If you knew that there was zero percent chance of being eaten by a shark, would you swim more often?

Rhetorical questions aside, the fear of being eaten has a profound influence on other animals too, and on the way they use marine environments.

Turtles, for example, fear being eaten by sharks and this restricts the movement and behaviour of entire populations. But when the fear of being eaten dissipates, we see that turtles eat more, breed more, and go wherever they please.

It might sound like turtle paradise, but in an article published today in Nature Climate Change we show that loss of ocean predators can have serious, cascading effects on oceanic carbon storage and, by extension, climate change.

Cascading effects

For a long time we’ve known that changes to the structure of food webs – particularly due to loss of top predators – can alter ecosystem function. This happens most notably in situations where loss of predators at the top of the food chain releases organisms lower in the food chain from top-down regulatory control.

For instance, the loss of a predator may allow numbers of its prey to increase, which may eat more of their prey, and so on. This is known as ‘trophic downgrading‘.

With the loss of some 90% of the ocean’s top predators, trophic downgrading has become all too common. This upsets ecosystems, but in our article we also report its effects on the capacity of the oceans to trap and store carbon.

This can occur in multiple ecosystems, with the most striking examples in the coastal zone. This is where the majority of the ocean’s carbon is stored, within seagrass, saltmarsh and mangrove ecosystems – commonly known as ‘blue carbon’ ecosystems.

Blue carbon ecosystems capture and store carbon 40 times faster than tropical rainforests (such as the Amazon) and can store the carbon for thousands of years.

This makes them one of the most effective carbon sinks on the planet. Despite occupying less that 1% of the sea floor, it is estimated that coastal blue carbon ecosystems sequester more than half the ocean’s carbon.

The carbon that blue carbon ecosystems store is bound within the bodies of plants and within the ground. When predators such as sharks and other large fish are removed from blue carbon ecosystems, resulting increases in plant-eating organisms can destroy the capacity of blue carbon habitats to sequester carbon.

For example, in seagrass meadows of Bermuda and Indonesia, less predation on herbivores has resulted in spectacular losses of vegetation, with removal of 90-100% of the above-ground vegetation.

Stop killing predators!

Such losses of vegetation can also destabilise carbon that has been buried and accumulated over millions of years. For example, a 1.5-square-kilometre die-off of saltmarsh in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, caused by recreational overharvesting of predatory fish and crabs, freed around 248,000 tonnes of below-ground carbon.

If only 1% of the global area of blue carbon ecosystems were affected by trophic cascades as in the latter example, this could result in around 460 million tonnes of CO₂ being released annually, which is equivalent to the annual CO₂ emissions of around 97 million cars, or just a bit less than Australia’s current annual greenhouse gas emissions.

So what can be done? Stronger conservation efforts and modification of fishing regulations can help restore marine predator populations, and thereby help maintain the important indirect role that predators play in climate change mitigation.

It’s about restoring balance so that we have, for example, healthy and natural numbers of both sea turtles and sharks. Policy and management need to reflect this important realisation as a matter of urgency.

More than 100 million sharks may be killed in fisheries each year, but if we can grant these predators great protection they may just help to save us in return.

The paper: ‘Predators help protect carbon stocks in blue carbon ecosystems‘ by Trisha B. Atwood et al is published in Nature Climate Change.

Peter Macreadie is Senior lecturer & ARC DECRA Fellow, Deakin University and Senior lecturer & ARC DECRA Fellow, University of Technology Sydney.

Euan Ritchie is Senior Lecturer in Ecology, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University.

Graeme Hays is Professor of Marine Science, Deakin University.

Rod Connolly is Professor in Marine Science, Griffith University, and Trisha B Atwood, Assistant Professor of aquatic ecology, Utah State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

“Agroecology means that we are free from chemical fertilizers and pesticides, growing many crops together – grains, lentils, beans, oilseeds – to create biodiversity, using maximum input from the land within the farm in order to produce food.”

So says Sheelu Francis, General Coordinator of the Women’s Collective of Tamil Nadu in India. The Collective uses agroecology – which they also call ‘natural farming’ or ‘zero budget’ farming – to address the issues faced by women and their families.

“Natural farming was introduced to us in the late 1990s. We were working with a women’s group… and we realized, from an expense analysis of their income, that most of their income was being used for health, for medicine, because there were lots of health problems [in their families].

“When we were working with the women, we came across lots of cases of cancer, and we linked these health problems to their food intake, especially to food produced using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This is why we thought to go back to natural and traditional way of farming.

“This was when we were introduced to ‘zero budgeting’, using no outside inputs, but using only resources from the farm like manure and things like that. We learned first how to enhance the available farm resources, using natural products, and then we learned how to increase production.”

Building ecological resilience to climate change

At the same time as Sheelu discovered how agroecology could help women economically, she was also involved in a ‘participatory action research’ project to study the impact of climate change on farmers. Her team learned that women in the community were managing climate change through growing millet, the traditional grain of Tamil Nadu.

“We asked women farmers in the community what seeds they had. Then we learned about millet. Millet seeds could be stored for many years and still germinate. In India, the South is made up of the Deccan plateau, which is elevated and dry land, and the people for the South all ate millet.”

Sheelu and the Women’s Collective learned more about millet and realized it “is nutritious and also solves the problem of water scarcity and erratic rains.” Millet could grow without a lot of water, and water scarcity is always an issue in Tamil Nadu, so it grew well in Tamil Nadu without requiring a lot of inputs.

“We came to the conclusion that millet is the answer to climate change, for malnutrition, to water scarcity, for soil enrichment, for environmental safety, and so on. We decided that millet would be the center of our work, both in terms of production and consumption. Millet became our way of life.

“It is one of the ‘safe foods’ we focus on, and we have campaigns for government programs and policies to support these changes.”

Agroecology against the Green Revolution

Millet also grows better when pulses like lentils and other plants are intercropped with it, adds Sheelu. “And that is how people have carried out their traditional agriculture systems. It is nothing new for farmers in Tamil Nadu. But because of the Green Revolution policies and technologies, farmers gave up all of those practices.

“Farmers were encouraged to grow all [rice] paddy, paddy, paddy, because of government subsidies which promoted growing rice, especially with hybrid seeds and chemicals. Rice paddies use lots of water, so when it is the dry season or when there is drought, there is no production at all.”

“Before the Green Revolution, we had 14,000 different varieties of paddy, but the Green Revolution displaced those traditional varieties and introduced hybrid varieties which only grow if you use chemical fertilizers.

“The use of chemical fertilizers has hurt the health of the people. Not only the chemicals, but now the people rely on polished rice for their nutrition, which is not very nutritious – 46% of children are malnourished in Tamil Nadu, and women are malnourished as well.

That is why we are against the Green Revolution. It has impacted human health, children’s health, environmental health, and it erased traditional systems.”

Multi-level education in health and farming

The Women’s Collective works with families and communities to learn about the benefits of eating millet, as well as with the women farmers to discuss the reasons why they should grow millet and practice the traditional methods of saving seeds and agroecological farming.

“We are trying to educate people on different levels. Even if they are not producers, we are trying to educate them about the nutritious content of millet. Women are seeing the health of their family suffer, so when we offer millet as a nutritious alternative, they adopt it quickly. We have a high school and college program about millet, which includes a cooking contest that emphasizes nutrition.

“We say, ‘in a week, there are 7 days, 21 meals. Eat millet for 7 meals.’ In the public food distribution system people get rice, so we started a campaign to get millet into the public distribution system. Families saw that millet was improving nutrition and were more motivated to eat millet.

“Women, most of the women, are food producers. They cultivate vegetables, greens. The men grow cash crops, they are already lost. They want income, so they want to grow cash crops. GMOs were introduced first through cotton, a cash not food crop, and the men thought they would get income, but they didn’t. This is why there are so many men farmers committing suicide in India.”

“We tell farmers, ‘if you lose your plant genetics [by buying GMO seeds and giving up traditional seeds], it is hard to get it back. If you use chemicals, you can revive your soil, your land, etc. But if you introduce GMO seeds, there is no turning back to your traditional seeds.”

Agroecology and the struggle for Dalit and women’s rights

Sheelu points out that the Green Revolution and the agricultural policies and practices that it promoted destroyed traditional farming that ensured healthy families and sustainable economies, exemplified in the shift from producing millet to producing rice.

But she also sees that race and caste oppression are responsible for this shift as well. Many of the women in Tamil Nadu that have traditionally grown millet are ‘dalits’, whereas rice is associated with lighter-skinned and richer castes.

“Millet grains are darker in color, so they are associated with dalits. It is poor people’s food. In the temple they give rice as Prasad (a religious food offering to the gods). Paddy – white, shining rice – is seen as god’s food. Racist thinking caused millet production and consumption to be marginalized.

“If you look at Tamil Nadu, traditionally and historically, before the Green Revolution, people consumed millet and only occasionally consumed rice. Rice was eaten as a special food during major religious festivals, about twice a year. This is why the gods got rice for Prasad in temple. The poorest of the poor had millet.

“In the process of trying to reach the upper caste, you change your diet, and then you change your agriculture. And the government policies pushed hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides for rice production, as well as a minimum support price for rice. This has pushed millet out of production. And everyone is maximizing water from the ground for rice. Even the government only distributes rice and wheat for people in need of food.”

Regaining culture through agriculture

“So we link eating millet to Tamil culture, because there is a strong group identity that is based in the Tamil language and in support of Sri Lankan Tamils. So we have linked the struggle for agroecology to our culture through the story of how we are pushed out of our culture of eating, which is why we are encouraging Tamils to eat millet. At Tamil meetings, millet is being served. There is a long way to go. But I have a strong feeling that we are on the right path.

“People who try to hold onto their ways of life are marginalized from their land, their seeds, and their way of farming. Now the industries are trying to take over, and to some extent they have succeeded. That is why we are strongly opposing Monsanto and Syngenta and the whole project of GM (genetically modified) seeds.”

Caste and gender oppression also affects the women’s lives directly. In Tamil Nadu, Dalit women farmers face have limited rights as women and have very few rights to access natural resources like land, water, and seeds.

“Land is a very big issue for us. Even among our membership, only 10% have their own land. 90% are landless laborers. And even when we can get land, there are problems. It is easy to get land the first year, but after the second year, once landowners see that we are producing, they take the land back. We are now advocating for the government to give long-term leases to single women on unutilized land owned by companies.

“We organize women farmers, particularly widows that are landless, into collective farms where they lease land and they grow millet, because we organize them for food security at the household level.

“The three things that we say, the first is land, the second is traditional seeds, which is very important, and the third is animals. And of course water. These are the things we are trying to focus on.”

Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau is Program Manager in the Global Movements Program at WhyHunger, an NGO supporting social movements for food sovereignty and agroecology.

Sheelu Francis is the President of the Tamil Nadu Women’s Collective (TNWC) in India, which is a member of the World March of Women.

This article originally featured in WhyHunger’s ‘Agroecology: Putting Food Sovereignty Into Action‘. It is also available in Spanish and Portuguese.

Danielle Bailey-Lash, a 40-year-old customer service representative from the sleepy lakeside community of Belews Creek, NC, never used to get sick.

Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, she got plenty of exercise, never smoked or drank, and took pride in looking after herself.

But in 2010, Bailey-Lash was rushed to hospital with agonizing headaches that radiated from her neck to the top of her head. Doctors conducted a scan, and found a tumor the size of a juice box growing on the right side of her brain. She was told she had just a few months to live.

Miraculously, Bailey-Lash beat the odds: after undergoing surgery, she is now in remission, with little to show for her brush with death besides an impressive scar above her right ear. But when she returned from the hospital, she got to thinking.

At least 10 of her friends in the neighborhood had recently fallen seriously ill with similar ailments – “breast cancers, strange tumors, a lot of problems with kidneys and livers” – that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

“It was just really strange – we were all so young and healthy, and at 35 or 40 we’re all getting sick”, she says.

Looking back, Bailey-Lash now thinks she knows what caused the rash of unexplained illnesses: the huge Belews Creek coal-ash impoundment, run by Duke Energy, that lay just a few hundred yards from her home.

The 342-acre pond, built four decades ago to serve a neighboring 2,240-megawatt power plant, contains more than four billion gallons of ash slurry – the waste from years of coal-fired energy generation, mixed with water to make it easier to pour into an unlined hole in the ground.

‘Always on my mind‘

Like many people who live near such ponds, Bailey-Lash fears that heavy metals and other toxins present in the coal ash are seeping out of the crude pit and entering the local groundwater. That’s especially problematic in rural communities like Belews Creek, where many residents depend on wells rather than municipal pipelines for their drinking water.

Indeed, a recent inspection found elevated levels of radon – a major cause of various cancers, and one known to be present in coal ash – in Bailey-Lash’s drinking water, and she was advised by local environmental officials to avoid cooking with, drinking or doing laundry with her tap water, and not to take showers for longer than a few minutes at a time.

The water problems make it impossible for Bailey-Lash to sell her house and move away, and have left her afraid for her own health and that of her daughter and husband. “It’s always on my mind”, she says.

And Bailey-Lash’s plight is hardly uncommon. More than 1,700 people – of whom around a quarter are below the poverty line – live within a three-mile radius of the Belews Creek plant and ash-pond, according to EPA data. There has been no formal study of health problems in the community, but activists and residents say that anecdotal evidence makes it clear that something is wrong.

Caroline Armjio, a former neighbor of Bailey-Lash’s, rattles off a long list of cousins, neighbors and family friends who’ve been afflicted by brain cancer, birth defects, leukemia and other mysterious ailments.

Armjio acknowledges that without proper scientific studies it’s hard to conclusively blame such problems on pollution from the Duke plant, but she can’t think of any other explanation. “There are so many people who’re sick”, she says. “There’s just too many.”

A quiet tragedy

America’s coal plants produce 140 million tons of ash each year, making it the country’s second-largest industrial waste stream. The vast majority of that ash is blended with water to make it easier to move, and then pumped into impoundments that are often little more than holes in the ground.

There are currently more than 1,100 such impoundments in the US, of which almost half lack any kind of lining to prevent seepage, and every state that has coal-ash impoundments has also had EPA-verified water contamination incidents linked to the sites.

That’s troubling because coal ash contains toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, selenium, and other agents that have been linked to cancer, learning disabilities, neurological disorders, birth defects, reproductive failure, asthma, and other illnesses.

According to an EPA risk assessment, people who live within a mile of an unlined coal-ash facility have a 1 in 50 risk of cancer due to arsenic exposure alone, without even considering the other toxins to which they’re potentially exposed.

More than 1.5 million children live near coal ash storage sites in the US, and there’s a growing body of evidence that those children suffer from increased rates of a range of health problems including sleep disorders and respiratory problems.

Catastrophic ash-pond failures, like the 2008 spill that saw 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash choke 300 acres of the Tennessee countryside, or the 2014 disaster in which a Duke-operated facility spilled 39,000 tons into North Carolina’s Dan River, just 35 miles downstream from Belews Creek, have brought coal ash into the public eye.

A hidden story

Yet ongoing but largely invisible ash-pond leaks remain “a quiet tragedy” of which most Americans remain unaware, says Mary Anne Hitt, head of the Sierra Club’s national anti-coal campaign.

“It’s a hidden story of the coal pollution problem in America. People don’t realize this is going on”, she says. “There are hundreds of slow-motion Dan River spills happening all around the country, where these ponds and dams are slowly leaking.”

Last November, Will Scott, the Yadkin riverkeeper, was part of a team that surveyed High Rock Lake, an hour’s drive south of Belews Creek, where Duke maintains three coal-ash ponds with a combined capacity of around five million tons of ash.

Extremely low water levels made it possible to see ugly orange streaks on the banks below the usual waterline, where Scott says waste from Duke’s ‘50s-era ash ponds was literally oozing out of the ground. “The ash is pushing down on the water table and pushing the ash out in all directions”, says Scott.

Duke insisted that the streaks were naturally occurring iron deposits, but Scott says subsequent testing of the orange streaks and the lake’s water found elevated levels of metals including lead, arsenic, and chromium, in keeping with coal-ash pollution.

And while low water levels made the High Rock Lake seepage easy to spot, Scott says, similar leaks are taking place, albeit less visibly, at coal-ash sites across North Carolina: “At this point there are seeps at pretty much every site across the state.”

Eat as much coal ash as you want

Duke Energy currently has around 150 million tons of coal waste stored in 4,500 acres of ash dumps, of which about 70% are in North Carolina. In the aftermath of the Dan River spill, the company admitted cutting corners and ignoring engineers’ requests for better monitoring at the site, and agreed to pay $102 million in fines and environmental restitution fees.

Duke also says that it will spend upwards of $3 billion to improve its waste storage facilities in coming years. “We are accountable for what happened at Dan River and have learned from this event”, said Duke CEO Lynn Good in a statement. “We are setting a new standard for coal ash management and implementing smart, sustainable solutions for all of our ash basins.”

Like the rest of the industry, however, Duke still denies that its ponds are to blame for health problems in surrounding communities. Coal-industry supporters point out that the EPA considers ash a non-hazardous substance, and argue that the heavy metals and carcinogens found in water surrounding coal-ash sites are naturally occurring.

“Coal ash is basically soil”, says Tom Robl, a University of Kentucky geoscientist who serves as a director of the American Coal Association. Not only is coal ash non-toxic, Robl says, it’s so safe that you could eat a brimming bowlful for breakfast without adverse consequences. “Feel free to eat as much coal ash as you want – it’s not toxic”, he says.

The root of all evil

It’s true that there’s little direct evidence that coal ash is causing health problems in humans, says Dennis Lemly, a Forest Service biologist who’s been studying coal ash’s impact on fish and wildlife since 1975. Still, there’s plenty of reason to believe that ash is bad for you.

While traces of many of the chemicals found in coal ash are naturally present in soil, the process of burning coal serves to concentrate them, Lemly explains. “The fact is coal ash is not dirt. Coal ash is a highly concentrated source, and concentration determines hazard.”

There’s no doubt in Lemly’s mind that coal-ash ponds are causing significant harm, both to people and to the environment. In an analysis of 23 coal ash sites, Lemly found that since the 1960s the facilities had jointly caused almost $3 billion in economic damage.

Causes range from lost tourism revenues to poisoned fish stocks, with most of the costs directly attributable to leaks and spills from coal-ash impoundment ponds. “Surface impoundment disposal is the root of all evil when it comes to water pollution and impacts on fish and wildlife”, he says.

There’s also growing evidence that selenium from coal ash is bioaccumulating in the food chain, even in areas that have theoretically been cleaned up. Ash spills leave behind buried sediments that are ingested by insects and microorganisms, reintroducing the toxins back into the food chain, Lemly says:

“Coal ash is highly toxic, and it poisons fish and wildlife every day. We’ve got case after case of that … the toxicity of coal ash isn’t debatable.”

Increased risks

Radiation is also a potential concern: in a study released this month, researchers found that coal ash contains ten times more radioactivity than regular coal, and warned that the tiny size of coal-ash particles means that any spills or leaks could lead to serious health impacts.

“People breathing this air may face increased risks, particularly since tiny particles tend to be more enriched in radioactivity”, lead author Nancy Lauer of Duke University told reporters.

The US coal industry has sought to downplay the risks of ash-related radiation: in the aftermath of the Tennessee spill, TVA told consumers that the ash was less radioactive, gram for gram, than table salt. Researchers subsequently found that the coal ash released during the Tennessee spill was about half again as radioactive as typical coal ash.

The Tennessee ash, moreover, was laced with radium-228 and radium-226, which when ingested is between 15 and 42 times more carcinogenic, per pico-curie of exposure, than the potassium-40 radionuclides found in salt.

And when all’s said and done, says Amy Adams of the Appalachian Voices non-profit group, the anecdotal evidence for patterns of health problems in communities abutting coal ash impoundments is overwhelming:

“The health issues around these ponds are similar from community to community. We can’t say unequivocally that it’s causing these illnesses. But it’s highly consistent with what we see with heavy metal toxicity.”

A parallel universe

But even as the evidence has grown for the health impact of coal-ash exposure, utilities have remained wedded to a “primitive and archaic” approach to dealing with their waste, says Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

That’s especially problematic because more sophisticated air-pollution countermeasures have increased the amount of toxins present in coal ash, Holleman explains: “We’re using 21st-century technology to remove the pollution from the air, and then we’re using 13th-century technology to store the toxins that we’ve removed from the emissions.”

Part of the problem, says Lisa Evans, an Earthjustice attorney specializing in hazardous waste law, is that coal ash impoundments were exempted from rules introduced in the 1970s to monitor and regulate coal slurry storage sites.

Coal slurry ponds now have tough structural safety rules and mandated quarterly inspections, and as a result there hasn’t been a major collapse of a slurry impoundment since 1972. “But high hazard coal-ash ponds never have to be inspected, because there’s no federal oversight”, says Evans. “It’s really a parallel universe. It’s quite incredible.”

‘A good framework’

Recent disasters are finally leading to a rethink, at least in some jurisdictions, of the rules governing coal-ash storage. Last year’s Dan River spill sparked a popular backlash against coal ash in North Carolina, says Adams, the Appalachian Voices activist.

Crucially, many of the most vocal protestors weren’t the liberals clustered in the state’s Research Triangle, far from the coal ash sites, but rather the more conservative, Republican-voting residents of rural areas bordering the ash ponds.

“It’s become a joke in North Carolina”, says Adams. “How do you turn a Republican into an environmentalist? You have a coal-ash spill in their back yard.”

The prospect of losing the support of their conservative base drove the state’s Republican lawmakers to take action: the Coal Ash Management Act, which was signed into law last September, banned the construction of new coal-ash impoundments, and created a commission to oversee the closure of existing sites.

“I think coming out of last year’s legislation there’s a good framework in place, and right now the big question is going to be how well it’s implemented”, says Robin Smith, a lawyer who served as North Carolina’s assistant secretary for the environment between 1999 and 2012.

Ticking time-bombs

Still, concerns remain: many of the sites to be ‘closed’ will simply be covered up and abandoned, without any effort to address potential leaks from the ash still stored in the unlined pits, activists say. And while some monitoring and oversight programs are now in place, prior budget and staffing cuts have left the state environmental agency without the resources and expertise to adequately enforce the law.

Federal regulators have also weighed in, with the Environmental Protection Agency due to announce supplementary regulations this week placing the first federal limits on toxic metals in wastewater from power plants, much of which comes from coal ash.

The new rule builds on a prior federal coal-ash rule, introduced last year, which disappointed campaigners by failing to declare coal ash a hazardous substance, and by establishing a ‘self-implementing’ regulatory regime in which utilities are responsible for monitoring their own efforts, and can only be held accountable through citizen lawsuits.

“It’s putting the fox in charge of the hen house”, Adams explains. “Without a fleet of inspectors to go out and check, we’re relying on industry’s good graces. And they’ve not been shown to have good graces when it comes to being honest in reporting correctly.”

Experts say the EPA’s rules will raise the bar somewhat for states that have so far ignored the coal-ash issue, but won’t drive the sweeping changes that are needed. There are also concerns that Republicans could try to roll back federal efforts, especially if they reclaim the White House: Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, has already pledged to repeal the EPA’s “new and costly” coal-ash rules if he reaches the Oval Office.

But even assuming the EPA’s standards remain in place, they’re hardly tough enough to protect public health in the absence of strong state-level regulations, says Hitt, the Sierra Club campaigner. North Carolina’s efforts in the aftermath of the Dan River spill are the exception rather than the rule, she warns:

“Most states don’t have any real state standards whatsoever. Leaving this to the states means leaving lots of ticking time bombs on the shores of our rivers and lakes.”

‘All I want to do is leave‘

Back in Stokes County, residents are waiting to hear how high a priority the new coal-ash commission will assign to closing down and cleaning up the Belews Creek ash-pond.

Belews Creek wasn’t identified as a high-priority site in the board’s first round of rulings, raising the prospect that it could ultimately receive a low-priority designation. That would allow Duke to ‘clean up’ the facility simply by capping the storage site, leaving the ash in place in its existing unlined pond, with no new measures taken to prevent coal-related toxins from entering the groundwater.

In the meantime, officials have been carrying out water testing mandated by the new regulations. So far officials have tested more than 200 wells located near coal-ash sites, including several in the Belews Creek area, and barely 10% have passed the state’s water quality standards for chemical nasties such as lead, vanadium and hexavalent chromium.

Of the handful of wells that did pass muster, it recently emerged, many had improperly been given the all-clear by labs using testing protocols that weren’t capable of detecting contaminants to the levels required by state water rules.

The state is in the process of retesting those wells, and Duke – which still denies its coal facilities are to blame for the contaminated water – has begun paying for bottled water to be delivered to homes around the state where residents have, like Bailey-Lash, been told their water is no longer considered safe for drinking or cooking.

It’s unclear how long it will take for officials to determine the future of Belews Creek and North Carolina’s other coal-ash ponds. While regulators weigh their decision, Bailey-Lash and her family remain stuck in their now-unsellable home, fearful for their health but unable to move out of the shadow of the coal plant.

“All I really want to do is leave, but I can’t”, she says. “I feel like a bad parent. But we don’t have anywhere to go.” 

Find out more:

• Grassroots non-profit Appalachian Voices is a powerful voice taking on coal ash in the Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina area.
• The Sierra Club is one of the leading national pressure groups, especially through its influential Beyond Coal campaign.
• Coal Ash Chronicles, run by journalist Rhiannon Fionn, is a valuable source of online news and commentary on the US coal-ash sector.

Ben Whitford is The Ecologist‘s US correspondent. He tweets – occasionally – at @ben_whitford, and can be found online at BenWhitford.com.

If you knew that there was zero percent chance of being eaten by a shark, would you swim more often?

Rhetorical questions aside, the fear of being eaten has a profound influence on other animals too, and on the way they use marine environments.

Turtles, for example, fear being eaten by sharks and this restricts the movement and behaviour of entire populations. But when the fear of being eaten dissipates, we see that turtles eat more, breed more, and go wherever they please.

It might sound like turtle paradise, but in an article published today in Nature Climate Change we show that loss of ocean predators can have serious, cascading effects on oceanic carbon storage and, by extension, climate change.

Cascading effects

For a long time we’ve known that changes to the structure of food webs – particularly due to loss of top predators – can alter ecosystem function. This happens most notably in situations where loss of predators at the top of the food chain releases organisms lower in the food chain from top-down regulatory control.

For instance, the loss of a predator may allow numbers of its prey to increase, which may eat more of their prey, and so on. This is known as ‘trophic downgrading‘.

With the loss of some 90% of the ocean’s top predators, trophic downgrading has become all too common. This upsets ecosystems, but in our article we also report its effects on the capacity of the oceans to trap and store carbon.

This can occur in multiple ecosystems, with the most striking examples in the coastal zone. This is where the majority of the ocean’s carbon is stored, within seagrass, saltmarsh and mangrove ecosystems – commonly known as ‘blue carbon’ ecosystems.

Blue carbon ecosystems capture and store carbon 40 times faster than tropical rainforests (such as the Amazon) and can store the carbon for thousands of years.

This makes them one of the most effective carbon sinks on the planet. Despite occupying less that 1% of the sea floor, it is estimated that coastal blue carbon ecosystems sequester more than half the ocean’s carbon.

The carbon that blue carbon ecosystems store is bound within the bodies of plants and within the ground. When predators such as sharks and other large fish are removed from blue carbon ecosystems, resulting increases in plant-eating organisms can destroy the capacity of blue carbon habitats to sequester carbon.

For example, in seagrass meadows of Bermuda and Indonesia, less predation on herbivores has resulted in spectacular losses of vegetation, with removal of 90-100% of the above-ground vegetation.

Stop killing predators!

Such losses of vegetation can also destabilise carbon that has been buried and accumulated over millions of years. For example, a 1.5-square-kilometre die-off of saltmarsh in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, caused by recreational overharvesting of predatory fish and crabs, freed around 248,000 tonnes of below-ground carbon.

If only 1% of the global area of blue carbon ecosystems were affected by trophic cascades as in the latter example, this could result in around 460 million tonnes of CO₂ being released annually, which is equivalent to the annual CO₂ emissions of around 97 million cars, or just a bit less than Australia’s current annual greenhouse gas emissions.

So what can be done? Stronger conservation efforts and modification of fishing regulations can help restore marine predator populations, and thereby help maintain the important indirect role that predators play in climate change mitigation.

It’s about restoring balance so that we have, for example, healthy and natural numbers of both sea turtles and sharks. Policy and management need to reflect this important realisation as a matter of urgency.

More than 100 million sharks may be killed in fisheries each year, but if we can grant these predators great protection they may just help to save us in return.

The paper: ‘Predators help protect carbon stocks in blue carbon ecosystems‘ by Trisha B. Atwood et al is published in Nature Climate Change.

Peter Macreadie is Senior lecturer & ARC DECRA Fellow, Deakin University and Senior lecturer & ARC DECRA Fellow, University of Technology Sydney.

Euan Ritchie is Senior Lecturer in Ecology, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University.

Graeme Hays is Professor of Marine Science, Deakin University.

Rod Connolly is Professor in Marine Science, Griffith University, and Trisha B Atwood, Assistant Professor of aquatic ecology, Utah State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

“Agroecology means that we are free from chemical fertilizers and pesticides, growing many crops together – grains, lentils, beans, oilseeds – to create biodiversity, using maximum input from the land within the farm in order to produce food.”

So says Sheelu Francis, General Coordinator of the Women’s Collective of Tamil Nadu in India. The Collective uses agroecology – which they also call ‘natural farming’ or ‘zero budget’ farming – to address the issues faced by women and their families.

“Natural farming was introduced to us in the late 1990s. We were working with a women’s group… and we realized, from an expense analysis of their income, that most of their income was being used for health, for medicine, because there were lots of health problems [in their families].

“When we were working with the women, we came across lots of cases of cancer, and we linked these health problems to their food intake, especially to food produced using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This is why we thought to go back to natural and traditional way of farming.

“This was when we were introduced to ‘zero budgeting’, using no outside inputs, but using only resources from the farm like manure and things like that. We learned first how to enhance the available farm resources, using natural products, and then we learned how to increase production.”

Building ecological resilience to climate change

At the same time as Sheelu discovered how agroecology could help women economically, she was also involved in a ‘participatory action research’ project to study the impact of climate change on farmers. Her team learned that women in the community were managing climate change through growing millet, the traditional grain of Tamil Nadu.

“We asked women farmers in the community what seeds they had. Then we learned about millet. Millet seeds could be stored for many years and still germinate. In India, the South is made up of the Deccan plateau, which is elevated and dry land, and the people for the South all ate millet.”

Sheelu and the Women’s Collective learned more about millet and realized it “is nutritious and also solves the problem of water scarcity and erratic rains.” Millet could grow without a lot of water, and water scarcity is always an issue in Tamil Nadu, so it grew well in Tamil Nadu without requiring a lot of inputs.

“We came to the conclusion that millet is the answer to climate change, for malnutrition, to water scarcity, for soil enrichment, for environmental safety, and so on. We decided that millet would be the center of our work, both in terms of production and consumption. Millet became our way of life.

“It is one of the ‘safe foods’ we focus on, and we have campaigns for government programs and policies to support these changes.”

Agroecology against the Green Revolution

Millet also grows better when pulses like lentils and other plants are intercropped with it, adds Sheelu. “And that is how people have carried out their traditional agriculture systems. It is nothing new for farmers in Tamil Nadu. But because of the Green Revolution policies and technologies, farmers gave up all of those practices.

“Farmers were encouraged to grow all [rice] paddy, paddy, paddy, because of government subsidies which promoted growing rice, especially with hybrid seeds and chemicals. Rice paddies use lots of water, so when it is the dry season or when there is drought, there is no production at all.”

“Before the Green Revolution, we had 14,000 different varieties of paddy, but the Green Revolution displaced those traditional varieties and introduced hybrid varieties which only grow if you use chemical fertilizers.

“The use of chemical fertilizers has hurt the health of the people. Not only the chemicals, but now the people rely on polished rice for their nutrition, which is not very nutritious – 46% of children are malnourished in Tamil Nadu, and women are malnourished as well.

That is why we are against the Green Revolution. It has impacted human health, children’s health, environmental health, and it erased traditional systems.”

Multi-level education in health and farming

The Women’s Collective works with families and communities to learn about the benefits of eating millet, as well as with the women farmers to discuss the reasons why they should grow millet and practice the traditional methods of saving seeds and agroecological farming.

“We are trying to educate people on different levels. Even if they are not producers, we are trying to educate them about the nutritious content of millet. Women are seeing the health of their family suffer, so when we offer millet as a nutritious alternative, they adopt it quickly. We have a high school and college program about millet, which includes a cooking contest that emphasizes nutrition.

“We say, ‘in a week, there are 7 days, 21 meals. Eat millet for 7 meals.’ In the public food distribution system people get rice, so we started a campaign to get millet into the public distribution system. Families saw that millet was improving nutrition and were more motivated to eat millet.

“Women, most of the women, are food producers. They cultivate vegetables, greens. The men grow cash crops, they are already lost. They want income, so they want to grow cash crops. GMOs were introduced first through cotton, a cash not food crop, and the men thought they would get income, but they didn’t. This is why there are so many men farmers committing suicide in India.”

“We tell farmers, ‘if you lose your plant genetics [by buying GMO seeds and giving up traditional seeds], it is hard to get it back. If you use chemicals, you can revive your soil, your land, etc. But if you introduce GMO seeds, there is no turning back to your traditional seeds.”

Agroecology and the struggle for Dalit and women’s rights

Sheelu points out that the Green Revolution and the agricultural policies and practices that it promoted destroyed traditional farming that ensured healthy families and sustainable economies, exemplified in the shift from producing millet to producing rice.

But she also sees that race and caste oppression are responsible for this shift as well. Many of the women in Tamil Nadu that have traditionally grown millet are ‘dalits’, whereas rice is associated with lighter-skinned and richer castes.

“Millet grains are darker in color, so they are associated with dalits. It is poor people’s food. In the temple they give rice as Prasad (a religious food offering to the gods). Paddy – white, shining rice – is seen as god’s food. Racist thinking caused millet production and consumption to be marginalized.

“If you look at Tamil Nadu, traditionally and historically, before the Green Revolution, people consumed millet and only occasionally consumed rice. Rice was eaten as a special food during major religious festivals, about twice a year. This is why the gods got rice for Prasad in temple. The poorest of the poor had millet.

“In the process of trying to reach the upper caste, you change your diet, and then you change your agriculture. And the government policies pushed hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides for rice production, as well as a minimum support price for rice. This has pushed millet out of production. And everyone is maximizing water from the ground for rice. Even the government only distributes rice and wheat for people in need of food.”

Regaining culture through agriculture

“So we link eating millet to Tamil culture, because there is a strong group identity that is based in the Tamil language and in support of Sri Lankan Tamils. So we have linked the struggle for agroecology to our culture through the story of how we are pushed out of our culture of eating, which is why we are encouraging Tamils to eat millet. At Tamil meetings, millet is being served. There is a long way to go. But I have a strong feeling that we are on the right path.

“People who try to hold onto their ways of life are marginalized from their land, their seeds, and their way of farming. Now the industries are trying to take over, and to some extent they have succeeded. That is why we are strongly opposing Monsanto and Syngenta and the whole project of GM (genetically modified) seeds.”

Caste and gender oppression also affects the women’s lives directly. In Tamil Nadu, Dalit women farmers face have limited rights as women and have very few rights to access natural resources like land, water, and seeds.

“Land is a very big issue for us. Even among our membership, only 10% have their own land. 90% are landless laborers. And even when we can get land, there are problems. It is easy to get land the first year, but after the second year, once landowners see that we are producing, they take the land back. We are now advocating for the government to give long-term leases to single women on unutilized land owned by companies.

“We organize women farmers, particularly widows that are landless, into collective farms where they lease land and they grow millet, because we organize them for food security at the household level.

“The three things that we say, the first is land, the second is traditional seeds, which is very important, and the third is animals. And of course water. These are the things we are trying to focus on.”

Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau is Program Manager in the Global Movements Program at WhyHunger, an NGO supporting social movements for food sovereignty and agroecology.

Sheelu Francis is the President of the Tamil Nadu Women’s Collective (TNWC) in India, which is a member of the World March of Women.

This article originally featured in WhyHunger’s ‘Agroecology: Putting Food Sovereignty Into Action‘. It is also available in Spanish and Portuguese.

Danielle Bailey-Lash, a 40-year-old customer service representative from the sleepy lakeside community of Belews Creek, NC, never used to get sick.

Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, she got plenty of exercise, never smoked or drank, and took pride in looking after herself.

But in 2010, Bailey-Lash was rushed to hospital with agonizing headaches that radiated from her neck to the top of her head. Doctors conducted a scan, and found a tumor the size of a juice box growing on the right side of her brain. She was told she had just a few months to live.

Miraculously, Bailey-Lash beat the odds: after undergoing surgery, she is now in remission, with little to show for her brush with death besides an impressive scar above her right ear. But when she returned from the hospital, she got to thinking.

At least 10 of her friends in the neighborhood had recently fallen seriously ill with similar ailments – “breast cancers, strange tumors, a lot of problems with kidneys and livers” – that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

“It was just really strange – we were all so young and healthy, and at 35 or 40 we’re all getting sick”, she says.

Looking back, Bailey-Lash now thinks she knows what caused the rash of unexplained illnesses: the huge Belews Creek coal-ash impoundment, run by Duke Energy, that lay just a few hundred yards from her home.

The 342-acre pond, built four decades ago to serve a neighboring 2,240-megawatt power plant, contains more than four billion gallons of ash slurry – the waste from years of coal-fired energy generation, mixed with water to make it easier to pour into an unlined hole in the ground.

‘Always on my mind‘

Like many people who live near such ponds, Bailey-Lash fears that heavy metals and other toxins present in the coal ash are seeping out of the crude pit and entering the local groundwater. That’s especially problematic in rural communities like Belews Creek, where many residents depend on wells rather than municipal pipelines for their drinking water.

Indeed, a recent inspection found elevated levels of radon – a major cause of various cancers, and one known to be present in coal ash – in Bailey-Lash’s drinking water, and she was advised by local environmental officials to avoid cooking with, drinking or doing laundry with her tap water, and not to take showers for longer than a few minutes at a time.

The water problems make it impossible for Bailey-Lash to sell her house and move away, and have left her afraid for her own health and that of her daughter and husband. “It’s always on my mind”, she says.

And Bailey-Lash’s plight is hardly uncommon. More than 1,700 people – of whom around a quarter are below the poverty line – live within a three-mile radius of the Belews Creek plant and ash-pond, according to EPA data. There has been no formal study of health problems in the community, but activists and residents say that anecdotal evidence makes it clear that something is wrong.

Caroline Armjio, a former neighbor of Bailey-Lash’s, rattles off a long list of cousins, neighbors and family friends who’ve been afflicted by brain cancer, birth defects, leukemia and other mysterious ailments.

Armjio acknowledges that without proper scientific studies it’s hard to conclusively blame such problems on pollution from the Duke plant, but she can’t think of any other explanation. “There are so many people who’re sick”, she says. “There’s just too many.”

A quiet tragedy

America’s coal plants produce 140 million tons of ash each year, making it the country’s second-largest industrial waste stream. The vast majority of that ash is blended with water to make it easier to move, and then pumped into impoundments that are often little more than holes in the ground.

There are currently more than 1,100 such impoundments in the US, of which almost half lack any kind of lining to prevent seepage, and every state that has coal-ash impoundments has also had EPA-verified water contamination incidents linked to the sites.

That’s troubling because coal ash contains toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, selenium, and other agents that have been linked to cancer, learning disabilities, neurological disorders, birth defects, reproductive failure, asthma, and other illnesses.

According to an EPA risk assessment, people who live within a mile of an unlined coal-ash facility have a 1 in 50 risk of cancer due to arsenic exposure alone, without even considering the other toxins to which they’re potentially exposed.

More than 1.5 million children live near coal ash storage sites in the US, and there’s a growing body of evidence that those children suffer from increased rates of a range of health problems including sleep disorders and respiratory problems.

Catastrophic ash-pond failures, like the 2008 spill that saw 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash choke 300 acres of the Tennessee countryside, or the 2014 disaster in which a Duke-operated facility spilled 39,000 tons into North Carolina’s Dan River, just 35 miles downstream from Belews Creek, have brought coal ash into the public eye.

A hidden story

Yet ongoing but largely invisible ash-pond leaks remain “a quiet tragedy” of which most Americans remain unaware, says Mary Anne Hitt, head of the Sierra Club’s national anti-coal campaign.

“It’s a hidden story of the coal pollution problem in America. People don’t realize this is going on”, she says. “There are hundreds of slow-motion Dan River spills happening all around the country, where these ponds and dams are slowly leaking.”

Last November, Will Scott, the Yadkin riverkeeper, was part of a team that surveyed High Rock Lake, an hour’s drive south of Belews Creek, where Duke maintains three coal-ash ponds with a combined capacity of around five million tons of ash.

Extremely low water levels made it possible to see ugly orange streaks on the banks below the usual waterline, where Scott says waste from Duke’s ‘50s-era ash ponds was literally oozing out of the ground. “The ash is pushing down on the water table and pushing the ash out in all directions”, says Scott.

Duke insisted that the streaks were naturally occurring iron deposits, but Scott says subsequent testing of the orange streaks and the lake’s water found elevated levels of metals including lead, arsenic, and chromium, in keeping with coal-ash pollution.

And while low water levels made the High Rock Lake seepage easy to spot, Scott says, similar leaks are taking place, albeit less visibly, at coal-ash sites across North Carolina: “At this point there are seeps at pretty much every site across the state.”

Eat as much coal ash as you want

Duke Energy currently has around 150 million tons of coal waste stored in 4,500 acres of ash dumps, of which about 70% are in North Carolina. In the aftermath of the Dan River spill, the company admitted cutting corners and ignoring engineers’ requests for better monitoring at the site, and agreed to pay $102 million in fines and environmental restitution fees.

Duke also says that it will spend upwards of $3 billion to improve its waste storage facilities in coming years. “We are accountable for what happened at Dan River and have learned from this event”, said Duke CEO Lynn Good in a statement. “We are setting a new standard for coal ash management and implementing smart, sustainable solutions for all of our ash basins.”

Like the rest of the industry, however, Duke still denies that its ponds are to blame for health problems in surrounding communities. Coal-industry supporters point out that the EPA considers ash a non-hazardous substance, and argue that the heavy metals and carcinogens found in water surrounding coal-ash sites are naturally occurring.

“Coal ash is basically soil”, says Tom Robl, a University of Kentucky geoscientist who serves as a director of the American Coal Association. Not only is coal ash non-toxic, Robl says, it’s so safe that you could eat a brimming bowlful for breakfast without adverse consequences. “Feel free to eat as much coal ash as you want – it’s not toxic”, he says.

The root of all evil

It’s true that there’s little direct evidence that coal ash is causing health problems in humans, says Dennis Lemly, a Forest Service biologist who’s been studying coal ash’s impact on fish and wildlife since 1975. Still, there’s plenty of reason to believe that ash is bad for you.

While traces of many of the chemicals found in coal ash are naturally present in soil, the process of burning coal serves to concentrate them, Lemly explains. “The fact is coal ash is not dirt. Coal ash is a highly concentrated source, and concentration determines hazard.”

There’s no doubt in Lemly’s mind that coal-ash ponds are causing significant harm, both to people and to the environment. In an analysis of 23 coal ash sites, Lemly found that since the 1960s the facilities had jointly caused almost $3 billion in economic damage.

Causes range from lost tourism revenues to poisoned fish stocks, with most of the costs directly attributable to leaks and spills from coal-ash impoundment ponds. “Surface impoundment disposal is the root of all evil when it comes to water pollution and impacts on fish and wildlife”, he says.

There’s also growing evidence that selenium from coal ash is bioaccumulating in the food chain, even in areas that have theoretically been cleaned up. Ash spills leave behind buried sediments that are ingested by insects and microorganisms, reintroducing the toxins back into the food chain, Lemly says:

“Coal ash is highly toxic, and it poisons fish and wildlife every day. We’ve got case after case of that … the toxicity of coal ash isn’t debatable.”

Increased risks

Radiation is also a potential concern: in a study released this month, researchers found that coal ash contains ten times more radioactivity than regular coal, and warned that the tiny size of coal-ash particles means that any spills or leaks could lead to serious health impacts.

“People breathing this air may face increased risks, particularly since tiny particles tend to be more enriched in radioactivity”, lead author Nancy Lauer of Duke University told reporters.

The US coal industry has sought to downplay the risks of ash-related radiation: in the aftermath of the Tennessee spill, TVA told consumers that the ash was less radioactive, gram for gram, than table salt. Researchers subsequently found that the coal ash released during the Tennessee spill was about half again as radioactive as typical coal ash.

The Tennessee ash, moreover, was laced with radium-228 and radium-226, which when ingested is between 15 and 42 times more carcinogenic, per pico-curie of exposure, than the potassium-40 radionuclides found in salt.

And when all’s said and done, says Amy Adams of the Appalachian Voices non-profit group, the anecdotal evidence for patterns of health problems in communities abutting coal ash impoundments is overwhelming:

“The health issues around these ponds are similar from community to community. We can’t say unequivocally that it’s causing these illnesses. But it’s highly consistent with what we see with heavy metal toxicity.”

A parallel universe

But even as the evidence has grown for the health impact of coal-ash exposure, utilities have remained wedded to a “primitive and archaic” approach to dealing with their waste, says Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

That’s especially problematic because more sophisticated air-pollution countermeasures have increased the amount of toxins present in coal ash, Holleman explains: “We’re using 21st-century technology to remove the pollution from the air, and then we’re using 13th-century technology to store the toxins that we’ve removed from the emissions.”

Part of the problem, says Lisa Evans, an Earthjustice attorney specializing in hazardous waste law, is that coal ash impoundments were exempted from rules introduced in the 1970s to monitor and regulate coal slurry storage sites.

Coal slurry ponds now have tough structural safety rules and mandated quarterly inspections, and as a result there hasn’t been a major collapse of a slurry impoundment since 1972. “But high hazard coal-ash ponds never have to be inspected, because there’s no federal oversight”, says Evans. “It’s really a parallel universe. It’s quite incredible.”

‘A good framework’

Recent disasters are finally leading to a rethink, at least in some jurisdictions, of the rules governing coal-ash storage. Last year’s Dan River spill sparked a popular backlash against coal ash in North Carolina, says Adams, the Appalachian Voices activist.

Crucially, many of the most vocal protestors weren’t the liberals clustered in the state’s Research Triangle, far from the coal ash sites, but rather the more conservative, Republican-voting residents of rural areas bordering the ash ponds.

“It’s become a joke in North Carolina”, says Adams. “How do you turn a Republican into an environmentalist? You have a coal-ash spill in their back yard.”

The prospect of losing the support of their conservative base drove the state’s Republican lawmakers to take action: the Coal Ash Management Act, which was signed into law last September, banned the construction of new coal-ash impoundments, and created a commission to oversee the closure of existing sites.

“I think coming out of last year’s legislation there’s a good framework in place, and right now the big question is going to be how well it’s implemented”, says Robin Smith, a lawyer who served as North Carolina’s assistant secretary for the environment between 1999 and 2012.

Ticking time-bombs

Still, concerns remain: many of the sites to be ‘closed’ will simply be covered up and abandoned, without any effort to address potential leaks from the ash still stored in the unlined pits, activists say. And while some monitoring and oversight programs are now in place, prior budget and staffing cuts have left the state environmental agency without the resources and expertise to adequately enforce the law.

Federal regulators have also weighed in, with the Environmental Protection Agency due to announce supplementary regulations this week placing the first federal limits on toxic metals in wastewater from power plants, much of which comes from coal ash.

The new rule builds on a prior federal coal-ash rule, introduced last year, which disappointed campaigners by failing to declare coal ash a hazardous substance, and by establishing a ‘self-implementing’ regulatory regime in which utilities are responsible for monitoring their own efforts, and can only be held accountable through citizen lawsuits.

“It’s putting the fox in charge of the hen house”, Adams explains. “Without a fleet of inspectors to go out and check, we’re relying on industry’s good graces. And they’ve not been shown to have good graces when it comes to being honest in reporting correctly.”

Experts say the EPA’s rules will raise the bar somewhat for states that have so far ignored the coal-ash issue, but won’t drive the sweeping changes that are needed. There are also concerns that Republicans could try to roll back federal efforts, especially if they reclaim the White House: Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, has already pledged to repeal the EPA’s “new and costly” coal-ash rules if he reaches the Oval Office.

But even assuming the EPA’s standards remain in place, they’re hardly tough enough to protect public health in the absence of strong state-level regulations, says Hitt, the Sierra Club campaigner. North Carolina’s efforts in the aftermath of the Dan River spill are the exception rather than the rule, she warns:

“Most states don’t have any real state standards whatsoever. Leaving this to the states means leaving lots of ticking time bombs on the shores of our rivers and lakes.”

‘All I want to do is leave‘

Back in Stokes County, residents are waiting to hear how high a priority the new coal-ash commission will assign to closing down and cleaning up the Belews Creek ash-pond.

Belews Creek wasn’t identified as a high-priority site in the board’s first round of rulings, raising the prospect that it could ultimately receive a low-priority designation. That would allow Duke to ‘clean up’ the facility simply by capping the storage site, leaving the ash in place in its existing unlined pond, with no new measures taken to prevent coal-related toxins from entering the groundwater.

In the meantime, officials have been carrying out water testing mandated by the new regulations. So far officials have tested more than 200 wells located near coal-ash sites, including several in the Belews Creek area, and barely 10% have passed the state’s water quality standards for chemical nasties such as lead, vanadium and hexavalent chromium.

Of the handful of wells that did pass muster, it recently emerged, many had improperly been given the all-clear by labs using testing protocols that weren’t capable of detecting contaminants to the levels required by state water rules.

The state is in the process of retesting those wells, and Duke – which still denies its coal facilities are to blame for the contaminated water – has begun paying for bottled water to be delivered to homes around the state where residents have, like Bailey-Lash, been told their water is no longer considered safe for drinking or cooking.

It’s unclear how long it will take for officials to determine the future of Belews Creek and North Carolina’s other coal-ash ponds. While regulators weigh their decision, Bailey-Lash and her family remain stuck in their now-unsellable home, fearful for their health but unable to move out of the shadow of the coal plant.

“All I really want to do is leave, but I can’t”, she says. “I feel like a bad parent. But we don’t have anywhere to go.” 

Find out more:

• Grassroots non-profit Appalachian Voices is a powerful voice taking on coal ash in the Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina area.
• The Sierra Club is one of the leading national pressure groups, especially through its influential Beyond Coal campaign.
• Coal Ash Chronicles, run by journalist Rhiannon Fionn, is a valuable source of online news and commentary on the US coal-ash sector.

Ben Whitford is The Ecologist‘s US correspondent. He tweets – occasionally – at @ben_whitford, and can be found online at BenWhitford.com.

Danielle Bailey-Lash, a 40-year-old customer service representative from the sleepy lakeside community of Belews Creek, NC, never used to get sick.

Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, she got plenty of exercise, never smoked or drank, and took pride in looking after herself.

But in 2010, Bailey-Lash was rushed to hospital with agonizing headaches that radiated from her neck to the top of her head. Doctors conducted a scan, and found a tumor the size of a juice box growing on the right side of her brain. She was told she had just a few months to live.

Miraculously, Bailey-Lash beat the odds: after undergoing surgery, she is now in remission, with little to show for her brush with death besides an impressive scar above her right ear. But when she returned from the hospital, she got to thinking.

At least 10 of her friends in the neighborhood had recently fallen seriously ill with similar ailments – “breast cancers, strange tumors, a lot of problems with kidneys and livers” – that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

“It was just really strange – we were all so young and healthy, and at 35 or 40 we’re all getting sick”, she says.

Looking back, Bailey-Lash now thinks she knows what caused the rash of unexplained illnesses: the huge Belews Creek coal-ash impoundment, run by Duke Energy, that lay just a few hundred yards from her home.

The 342-acre pond, built four decades ago to serve a neighboring 2,240-megawatt power plant, contains more than four billion gallons of ash slurry – the waste from years of coal-fired energy generation, mixed with water to make it easier to pour into an unlined hole in the ground.

‘Always on my mind‘

Like many people who live near such ponds, Bailey-Lash fears that heavy metals and other toxins present in the coal ash are seeping out of the crude pit and entering the local groundwater. That’s especially problematic in rural communities like Belews Creek, where many residents depend on wells rather than municipal pipelines for their drinking water.

Indeed, a recent inspection found elevated levels of radon – a major cause of various cancers, and one known to be present in coal ash – in Bailey-Lash’s drinking water, and she was advised by local environmental officials to avoid cooking with, drinking or doing laundry with her tap water, and not to take showers for longer than a few minutes at a time.

The water problems make it impossible for Bailey-Lash to sell her house and move away, and have left her afraid for her own health and that of her daughter and husband. “It’s always on my mind”, she says.

And Bailey-Lash’s plight is hardly uncommon. More than 1,700 people – of whom around a quarter are below the poverty line – live within a three-mile radius of the Belews Creek plant and ash-pond, according to EPA data. There has been no formal study of health problems in the community, but activists and residents say that anecdotal evidence makes it clear that something is wrong.

Caroline Armjio, a former neighbor of Bailey-Lash’s, rattles off a long list of cousins, neighbors and family friends who’ve been afflicted by brain cancer, birth defects, leukemia and other mysterious ailments.

Armjio acknowledges that without proper scientific studies it’s hard to conclusively blame such problems on pollution from the Duke plant, but she can’t think of any other explanation. “There are so many people who’re sick”, she says. “There’s just too many.”

A quiet tragedy

America’s coal plants produce 140 million tons of ash each year, making it the country’s second-largest industrial waste stream. The vast majority of that ash is blended with water to make it easier to move, and then pumped into impoundments that are often little more than holes in the ground.

There are currently more than 1,100 such impoundments in the US, of which almost half lack any kind of lining to prevent seepage, and every state that has coal-ash impoundments has also had EPA-verified water contamination incidents linked to the sites.

That’s troubling because coal ash contains toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, selenium, and other agents that have been linked to cancer, learning disabilities, neurological disorders, birth defects, reproductive failure, asthma, and other illnesses.

According to an EPA risk assessment, people who live within a mile of an unlined coal-ash facility have a 1 in 50 risk of cancer due to arsenic exposure alone, without even considering the other toxins to which they’re potentially exposed.

More than 1.5 million children live near coal ash storage sites in the US, and there’s a growing body of evidence that those children suffer from increased rates of a range of health problems including sleep disorders and respiratory problems.

Catastrophic ash-pond failures, like the 2008 spill that saw 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash choke 300 acres of the Tennessee countryside, or the 2014 disaster in which a Duke-operated facility spilled 39,000 tons into North Carolina’s Dan River, just 35 miles downstream from Belews Creek, have brought coal ash into the public eye.

A hidden story

Yet ongoing but largely invisible ash-pond leaks remain “a quiet tragedy” of which most Americans remain unaware, says Mary Anne Hitt, head of the Sierra Club’s national anti-coal campaign.

“It’s a hidden story of the coal pollution problem in America. People don’t realize this is going on”, she says. “There are hundreds of slow-motion Dan River spills happening all around the country, where these ponds and dams are slowly leaking.”

Last November, Will Scott, the Yadkin riverkeeper, was part of a team that surveyed High Rock Lake, an hour’s drive south of Belews Creek, where Duke maintains three coal-ash ponds with a combined capacity of around five million tons of ash.

Extremely low water levels made it possible to see ugly orange streaks on the banks below the usual waterline, where Scott says waste from Duke’s ‘50s-era ash ponds was literally oozing out of the ground. “The ash is pushing down on the water table and pushing the ash out in all directions”, says Scott.

Duke insisted that the streaks were naturally occurring iron deposits, but Scott says subsequent testing of the orange streaks and the lake’s water found elevated levels of metals including lead, arsenic, and chromium, in keeping with coal-ash pollution.

And while low water levels made the High Rock Lake seepage easy to spot, Scott says, similar leaks are taking place, albeit less visibly, at coal-ash sites across North Carolina: “At this point there are seeps at pretty much every site across the state.”

Eat as much coal ash as you want

Duke Energy currently has around 150 million tons of coal waste stored in 4,500 acres of ash dumps, of which about 70% are in North Carolina. In the aftermath of the Dan River spill, the company admitted cutting corners and ignoring engineers’ requests for better monitoring at the site, and agreed to pay $102 million in fines and environmental restitution fees.

Duke also says that it will spend upwards of $3 billion to improve its waste storage facilities in coming years. “We are accountable for what happened at Dan River and have learned from this event”, said Duke CEO Lynn Good in a statement. “We are setting a new standard for coal ash management and implementing smart, sustainable solutions for all of our ash basins.”

Like the rest of the industry, however, Duke still denies that its ponds are to blame for health problems in surrounding communities. Coal-industry supporters point out that the EPA considers ash a non-hazardous substance, and argue that the heavy metals and carcinogens found in water surrounding coal-ash sites are naturally occurring.

“Coal ash is basically soil”, says Tom Robl, a University of Kentucky geoscientist who serves as a director of the American Coal Association. Not only is coal ash non-toxic, Robl says, it’s so safe that you could eat a brimming bowlful for breakfast without adverse consequences. “Feel free to eat as much coal ash as you want – it’s not toxic”, he says.

The root of all evil

It’s true that there’s little direct evidence that coal ash is causing health problems in humans, says Dennis Lemly, a Forest Service biologist who’s been studying coal ash’s impact on fish and wildlife since 1975. Still, there’s plenty of reason to believe that ash is bad for you.

While traces of many of the chemicals found in coal ash are naturally present in soil, the process of burning coal serves to concentrate them, Lemly explains. “The fact is coal ash is not dirt. Coal ash is a highly concentrated source, and concentration determines hazard.”

There’s no doubt in Lemly’s mind that coal-ash ponds are causing significant harm, both to people and to the environment. In an analysis of 23 coal ash sites, Lemly found that since the 1960s the facilities had jointly caused almost $3 billion in economic damage.

Causes range from lost tourism revenues to poisoned fish stocks, with most of the costs directly attributable to leaks and spills from coal-ash impoundment ponds. “Surface impoundment disposal is the root of all evil when it comes to water pollution and impacts on fish and wildlife”, he says.

There’s also growing evidence that selenium from coal ash is bioaccumulating in the food chain, even in areas that have theoretically been cleaned up. Ash spills leave behind buried sediments that are ingested by insects and microorganisms, reintroducing the toxins back into the food chain, Lemly says:

“Coal ash is highly toxic, and it poisons fish and wildlife every day. We’ve got case after case of that … the toxicity of coal ash isn’t debatable.”

Increased risks

Radiation is also a potential concern: in a study released this month, researchers found that coal ash contains ten times more radioactivity than regular coal, and warned that the tiny size of coal-ash particles means that any spills or leaks could lead to serious health impacts.

“People breathing this air may face increased risks, particularly since tiny particles tend to be more enriched in radioactivity”, lead author Nancy Lauer of Duke University told reporters.

The US coal industry has sought to downplay the risks of ash-related radiation: in the aftermath of the Tennessee spill, TVA told consumers that the ash was less radioactive, gram for gram, than table salt. Researchers subsequently found that the coal ash released during the Tennessee spill was about half again as radioactive as typical coal ash.

The Tennessee ash, moreover, was laced with radium-228 and radium-226, which when ingested is between 15 and 42 times more carcinogenic, per pico-curie of exposure, than the potassium-40 radionuclides found in salt.

And when all’s said and done, says Amy Adams of the Appalachian Voices non-profit group, the anecdotal evidence for patterns of health problems in communities abutting coal ash impoundments is overwhelming:

“The health issues around these ponds are similar from community to community. We can’t say unequivocally that it’s causing these illnesses. But it’s highly consistent with what we see with heavy metal toxicity.”

A parallel universe

But even as the evidence has grown for the health impact of coal-ash exposure, utilities have remained wedded to a “primitive and archaic” approach to dealing with their waste, says Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

That’s especially problematic because more sophisticated air-pollution countermeasures have increased the amount of toxins present in coal ash, Holleman explains: “We’re using 21st-century technology to remove the pollution from the air, and then we’re using 13th-century technology to store the toxins that we’ve removed from the emissions.”

Part of the problem, says Lisa Evans, an Earthjustice attorney specializing in hazardous waste law, is that coal ash impoundments were exempted from rules introduced in the 1970s to monitor and regulate coal slurry storage sites.

Coal slurry ponds now have tough structural safety rules and mandated quarterly inspections, and as a result there hasn’t been a major collapse of a slurry impoundment since 1972. “But high hazard coal-ash ponds never have to be inspected, because there’s no federal oversight”, says Evans. “It’s really a parallel universe. It’s quite incredible.”

‘A good framework’

Recent disasters are finally leading to a rethink, at least in some jurisdictions, of the rules governing coal-ash storage. Last year’s Dan River spill sparked a popular backlash against coal ash in North Carolina, says Adams, the Appalachian Voices activist.

Crucially, many of the most vocal protestors weren’t the liberals clustered in the state’s Research Triangle, far from the coal ash sites, but rather the more conservative, Republican-voting residents of rural areas bordering the ash ponds.

“It’s become a joke in North Carolina”, says Adams. “How do you turn a Republican into an environmentalist? You have a coal-ash spill in their back yard.”

The prospect of losing the support of their conservative base drove the state’s Republican lawmakers to take action: the Coal Ash Management Act, which was signed into law last September, banned the construction of new coal-ash impoundments, and created a commission to oversee the closure of existing sites.

“I think coming out of last year’s legislation there’s a good framework in place, and right now the big question is going to be how well it’s implemented”, says Robin Smith, a lawyer who served as North Carolina’s assistant secretary for the environment between 1999 and 2012.

Ticking time-bombs

Still, concerns remain: many of the sites to be ‘closed’ will simply be covered up and abandoned, without any effort to address potential leaks from the ash still stored in the unlined pits, activists say. And while some monitoring and oversight programs are now in place, prior budget and staffing cuts have left the state environmental agency without the resources and expertise to adequately enforce the law.

Federal regulators have also weighed in, with the Environmental Protection Agency due to announce supplementary regulations this week placing the first federal limits on toxic metals in wastewater from power plants, much of which comes from coal ash.

The new rule builds on a prior federal coal-ash rule, introduced last year, which disappointed campaigners by failing to declare coal ash a hazardous substance, and by establishing a ‘self-implementing’ regulatory regime in which utilities are responsible for monitoring their own efforts, and can only be held accountable through citizen lawsuits.

“It’s putting the fox in charge of the hen house”, Adams explains. “Without a fleet of inspectors to go out and check, we’re relying on industry’s good graces. And they’ve not been shown to have good graces when it comes to being honest in reporting correctly.”

Experts say the EPA’s rules will raise the bar somewhat for states that have so far ignored the coal-ash issue, but won’t drive the sweeping changes that are needed. There are also concerns that Republicans could try to roll back federal efforts, especially if they reclaim the White House: Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, has already pledged to repeal the EPA’s “new and costly” coal-ash rules if he reaches the Oval Office.

But even assuming the EPA’s standards remain in place, they’re hardly tough enough to protect public health in the absence of strong state-level regulations, says Hitt, the Sierra Club campaigner. North Carolina’s efforts in the aftermath of the Dan River spill are the exception rather than the rule, she warns:

“Most states don’t have any real state standards whatsoever. Leaving this to the states means leaving lots of ticking time bombs on the shores of our rivers and lakes.”

‘All I want to do is leave‘

Back in Stokes County, residents are waiting to hear how high a priority the new coal-ash commission will assign to closing down and cleaning up the Belews Creek ash-pond.

Belews Creek wasn’t identified as a high-priority site in the board’s first round of rulings, raising the prospect that it could ultimately receive a low-priority designation. That would allow Duke to ‘clean up’ the facility simply by capping the storage site, leaving the ash in place in its existing unlined pond, with no new measures taken to prevent coal-related toxins from entering the groundwater.

In the meantime, officials have been carrying out water testing mandated by the new regulations. So far officials have tested more than 200 wells located near coal-ash sites, including several in the Belews Creek area, and barely 10% have passed the state’s water quality standards for chemical nasties such as lead, vanadium and hexavalent chromium.

Of the handful of wells that did pass muster, it recently emerged, many had improperly been given the all-clear by labs using testing protocols that weren’t capable of detecting contaminants to the levels required by state water rules.

The state is in the process of retesting those wells, and Duke – which still denies its coal facilities are to blame for the contaminated water – has begun paying for bottled water to be delivered to homes around the state where residents have, like Bailey-Lash, been told their water is no longer considered safe for drinking or cooking.

It’s unclear how long it will take for officials to determine the future of Belews Creek and North Carolina’s other coal-ash ponds. While regulators weigh their decision, Bailey-Lash and her family remain stuck in their now-unsellable home, fearful for their health but unable to move out of the shadow of the coal plant.

“All I really want to do is leave, but I can’t”, she says. “I feel like a bad parent. But we don’t have anywhere to go.” 

Find out more:

• Grassroots non-profit Appalachian Voices is a powerful voice taking on coal ash in the Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina area.
• The Sierra Club is one of the leading national pressure groups, especially through its influential Beyond Coal campaign.
• Coal Ash Chronicles, run by journalist Rhiannon Fionn, is a valuable source of online news and commentary on the US coal-ash sector.

Ben Whitford is The Ecologist‘s US correspondent. He tweets – occasionally – at @ben_whitford, and can be found online at BenWhitford.com.

VWs diesel cars emit a much larger amount of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and fine particulates than regulators thought.

Greenpeace estimates that an extra 60,000 to 24,000 tonnes of NOx have been emitted each year from 11m vehicles sold around the world.

NOx and fine particulates have severe impacts on human health and are responsible for many early deaths each year.

We can put a crude financial figure on the impact of the loss of life. Roughly speaking, we think that VW’s actions resulted in costs of between £21 and £90bn for NOx pollution alone.

The larger figure is greater than the stock market value of the entire company. VW would therefore be worthless if called upon to pay the full price for its actions.

Our calculation is based on three separate numbers. All are approximate and can be argued over. But we thought it might be helpful to do the arithmetic nevertheless. These numbers only estimate the social cost of early deaths, not the full burden of ill health, from NOx pollution.

Could this wipe out VW altogether?

1. The World Health Organisation estimates that each 1,000 tonnes of NOx emitted to the atmosphere costs about 70 lives. The total number of lives lost annually from the additional NOx from VW cars is thus estimated to be between 4,000 and 17,000. (These are numbers provided by Greenpeace).

2. A UK academic study (para 18, Executive Summary) suggests that those dying early as a result of particulate pollution lose an average of over 11 years of life. If NOx early deaths are comparable this would mean that up to 200,000 total years of life are being lost annually because of the extra NOx pollution VW caused.

3. NICE, the UK government body responsible for deciding whether life-prolonging drugs are worth the cost, suggests that a year of extra life can be valued at up to £30,000. Depending on circumstances, NICE will agree that drugs costing at least £20,000, and sometimes as much as £30,000, can be bought by the NHS. Other countries, such as the US, use higher numbers for the value of a year of life.

Simple multiplication of these three numbers gives a figure of between £1.4bn and £6.0bn a year. The typical VW car will be used for about 15 years, implying that the total cost to world health from VW’s higher-than-stated pollution from its 11m cars is between £21bn and £90bn. Before the revelations, VW was valued at about £50bn by the stock market.

But what about the climate?

Diesel cars have been favoured by governments because of their lower CO₂ emissions than their petrol equivalents. Diesel’s advantage over petrol saves about 0.5 tonnes of CO₂ per year. When economists put an environmental cost on a tonne of CO2, they often use a figure of about £50 a tonne of CO₂.

Diesel’s better carbon emissions performance therefore has a value of around £25 a year per car. For the 11m affected diesel cars the CO₂ saving over the 15 year life of the vehicle will be worth about £4.1bn, a small fraction of the extra cost imposed by the worse NOx pollution.

To us, this seems an interesting illustration of how current pollution costs may bring about faster action on fossil fuels than the longer-run but equally serious threat from climate change.

Unless NOx performance of diesel cars can be substantially improved, petrol cars are better, even taking into account the increased CO₂ emissions. Electric cars are, of course, very much better both from CO₂ and NOx perspectives.

Proper accounting for the costs of pollution will take an inevitable and predictable toll on companies reliant on fossil fuels, directly or indirectly.

Carbon risk is no ‘black swan’ – it is predictable and inevitable

A pension fund manager recently said to one of us that she is resisting calls to divest shareholdings in businesses like VW linked to the fossil fuel economy.

Her justification was that the risk of an unexpected deterioration in value was no different to other reputational or brand risks faced by companies in her portfolios. The potential cost of fossil fuel involvement is equivalent, she said, to the possibility of damage to a company’s value from its exposure, for example, to child labour accusations or to evidence of regulatory corruption.

We disagree; the ‘carbon risk’ is a systematic, visible and large threat to major companies around the world. Only today, National Grid is saying as clearly as it can that the future of electricity supply is based around solar power.

No pension fund trustee can legitimately ignore the increasingly obvious likelihood of a rapid destruction of shareholder value as the world speeds up the switch away from coal, oil and even gas.

The death of the carbon economy is not a Black Swan event. It is an entirely predictable and inevitable development.

Mike Berners-Lee is an authority on carbon footprinting and is a director of Small World Consulting.

Chris Goodall is an expert on energy, environment and climate change and valued contributor to The Ecologist. He blogs at Carbon Commentary.

This article was originally published on Carbon Commentary.

Shell has abandoned its controversial drilling operations in the Alaskan Arctic in the face of mounting opposition.

Its decision, which has been welcomed by environmental campaigners, follows disappointing results from an exploratory well drilled 80 miles off Alaska’s north-west coast. Shell said it had found oil and gas but not in sufficient quantities.

Environmentalists claim victory as Shell abandons Arctic oil drilling, but the energy company is still pursuing oil and gas elsewhere in the short-term.

The move is a major climbdown for the Anglo-Dutch group which had talked up the prospects of oil and gas in the region. Shell has spent about $7bn (£4.6bn) on Arctic offshore development in the hope there would be deposits worth pursuing, but now says operations are being ended for the “foreseeable future.”

Shell is expected to take a hit of around $4.1bn as a result of the decision.

In a statement today, Marvin Odum, director of Shell Upstream Americas, said: “Shell continues to see important exploration potential in the basin, and the area is likely to ultimately be of strategic importance to Alaska and the US. However, this is a clearly disappointing exploration outcome for this part of the basin.”

“Shell will now cease further exploration activity in offshore Alaska for the foreseeable future. This decision reflects both the Burger J well result, the high costs associated with the project, and the challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment in offshore Alaska.”

Growing pressure from campaigners – and investors

“Big oil has sustained an unmitigated defeat”, commented Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven. “They had a budget of billions, we had a movement of millions. For three years we faced them down, and the people won.

“The Save the Arctic movement has exacted a huge reputational price from Shell for its Arctic drilling programme. And as the company went another year without striking oil, that price finally became too high. They’re pulling out.

“Now President Obama should use his remaining months in office to say that no other oil company will be licenced to drill in the American Arctic.”

The company has come under increasing pressure from shareholders worried about the plunging share price and the costs of what has so far been a futile search in the Chukchi Sea.

Shell has also privately made clear it is taken aback by the public protests against the drilling which are threatening to seriously damage its reputation.

Ben van Beurden, the chief executive, is also said to be worried that the Arctic is un dermining his attempts to influence the debate around climate change. His attempts to argue that a Shell strategy of building up gas as a ‘transitional’ fuel to pave the way to a lower carbon future has met with scepticism, partly because of the Arctic operations.

Falling oil price compounds problems

A variety of consultants have also argued that Arctic oil is too expensive to find and develop in either a low oil price environment or in a future world with a higher price on carbon emissions. Current oil prices are under $50 per barrel, while Arctivc oil will only be profitable at over $100.

Fatih Birol, incoming executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), recently told the Guardian‘s Fiona Harvey that the technology was not ready, and faces hurdles that may prove too costly to overcome:

“I believe that Arctic oil is not for today, and not for tomorrow – maybe for the day after tomorrow. It’s geologically difficult, technologically difficult, lots of environmental challenges, and the cost of production is very, very high, especially if you look at the current oil price levels.”

Birol stopped short of recommending an outright ban, but urged leaders of states and businesses to look deeply into the issues before embarking on expeditions:

“It should be an assessment of the oil company, whether or not they see [a business case] at those prices [for oil], or at those costs [of production] – whether or not it could be a profitable project. I think the companies should look at all these risks combined. It is up to them to make or lose money.”

He warned governments to consider the potential risks, including those of climate change and pollution. “Governments should hold projects from the angle of whether or not it makes economic sense for the country, for this business, whether or not it has implications for the local and the global environment. And they should also think of what supports the energy security of their country.”

Birol took over as executive director of the IEA this month, from his longstanding position of chief economist at the agency, which is regarded as the gold standard on energy issues. He has long been a champion of clean energy, and was one of the first economists to put climate change at the heart of the world’s energy policy.

Terry Macalister is the Guardian’s energy and industrial correspondent. Fiona Harvey is an award-winning environment journalist for the Guardian. Some additional reporting by The Ecologist.

More about Greenpeace’s three year campaign against Shell’s Arctic drilling.

This article originally appeared on the Guardian and is reproduced here by kind permission via the Guardian Environment Network.

Not many people enjoy the existence of poverty. Some think it’s inevitable, others that tackling it is politically impossible. But for those with ambition, an end to poverty is a worthy enough goal.

Naturally the self-congratulation have been in full flow this weekend, as celebrities and world leaders gathered in New York to launch their latest effort to do just that, in the form of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

But something was missing in between the speeches and performances by the likes of Barack Obama, Ed Sheeran, Beyonce, Bill Gates and Meryl Streep. That thing is power. Because unless you understand that the poverty of some flows from the wealth and power of others, efforts to fight poverty will not truly work.

The SDGs consist of 17 objectives which aim to build a better planet – from eradicating hunger to building more sustainable cities. Each objectives contains a number of targets which cover everything from having better public transport to helping artisanal fisherfolk get better access to markets.

The goals do represent the many dimensions of poverty – it isn’t simply about a certain number of dollars a day. While some targets are limited or problematic (“preventing trade restrictions in agriculture” could cover a multitude of sins) others are very good (“encouraging local involvement in water management” and “improving the incomes of small farmers”).

Rooted in an ignorance of global power dynamics

The real problem is that this wish-list comes with no historical background of how we got here, and no political strategy for how we get out. As such it relies on a mixture of more market and more technically competent governments. There’s no sign that the economic model itself is broken – just that it needs some tuning.

Take one obvious gap: trans-national corporations. They aren’t mentioned in the SDGs, yet the power of corporations is fundamental to the staggering levels of inequality which afflict the world, and are at the centre of an economic model quite prepared to burn the planet in its drive for ever more profit. it is impossible to realise the targets of the SDGs without tackling corporate power.

Nor is there any acknowledgment of colonial history, of slavery, of racism, of desperately unfair terms of trade, of structural adjustment policies which flushed dozens of countries’ economies down the drain only 30 years ago.

Far from critiquing the control of the market, the SDGs exhort world leaders to “remove market distortions” and “ensure the proper functioning of food commodity markets”. The SDGs’ answer to ‘hunger’ is growing more food – despite the fact that we have more than enough food in the world to feed everyone.

Technology plays a key role in the targets – for instance in the eradication of epidemics of HIV and malaria – but with no sign of how governments will improve the flow of knowledge around the world without breaking the ever more ferocious intellectual property regime that allows corporate giants to monopolise that knowledge.

More foreign investment is encouraged, but without a framework for controlling that investment, how is it supposed to benefit the majority?

in short, power doesn’t exist in the SDGs. The chapter on inequality nowhere mentions that the problem of poverty is inseparable from the problem of super-wealth; or that exploitation and the monopolisation of resources by the few is the cause of poverty.

Since 1974. we have only moved backwards

Of course this lack of analysis isn’t accidental. In the world of fighting poverty, of ‘development’, corporations and the super-rich are no longer problems, but partners.

How on earth will the SDGs be financed, especially since a global tax body has already been vetoed by rich countries three months ago? By big business of course. With a captured public sector unable to fund the SDG promises, big business will happily come in, with state backing, to run healthcare and education, communications and transport, food and water. The market is the answer.

Perhaps it’s unfeasible to think that the UN could advocate such seemingly radical proposals as democratic control of the world’s resources? Actually that doubt shows how far backwards we’ve gone.

Because in the mid-1970s the UN adopted a policy which, while less detailed (mercifully, it fits on a few pages), laid out a far better analysis of the world’s problems, with a clearer set of solutions for moving forward.

it seems incredible now that the New International Economic Order (NIEO) was really UN policy, but it passed the General Assembly in May 1974 and was regarded as much too moderate by many campaigners of the time. The NIEO declared that

“the remaining vestiges of alien and colonial domination, foreign occupation, racial discrimination, apartheid and neo-colonialism in all its forms continue to be among the greatest obstacles to … full emancipation and progress”.

in an era when few people knew what a TNC was, its recommendations included the “regulation and supervision of the activities of transnational corporations”, as well as radical reform of the global trade regime.

The world has changed and the NIEO is not a blueprint for a perfect planet. But it highlights the poverty of ‘development’ thinking, the pinnacle of which is represented by the SDGs. The answer to world poverty can’t be found among the development professional and celebrities in New York.

Rather it will be found among the many thousands of activists, community organisations and social movements who are really confronting power in the world. Let’s join them.

Nick Dearden is director of the Global Justice Now and former director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign.

This article was originally published by Global Justice Now.