down to 11,000 metres), and less than 0.1 percent of the deep seabed. Even our understanding of the broad patterns of biodiversity distribution is pretty shaky.”
Novel ecosystems
New technologies are constantly opening up opportunities for discovery – like ‘torpedoes with handles’ that scuba divers can ride down to 90 metres using mixed-gas rebreathers, and Triton submersibles with acrylic spheres offering a 360° view of the ocean around.
Rogers said: “They were developed mainly for the mega-yacht market but they’re also great for research. Ours are good to 300 metres, but some models can go to 1,000 metres. And if we go deeper I’ll expect to find even more novel ecosystems.”
But there’s no time to lose. Rogers cautioned: “The ocean is changing so fast, and the negative effects of human activity create a huge urgency. We are having massive impacts on things we don’t even know are there.
“It’s vital that scientists, governments and UN bodies know what is there in the deep ocean before we allow it to be trashed for short-term profit. What we need here is a scale of scientific endeavour similar to space exploration. This is far too big a problem for conventional scientific approaches.”
Rising tensions
The fourth biggest threat to the oceans? Habitat destruction, for example of coastal mangrove forests cut down for fuel or shrimp farms, sea-grass meadows and deep-water reefs ploughed up by trawlers, or uniquely biodiverse hydrothermal vents destroyed by mining for their valuable rare earth metals.
While the seabed is legally defined in the UNCLOS (Law of the Sea) treaty as “the common heritage of mankind, the exploration and exploitation of which shall be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole”, Rogers lamented that the International Seabed Authority “has been giving out licences for exploration for deep-sea mining with very little knowledge or understanding of what life is present, never mind how it will be impacted”.
With the oceans generating an estimated US$2.5 trillion annual value to the global economy, surely a few tens of billions a year for deep ocean research and protection would be both precautionary and affordable? But sadly, as Rogers explains, that prospect is remote.
Rogers concluded: “We are seeing a widespread trend to nationalism, militarism and unilateralism just as we need the reverse – to come together to deal with the really big existential problems of climate change, feeding a growing world population sustainably, and conserving global biodiversity.
“All the rising global tensions are a huge distraction from the real issue we are facing – how to maintain the planet in a habitable condition for 10 billion people.”
This Author
Oliver Tickell is a regular contributor to Resurgence & Ecologist and author of the report International Law and Marine Plastic Pollution: Holding Offenders Accountable. This article first appeared in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, which is out now!
