The UK has signed a document seeking to block efforts to make the world’s top shipping regulator more transparent, after a leading NGO called for “urgent reform” within the organisation.

An official document signed by the UK, the Cook Islands, the Marshall Islands, Panama, United Arab Emirates and the United States and submitted to the International Maritime Organisation’s working group on reform in October this year noted concerns from some members that  “further expansion of access to information” about the organisation “could lead to outside influence”. As a result the document suggested the motion be abandoned.

Next week, the IMO will hold a debate on reform at its headquarters in London. Australia is among the countries calling for greater openness at the organisation, with measures to open up meetings to the public and give more powers to journalists covering the body.

Arguing against

The IMO is the UN body is supposed to ensure the shipping industry curbs greenhouse gas emissions and limits plastic waste. In April, the organisation signed an historic agreement to dramatically reduce carbon emissions from the sector. The agreement commits shipping companies to halve their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, compared to 2008 levels.

But the London-based organisation has been dogged by allegations that it is too close to industry.

Transparency International – which published research earlier this year warning that the influences at the IMO could undermine efforts to combat climate change – said it was “concerned” by the document and warned that the UK’s position “could hamper reform” at the organisation.

Transparency International found that journalists said they were unable to report freely on the organisation, while non-profits could face expulsion from the IMO if they criticised it. Shipping giants were found to have “undue influence over the policymaking process”. While five small states – Panama, Liberia, the Marshall Islands, Malta and the Bahamas – many known as tax havens for ships, had an outsize influence at the body, contributing 43.5% of funding for the organisation from member states.

In 2017, delegates at the IMO expressed concern at the value of gifts given out at the organisation. Climate Home reported that presents left on countries tables were so heavy that they damaged 137 headphones and five microphones.The Transparency International report prompted a move by the IMO to open up more to the public, with the body announcing this summer that its governing council would consider reforms. But according to the document seen by Unearthed, the UK has backed countries arguing against these efforts.

Heavy presents

A section of the document published on October 19th 2018 reads:

“During the 120th session of Council, the Secretariat submitted document C 120/4/3 wherein they provided a synopsis of IMO’s current policies on releasing information to the public. During the subsequent discussion, the Council agreed to make some changes to increase the level of transparency that is afforded to the public. It was clear from the interventions made that a number of countries had reservations regarding further expansion of access to information, some attributing this to a concern that it could lead to outside influence. Based on this, the co-sponsors recommend that this topic/issue not be included in the terms of reference of the Working Group.”

Unearthed asked the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, the government department that deals with IMO, for a comment on this story. An agency spokesperson told Unearthed the UK has “always actively supported transparency in the IMO and will continue to do so.” A spokesperson added that the document signed by the UK was designed to refer to “the outcome of the last session, not the view of the co-sponsors” – including the UK.

Shipping currently contributes two percent of the world’s carbon emissions, the same as some industrialised countries. A 2015 report by the European Parliament suggested that could rise to 17 percent by 2050, if emissions are not checked.

Rueben Lifuka, vice-chair of Transparency International, said: “Unfortunately the International Maritime Organization is far too susceptible to disproportionate influence from private interests and certain Member States, meaning that there could be obstacles to meeting the targets for emissions reduction set earlier this year.”

The IMO declined to comment on this story.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

The seriousness of our environmental plight comes more clearly into view with each passing news cycle. The Canadian glaciers are melting faster than we forecast. Humanity has wiped out 60 percent of animal populations since 1970.

Only 12 years remain to act if we are to keep global temperatures below 1.5C as required – yet global action on climate change consistently falls far short of what is needed. The ecological rifts opening up are legion.

From climate change to biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle depletion to ocean acidification, the realisation that we are at – or will soon be reaching – points of no return has dominated headlines in recent months.

New movement

Cause for alarm is clearly justified. Given the increasingly dire warnings regarding the state of our planet, hope is often hard to come by.

While the headlines have grown increasingly negative about the course of the past decade, a positive new force in climate politics has been quietly emerging. Its increasing strength holds much promise in the fight against climate change.

This is the growing involvement of workers’ movements in environmental action and campaigning. But it has not always been this way.

So many times in the past we have seen people, desperate for work, fighting to protect the dangerous, dirty industries on which their communities depend. With equal intensity, we have seen environmentalists, in the name of planetary protection, fight tooth-and-nail against those very same enterprises.

However, the ever-closer union of these movements – workers and environmentalists – brings together two of most powerful social forces we have in the fight against capitalist, profit-first development and the ecological devastation it wreaks.

Employment crisis

This coming together of workers’ and environmental movements in the UK is due in large part to the One Million Climate Jobs campaign. This campaign aims to create hope in a time of crisis.

The campaign is backed by eight major unions and sets out an approach that aims to tackle the economic, environmental and employment crises.

It proposes the creation of one million new climate jobs across the UK through the development of a National Climate Service. A climate job is defined as a new job that directly reduces emissions.

It is important to note that these are state-employed jobs and that the implementation of this programme would indirectly create a further 500,000 jobs in the supply chain.

And to make sure that the transition to a low-carbon society is fair, the campaign also proposes that every worker currently employed in high-carbon industries will be guaranteed a secure, unionized climate job where they can use their skills.

Shaping policy

The One Million Climate Jobs pamphlet sets out exactly where the jobs will be created – sectors such as insulation, renewable energy, agriculture, transport, industry, education and waste – and calculates the costs of doing so.

The pamphlet itself is useful a tool for policy makers and campaigners, but behind it is where the real strength lies – the workers’ movement campaigning for its implementation. Although the programme is ambitious, as required by current climate science, it is also realistic, ready to implement and relevant today more than ever.

The One Million Climate Jobs campaign was developed over a decade ago by a group of trade unionist activists who believed that campaigning for jobs and planet were not mutually exclusive.

It was further inspired by the struggle of workers at the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight, who occupied their factory when it was threatened with closure in 2009.

That same year, the first edition of the climate jobs report was published by Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union group (CACCTU). It called for government investment to create one million jobs in clean energy, energy efficiency and public transport. Union members, academics, activists and environmental specialists have worked together to create two further editions since. 

The campaign has gone from strength to strength, forging further links between the workers’ and environmental movements through its publications on fracking, trade union activity on climate change and by creating ‘toolkits’ aimed at boosting union affiliation to the campaign.

Historic motion 

CACCTU has also toured the UK with a campaign bus and organised huge national climate demonstrations that have brought together thousands of workers demanding action on climate change.

However, within the union movement, the transition to a zero-carbon future is still a controversial and hotly-debated issue. In 2017, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) passed a historic motion calling for climate action and energy democracy.

The motion omitted some areas of contention, and the GMB union more recently put forward a motion arguing that the voices of existing energy workers (predominantly those involved with heavily polluting, fossil-fuel based industries), should be paramount in this process.

The Campaign Against Climate Change is concerned that the GMB proposal does not reflect the urgency of the issue of climate change, and carries the risk of moving backwards.

The Campaign is currently calling for the TUC to “reflect the voices of all its members in forming energy and climate policies. Future jobs in solar, wind and energy efficiency are crucial to our economy and these sectors have been badly affected by government cuts. The TUC must be a voice for them too, and call for urgent investment in climate jobs.”

Rank and file

There is now significant momentum on the issue of climate change within unions, driven by rank and file members.

For example, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has called for stronger climate action and greater funding for their workers who risk their lives dealing with climate impacts, particularly from flooding.

Unison recently passed a motion supporting divestment from fossil fuels and published a new policy on investing local government pensions to address climate change. The PCS union campaign tirelessly on climate jobs and the need for a rapid transition on the scale of the Lucas Plan.

While the GMB supports fracking, they also work to highlight the ways that climate change disproportionately affects poor and working-class people; they are also pushing for a just transition to a low-carbon future.

And the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) are extremely active in anti-fracking campaigns.

Social protections

At the TUC Congress in 2018, in a historic vote, the trade union movement called for a moratorium on fracking in England.  Many unions support a full ban.

Union members have often been on the front line of the anti-fracking struggle. When Cuadrilla’s fracking operations in Lancashire were given the green light in October 2018 following a 7-year pause, the news was met by strong opposition from the trade union movement.

When three anti-fracking activists were imprisoned for non-violent protests at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road site, trade union members stood in solidarity to condemn the ‘dangerous precedent’ set by their arrest.

Over 200 members from a huge range of unions signed an open letterc ondemning the judgement and its threat to: “The right to protest and take non-violent direct action against threats to the climate and the environment.”

The letter went on: “We need investment in a publicly owned and democratically controlled energy system, which can oversee the transition to renewable energy.  A transition that is just by providing social protections for workers and creates unionised sustainable jobs across all sectors as we develop a new zero carbon economy.”

Growing movement

Increasing alarm over the urgency of the multiple ecological crises we face has in recent years energised the environmental movement. 

The growing demand for climate jobs has added a new and important dimension to these campaigns. And these demands are gaining traction.

The leaders of the Labour Party and the Green Party have publicly backed the One Million Climate Jobs campaign. Jeremy Corbyn recently announced that, should Labour get elected, they would create 400,000 skilled jobs to reduce the UK’s emissions.

In Sheffield, a report has been released that demonstrates how shifting the city to zero carbon could bring about a net gain of 40,000 jobs. Crucially, it is a growing demand from workers themselves – within workplaces there is an incrementally increasing view that the future of the planet is a trade union issue.

Across the world, the climate jobs movement is growing and becoming ever more confident. In countries from South Africa to Norway, from Canada to the UK, workers are increasingly demanding the right to build the low-carbon infrastructure of tomorrow.

Mass demonstration 

Yet given the enormity of the challenge and the little time left to act, we need to intensify the fight for climate jobs now. 

At the start of December 2018, world leaders will meet at the COP24 climate summit in Poland. They will discuss the enforcement mechanisms required to ensure that participating nations make emission reductions as pledged at the Paris COP21 conference in 2015.

On 1 December in London, just days before negotiations begin, a mass climate demonstration will take place to pressure those leaders to go further.

Adding to the scale of that crowd will be workers demanding positive, socially-useful work constructing the infrastructure we so clearly need for our future.

The skilled hands of those who could create this future will hold banners as they march, demanding a chance to build it. Join them.

These Authors

Hazel Graham and Stephen Graham are supporters of the One Million Climate Jobs Campaign. 

At a community hall in Camden, North London, a group of people settled down to a very personal discussion – the acknowledgement of domestic abuse among family members and how to deal with it.

The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

The meeting focussed on Aruna, her 3-year-old daughter Rubi, and Abhik, Rubi’s father.

The event was among many similar family meetings organised by independent coordinators from Camden Family Group Conference Service. The aim of these family group conferences is to rebalance power between social work professionals and families by involving extended family and giving everyone a voice.

Maori practice

Aruna said: “The domestic abuse was on the table for discussion from the start of the meeting, that it was bad for the child and for our family. 

“My family raised their concerns with what had happened and also were able to make it clear that they were not going to accept any type of abuse. It was import­ant for me that both sides of the family accepted what had happened and also that it was wrong.”

This way of working, developed over the last 20 years, draws on the experience of New Zealand’s Indigenous Maori people. Back in the mid-1980s, social workers in New Zealand began to react to concerns from the Maori community, members of which were alarmed at the high proportion of their children in care, the removal of those children to non-Maori institutions and carers, and the abuse that numbers of their children suffered.

Maoris pointed to their own long-established practice of holding family network meetings to discuss and resolve problems faced by children and their families in the community.

A crisis in social work services in New Zealand led to the Maori practice being examined and then adopted in a radical piece of legislation in 1989. Since then, the situation of New Zealand children (of any community) facing harm or exclusion from their home has had to be considered in a family group conference.

Shifting power

This conference has to happen before the matter goes to court, and it will only go to court if it remains unresolved. The practice has now spread to many other countries, including Britain.

The experience of employing this model, supported by research, is that solutions are created and rooted in the families, often using their own resources but also deciding what help they want from statutory agencies.

This has made the solutions more enduring and sustainable than solutions decided upon by professional social workers, even when they have discussed them with the immediate family. The presence of professional social workers makes it tempting for families to put responsibility onto them: the absence of professionals sends a positive message to the family that they can make good decisions and that they have the opportunity to do so.

Working with families through family group conferences and seeing the use of the model develop has been exciting.

For us as social work professionals it has felt so much more positive than working from a position of traditional professional power.

Restorative justice 

Nearly every family group conference results in the family using the model and making a plan. Invariably their plans are agreed. Families professionals had been despairing of coming up with imaginative and lasting solutions.

The family–professional relationship changes, and that has proved creative. Family group conferences are a part of the approach that is so successful in restorative justice conferences.

The key ingredients are honesty, clarity, participation (by children and the wider family) and empowerment. Decisions are made by family members on their own.

Communication and resolution is so often the experience for families and professionals when using family group conferences to work on difficult issues including child abuse and neglect.

Maori families have long known that the key thing to do in such challenging situations is to meet together and talk. Some prominent Maoris knew this when the white and non-Maori social work profession in New Zealand was in crisis in the mid-1980s, and an inquiry chaired by a Maori judge led to a radical change in practice.

Building community 

In his book Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block describes some essentials that are relevant to how family conferences are structured.

He stresses the value of getting together and not just talking about concerns; that community is built by focusing on people’s gifts rather than their deficiencies; and that labelling people diminishes their capacity to fulfil their potential.

Why might this be relevant to Resurgence & Ecologist readers? Well, we think the experience of using family group conferences is exciting and contains much good news about the potential of changing the power relationship between authorities and people.

Family group conferences are built around a different power structure, and it is through greater equality in the power balance between families and professional agencies that the dialogue and agreements are achieved.

Further, the outcomes are nearly always good and constructive and much more creative than those often reached when a social worker and a family meet in an atmosphere of criticism and distrust.

Planning the future 

Using a family group conference to achieve a decision about children is an alternative to more traditional ways of working, though the great majority of referrals come from a local authority statutory agency.

The conference is held in a neutral venue that the family finds acceptable. According to the Family Rights Group, in 2017 84 percent of local authorities referred families for family group conferences.

In the Netherlands, the principles behind the conferences have been taken further. There, the initiative for a family group conference does not have to come from a statutory agency: legislation now enables any family member to request one, which the local authority must pay a local service to provide.

Family group conferences are also available to address homelessness, difficulties arising from mental health needs, the future of prisoners about to be released, and the difficulties arising from disabilities or ageing.

A family group conference about a child is not about his or her problems to date. It will need to recognise these, but key to the whole process is that the family network is invited to plan for the child’s future.

Transformative process

One of the testaments to family group conferences is that the families who partici­pate often become advocates for the process.

In Camden, people have joined a Family Advisory Board, whose members advise on publicity and process. They are also involved in meeting new families who are thinking about whether to agree to a family group conference. Their position is that they have been there, and it works. 

For people like Aruna, the family conferences have proved constructive and even transformative. Since the family group conference, she says her family find it easier to cope, talk and plan for Rubi’s best interests, which Aruna described as “the most important thing”.

She continued: “Through the family group conference we got to understand each other more, and that includes the social worker. We got stuff done and it also improved relationships and our confidence for the future.”

Key principles

– Information from social workers about their concerns must be clear and precise.

– The child’s extended family network (relatives and significant friends) is involved in the process.

– The key part of the process – and the part that makes it fundamentally different from simply consulting with families – is private family time. The family network meets without the social worker to make a plan for the future that deals with the social worker’s concerns. Thus the power balance between families and professionals changes.

– The family plan is accepted unless a professional shows that it puts a child at risk.

– Everyone, including children, should have a voice.

– Family group conferences are convened only when a family agrees – they should not be imposed on families – and they are organised by an independent coordinator.

These Authors 

Andrew Papworth and Tim Fisher are former and current manager respectively of Camden Family Group Conference Service, a part of Camden local authority. The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

Not heard of Extinction Rebellion before? Then you heard it here first. Because soon, everyone is going to have heard of it. The Extinction Rebellion is a non-violent direct action movement challenging inaction over dangerous climate change and the mass extinction of species which, ultimately, threatens our own species.

This article was first published on The Conversation. 

Saturday (17 November 2018) was “Rebellion Day” – when people opposed to what they see as a government of “climate criminals” aim to gather together enough protesters to close down parts of the capital – by shutting down fossil-powered road traffic at key pinch-points in London.

I’m a reader in philosophy at the University of East Anglia and I have thrown myself headfirst into this movement. Our long-term aim is to create a situation where the government can no longer ignore the determination of an increasingly large number of people to shift the world from what appears to be a direct course towards climate calamity. Who knows, the government could even end up having to negotiate with the rebels.

Climate justice 

As someone who is both a veteran of non-violent direct actions over the years and an academic seeking to make sense of these campaigns, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about what’s old and what’s new about the Extinction Rebellion. Here are my conclusions so far.

The Extinction Rebellion is rooted in longstanding traditions exemplified by the radical nuclear disarmament movement. The founders of the Extinction Rebellion have thought carefully about past precedents, and about what works and what doesn’t.

They’ve noted for instance that you don’t necessarily need active involvement from more than a tiny percentage of the population to win radical change, provided that you have a righteous cause that can elicit tacit backing from a much larger percentage.

The Extinction Rebellion is also quite different from its predecessors. True, the disarmament movement was about our very existence, but nuclear devastation was – and still is – only a risk.

Extinction Rebellion’s aim is to prevent a devastation of our world that will come – and quite soon, unless we manage to do something unprecedented that will radically change our direction.

Climate activists often compare their struggle to victories from the past. But in my view comparisons which are often made – to Indian independence, the civil rights movement or the campaign for universal suffrage, for example – are over-optimistic, even fatuous. These historical movements were most often about oppressed classes of people rising up and empowering themselves, gaining access to what the privileged already had. 

Neoliberal capitalism 

The Extinction Rebellion challenges oligarchy and neoliberal capitalism for their rank excess and the political class for its deep lack of seriousness. But the changes that will be needed to arrest the collapse of our climate and biodiversity are now so huge that this movement is concerned with changing our whole way of life. 

Changing our diet significantly. Changing our transport systems drastically. Changing the way our economies work to radically relocalise them. The list goes on.

This runs up against powerful vested interests – but also places considerable demands upon ordinary citizens, especially in “developed” countries such as the UK. It is therefore a much harder ask. This means that the chances of the Extinction Rebellion succeeding are relatively slim. But this doesn’t prove it’s a mistaken enterprise – on the contrary, it looks like our last chance.

This all leads into why I sat in the road blocking the entrance to Parliament Square on October 31, when the Extinction Rebellion was launched, and why I participated on 17 November. 

As a Quaker, I cherish the opening words of the famous Shaker hymn: Tis the gift to be simple. What does it mean to live simply at this moment in history? It means to do everything necessary so that others – most importantly our children (and their children) – can simply live. It isn’t enough to live a life of voluntary simplicity.

One needs also to take peaceful direct action to seek to stop the mega-machine of growth-obsessed corporate capitalism that is destroying our common future. That’s why it seems plain to me that we need peaceful rebellion now, so that we and countless other species don’t face devastation or indeed extinction. 

Civil disobedience 

The next line of that Shaker hymn goes: “Tis the gift to be free.” In our times, to be free means to not be bound by laws that are consigning our children to purgatory or worse.

If one cares properly for one’s children, that must entail caring for their children, too. You don’t really care for your children if you damn their children. And that logic multiplies into the future indefinitely – we aren’t caring adequately for any generation if the generation to follow it is doomed.

As mammals whose primary calling is to care for our kids, it is therefore logical that an outright existential threat to their future, and to that of their children, must be resisted and rebelled against, no matter what the pitifully inadequate laws of our land say.

I’ve felt called upon to engage in conscientious civil disobedience before, at Faslane and Aldermaston against nuclear weapons and with EarthFirst in defence of the redwood forests threatened with destruction in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. 

But the Extinction Rebellion seems to me the most compelling cause of them all. Unless we manage to do the near impossible, then after a period of a few decades at most there won’t be any other causes to engage with. It really now is as stark and as dark as that.

If you too feel the call, then I think you now know what to do. A further action will take place on 27 November 2018. 

This Author

Rupert Read is a reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. This article was first published on The Conversation.

There is an LED sign at a Chase Bank in downtown Midland, Texas, the heart of the Permian Basin, which quantifies the current oil boom. It alternates between current rig count, the price of oil, and the price of gasoline.

On October 30, the day I arrived, the sign informed me there were 1,068 drilling rigs across the United States, of which 489 — nearly half — are in the Permian Basin.

Though the flashing sign is meant to celebrate the fracking boom, Sharon Wilson, Texas coordinator of Earthworks, sees it as a warning sign of the urgent need to cut greenhouse gas emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Energy transfer

The Permian Basin is one of the most prolific oil and natural gas basins in the U.S. Roughly 250 miles wide and 300 miles long, it spans West Texas and southeastern New Mexico.

The approximately 86,000-square-mile area encompasses several sub-basins, including the Delaware Basin, Central Basin, and the Midland Basin, all of which are in the midst of the latest oil boom.

Wilson, an outspoken anti-fracking activist, has advocated for better regulations to rein in the fracking industry, which utilizes horizontal drilling and fluid injections to crack open shale to release oil and gas trapped inside.

But she no longer believes regulations are the answer because state and federal governments aren’t prepared to enforce them. “The only way to save the planet from climate change is to stop fracking now,” she told me.

The frenzied expansion of the oil and gas industry in the Permian Basin over the last two years is like nothing Wilson has ever seen. Infrastructure tied to the fracking industry — from well pads and waste disposal plants to pipelines and energy transfer sites — is being built faster than ever.

Industry self-reports

Wilson has found some sites operating before posting signs identifying who owns and operates them, which is illegal and makes filing potential air pollution complaints difficult.

“Stopping climate change is the most important issue of our time,” Wilson said, “but not enough people get methane’s role. We are on a path to planetary suicide, and what is going on in the Permian Basin proves that.” Driven by this belief, Earthworks has been spending time and resources trying to bring light to the region’s methane problem.

“If we stop methane emissions, the planet will have an immediate response,” she points out. To do that, Earthworks says fracking, which has helped unleash a glut of natural gas and oil drilling in the U.S., must stop right away.

Methane, the main component in natural gas, is a greenhouse gas that is up to 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after entering the atmosphere.

A study organized by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and published in June this year reports that the U.S. oil and gas supply chain is leaking roughly 60 percent more methane than previous Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates, which largely relied on industry self-reports.

Catastrophic impacts

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report in October stressing the urgency of lowering globe-warming emissions. Known as the 1.5°C report, the IPCC’s projections give humankind 12 years to reduce emissions enough to limit climate change catastrophe.

It concludes that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have already pushed average global temperatures up by 1°C (1.8°F) since the second half of the 19th century, and that urgent changes are needed to keep warming limited to 1.5°C total in order to reduce the risk of extreme heat, drought, floods, and poverty.

The IPCC’s predictions show that even if the Paris Agreement’s current pledges are met, emissions are not being cut fast enough to keep global temperatures from rising another half degree Celsius by 2100, according to the group Climate Analytics.

The EPA’s latest annual Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, also released in October, confirms that methane emissions are not going down quickly enough. The report provides a snapshot of large emitters, indicates 2017 oil and gas methane emissions, and shows emission trajectories across the country that are on the rise.

According to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group pushing for more stringent air pollution regulations: “A look at those trends shows we are not cutting oil and gas methane emissions nearly fast enough to help avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.”

Air monitoring

EDF’s own study on methane emissions released earlier this year gives a more comprehensive account of methane releases than the EPA’s report.

Though both call for further cuts to methane emissions, the Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction, first, by announcing the U.S. would pull out of the Paris Agreement, and then rolling back the EPA’s first-ever national rule, enacted in 2016, to directly limit methane emissions from oil and gas operations.

Wilson is encouraging journalists to come see how widespread emissions of methane and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are at oil and gas sites in the Permian Basin.

On October 31, I met up with her and Alan Septoff, Earthworks’ strategic communications director, during one of their air monitoring trips in Pecos, Texas, a city in the southwest region of the Permian Basin

We stopped at oil and gas industry sites where Wilson had previously documented methane emissions with an optical gas imaging camera, which makes otherwise invisible emissions visible. And though the infrared camera does not specify or quantify the gases being emitted, Wilson said, “If it’s coming out of oil and gas facilities, it is natural gas, which is methane.”

Hydrogen sulfide

“There are hitchhiker gases or VOCs that come with the methane too,” she added, explaining that identifying which compounds are present would require more precise air monitoring.

And while each fracking industry site is permitted to emit certain amounts of gases at various stages of production, Wilson can often identify clear violations, and when she does, she submits a complaint to the state.

We also stopped at other sites where the smell of rotting eggs, a sign of the hazardous gas hydrogen sulfide, suggested more leaks were likely to be found.

The optical gas imaging camera made it easy to see dense plumes of emissions coming out of tanks and hatches that, Wilson explained, often could be contained if industry used available methane emissions control technology. But such devices are not required and are hardly the norm.

We drove for miles with the smell of rotten eggs permeating the car. At some of the sites, the smell was so strong I became queasy. Methane is colorless and odorless, but if powerful-smelling hydrogen sulfide is leaking from drilling sites, methane likely is as well.

Endless leaks

“We are out here recording methane emissions because no one else is doing it,” Wilson said. “The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) only monitors emissions in isolated cases, usually when we file regulatory complaints and push them to do it. So we are out here because the government isn’t doing its job.”

Andrea Morrow, TCEQ’s media relations manager, begs to differ. She told me during a call that the agency monitors emissions in numerous ways: “If we see something that is amiss on a fixed monitor, we check it out.” However, the agency has only four air monitors in the producing areas of the Texas Permian, despite the vast area, leaving some oil and gas sites well over 100 miles away from the nearest monitor.

She added: “If we get complaints, that would be another driver,” and noted that the agency performs both regular and unannounced inspections at oil and gas sites.

Morrow couldn’t quantify how many unannounced inspections were done in the Permian Basin this year. The way the agency keeps records doesn’t work like that, she explained, but offered me a link to TCEQ’s Annual Enforcement Reports and the agency’s Air Monitoring Data page.

Wilson acknowledges that TCEQ follows up on some of the complaints Earthworks files. “Some of the complaints have led to sites being shut down temporarily until a problem is fixed. Though in most instances after one part is fixed, another will fail and the leaks are endless,” she said.

Emitting methane

“One way not to quantify a problem is not to monitor it,” Septoff said. He thinks the lack of urgency toward reducing methane emissions is due, in part, to so few people understanding how much methane the fracking industry releases and its contribution to climate change.

“President Obama did a disservice by selling the notion that natural gas is a bridge fuel,” Septoff pointed out. The same misguided idea was embraced by Carl Pope, the former executive director of the Sierra Club. Although the Sierra Club no longer touts natural gas as a form of “clean energy,” the misleading narrative is still touted by industry representatives and politicians on both sides of the aisle in states where the fracking industry operates.

Cornell University Professor Emeritus Dr. Anthony Ingraffea and his colleagues have published studies showing that because so much methane is released as natural gas is drilled and delivered to market, the fossil fuel billed as a “bridge fuel” may be as harmful to the climate, if not more so, than coal.

Ingraffea’s work also has outlined the role U.S. fracking plays in changing the world’s climate. In a lecture entitled “Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken,” Ingraffea explains that initial studies about climate change didn’t factor in the strong warming power of methane emissions. “The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris Accord in just 10 to 15 years,” he said in his lecture, released April 4.

While the EPA has removed a lot of information about climate change from its website, NASA still offers plenty.

A 2016 post about climate change by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory warns: “If we stop emitting methane, it will immensely slow the warming of the planet,” Wilson said while we drove through a landscape full of flares burning off methane at countless oil and gas sites, “But we are doing the opposite. Instead of moving towards renewable energy, we are fracking oil and gas for export.”

This Article

This article first appeared – with wonderful photography – at Desmog.uk.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon jumped almost 50 percent during the three month electoral season that brought Jair Bolsonaro to power, according to preliminary official figures.

That means the forest lost 1,674 sq km from August to October, an area more than double the size of New York City. The main culprit was the conversion of forest to pasture.

The largest increase was in the border area between Acre and Amazonas states. The deforestation increase there, compared with the same period in 2017, was 273 percent and 114 percent respectively.

Criminals

Deforestation usually increases in Brazil’s electoral years, amid promises from local politicians they will open up protected land or make environmental legislation more flexible if elected.

But during the 2018 campaign, far-right candidate and now president-elect Bolsonaro added a powerful permissive voice. In a nod to agribusiness, land-grabbers, and illegal gold miners and loggers, he repeatedly criticized Brazil’s environment agency Ibama’s supervision, calling it excessive and ideologically biased.

As a result Bolsonaro, collected landslide victories in Amazon regions with higher deforestation rates. A survey revealed long-term deforestation rates in pro-Bolsonaro municipalities were more than two and a half times higher than in municipalities that voted for leftist candidate Fernando Haddad (PT) in the first round.

Under heavy criticism from Bolsonaro during the campaign, federal environment agents have faced mounting opposition in the field. Several CHN spoke to have had warnings from illegal loggers and miners that “things will change” under Bolsonaro.

There were three attacks against federal agents during the campaign. The most serious one took place on October 19 in Pará state. A group of federal agents from ICMBio (the agency in charge of conservation area management) were trapped while returning from a raid after criminals burned a small bridge.

Agricultural frontier

The team had to improvise another bridge and was rescued by Pará state police, which withdrew its support for ICMBio soon after the incident citing lack of security. As a response, the federal government had to dispatch the National Public Security Force, only used in exceptional situations, to the region.

The new figures on forest loss come from Deter B, a satellite monitoring system developed by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) in order to monitor deforestation in almost real time for surveillance purposes. The data is publicly available and the calculation of the rate over the electoral season was made by Inpe at Climate Home News’ request.

Brazil’s official annual deforestation rate is calculated by Inpe’s Prodes project, which has a more precise resolution. Both system, however, usually present similar results.

Cláudio Almeida, Inpe’s Amazon monitoring coordinator, warned Deter B  is more liable to suffer interference from cloudiness and other variables. But, he said the almost 48.8 percent difference with last year indicated the deforestation rate was unmistakably higher.

“Literature shows that several factors lead to an increase in deforestation: real estate speculation, expansion of the agricultural frontier, new infrastructures such as roads and ports and expectations of regional development,” he said.

Cattle population

The increase of the past three months, however, will only be officially accounted in 2019. The reason is that the Prodes uses data from August 2017 to July. 

The 2018 deforestation rate is expected to be published in the next weeks and will most likely show a small increase from 2017.

After the election, Bolsonaro said he will no longer merge the ministry of environment into the ministry of agriculture, a campaign promise. The agribusiness and beef lobbies, close allies of the president-elect, advised him against it, as the environment ministry has other obligations outside agricultural affairs, such as oil and mining licensing.

The president-elect, however, has made clear that he will not choose an environmentalist to lead the department charged with protecting the Amazon and that the future selection minister will need agribusiness’ pre-approval. 

Last week, Bolsonaro chose congresswoman Tereza Cristina, the leader of the farm caucus, to be his minister of agriculture. Cristina is an agronomist from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, which has a cattle population of 21.5 million and a human population of 2.6 million.

A recent report by Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi), an arm of the Catholic church, includes Cristina in a list of 50 Congressmen with anti-indigenous rights record. Among other actions, in last August she petitioned President Temer to revoke a decree of 2007 that established the national policy for the sustainable development of traditional peoples and communities.

According to the request co-signed by Cristina, the decree “stimulate and cause acts that challenge the order and the security. What’s more, it violates the constitutional guarantee of private property and human dignity, imposing on the land owners the loss of its lands, its productions and their family livelihood.”

This Article

This Article first appeared on Climate Home.

Every once in a while a new eye-catching catastrophe grabs the public consciousness and we the sense that environmentalism is going viral. 

This article wasfirst published on EcoHustler.

Unexpected online friends share an emotional video from a seemingly well-meaning company. For a second you believe that this might be the turning point. Then, the interest wanes and disaster becomes the everyday once again.

This time it is the turn of supermarket middleweight Iceland to wade into the spotlight with their banned Christmas advert highlighting the destruction wreaked by palm oil farming.

Breaching rules

The short film, originally created by Greenpeace, tells the story of a baby orangutan driven out of its rainforest home by deforestation. It was deemed to be in breach of political advertising rules. 

Politicians and commentators were quick to leap into outraged defence of the supermarket, which is also the first in the UK to drop the controversial ingredient from all their own-brand products. 

A petition for the advert to be released has already reached over half a million signatures.

The environmental impact of palm oil farming can never be understated. However, cynical minds cannot help but question how much the decision is led by environmental concern, and how much by the growing trend for ‘green’ lifestyles.

Although the entry of environmentalism into the public consciousness is to be applauded, it seems to be increasingly predicated on individual purchasing power.

Purchasing power

Rather than demanding change from the 100 companies that cause 71 percent of global emissions, the general public is told that they must change their own buying habits to save the planet.

This mentality is shown in the current WWF advert in which an explosion of plastic products flies at the viewer, as a voiceover claims that we can “win the biggest battles in the smallest moments” by considering “the food we eat, the things we buy and the way we live”.

While individual actions such as recycling and conscious purchasing will have some impact, they are always severely limited.

Take recycling as a well known example. Although recycling rates in the UK have shown great improvements over the last couple of decades – raising from an abysmal 11.2 percent in 2000 to 43.7 percent – in recent years the improvement rates have plateaued.

There has been no significant rise in the last five years, making it doubtful that we will reach the national target of 50 percent before it’s too late.

Consumer aspirations

An emphasis on individual action has cemented the rise of green consumerism – the pitfalls of which have already been outlined – but this trend seems to have reached new heights: ‘green choices’ are sold back to us, often in ways that lack environmental credibility.

Reusable plastic bottles and tote bags have become the go-to giveaway products, creating cupboards full of supposedly eco-alternatives which actually consume far more energy in their production than their single-use counterparts.

The larger companies that create these increasingly ubiquitous products have to drive new models and designs so that they can encourage consumers to keep coming back.

As with any social movement, environmental slogans are printed onto t-shirts, bags or anything else ready to be flogged to the public. In short, environmentalism is being sold as a consumer aspiration which in the end only encourages us to buy more rather than cutting our waste production.

Iceland has made significant steps to brand themselves as the environmental choice. Picking them over Tesco becomes like choosing Ecover instead of Persil.

Shifting impacts

Green capitalists will argue that by consumers purchasing these brands over their less sustainable counterparts the necessary environmental shift will be set in motion. But this growth in choice only serves to hold back the real changes we need.

Instead of moving towards local and independent shops and services we continue to rely on the national, or even global giants whose size will always guarantee a level of environmental destruction. 

Minds can slowly be changed. Perhaps Iceland’s first steps will encourage the global brands that they still stock to join them and stop using palm oils. But any progress will be slow and each similar battle will have to be won on its own.

The process will be nowhere near quick enough for the level of change we need to see, and in a financial system based firmly on growth it may never happen. This is the fundamental issue: capitalism is an unsustainable system.

If we move away from using palm oil the environmental impact will simply be shifted. Rather than decimating Indonesian forests with oil palms, deforestation will move to other areas of the world inhabited by endangered species, as we begin to rely on crops which demand more land than palm.

New path 

The global demand, and producers’ methods to meet it, cannot be sustainably managed under the current system.

We can rebrand capitalism in hundreds of ‘green’ guises but it will always be led by individuals who value growth in profits over protection of natural resources.

Initiatives such as Iceland’s palm oil advert are more likely to increase their profits rather than significantly reverse the precarious position the world finds itself in. It may even do more damage by sedimenting beliefs that dramatic and systematic changes are not needed.

We must stop just reshuffling the deck and choose a new path to reverse our fate.

This Author

Liz Lee Reynolds is a freelance writer focussing on place and the environment. She tweets @LizzieeLR. 

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote is often taken out of context – this being no exception – however, what if taxes could actually be used to prevent deaths? Or at least reduce harm to ourselves and the planet?

Scientists at Oxford University calculated that a red and processed meat tax would prevent many premature deaths while simultaneously raising millions in tax revenue and reducing NHS costs. This would mean that products like sausages and bacon would double in price, when taking into account the harm they cause to people’s health.

The Vegan Society welcomes a proposed meat tax, but only if implemented alongside other policies.

Very unhealthy

Red and processed meats have been shown to be very unhealthy; the World Health Organisation classifies processed meat as a carcinogen – unprocessed red meat is also classified as probably carcinogenic. Diets high in red and processed meats have also been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes and strokes.

It is estimated that diet-related ill health costs the NHS £5.8 billion annually – more than smoking, alcohol, or physical inactivity. Businesses and the economy as a whole suffer through missed work days due to sickness.

Red meat also has a detrimental impact on the environment due to high levels of land use, water use and greenhouse gas emissions. A recent study in the journal Science concluded that cutting consumption of meat is “the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact”.

A meat tax would encourage people to make healthier, more environmentally-friendly, longer-term diet choices whilst also saving £700m in NHS costs and an estimated 6,000 premature deaths every year in the UK.

So why is a proposal with such clear benefits not met with unanimous approval?

Vegan tax

Martin Daubney, former editor of Loaded magazine, offered his considered contribution to the debate: “We should tax vegans, because this is an absolute nonsense.” Details of Martin’s ‘vegan tax’ proposals and how they would benefit public health or the environment remain unclear at the time of writing.

Other commentators raise more coherent concerns, for example, that a meat tax would be regressive, unfairly impacting the poorest in our society. We do not advocate for a regressive tax. Instead we would want to see a meat tax combined with other changes to reduce prices on healthier products and to increase understanding of healthy cooking. Incentivising healthy food would mean that individuals do not need to spend more on food overall. 

Opponents also object on the grounds that this is another unnecessary government intervention – the ‘nanny state’ argument. What they seemingly forget is that the government already intervenes and taxes many products with undesirable outcomes, like tobacco, alcohol and, more recently, sugar. The public widely accepts government interventions in cases where the market is clearly producing unwanted outcomes – cancer, alcoholism, childhood obesity.

There is debate on whether a meat tax would actually reduce red and processed meat consumption, however, examples in other areas show that taxes can be highly effective at instigating behavioural change.

The plastic-bag levy, although very small at 5p per bag, has resulted in a dramatic decline in the number given out by supermarkets. This shows that nudges towards favourable outcomes can be influenced by even relatively modest taxes. When considering just health outcomes, the Oxford report calculates the optimal meat tax for the UK at 14 percent for red meat and 79 percent for processed meat, far higher than the 5p plastic bag levy, indicating it would have a major impact on consumer behaviour.

More affordable

Another argument against, is that a meat tax is too unpopular with voters for it to be politically viable. Research from Chatham House in 2015 found that opposition to a meat tax significantly softened when the harms were explained. Respondents also expected governments to take the lead action on issues that are for the global good, including in food policy. Additionally, meat tax revenues could be used to make healthier foods more affordable, further sweetening the deal for the consumer.

Despite the clear benefits for public health, the environment and the public purse, a meat tax alone is not enough to induce the changes required. We would like to see a meat tax implemented alongside complimentary policies designed to elicit the most benefit from our food and farming system. Ultimately, healthy foods should be more affordable than unhealthy foods.

The Vegan Society and New Economics Foundation’s Grow Green report, highlights a range of policy measures to fix the UK’s broken food system. The report focuses on increasing protein crop production (peas, beans, lentils etc.) which are simultaneously affordable, ethical, sustainable and healthy – neatly described as a ‘win-win-win-win’.

The recommended measures include incentives encouraging farmers to switch from animal protein, funding research for crop development, a farm entry scheme for budding protein-crop farmers and increasing availability of protein crops on menus in hospitals and schools. These policy recommendations encourage a shift away from animal agriculture towards a plant-based system, which is healthier and more sustainable than our current failing model.

An alternative to a meat tax, which has similar outcomes, is an economy-wide carbon tax. This would be levied relative to the amount of carbon emissions associated with each product’s production. In terms of food, the highest carbon emitters are ruminant livestock such as cows and sheep. This would increase the price of the worst offending products, thereby reducing consumption of red meat, whilst raising tax revenue.

Environmental catastrophe

It is clear that we need to make drastic changes to avert major public health and environmental catastrophes. 

A meat tax would make a good starter. However, it would be best served with our accompanying suggestions. 

This Author

Mark Banahan is Campaigns and Policy Officer at The Vegan Society and a keen vegan and political activist. If you would like to learn more about veganism, sign up to the 7-day challenge here.

Brazil’s president-elect Jair Bolsonaro has named an anti-globalist diplomat to lead on foreign affairs and his country’s relationship to the Paris Agreement.

Ernesto Araújo has praised US president Donald Trump and accused the political left of appropriating climate change to serve an ideological agenda. He currently runs Brazil’s US and Canada department, a relatively junior position in the foreign service, and only became an ambassador this year.

On Twitter announcing his new minister, Bolsonaro called Araújo a “brilliant intellectual”.

Greenhouse gas

During the election campaign, Araújo started a blog, which he used to question the moral underpinnings of internationalism. In a post on 12 October, Araújo wrote that the left twisted legitimate causes “to serve their political project of total domination”.

Thousands of studies by hundreds of scientists agree that climate change is real, serious and driven by human activity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report warned that only radical action can avert dangerous impacts.

Araújo has dismissed that body of evidence, claiming it is selective and politically motivated. “The left has appropriated the environmental cause and perverted it to the point of paroxysm over the last 20 years with the ideology of climate change, the climatism,” he wrote in the blog post.

This movement gathered data “suggesting a correlation” between rising temperatures and CO2, he claimed. They “ignored data suggesting the opposite… and created a ‘scientific’ dogma that no one else can contest or he will be excommunicated from good society – exactly the opposite of the scientific spirit.”

His claims contradict not only the vast majority of climate scientists but also the consensus among world leaders. To date, 184 countries – including Brazil under a previous administration – have ratified the Paris Agreement, agreeing to cooperate to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Election campaign

In 2017, Araújo wrote in a diplomatic journal that “only Trump can save the west” – a bastardisation of Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Like Trump, Brazil’s president-elect comes to power amid uncertainty about whether he will leave the Paris Agreement. Early in his campaign, Bolsonaro threatened to quit the deal, then in the days before the election took a softer stance.

Araújo, who shares Bolsonaro’s suspicions about the international order, will take charge of the department that oversees Brazil’s position at international climate negotiations.

Brazil is in line to host next year’s UN climate talks. Bolsonaro has given no indication whether his administration will pursue this initiative.

On Wednesday, Climate Home News reported that the election campaign saw a near 50 percent rise in deforestation compared with the same period last year. Federal environment agents said emboldened criminal gangs had warned them “things will change” under Bolsonaro.

This Article

This article first appeared at Climate Home News. 

Narratives matter. They establish the architecture for the telling of stories about the state of the world and how we should act.

The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

A powerful environmental narrative emerged during the mid-twentieth century  that has shaped institutions and cultural understandings of our relationship with nature, the planet and different actors in society.

At its root this narrative adopts a simple state-cause-consequence structure. Nature is in crisis due to human fecundity, greed and ignorance, and catastrophe looms. The activist generation of the 1970s populated this narrative with villainous, innocent and heroic characters and called on governments to act to regulate the perpetrators of harm and for companies to change their immoral ways.

Enhance and restore

This narrative is powerful and has achieved much, but it mobilises action through a combination of anxiety and blame.

The relentless retelling of ‘doom and gloom’ stories may have alienated many ordinary people from the envir­onmental movement: the issues seem so big that people feel powerless to make a difference within the constraints of their everyday lives.

Early in 2019, the UK government will introduce the first broad environmental bill in 20 years. Campaigners are calling for it to be ambitious, but in what way?

The established environmental narrative frames ambition in terms of halting loss through more powerful regulation, targets and watchdogs.

Significantly the consultation document states that the government’s ambition is to “enhance and restore habitats and landscapes”, not just protect and conserve them.

Ecological abundance 

The new bill may be the first in the world to include a legal duty to leave the environment in better shape than we found it.

This ‘restoration’ ambition raises an important set of questions: what do we want to restore? What natural processes, attributes and types of value do we wish to enhance or recover? Who should decide on these questions?

Mobilising this ambition will require a new environmental narrative: one that empowers collective imaginings of the future environments we wish to create.

I recently published an article in the journal Ambio suggesting that in rewilding we are seeing the emergence of a new environmental narrative, which I labelled “Recoverable Earth”. In structure, ethos and ambition it is quite different from the established environmental narrative.

It is characterised by fresh and compelling stories telling of the return and recovery of European megafauna, the restoration of natural dynamics and ecological abundance: stories of reassessment and refinding the self, and working with restored forces of Nature to create novel solutions to the challenges of environmental and social change. These are stor­ies of what can be achieved rather than what needs to be done.

Mental health 

Interestingly, these new stories of envir­onmental recovery map onto the narrative structure of accounts of mental health recovery.

These commonly incorporate four narrative components: accounts of (1) despair, anguish and hopelessness, (2) awakenings and reassessments, (3) decisions to act, often in the company of others, leading to (4) the recovery of hope and wellness.

Rewilding stories assemble these components in a synergistic manner. For example, the story of Gelderse Poort, located immediately upriver from the city of Nijmegen (Europe’s 2018 Green Capital) begins with accounts of despair concerning the loss of natural values in the Dutch delta.

It continues with two key ecological awakenings: that, given space, nature can spontaneously recover; and that grazing aids the development of rich and diverse ecosystems.

This inspired a pilot project to acquire agricultural land in the floodplain and introduce grazing with ‘wilded’ ponies and cattle.

Restoration questions 

This radical new vision attracted funds and interest: it prompted WWF-Netherlands to reassess its attitude towards aggregate mining. WWF-Netherlands formed a partnership with brick companies, which purchased more agricultural land and excavated the accumulated silt and clay to restore the river.

The story continues with accounts of the rapid and unexpected recovery of nature and how this has enhanced the life quality of Nijmegen’s citizens: rare species have returned, dune and freshwater systems previously known only from coastal or higher areas have appeared, and citizens benefit from reduced flood risk, low insurance costs and the many outdoor recreation opportunities the restored landscape offers – from beach sunbathing to wildlife watching.

Gelderse Poort is a story of the recovery of socio-ecological wellness. New stories of envir­onmental recovery and restoration lack the blame and catastrophic consequence components of the older narrative.

They adopt a more pragmatic worldview: we are where we are, there is no way back, and there is little value in feeling guilt and attributing blame.

Interpreting the ‘re’ prefix as ‘again’ rather than ‘back’ creates the flexibility to envision better, yet different environmental futures. It creates the architecture to explore and discuss the restoration questions noted above and the policy principles that should follow.

Collective wellbeing 

Adopting a new environmental narrative does not mean abandoning the old.

Twenty-first-century environmentalism could adopt the strapline “Protect the best, recover the rest”. The first part of the couplet refers to the regulations and natural areas established in the twentieth century; the second part refers to new policy, projects and campaigns that take inspiration from mul­tiple pasts to restore degraded landscapes and ecological processes and recover wellness for people and Nature.

There is talk of the UN declaring 2020–30 as a decade of ecosystem restoration. The Recoverable Earth narrative offers a structure for telling environmental stories that are fresh, hopeful, intriguing and empowering.

Adopting this narrative in environmental policy, communication and marketing could instil people with the confidence to act with an independence of spirit and vision to restore their landscapes and ecosystems and recover a sense of collective wellbeing.

This Author 

Paul Jepson is course director of the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow with the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment. The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!