Monthly Archives: April 2017

The ecology of war: imperial power, permanent conflict and disposable humans

Doctor Ghassan ‘Gus’ Abu-Sitta is the head of the Plastic Surgery Department at the AUB Medical Center in Lebanon. He specializes in reconstructive surgery.

What it means in this part of the world is clear: they bring you people from the war zones, torn to pieces, missing faces, burned beyond recognition, and you have to try to give them their life back.

Dr. Abu-Sitta is also a thinker. A Palestinian born in Kuwait, he studied and lived in the UK, and worked in various war zones of the Middle East, as well as in Asia, before accepting his present position at the AUB Medical Center in Beirut, Lebanon.

We were brought together by peculiar circumstances. Several months ago I burned my foot on red-hot sand, in Southeast Asia. It was healing slowly, but it was healing. Until I went to Afghanistan where at one of the checkpoints in Herat I had to take my shoes off, and the wound got badly infected.

Passing through London, I visited a hospital there, and was treated by one of Abu-Sitta’s former professors. When I said that among other places I work in Lebanon, he recommended that I visit one of his “best students who now works in Beirut”.

I did. During that time, a pan-Arab television channel, Al-Mayadeen, was broadcasting in English, with Arabic subtitles, a long two-part interview with me, about my latest political / revolutionary novel ‘Aurora‘ and about the state of the global south, and the upsurge of the Western imperialism.

To my surprise, Dr. Abu-Sitta and his colleagues were following my work and political discourses. To these hardened surgeons, my foot ‘issue’ was just a tiny insignificant scratch. What mattered was the US attack against Syria, the Palestine, and the provocations against North Korea.

My ‘injury’ healed well, and Dr. Abu-Sitta and I became good friends. Unfortunately I have to leave Beirut for Southeast Asia, before a huge conference, which he and his colleagues are launching on the May 15, 2017, a conference on the ‘Ecology of War’.

I believe that the topic is thoroughly fascinating and essential for our humanity, even for its survival. It combines philosophy, medicine and science.

The destruction of the strong state leads to conflict

What happens to people in war zones? And what is a war zone, really? We arrived at some common conclusions, as both of us were working with the same topic but looking at it from two different angles:

“The misery is war. The destruction of the strong state leads to conflict. A great number of people on our Planet actually live in some conflict or war, without even realizing it: in slums, in refugee camps, in thoroughly collapsed states, or in refugee camps.”

We talked a lot: about fear, which is engulfing countries like the UK, about the new wave of individualism and selfishness, which has its roots in frustration. At one point he said:

“In most parts of the world ‘freedom’ is synonymous with the independence struggle for our countries. In such places as the UK, it mainly means more individualism, selfishness and personal liberties.”

We talked about imperialism, medicine and the suffering of the Middle East. Then we decided to publish this dialogue, shedding some light on the ‘Ecology of War’ – this essential new discipline in both philosophy and medicine. The discussion took place in Beirut, Lebanon, in Cafe Younes, on April 25, 2017.

Broken social contract in the Arab World, even in Europe

Gus Abu-Sitta: In the South, medicine and the provision of health were critical parts of the post-colonial state. And the post-colonial state built medical systems such as we had in Iraq, Egypt and in Syria as part of the social contract. They became an intrinsic part of the creation of those states.

And it was a realization that the state has to exercise its power both coercively, (which we know the state is capable of exercising, by putting you in prison, and even exercising violence), but above all non-coercively: it needs to house you, educate you, and give you health, all of those things. And that non-coercive power that the states exercise is a critical part of the legitimizing process of the state. We saw it evolve in 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.

So as a digression, if you want to look at how the state was dismantled: the aim of the sanctions against Iraq was not to weaken the Makhabarat or the army, the aim of the sanctions was to rob the Iraqi state of its non-coercive power; its ability to give life, to give education, and that’s why after 12 years, the state has totally collapsed internally – not because its coercive powers have weakened, but because it was robbed of all its non-coercive powers, of all its abilities to guarantee life to its citizens.

So in a way the contract between the state and the people was broken?

Absolutely! And you had that contract existing in the majority of post-colonialist states. With the introduction of the IMF and World Bank-led policies that viewed health and the provision of health as a business opportunity for the ruling elites and for corporations, and viewed free healthcare as a burden on the state, you began to have an erosion in certain countries like Egypt, like Jordan, of the non-coercive powers of the state, leading to the gradual weakening of its legitimacy.

Once again, the aim of the IMF and World Bank was to turn health into a commodity, which could be sold back to people as a service; sold back to those who could afford it.

So, the US model, but in much more brutal form, as the wages in most of those countries were incomparably lower.

Absolutely! And the way you do that in these countries: you create a two-tier system where the government tier is so under-funded, that people choose to go to the private sector. And then in the private sector you basically have the flourishing of all aspects of private healthcare: from health insurance to provision of health care, to pharmaceuticals.

Paradoxically this scenario is also taking place in the UK right now.

We see it in the UK and we’ll see it in many other European countries. But it has already happened in this region, in the Arab world. Here, the provision of health was so critical to creation of the states. It was critical to the legitimacy of the state.

Dismantling the welare state – a form of war against the poor

The scenario has been extremely cynical: while the private health system was imposed on the Arab region and on many other parts of the world, in the West itself, except in the United States, medical care remains public and basically free. We are talking about state medical care in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Yes. In Europe as part of the welfare state that came out of the Second World War, the provision of healthcare was part of the social contract. As the welfare state with the advent of Thatcherism and Reagan-ism was being dismantled, it became important to undergo a similar process as elsewhere.

The difference is that in the UK, and also in countries like Germany, it was politically very dangerous. It could lead to election losses. So the second plan was to erode the health system, by a thousand blows kill it gradually. What you ended up in the UK is the piece-by-piece privatization of the health sector.

And the people don’t know, they don’t notice that the system is becoming private. Or in Germany where actually the government does not pay for healthcare – the government subsidizes the insurance companies that profit from the private provision of healthcare.

Before we began recording this discussion, we were speaking about the philosophical dilemmas that are now besieging or at least should be besieging the medical profession. Even the social medical care in Europe: isn’t it to some extent a cynical arrangement? European countries are now all part of the imperialist block, together with the United States, and they are all plundering the rest of the world – the Middle East, Africa, parts of Asia – and they are actually subsidizing their social system from that plunder.

That’s one thing. But also, the doctors and nurses working for instance in the UK or Germany are often ‘imported’ from much poorer countries, where they have often received free education. Instead of helping their own, needy people, they are actually now serving the ageing and by all international comparisons, unreasonably spoiled and demanding population in Europe, which often uses medical facilities as if they were some ‘social club’.

I think what has happened, particularly in Europe is that there is a gradual erosion of all aspects of the welfare state. Politically it was not yet possible to get rid of free healthcare.

The problem that you can certainly see in the United Kingdom is that health is the final consequence of social and economic factors that people live in. So if you have chronic unemployment, second and third generation unemployment problem, these have health consequences.

If you have the destruction of both pensions and the cushion of a social umbrella for the unemployed, that has consequences … Poor housing has health consequences. Mass unemployment has health consequences. Politically it was easy to get rid of all other aspects of the welfare state, but they were stuck with a healthcare problem.

And so the losing battle that the health systems in the West are fighting is that they are being expected to cater to the poor consequences of the brutal capitalist system as a non-profit endeavor. But we know that once these lifestyle changes are affecting people’s health, it’s too late in terms of cure or prevention.

And so what the European health systems do, they try to patch people and to get them out of the system and back on the street. So if you have children with chronic asthma, you treat the asthma but not the dump housing in which these children are living in.

If you have violent assaults and trauma related to violence, you treat the trauma, the physical manifestation, and not the breakdown of youth unemployment, or racism that creates this. So in order to sustain this anomaly, as you said, you need an inflated health system, because you make people sick and then you try to fix them, rather than stopping them from being sick.

Hence that brain drains that have basically happened, where you have more Ghanaian doctors in New York than you have in Ghana.

And you have an entire army of Philippine nurses in the UK, while there is suddenly a shortage of qualified nurses in Manila.

This is the result of the fact that actually people’s health ‘happens’ outside the health system. Because you cannot get rid of the health system, you end up having a bloated health system, and try to fix the ailments that are coming through the door.

Collapse of health care In the Middle East

You worked in this entire region. You worked in Iraq, and in Gaza… both you and I worked in Shifa Hospital in Gaza… You worked in Southern Lebanon during the war. How brutal is the healthcare situation in the Middle East? How badly has been, for instance, the Iraqi peoples’ suffering, compared to Western patients? How cruel is the situation in Gaza?

If you look at places like Iraq: Iraq in the 80’s probably had one of the most advanced health systems in the region. Then you went through the first war against Iraq, followed by 12 years of sanctions in which that health system was totally dismantled – not just in terms of hospitals and medication and the forced exile of doctors and health professionals, but also in terms of other aspects of health, which are the sewage and water and electricity plants, all of those parts of the infrastructure that directly impact on people’s lives.

Then came depleted uranium…

And then you add to the mix that 2003 War and then the complete destruction and dismantling of the state, and the migration of some 50% of Iraq’s doctors.

Where did they migrate?

Everywhere: to the Gulf and to the West; to North America, Europe … So what you have in Iraq is a system that is not only broken, but that has lost the components that are required to rebuild it. You can’t train a new generation of doctors in Iraq, because your trainers have all left the country.

You can’t create a health system in Iraq, because you have created a government infrastructure that is intrinsically unstable and based on a multi-polarity of the centers of power which all are fighting for control of the pie of the state … and so Iraqis sub-contract their health at hospital level to India and to Turkey and Lebanon, or Jordan, because they are in this vicious loop.

But this is only for those who can afford it?

Yes for those who can, but even in those times when the government had cash it could not build the system, anymore. So it would sub-contract health provisions outside, because the system was so broken that money couldn’t fix it.

It’s the same across the Middle East

The same is happening in Libya and the same is happening in Syria, with regards of the migration of their doctors. Syria will undergo something similar to Iraq at the end of the war, if the Syrian state is destroyed.

But it is still standing.

It still stands and it is still providing healthcare to the overwhelming majority of the population even to those who live in the rebel-controlled areas. They are travelling to Damascus and other cities for their cardiac services or for their oncological services.

So no questions asked; you are sick, you get treated?

Even from the ISIS-controlled areas people can travel and get treated, because this is part of the job of the state.

The same thing is happening with the education there; Syria still provides all basic services in that area.

Absolutely! But in Libya, because the state has totally disappeared or has disintegrated, all this is gone.

Libya is not even one country, any more …

There is not a unified country and there is definitely no health system. In Gaza and the Palestine, the occupation and the siege, ensure that there is no normal development of the health system and in case of Gaza as the Israelis say “every few years you come and you mown the lawn.”

You kill as many people in these brutal and intense wars, so you can ensure that the people for the next few years will be trying to survive the damage that you have caused.

Is there any help from Israeli physicians?

Oh yes! Very few individuals, but there is…

But the Israeli medical establishment is actually an intrinsic part of the Israeli establishment, and the Israeli academic medical establishment is also part of the Israeli establishment.

And the Israeli Medical Association refused to condemn the fact that Israeli doctors examine Palestinian political prisoners for what they call “fitness for interrogation”. Which is basically … you get seen by a doctor who decides how much torture you can take before you die.

This actually reminds me of what I was told in 2015 in Pretoria, South Africa, where I was invited to participate as a speaker at the International Conference of the Psychologists for Peace. Several US psychologists reported that during the interrogation and torture of alleged terrorists, there were professional psychologists and even clinical psychiatrists standing by, often assisting the interrogators.

Yes, there are actually two or three well-known American psychologists who designed the CIA interrogation system – its process.

What you have described that is happening in Palestine is apparently part of a very pervasive system. I was told in the Indian-controlled Kashmir that Israeli intelligence officers are sharing their methods of interrogation and torture with their Indian counterparts. And of course the US is involved there as well.

Conflict medicine and the ecology of war

War surgery grew out of the Napoleonic Wars. During these wars, two armies met. They usually met at the frontline. They attacked each other, shot at each other or stabbed each other. Most of injured were combatants, and they got treated in military hospitals. You had an evolution of war surgery.

What we have in this region, we believe, is that the intensity and the prolonged nature of these wars or these conflicts are not temporal – like battles. They don’t start and finish. And they are sufficiently prolonged that they change the biological ecology, the ecology in which people live. They create the ecology of war.

That ecology maintains itself well beyond of what we know is the shooting, because they alter the living environment of people. The wounds are physical, psychological and social wounds; the environment is altered as to become hostile – both to the able-bodied and more hostile to the wounded.

And as in the cases of these multi-drug-resistant organisms, which are now a big issue in the world like the multi-drug-resistant bacteria, 85% of Iraqi war wounded have multi-drug-resistant bacteria, 70% of Syrian war wounded have it …

So we say: this ecology, this biosphere that the conflicts create is even altered at the basic DNA of the bacteria. We have several theories about it; partly it’s the role of the heavy metals in modern ordnance, which can trigger mutation in these bacteria that makes them resistant to antibiotics.

So your biosphere, your bubble, your ecological bubble in which you live in, is permanently changed. And it doesn’t disappear the day the bombs disappear. It has to be dismantled, and in order to dismantle it you have to understand the dynamics of the ecology of war.

That’s why our program was set up at the university, which had basically been the major tertiary teaching center during the civil war and the 1982 Israeli invasion. And then as the war in Iraq and Syria developed, we started to get patients from these countries and treat them here.

We found out that we have to understand the dynamics of conflict medicine and to understand the ecology of war; how the physical, biological, psychological and social manifestations of war wounding happen, and how this ecology of war is created; everything from bacteria to the way water and the water cycle changes, to the toxic remains of war, to how people’s bodies react …

Many of my Iraqi patients that I see have multiple members of their families injured.

Is the AUB Medical Center now the pioneer in this research: the ecology of war?

Yes, because of the legacy of the civil war… of regional wars.

Nothing less than a regional perpetual conflict…

Perpetual conflict, yes; first home-grown, and then regional. We are the referral center for the Iraqi Ministry of Health, referral center for the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, so we act as a regional center, and the aim of our program is to dedicate more time and space and energy to the understanding of how this ecology of war comes about.

A permanent state of extreme poverty and misery

In my writing and in my films, I often draw the parallel between the war and extreme poverty. I have been working in some of the worst slums on Earth, those in Africa, Central America and Caribbean, South Asia, the Philippines and elsewhere.

I concluded that many societies that are in theory living in peace are in reality living in prolonged or even perpetual wars. Extreme misery is a form of war, although there is no ‘declaration of war’, and there is no defined frontline. I covered both countless wars and countless places of extreme misery, and the parallel, especially the physical, psychological and social impact on human beings, appears to be striking.

Would you agree, based on your research? Do you see extreme misery as a type of war?

Yes. At the core of it is the ‘dehumanization’ of people. Extreme poverty is a form of violence. The more extreme this poverty becomes, the closer it comes to the physical nature of violence. War is the accelerated degradation of people’s life to reaching that extreme poverty. But that extreme poverty can be reached by a more gradual process. War only gets them there faster.

A perpetual state of extreme poverty is in a way similar to a perpetual state of conflict, of a war.

Definitely. And it is a war mainly against those who are forced to live in these circumstances. It’s the war against the poor and the South. It’s the war against the poor in the inner cities of the West.

When you are defining the ecology of war, are you also taking what we are now discussing into consideration? Are you researching the impact of extreme poverty on human bodies and human lives? In this region, extreme poverty can often be found in the enormous refugee camps, while in other parts of the world it dwells in countless slums.

This extreme poverty is part of the ecology that we are discussing. One of the constituents of the ecology is when you take a wounded body and you place it in a harsh physical environment and you see how this body is re-wounded and re-wounded again, and this harsh environment becomes a continuation of that battleground, because what you see is a process of re-wounding.

Not because you are still in the frontline somewhere in Syria, but because your kids are now living in a tent with eight other people and they are in danger of becoming the victims of the epidemic of child burns that we now have in the refugee camps, because of poor and unsafe housing.

What exactly is a war injury?

Let’s look at it from a different angle: what constitutes a war wound, or a conflict-related injury? Your most basic conflict-related injury is a gunshot wound and a blast injury from shrapnel.

But what happens when you take that wounded body and throw it into a tent? What are the complications for this wounded body living in a harsh environment; does this constitute a war-related injury?

When you impoverish the population to the point that you have children suffering from the kind of injuries that we know are the results of poor and unsafe housing, is that a conflict-related injury? Or you have children now who have work-related injuries, because they have to go and become the main breadwinners for the home, working as car mechanics or porters or whatever.

Beyond the headlines – the permanent war

Or do you also consider a fact that if you come from a country where a given disease used to be treatable there, but due to the destruction of a health system, that ailment is not treatable anymore, because the hospitals are gone or because doctors had to leave, does that constitute a conflict-related injury?

So, we have to look at the entire ecology: beyond a bullet and shrapnel – things that get headlines in the first 20 seconds.

Your research seems to be relevant to most parts of the world.

Absolutely. Because we know that these humanitarian crises only exist in the imagination of the media and the UN agencies. There are no crises.

It is a perpetual state, again.

Exactly, it is perpetual. It does not stop. It is there all the time. Therefore there is no concept of ‘temporality of crises’, one thing we are arguing against. There is no referee who blows the whistle at the end of the crises.

When the cameras go off, the media and then the world, decides that the crises are over. But you know that people in Laos, for instance, still have one of the highest amputation rates in the world.

 I know. I worked there in the Plain of Jars, which is an enormous minefield even to this day.

Or Vietnam, with the greatest child facial deformities in the world as a result of Agent Orange.

You worked in these countries.

Yes.

Me too; and I used to live in Vietnam. That entire region is still suffering from what used to be known as the ‘Secret War’. In Laos, the poverty is so rampant that people are forced to sell unexploded US bombs for scrap. They periodically explode. In Cambodia, even between Seam Reap and the Thai border, there are villages where people are still dying or losing limbs.

Now many things depend on how we define them. It is often a game of words.

India is a war zone, from Kashmir to the Northeast, Bihar and slums of Mumbai.

If you take the crudest way of measuring conflict, which is the number of people killed by weapons, Guatemala and Salvador have now more people slaughtered than they had during the war.

But because the nature in which violence is exhibited changed, because it doesn’t carry a political tag now, it is not discussed. But actually, it is by the same people against the same people.

Empire of Chaos

I wrote about and filmed in Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, on several occasions. The extreme violence there is a direct result of the conflict implanted, triggered by the West, particularly by the United States. The same could be said about such places like Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Haiti. It has led to almost absolute social collapse.

Yes, in Jamaica, the CIA played a great role in the 70’s.

In that part of the world we are not talking just about poverty…

No, no. We are talking AK-47’s!

Exactly. Once I filmed in San Salvador, in a gangland… A friend, a local liberation theology priest kindly drove me around. We made two loops. The first loop was fine. On the second one they opened fire at our Land Cruiser, with some heavy stuff. The side of our car was full of bullet holes, and they blew two tires. We got away just on our rims. In the villages, maras simply come and plunder and rape. They take what they want. It is a war.

ICRC, they train surgeons in these countries. So the ICRC introduced war surgery into the medical curriculum of the medical schools in Colombia and Honduras. Because effectively, these countries are in a war, so you have to train surgeons, so they know what to do when they receive four or five patients every day, with gunshot wounds.

Let me tell you what I witnessed in Haiti, just to illustrate your point. Years ago I was working in Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. They say it is the most dangerous ‘neighborhood’ or slum on Earth. The local wisdom goes: “you can enter, but you will never leave alive.”

I went there with a truck, with two armed guards, but they were so scared that they just abandoned me there, with my big cameras and everything, standing in the middle of the road. I continued working; I had no choice.

At one point I saw a long line in front of some walled compound. I went in. What I was suddenly facing was thoroughly shocking: several local people on some wooden tables, blood everywhere, and numerous US military medics and doctors performing surgeries under the open sky.

It was hot, flies and dirt everywhere… A man told me his wife had a huge tumor. Without even checking what it was, the medics put her on a table, gave her ‘local’ and began removing the stuff. After the surgery was over, a husband and wife walked slowly to a bus stop and went home.

A couple of kilometers from there I found a well-equipped and clean US medical facility, but only for US troops and staff. I asked the doctors what they were really doing in Haiti and they were quiet open about it; they replied: “we are training for combat scenario … This is as close to a war that we can get.”

They were experimenting on human beings, of course; learning how to operate during the combat…

So, the distinction is only in definitions.

De-medicalization and de-development

As a surgeon who has worked all over the Middle East but also in many other parts of the world, how would you compare the conflict here to the conflicts in Asia, the Great Lakes of Africa and elsewhere?

In the Middle East, you still have people remembering when they had hospitals. Iraqis who come to my clinic remember the 80’s. They know that life was different and could have been different. And they are health-literate.

The other issue is that in 2014 alone, some 30,000 Iraqis were injured. The numbers are astounding. We don’t have a grasp of the numbers in Libya, the amount of ethnic cleansing and killing that is happening in Libya.

In terms of numbers, they are profound, but in terms of the effect, we are at the beginning of the phase of de-medicalization. So it wasn’t that these medical systems did not develop. They are being de-developed. They are going backwards.

Are you blaming Western imperialism for the situation?

If you look at the sanctions and what they did to their health system, of course! If you look at Libya, of course! The idea that these states disintegrated is a falsehood. We know what the dynamics of the sanctions were in Iraq, and what happened in Iraq after 2003. We know what happened in Libya.

Or in Afghanistan …

The first thing that the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan or the Nicaraguan Contras were told to do was to attack the clinics. The Americans have always understood that you destroy the state by preventing it from providing these non-coercive powers that I spoke about.

Do you see this part of the world as the most effected, most damaged?

At this moment and time certainly. And the statistics show it. I think around 60% of those dying from wars are killed in this region …

And how do you define this region geographically?

From Afghanistan to Mauritania. And that includes the Algerian-Mali border. The Libyan border … The catastrophe of the division of Sudan, what’s happening in South Sudan, what’s happening in Somalia, Libya, Egypt, the Sinai Desert, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, even Pakistan including people who are killed there by drones …

The complete take-over of corporate power

But then we also have around 10 million people who have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo, since the 1995 Rwandan invasion …

Now that is a little bit different. That is the ‘more advanced phase’: when you’ve completely taken away the state … In the Arab world Libya is the closest to that scenario. There the oil companies have taken over the country.

The mining companies are occupying DRC. And they run the wars directly, rather than through the Western armies.

You erode the state, completely, until it disappears and then the corporations, directly, as they did in the colonialist phase during the East Indian Company, and the Dutch companies, become the main players again.

Getting the big picture

What is the goal of your research, the enormous project called the ‘Ecology of War’?

One of the things that we insist on is this holistic approach. The compartmentalization is part of the censorship process. “You are a microbiologist then only look what is happening with the bacteria … You are an orthopedic surgeon, so you only have to look at the blast injuries, bombs, landmine injuries … “

So that compartmentalization prevents bringing together people who are able to see the whole picture. Therefore we are insisting that this program also has social scientists, political scientists, anthropologists, microbiologists, surgeons … Otherwise we’d just see the small science.

We are trying to put the sciences together to see the bigger picture. We try to put the pieces of puzzle together, and to see the bigger picture.

And now you have a big conference. On the 15th of May…

Now we have a big conference; basically the first congress that will look at all these aspects of conflict and health; from the surgical, to the reconstruction of damaged bodies, to the issues of medical resistance of bacteria, infectious diseases, to some absolutely basic issues.

Like, before the war there were 30,000 kidney failure patients in Yemen. Most dialysis patients are 2 weeks away from dying if they don’t get dialysis. So, there is a session looking at how you provide dialysis in the middle of these conflicts?

What do you do, because dialysis services are so centralized? The movement of patients is not easy, and the sanctions … One topic will be ‘cancer and war’ … So this conference will be as holistic as possible, of the relationship between the conflict and health.

We expect over 300 delegates, and we will have speakers from India, Yemen, Palestine, Syria, from the UK, we have people coming from the humanitarian sector, from ICRC, people who worked in Africa and the Middle East. We have people who worked in previous wars and are now working in current wars, so we have a mix of people from different fields.

What is the ultimate goal of the program?

We have to imagine the health of the region beyond the state. On the conceptual level, we need to try to figure out what is happening? We can already see certain patterns. One of them is the regionalization of healthcare.

The fact that Libyans get treated in Tunisia, Iraqis and Syrians get treated in Beirut, Yemenis get treated in Jordan. So you already have the disintegration of these states and the migration of people to the regional centers. The state is no longer a major player, because the state was basically destroyed.

We feel that this is a disease of the near future, medium future and long term future. Therefore we have to understand it, in order to better treat it, we have to put mechanisms in place that this knowledge transfers into the medical education system, which will produce medical professionals who are better equipped to deal with this health system.

We have to make sure that people are aware of many nuances of the conflict, beyond the shrapnel and beyond the bullet. The more research we put into this area of the conflict and health, the more transferable technologies we develop – the better healthcare we’d be allowed to deliver in these situations, the better training our students and graduates would receive, and better work they will perform in this region for the next 10 or 15 years.

And hopefully more lives would be saved …

 


 

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel ‘Aurora‘ and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: ‘Exposing Lies Of The Empire‘ and Fighting Against Western Imperialism. View his other books here.

Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

This article was originally published here by CounterPunch.

 

A climate insurgency: building a Trump-free, fossil-free future

As the thousands of foot-weary protesters leave the April 29 Peoples Climate March in Washington, DC – and its scores of sister marches around the country – one question will no doubt be foremost on their minds:

How can a march, or indeed any other action they take, force a reversal in the world’s hurtle to climate doom?

After all, a single march, no matter how large, is not going to force President Trump and his administration of fossil-fuel company executives and climate-change deniers to reverse course.

They have already cancelled the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, authorized drilling and mining on public lands, and gutted regulations that protect local people and environments against the extraction of fossil fuels.

He has cleared the way for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. His allies in Congress are whetting their knives to gut the Clean Air, Clean Water and Environmental Policy Acts. The fossil fuel industry is lining up for permits to build new infrastructure that will accelerate global warming and threaten local environments to boot.

Americans’ love of Trump is turning sour

The unintended consequence of these actions has been to isolate Trump and his allies from the American people. This is revealed in polls taken since Trump’s election. Half of Americans call climate change a ‘major threat’ to the nation’s well-being.

Three-quarters of voters said carbon dioxide should be regulated as a pollutant and 70% support strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants – even if it raises the cost of electricity. Meanwhile, 81% said the United States should use more renewable energy, whereas only 3% said it should use less.

The public believes – by a factor of six to one – that the U.S. government is doing ‘too little’ rather than ‘too much’ to protect the environment. Moreover, 61% of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the environment, which is higher than his disapproval rating for all other issues, including health care and immigration.

This overwhelming rejection of Trump’s assault on the climate and general embrace of a shift toward climate protection opens the way to massive support for the global nonviolent constitutional insurgency which has been undermining the very legitimacy of those destroying the earth’s climate.

The immediate goal of the climate insurgency is the same as that enunciated by the nations of the world in the Paris climate agreement: to prevent more than 1.5 degrees Celsius additional warming.

No, Mr Trump – we do not consent to your war on our planet!

The fundamental strategy for the nonviolent constitutional insurgency is to withdraw the support of the people from climate destruction.

It uses nonviolent direct action – or civil disobedience – to express the popular refusal to acquiesce in the burning of fossil fuels and to force a transition to climate-safe energy. It defends such action as both the right and the duty of the people – and proclaims climate destruction to be illegal and unconstitutional.

It mobilizes both those who are willing to engage in activities the authorities claim to be illegal and the wider population who support these objectives. It seeks to create an irresistible momentum of escalating popular action for climate protection.

While many have been stricken with pain and foreboding by Trump’s climate agenda, such feelings haven’t paralyzed them from taking action. Even before Trump’s inauguration, EPA workers put their jobs at risk to expose Trump’s climate lies.

Shortly after Trump’s election, the Illinois legislature passed the Future Energy Jobs Package, which will invest at least $500 million in new solar – especially community solar – and energy efficiency programs targeted at low-income communities, combined with job training for work in the solar industry.

Chicago also recently announced that it will transition all of its municipal buildings and operations to 100% clean, renewable energy by 2025. Meanwhile, 23 state and local governments vowed to fight Trump’s ‘Energy Independence’ executive order in court. A US district court judge ruled that there is a constitutional right to a stable climate.

Leading corporate executives urged the United States not to leave the Paris climate agreement; Maryland has just banned all fracking; and anti-pipeline campaigns are under way in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Saturday’s Peoples Climate March represents a culmination and celebration of this activity, as well as the launch of its next phase.

No overnight victory, but building a movement

Despite the emergence of the climate insurgency and the overwhelming public support for climate protection, Trump and his fossil fuel allies control virtually all the levers of governmental power.

The Peoples Climate March is unlikely to stop that, but it can be part of building the momentum for a movement that can defeat Trumpism and set us on the course for a transition to a fossil-free economy.

Here are three strategic elements – drawing from my new book ‘Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual‘ – that may be crucial in the aftermath of the march.

1. Build the Trump resistance around climate protection

The United States is in the midst of an unprecedented wave of civil resistance to Trump and Trumpism – what movements of resistance to tyranny elsewhere have called ‘social self-defense‘.

It includes millions of aroused individuals and community members, social movements, non-profit advocacy organizations, lawyers and judges, scientists and librarians, and much of the Democratic Party.

Many advocacy groups have climbed out of their issue silos to cooperate in the Trump resistance. And there is powerful synergism between those taking direct action in civil society and those challenging Trump and his allies within the political system.

The Trump resistance has so far blocked the Muslim and refugee ban, forestalled the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, stymied the building of Trump’s wall with Mexico, and successfully pushed back against much of the rest of the Trump agenda. In the process they have significantly undermined public and institutional support for both the Trump administration and its right-wing Republican allies.

The Trump resistance creates a new political context for the climate protection movement. It opens the opportunity for the climate movement to be a central part of the broad and powerful anti-Trump movement that can force a reversal of his climate agenda. Victory for this broader movement is essential for climate protection. Mass repudiation of Trump and Trumpism that breaks the power of the president and his allies are necessary conditions for effective climate protection.

Fortunately, the climate movement is already reaching out and supporting the other elements of the Trump resistance. For example, says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, “The Sierra Club stands in solidarity with Muslims, refugees, immigrants, people of color, women and all those threatened” by the Trump administration.

“Protecting our communities and our environment go hand-in-hand, and everyone who values a just and free America should continue to resist hateful actions” – like the Muslim ban.

An open letter from environmental and climate justice organizations declares, “We support workers who choose to walk off their jobs on May 1 because we know that the fight to protect land, water, air and soil is inseparable from the fight to protect the life and dignity of workers, migrants, and communities of color.”

Conversely, climate protection can provide a major unifying and empowering focus for social self-defense. Much of the Trump resistance is rightly focused on his attacks on particular groups: immigrants, Muslims, women, people of color and many others. But climate change is a universal threat that creates a universal common interest. As such, it can be a unifying thread among the many diverse elements of the Trump resistance.

Climate protection has wide support across almost all the constituencies that need to come together to break Trump’s power. For example, the policy platform of the Women’s March stated that “our environment and our climate must be protected” and that “our land and natural resources cannot be exploited for corporate gain or greed.”

The need to protect the climate is in direct contradiction to Trump’s “America First” rhetoric. There is no way that America can survive, let alone thrive, unless climate change is reduced, and there is no way that can happen without international cooperation and agreement.

Creating millions of jobs protecting the climate is also the most effective way to address the economic needs of American workers that Trump exploited to win the presidency. A program of jobs for climate and justice can be the centerpiece of an alternative economic program that can draw away support from Trump’s false promises.

2. Impose the transition to fossil freedom

Without pipelines, oil trains, power plants and other infrastructure, coal, oil and gas would remain harmlessly in the earth where they have lain for millions of years. All over the world, climate campaigns are focusing on halting all new fossil fuel infrastructure – a so-called ‘fossil freeze‘.

Meanwhile, state and local policy is increasingly rejecting new fossil fuel infrastructure based on the greater economy of grid modernization, distributed energy, energy efficiency and the falling cost of renewables. These two pincers can converge to slow and eventually defeat new fossil fuel infrastructure throughout the country.

Of course, Trump is trying to expand fossil fuel infrastructure. But the Trump era will see massive resistance to his plans. One harbinger: In early April, an advance guard set up camp in Eagle Butte, South Dakota to lay the groundwork of resistance to Trump’s plan to revive the Keystone XL pipeline.

Climate protection requires not only a halt to new fossil fuel infrastructure, but also a planned transition to a fossil free economy. That means not just changing energy sources, but changing every institution that utilizes energy. Ultimately, it means using forests, farms and other ‘sinks’ to begin withdrawing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.

This transition requires planning. The climate movement should insist that every institution – from schools, churches, states and municipalities to the federal government – develop and immediately start to implement a climate action plan that will eliminate fossil fuel burning by 2050 at the latest.

Portland, Oregon just announced a plan for transitioning to 100% renewable energy by 2050. Such plans must include protection for workers and communities whose livelihoods may be adversely affected by the transition to a fossil-free economy – not to mention strategies to use that transition to reverse the economic, racial, generational and gender inequality and injustice that the Trump administration seems to be advancing.

Local and state fossil freezes and climate action plans can lay the groundwork for – and prove the feasibility of – a national fossil freeze and climate action plan.

In the lead-up to the Peoples Climate March Sens. Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley plan to release a Clean Energy for All bill “to transition away from fossil fuel sources of energy to 100% clean and renewable energy by 2050.” Trump can’t stop us from implementing the elements of such a plan at a state and local level.

3. Claim a stable climate as a constitutional right

Two days after the election of Donald Trump, Federal Judge Ann Aiken ruled in a case now dubbed Climate Kids v. Trump that “the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.” A stable climate system is quite literally the foundation of society, “without which there would be neither civilization nor progress.”

In short, the right to a stable climate is protected by the US Constitution’s guarantee of the right to life and liberty.

Climate protection advocates do not need to wait for the legal process to play out in order to argue that the Aiken decision establishes that the people have a right, grounded in the US Constitution, to force the government to protect the climate. If the courts won’t enforce that right in time, it is up to the people to do so.

The climate movement can assert that it is not just advocating an environmental policy, but fighting for a basic human and constitutional right for all people. It thus makes defiance of Trump’s climate agenda not just opposition to bad policies, but the basis for a constitutional insurgency that defines climate-destroying policies and the activities that enforce them as criminal acts that the people have a right, indeed a duty, to resist.

And now, the People’s Climate March

While it is impossible to know what future course the Trump era will take, we do know that the future of the planet and its people depend on resisting and overcoming the president’s anti-climate agenda – and reversing it to eliminate fossil fuels.

If the global nonviolent climate insurgency succeeds, Trump and Trumpism will be remembered by historians as a failed attempt to prevent humanity from protecting itself against climate catastrophe.

And the People’s Climate March may well be recorded as a historic marker on the way to a fossil-free future.

 


 

Jeremy Brecher is a co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability, historian and author of ‘Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival‘. See his website here.

Petition: Add your name to ‘support the Merkley-Sanders 100% Clean Energy Bill and to urge all Democratic Senators to do the same‘.

The book:Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival‘ is available as a free download.

This article was originally published here by Waging Nonviolence (CC-BY). This story was made possible by WNV members – become one today!

 

Conservatives’ hard right Brexit plans: UK’s great leap backwards to ‘dirty man of Europe’

As any dodgy dealer knows, the best way to sell something duff is to harry the unsuspecting buyer.

Theresa May in calling an election with less than seven weeks’ notice is bullying the voter into a panic decision: one that could jeopardise the health and happiness of future generations.

The spin from Number 10 is May wants to be even stronger in negotiating in Europe and the Tories want to take advantage of the division in the Labour party.

It seems just as likely that the prime minister wants to shore up her authority before it is undermined by the gaping chasm opening under her among her own warring tribe.

May was after all the compromise candidate: a Remain campaigner trusted to abandon her principles and drive home the Brexit agenda. She is hoping we fail to notice she is quickly becoming the compromised candidate.

The united front between the Dirty Brexit industrialists and the Clean Brexit conservatives cannot hold. So which Tory party is Britain being asked to vote for?

We can unpick them one by one as we please

The Conservatives simply cannot deliver the Brexit the right-wingers promised: the party is now slowing pulling apart under the weight of its internal contradictions. The most significant and serious of these contradictions, in terms of the long-term wealth and health of the country, concerns the environment.

May is proposing that 12,000 regulations are copied and pasted into the UK statute book through the Great Repeal Bill: but an estimated 1,000 will need to be changed in the process. There are more than 200 laws “covering water and air quality, waste management, nature protection, industrial pollution control, chemicals and GMOs, noise and forestry”.

“All EU laws will transfer into British law, May explained. “And then we can unpick them one by one as we please.”

Who would want to unpick environmental protections? The middle-ranking businessmen who funded the Leave campaign, who populate the neoliberal wing of the party, and who supported Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, are desperate to revive their profits.

The environmental splendour symbolic of ‘greatness’

And their claim that capitalist competition drives innovation simply does not hold any more. The return on investment must instead come from creating new markets at the margins, and reducing the costs of production: this means destroying decades of negotiated environmental regulations.

‘The Great Unpicking’. This is the real agenda for many of the bankrollers of Brexit.

A contradiction and split in the party arises because the business class needs the support of millions of workers to win an election. This includes well educated, highly paid workers. It includes those concerned about their own immediate natural environment. And those worried about the impact climate change will have on their children.

A significant number of the Conservative party want to, well, conserve much of this country’s environmental splendour. It forms part of their foundational myth as evidence of the greatness of Britain. It grounds their patriotism.

The environmentalists in the Tory party who have clustered around the Bright Blue think tank recently performed an extremely canny manoeuvre. They polled the membership, and found extraordinary levels of support for the current European Union regime of environmental regulation among its grassroots.

Rebecca Pow, the Conservative MP for Taunton Deane, used the poll to hook her arguments into the news agenda. “I have found huge support among Conservatives from old to young for protecting our precious environment”, she told the press.

“In this Brexit world we should adopt wholesale the current EU environment legislation relating to areas including water, wildlife, habitats, beaches and climate change and tailor it to our particular needs, as time goes on.”

The industrialists again set the agenda

The split between conservative Conservatives and desperate profit-seeking Tories was brilliantly personified by David Cameron and George Osborne not so long ago. Cameron wooed those threatening to defect to the Green party with, Vote Blue, Go Green. Osborne attacked the environmental Taliban to the delight of carbon intensive industry.

Osborne allowed the green rhetoric to continue, knowing that to investors actions speak louder than words. He began the process of cutting subsidies for solar and onshore wind, abandoning Zero Carbon Homes, announcing plans to sell off the Green Investment Bank, and crapping the Green Deal. In addition we have seen scrapping of £1 billion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, reducing tax breaks for clean cars and allowing fracking under National Parks.”

May as the ‘strong’ leader of the Tories now has to hold together the two competing halves of the party. The signal at the beginning, was she would serve the industrialist, climate denying wing. This is why on taking office she abolished the Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. But mostly, she has tried to ignore this issue.

Lord (Kate) Parminter, the Lib Dem environment spokesperson, wrote in the Ecologist magazine: Since Brexit, the Conservative government has avoided questions about the future of environmental protection. For example, Government ministers were asked seven times if the government would retain EU air quality limits following Brexit. They still declined to make a commitment.”

It seems May remains beholden to a small, vocal, hardened and influential faction within the Conservative party which is determined to strip away environmental protections agreed in Europe. This faction seems to be getting the most air time.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a wealthy descendant of Somerset’s coal barons, told a hearing of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee that Britain can and should go “a very long way” towards destroying current environmental standards.

“We could, if we wanted, accept emissions standards from India, America, and Europe. There’d be no contradiction with that. We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that. We could take it a very long way. American emission standards are fine.”

Plans to ditch ‘spirit crushing’ EU regulations?

Andrea Leadsom stood against May in the leadership contest for the climate-denying right wing. She is now Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is responsible for the imposition of an estimated 25% of all EU environmental regulations.

Leadsom argued that a third of these environmental rules “won’t be easy to transpose” during a hearing of the Environmental Audit Committee in October last year. She denied any “ulterior motive” before asserting: “There are roughly a quarter that cannot be brought immediately into law either because it requires technical attention or falls away, and that’s the bit we will be looking at to see what steps need to be taken.”

She said the Great Repeal Bill would bring comfort to environmental groups and businesses alike, with a smooth transition of EU into UK law, but then added that ” … over a period of time, we will be able to repeal, amend, and strengthen laws at leisure.”

George Eustice MP, the farming minister, has advocated an end to “spirit-crushing” environmental regulations. “The birds and habitats directives would go”, he said, referring to two key pieces of European environmental law. “A lot of the national directives they instructed us to put in place would stay. But the directives’ framework is so rigid that it is spirit-crushing.”

David Bannerman MEP reinforced the message by describing Brexit as “a huge opportunity” to end “over-regulation”, his comments not targeted specifically at the environment. Owen Paterson, one time environment secretary, welcomed the suggested scrapping of the Renewable Energy Directive, adding: “It’s distorting the whole energy market.”

The Express, the in-house magazine of the extreme right of the Tory party, could barely contain its excitement. “The Renewable Energy Directive is thought to be among of raft of EU policies set for the post-Brexit bonfire of Brussels diktats … [It] resulted in the Government spending billions on subsidies for wind and solar farms…”

And while we’re at it, let’s ditch the Climate Change Act!

The Telegraph, jockeying for position as the extreme right newsletter, wants to see the end of EU regulations as just a beginning for its war on bureaucracy;

“[T]here is a great deal of UK red tape that needs looking at, too. The Climate Change Act 2008 was a unilateral decision to commit Britain to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent within five decades. It proved that the British are capable of making mistakes all by themselves.”

The industrial core of the Conservative party is also well represented by think tanks and lobbyists. Key among them is Open Europe, which has used donations from rabidly right-wing think tanks to fund anti-EU research.

As the country is crushed under government austerity the PR team focused attention on the potential costs of EU laws, while downplaying any benefits. The most expensive regulation, The UK Renewable Energy Strategy, is priced at £4.7bn a year.

This is clearly designed to feed resentment, including among people relying on foodbanks to feed their children. Children who are currently protected by environmental regulation.

As the accumulation of billions in capital swirls into offshore tax havens, the electorate are being told it’s a choice between food or health. As a nation, we apparently cannot afford both.

May promised Red, White and Blue Brexit. The Conservative party promises Hard Brexit. The terrifying reality is we are headlining perilously close to a Dirty Brexit.

 


 

Brendan Montague is a regular columnist for openDemocracy in our ‘Brexit Inc: the environment and corporate power in the new Britain’ series.

Related Articles by Brendan Montague


This article
was first published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Creative Commons License

 

Conservatives’ hard right Brexit plans: UK’s great leap backwards to ‘dirty man of Europe’

As any dodgy dealer knows, the best way to sell something duff is to harry the unsuspecting buyer.

Theresa May in calling an election with less than seven weeks’ notice is bullying the voter into a panic decision: one that could jeopardise the health and happiness of future generations.

The spin from Number 10 is May wants to be even stronger in negotiating in Europe and the Tories want to take advantage of the division in the Labour party.

It seems just as likely that the prime minister wants to shore up her authority before it is undermined by the gaping chasm opening under her among her own warring tribe.

May was after all the compromise candidate: a Remain campaigner trusted to abandon her principles and drive home the Brexit agenda. She is hoping we fail to notice she is quickly becoming the compromised candidate.

The united front between the Dirty Brexit industrialists and the Clean Brexit conservatives cannot hold. So which Tory party is Britain being asked to vote for?

We can unpick them one by one as we please

The Conservatives simply cannot deliver the Brexit the right-wingers promised: the party is now slowing pulling apart under the weight of its internal contradictions. The most significant and serious of these contradictions, in terms of the long-term wealth and health of the country, concerns the environment.

May is proposing that 12,000 regulations are copied and pasted into the UK statute book through the Great Repeal Bill: but an estimated 1,000 will need to be changed in the process. There are more than 200 laws “covering water and air quality, waste management, nature protection, industrial pollution control, chemicals and GMOs, noise and forestry”.

“All EU laws will transfer into British law, May explained. “And then we can unpick them one by one as we please.”

Who would want to unpick environmental protections? The middle-ranking businessmen who funded the Leave campaign, who populate the neoliberal wing of the party, and who supported Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, are desperate to revive their profits.

The environmental splendour symbolic of ‘greatness’

And their claim that capitalist competition drives innovation simply does not hold any more. The return on investment must instead come from creating new markets at the margins, and reducing the costs of production: this means destroying decades of negotiated environmental regulations.

‘The Great Unpicking’. This is the real agenda for many of the bankrollers of Brexit.

A contradiction and split in the party arises because the business class needs the support of millions of workers to win an election. This includes well educated, highly paid workers. It includes those concerned about their own immediate natural environment. And those worried about the impact climate change will have on their children.

A significant number of the Conservative party want to, well, conserve much of this country’s environmental splendour. It forms part of their foundational myth as evidence of the greatness of Britain. It grounds their patriotism.

The environmentalists in the Tory party who have clustered around the Bright Blue think tank recently performed an extremely canny manoeuvre. They polled the membership, and found extraordinary levels of support for the current European Union regime of environmental regulation among its grassroots.

Rebecca Pow, the Conservative MP for Taunton Deane, used the poll to hook her arguments into the news agenda. “I have found huge support among Conservatives from old to young for protecting our precious environment”, she told the press.

“In this Brexit world we should adopt wholesale the current EU environment legislation relating to areas including water, wildlife, habitats, beaches and climate change and tailor it to our particular needs, as time goes on.”

The industrialists again set the agenda

The split between conservative Conservatives and desperate profit-seeking Tories was brilliantly personified by David Cameron and George Osborne not so long ago. Cameron wooed those threatening to defect to the Green party with, Vote Blue, Go Green. Osborne attacked the environmental Taliban to the delight of carbon intensive industry.

Osborne allowed the green rhetoric to continue, knowing that to investors actions speak louder than words. He began the process of cutting subsidies for solar and onshore wind, abandoning Zero Carbon Homes, announcing plans to sell off the Green Investment Bank, and crapping the Green Deal. In addition we have seen scrapping of £1 billion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, reducing tax breaks for clean cars and allowing fracking under National Parks.”

May as the ‘strong’ leader of the Tories now has to hold together the two competing halves of the party. The signal at the beginning, was she would serve the industrialist, climate denying wing. This is why on taking office she abolished the Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. But mostly, she has tried to ignore this issue.

Lord (Kate) Parminter, the Lib Dem environment spokesperson, wrote in the Ecologist magazine: Since Brexit, the Conservative government has avoided questions about the future of environmental protection. For example, Government ministers were asked seven times if the government would retain EU air quality limits following Brexit. They still declined to make a commitment.”

It seems May remains beholden to a small, vocal, hardened and influential faction within the Conservative party which is determined to strip away environmental protections agreed in Europe. This faction seems to be getting the most air time.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a wealthy descendant of Somerset’s coal barons, told a hearing of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee that Britain can and should go “a very long way” towards destroying current environmental standards.

“We could, if we wanted, accept emissions standards from India, America, and Europe. There’d be no contradiction with that. We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that. We could take it a very long way. American emission standards are fine.”

Plans to ditch ‘spirit crushing’ EU regulations?

Andrea Leadsom stood against May in the leadership contest for the climate-denying right wing. She is now Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is responsible for the imposition of an estimated 25% of all EU environmental regulations.

Leadsom argued that a third of these environmental rules “won’t be easy to transpose” during a hearing of the Environmental Audit Committee in October last year. She denied any “ulterior motive” before asserting: “There are roughly a quarter that cannot be brought immediately into law either because it requires technical attention or falls away, and that’s the bit we will be looking at to see what steps need to be taken.”

She said the Great Repeal Bill would bring comfort to environmental groups and businesses alike, with a smooth transition of EU into UK law, but then added that ” … over a period of time, we will be able to repeal, amend, and strengthen laws at leisure.”

George Eustice MP, the farming minister, has advocated an end to “spirit-crushing” environmental regulations. “The birds and habitats directives would go”, he said, referring to two key pieces of European environmental law. “A lot of the national directives they instructed us to put in place would stay. But the directives’ framework is so rigid that it is spirit-crushing.”

David Bannerman MEP reinforced the message by describing Brexit as “a huge opportunity” to end “over-regulation”, his comments not targeted specifically at the environment. Owen Paterson, one time environment secretary, welcomed the suggested scrapping of the Renewable Energy Directive, adding: “It’s distorting the whole energy market.”

The Express, the in-house magazine of the extreme right of the Tory party, could barely contain its excitement. “The Renewable Energy Directive is thought to be among of raft of EU policies set for the post-Brexit bonfire of Brussels diktats … [It] resulted in the Government spending billions on subsidies for wind and solar farms…”

And while we’re at it, let’s ditch the Climate Change Act!

The Telegraph, jockeying for position as the extreme right newsletter, wants to see the end of EU regulations as just a beginning for its war on bureaucracy;

“[T]here is a great deal of UK red tape that needs looking at, too. The Climate Change Act 2008 was a unilateral decision to commit Britain to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent within five decades. It proved that the British are capable of making mistakes all by themselves.”

The industrial core of the Conservative party is also well represented by think tanks and lobbyists. Key among them is Open Europe, which has used donations from rabidly right-wing think tanks to fund anti-EU research.

As the country is crushed under government austerity the PR team focused attention on the potential costs of EU laws, while downplaying any benefits. The most expensive regulation, The UK Renewable Energy Strategy, is priced at £4.7bn a year.

This is clearly designed to feed resentment, including among people relying on foodbanks to feed their children. Children who are currently protected by environmental regulation.

As the accumulation of billions in capital swirls into offshore tax havens, the electorate are being told it’s a choice between food or health. As a nation, we apparently cannot afford both.

May promised Red, White and Blue Brexit. The Conservative party promises Hard Brexit. The terrifying reality is we are headlining perilously close to a Dirty Brexit.

 


 

Brendan Montague is a regular columnist for openDemocracy in our ‘Brexit Inc: the environment and corporate power in the new Britain’ series.

Related Articles by Brendan Montague


This article
was first published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Creative Commons License

 

Conservatives’ hard right Brexit plans: UK’s great leap backwards to ‘dirty man of Europe’

As any dodgy dealer knows, the best way to sell something duff is to harry the unsuspecting buyer.

Theresa May in calling an election with less than seven weeks’ notice is bullying the voter into a panic decision: one that could jeopardise the health and happiness of future generations.

The spin from Number 10 is May wants to be even stronger in negotiating in Europe and the Tories want to take advantage of the division in the Labour party.

It seems just as likely that the prime minister wants to shore up her authority before it is undermined by the gaping chasm opening under her among her own warring tribe.

May was after all the compromise candidate: a Remain campaigner trusted to abandon her principles and drive home the Brexit agenda. She is hoping we fail to notice she is quickly becoming the compromised candidate.

The united front between the Dirty Brexit industrialists and the Clean Brexit conservatives cannot hold. So which Tory party is Britain being asked to vote for?

We can unpick them one by one as we please

The Conservatives simply cannot deliver the Brexit the right-wingers promised: the party is now slowing pulling apart under the weight of its internal contradictions. The most significant and serious of these contradictions, in terms of the long-term wealth and health of the country, concerns the environment.

May is proposing that 12,000 regulations are copied and pasted into the UK statute book through the Great Repeal Bill: but an estimated 1,000 will need to be changed in the process. There are more than 200 laws “covering water and air quality, waste management, nature protection, industrial pollution control, chemicals and GMOs, noise and forestry”.

“All EU laws will transfer into British law, May explained. “And then we can unpick them one by one as we please.”

Who would want to unpick environmental protections? The middle-ranking businessmen who funded the Leave campaign, who populate the neoliberal wing of the party, and who supported Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, are desperate to revive their profits.

The environmental splendour symbolic of ‘greatness’

And their claim that capitalist competition drives innovation simply does not hold any more. The return on investment must instead come from creating new markets at the margins, and reducing the costs of production: this means destroying decades of negotiated environmental regulations.

‘The Great Unpicking’. This is the real agenda for many of the bankrollers of Brexit.

A contradiction and split in the party arises because the business class needs the support of millions of workers to win an election. This includes well educated, highly paid workers. It includes those concerned about their own immediate natural environment. And those worried about the impact climate change will have on their children.

A significant number of the Conservative party want to, well, conserve much of this country’s environmental splendour. It forms part of their foundational myth as evidence of the greatness of Britain. It grounds their patriotism.

The environmentalists in the Tory party who have clustered around the Bright Blue think tank recently performed an extremely canny manoeuvre. They polled the membership, and found extraordinary levels of support for the current European Union regime of environmental regulation among its grassroots.

Rebecca Pow, the Conservative MP for Taunton Deane, used the poll to hook her arguments into the news agenda. “I have found huge support among Conservatives from old to young for protecting our precious environment”, she told the press.

“In this Brexit world we should adopt wholesale the current EU environment legislation relating to areas including water, wildlife, habitats, beaches and climate change and tailor it to our particular needs, as time goes on.”

The industrialists again set the agenda

The split between conservative Conservatives and desperate profit-seeking Tories was brilliantly personified by David Cameron and George Osborne not so long ago. Cameron wooed those threatening to defect to the Green party with, Vote Blue, Go Green. Osborne attacked the environmental Taliban to the delight of carbon intensive industry.

Osborne allowed the green rhetoric to continue, knowing that to investors actions speak louder than words. He began the process of cutting subsidies for solar and onshore wind, abandoning Zero Carbon Homes, announcing plans to sell off the Green Investment Bank, and crapping the Green Deal. In addition we have seen scrapping of £1 billion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, reducing tax breaks for clean cars and allowing fracking under National Parks.”

May as the ‘strong’ leader of the Tories now has to hold together the two competing halves of the party. The signal at the beginning, was she would serve the industrialist, climate denying wing. This is why on taking office she abolished the Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. But mostly, she has tried to ignore this issue.

Lord (Kate) Parminter, the Lib Dem environment spokesperson, wrote in the Ecologist magazine: Since Brexit, the Conservative government has avoided questions about the future of environmental protection. For example, Government ministers were asked seven times if the government would retain EU air quality limits following Brexit. They still declined to make a commitment.”

It seems May remains beholden to a small, vocal, hardened and influential faction within the Conservative party which is determined to strip away environmental protections agreed in Europe. This faction seems to be getting the most air time.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a wealthy descendant of Somerset’s coal barons, told a hearing of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee that Britain can and should go “a very long way” towards destroying current environmental standards.

“We could, if we wanted, accept emissions standards from India, America, and Europe. There’d be no contradiction with that. We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that. We could take it a very long way. American emission standards are fine.”

Plans to ditch ‘spirit crushing’ EU regulations?

Andrea Leadsom stood against May in the leadership contest for the climate-denying right wing. She is now Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is responsible for the imposition of an estimated 25% of all EU environmental regulations.

Leadsom argued that a third of these environmental rules “won’t be easy to transpose” during a hearing of the Environmental Audit Committee in October last year. She denied any “ulterior motive” before asserting: “There are roughly a quarter that cannot be brought immediately into law either because it requires technical attention or falls away, and that’s the bit we will be looking at to see what steps need to be taken.”

She said the Great Repeal Bill would bring comfort to environmental groups and businesses alike, with a smooth transition of EU into UK law, but then added that ” … over a period of time, we will be able to repeal, amend, and strengthen laws at leisure.”

George Eustice MP, the farming minister, has advocated an end to “spirit-crushing” environmental regulations. “The birds and habitats directives would go”, he said, referring to two key pieces of European environmental law. “A lot of the national directives they instructed us to put in place would stay. But the directives’ framework is so rigid that it is spirit-crushing.”

David Bannerman MEP reinforced the message by describing Brexit as “a huge opportunity” to end “over-regulation”, his comments not targeted specifically at the environment. Owen Paterson, one time environment secretary, welcomed the suggested scrapping of the Renewable Energy Directive, adding: “It’s distorting the whole energy market.”

The Express, the in-house magazine of the extreme right of the Tory party, could barely contain its excitement. “The Renewable Energy Directive is thought to be among of raft of EU policies set for the post-Brexit bonfire of Brussels diktats … [It] resulted in the Government spending billions on subsidies for wind and solar farms…”

And while we’re at it, let’s ditch the Climate Change Act!

The Telegraph, jockeying for position as the extreme right newsletter, wants to see the end of EU regulations as just a beginning for its war on bureaucracy;

“[T]here is a great deal of UK red tape that needs looking at, too. The Climate Change Act 2008 was a unilateral decision to commit Britain to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent within five decades. It proved that the British are capable of making mistakes all by themselves.”

The industrial core of the Conservative party is also well represented by think tanks and lobbyists. Key among them is Open Europe, which has used donations from rabidly right-wing think tanks to fund anti-EU research.

As the country is crushed under government austerity the PR team focused attention on the potential costs of EU laws, while downplaying any benefits. The most expensive regulation, The UK Renewable Energy Strategy, is priced at £4.7bn a year.

This is clearly designed to feed resentment, including among people relying on foodbanks to feed their children. Children who are currently protected by environmental regulation.

As the accumulation of billions in capital swirls into offshore tax havens, the electorate are being told it’s a choice between food or health. As a nation, we apparently cannot afford both.

May promised Red, White and Blue Brexit. The Conservative party promises Hard Brexit. The terrifying reality is we are headlining perilously close to a Dirty Brexit.

 


 

Brendan Montague is a regular columnist for openDemocracy in our ‘Brexit Inc: the environment and corporate power in the new Britain’ series.

Related Articles by Brendan Montague


This article
was first published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Creative Commons License

 

Conservatives’ hard right Brexit plans: UK’s great leap backwards to ‘dirty man of Europe’

As any dodgy dealer knows, the best way to sell something duff is to harry the unsuspecting buyer.

Theresa May in calling an election with less than seven weeks’ notice is bullying the voter into a panic decision: one that could jeopardise the health and happiness of future generations.

The spin from Number 10 is May wants to be even stronger in negotiating in Europe and the Tories want to take advantage of the division in the Labour party.

It seems just as likely that the prime minister wants to shore up her authority before it is undermined by the gaping chasm opening under her among her own warring tribe.

May was after all the compromise candidate: a Remain campaigner trusted to abandon her principles and drive home the Brexit agenda. She is hoping we fail to notice she is quickly becoming the compromised candidate.

The united front between the Dirty Brexit industrialists and the Clean Brexit conservatives cannot hold. So which Tory party is Britain being asked to vote for?

We can unpick them one by one as we please

The Conservatives simply cannot deliver the Brexit the right-wingers promised: the party is now slowing pulling apart under the weight of its internal contradictions. The most significant and serious of these contradictions, in terms of the long-term wealth and health of the country, concerns the environment.

May is proposing that 12,000 regulations are copied and pasted into the UK statute book through the Great Repeal Bill: but an estimated 1,000 will need to be changed in the process. There are more than 200 laws “covering water and air quality, waste management, nature protection, industrial pollution control, chemicals and GMOs, noise and forestry”.

“All EU laws will transfer into British law, May explained. “And then we can unpick them one by one as we please.”

Who would want to unpick environmental protections? The middle-ranking businessmen who funded the Leave campaign, who populate the neoliberal wing of the party, and who supported Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, are desperate to revive their profits.

The environmental splendour symbolic of ‘greatness’

And their claim that capitalist competition drives innovation simply does not hold any more. The return on investment must instead come from creating new markets at the margins, and reducing the costs of production: this means destroying decades of negotiated environmental regulations.

‘The Great Unpicking’. This is the real agenda for many of the bankrollers of Brexit.

A contradiction and split in the party arises because the business class needs the support of millions of workers to win an election. This includes well educated, highly paid workers. It includes those concerned about their own immediate natural environment. And those worried about the impact climate change will have on their children.

A significant number of the Conservative party want to, well, conserve much of this country’s environmental splendour. It forms part of their foundational myth as evidence of the greatness of Britain. It grounds their patriotism.

The environmentalists in the Tory party who have clustered around the Bright Blue think tank recently performed an extremely canny manoeuvre. They polled the membership, and found extraordinary levels of support for the current European Union regime of environmental regulation among its grassroots.

Rebecca Pow, the Conservative MP for Taunton Deane, used the poll to hook her arguments into the news agenda. “I have found huge support among Conservatives from old to young for protecting our precious environment”, she told the press.

“In this Brexit world we should adopt wholesale the current EU environment legislation relating to areas including water, wildlife, habitats, beaches and climate change and tailor it to our particular needs, as time goes on.”

The industrialists again set the agenda

The split between conservative Conservatives and desperate profit-seeking Tories was brilliantly personified by David Cameron and George Osborne not so long ago. Cameron wooed those threatening to defect to the Green party with, Vote Blue, Go Green. Osborne attacked the environmental Taliban to the delight of carbon intensive industry.

Osborne allowed the green rhetoric to continue, knowing that to investors actions speak louder than words. He began the process of cutting subsidies for solar and onshore wind, abandoning Zero Carbon Homes, announcing plans to sell off the Green Investment Bank, and crapping the Green Deal. In addition we have seen scrapping of £1 billion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, reducing tax breaks for clean cars and allowing fracking under National Parks.”

May as the ‘strong’ leader of the Tories now has to hold together the two competing halves of the party. The signal at the beginning, was she would serve the industrialist, climate denying wing. This is why on taking office she abolished the Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. But mostly, she has tried to ignore this issue.

Lord (Kate) Parminter, the Lib Dem environment spokesperson, wrote in the Ecologist magazine: Since Brexit, the Conservative government has avoided questions about the future of environmental protection. For example, Government ministers were asked seven times if the government would retain EU air quality limits following Brexit. They still declined to make a commitment.”

It seems May remains beholden to a small, vocal, hardened and influential faction within the Conservative party which is determined to strip away environmental protections agreed in Europe. This faction seems to be getting the most air time.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a wealthy descendant of Somerset’s coal barons, told a hearing of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee that Britain can and should go “a very long way” towards destroying current environmental standards.

“We could, if we wanted, accept emissions standards from India, America, and Europe. There’d be no contradiction with that. We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that. We could take it a very long way. American emission standards are fine.”

Plans to ditch ‘spirit crushing’ EU regulations?

Andrea Leadsom stood against May in the leadership contest for the climate-denying right wing. She is now Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is responsible for the imposition of an estimated 25% of all EU environmental regulations.

Leadsom argued that a third of these environmental rules “won’t be easy to transpose” during a hearing of the Environmental Audit Committee in October last year. She denied any “ulterior motive” before asserting: “There are roughly a quarter that cannot be brought immediately into law either because it requires technical attention or falls away, and that’s the bit we will be looking at to see what steps need to be taken.”

She said the Great Repeal Bill would bring comfort to environmental groups and businesses alike, with a smooth transition of EU into UK law, but then added that ” … over a period of time, we will be able to repeal, amend, and strengthen laws at leisure.”

George Eustice MP, the farming minister, has advocated an end to “spirit-crushing” environmental regulations. “The birds and habitats directives would go”, he said, referring to two key pieces of European environmental law. “A lot of the national directives they instructed us to put in place would stay. But the directives’ framework is so rigid that it is spirit-crushing.”

David Bannerman MEP reinforced the message by describing Brexit as “a huge opportunity” to end “over-regulation”, his comments not targeted specifically at the environment. Owen Paterson, one time environment secretary, welcomed the suggested scrapping of the Renewable Energy Directive, adding: “It’s distorting the whole energy market.”

The Express, the in-house magazine of the extreme right of the Tory party, could barely contain its excitement. “The Renewable Energy Directive is thought to be among of raft of EU policies set for the post-Brexit bonfire of Brussels diktats … [It] resulted in the Government spending billions on subsidies for wind and solar farms…”

And while we’re at it, let’s ditch the Climate Change Act!

The Telegraph, jockeying for position as the extreme right newsletter, wants to see the end of EU regulations as just a beginning for its war on bureaucracy;

“[T]here is a great deal of UK red tape that needs looking at, too. The Climate Change Act 2008 was a unilateral decision to commit Britain to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent within five decades. It proved that the British are capable of making mistakes all by themselves.”

The industrial core of the Conservative party is also well represented by think tanks and lobbyists. Key among them is Open Europe, which has used donations from rabidly right-wing think tanks to fund anti-EU research.

As the country is crushed under government austerity the PR team focused attention on the potential costs of EU laws, while downplaying any benefits. The most expensive regulation, The UK Renewable Energy Strategy, is priced at £4.7bn a year.

This is clearly designed to feed resentment, including among people relying on foodbanks to feed their children. Children who are currently protected by environmental regulation.

As the accumulation of billions in capital swirls into offshore tax havens, the electorate are being told it’s a choice between food or health. As a nation, we apparently cannot afford both.

May promised Red, White and Blue Brexit. The Conservative party promises Hard Brexit. The terrifying reality is we are headlining perilously close to a Dirty Brexit.

 


 

Brendan Montague is a regular columnist for openDemocracy in our ‘Brexit Inc: the environment and corporate power in the new Britain’ series.

Related Articles by Brendan Montague


This article
was first published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Creative Commons License

 

Conservatives’ hard right Brexit plans: UK’s great leap backwards to ‘dirty man of Europe’

As any dodgy dealer knows, the best way to sell something duff is to harry the unsuspecting buyer.

Theresa May in calling an election with less than seven weeks’ notice is bullying the voter into a panic decision: one that could jeopardise the health and happiness of future generations.

The spin from Number 10 is May wants to be even stronger in negotiating in Europe and the Tories want to take advantage of the division in the Labour party.

It seems just as likely that the prime minister wants to shore up her authority before it is undermined by the gaping chasm opening under her among her own warring tribe.

May was after all the compromise candidate: a Remain campaigner trusted to abandon her principles and drive home the Brexit agenda. She is hoping we fail to notice she is quickly becoming the compromised candidate.

The united front between the Dirty Brexit industrialists and the Clean Brexit conservatives cannot hold. So which Tory party is Britain being asked to vote for?

We can unpick them one by one as we please

The Conservatives simply cannot deliver the Brexit the right-wingers promised: the party is now slowing pulling apart under the weight of its internal contradictions. The most significant and serious of these contradictions, in terms of the long-term wealth and health of the country, concerns the environment.

May is proposing that 12,000 regulations are copied and pasted into the UK statute book through the Great Repeal Bill: but an estimated 1,000 will need to be changed in the process. There are more than 200 laws “covering water and air quality, waste management, nature protection, industrial pollution control, chemicals and GMOs, noise and forestry”.

“All EU laws will transfer into British law, May explained. “And then we can unpick them one by one as we please.”

Who would want to unpick environmental protections? The middle-ranking businessmen who funded the Leave campaign, who populate the neoliberal wing of the party, and who supported Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, are desperate to revive their profits.

The environmental splendour symbolic of ‘greatness’

And their claim that capitalist competition drives innovation simply does not hold any more. The return on investment must instead come from creating new markets at the margins, and reducing the costs of production: this means destroying decades of negotiated environmental regulations.

‘The Great Unpicking’. This is the real agenda for many of the bankrollers of Brexit.

A contradiction and split in the party arises because the business class needs the support of millions of workers to win an election. This includes well educated, highly paid workers. It includes those concerned about their own immediate natural environment. And those worried about the impact climate change will have on their children.

A significant number of the Conservative party want to, well, conserve much of this country’s environmental splendour. It forms part of their foundational myth as evidence of the greatness of Britain. It grounds their patriotism.

The environmentalists in the Tory party who have clustered around the Bright Blue think tank recently performed an extremely canny manoeuvre. They polled the membership, and found extraordinary levels of support for the current European Union regime of environmental regulation among its grassroots.

Rebecca Pow, the Conservative MP for Taunton Deane, used the poll to hook her arguments into the news agenda. “I have found huge support among Conservatives from old to young for protecting our precious environment”, she told the press.

“In this Brexit world we should adopt wholesale the current EU environment legislation relating to areas including water, wildlife, habitats, beaches and climate change and tailor it to our particular needs, as time goes on.”

The industrialists again set the agenda

The split between conservative Conservatives and desperate profit-seeking Tories was brilliantly personified by David Cameron and George Osborne not so long ago. Cameron wooed those threatening to defect to the Green party with, Vote Blue, Go Green. Osborne attacked the environmental Taliban to the delight of carbon intensive industry.

Osborne allowed the green rhetoric to continue, knowing that to investors actions speak louder than words. He began the process of cutting subsidies for solar and onshore wind, abandoning Zero Carbon Homes, announcing plans to sell off the Green Investment Bank, and crapping the Green Deal. In addition we have seen scrapping of £1 billion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, reducing tax breaks for clean cars and allowing fracking under National Parks.”

May as the ‘strong’ leader of the Tories now has to hold together the two competing halves of the party. The signal at the beginning, was she would serve the industrialist, climate denying wing. This is why on taking office she abolished the Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. But mostly, she has tried to ignore this issue.

Lord (Kate) Parminter, the Lib Dem environment spokesperson, wrote in the Ecologist magazine: Since Brexit, the Conservative government has avoided questions about the future of environmental protection. For example, Government ministers were asked seven times if the government would retain EU air quality limits following Brexit. They still declined to make a commitment.”

It seems May remains beholden to a small, vocal, hardened and influential faction within the Conservative party which is determined to strip away environmental protections agreed in Europe. This faction seems to be getting the most air time.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a wealthy descendant of Somerset’s coal barons, told a hearing of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee that Britain can and should go “a very long way” towards destroying current environmental standards.

“We could, if we wanted, accept emissions standards from India, America, and Europe. There’d be no contradiction with that. We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that. We could take it a very long way. American emission standards are fine.”

Plans to ditch ‘spirit crushing’ EU regulations?

Andrea Leadsom stood against May in the leadership contest for the climate-denying right wing. She is now Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is responsible for the imposition of an estimated 25% of all EU environmental regulations.

Leadsom argued that a third of these environmental rules “won’t be easy to transpose” during a hearing of the Environmental Audit Committee in October last year. She denied any “ulterior motive” before asserting: “There are roughly a quarter that cannot be brought immediately into law either because it requires technical attention or falls away, and that’s the bit we will be looking at to see what steps need to be taken.”

She said the Great Repeal Bill would bring comfort to environmental groups and businesses alike, with a smooth transition of EU into UK law, but then added that ” … over a period of time, we will be able to repeal, amend, and strengthen laws at leisure.”

George Eustice MP, the farming minister, has advocated an end to “spirit-crushing” environmental regulations. “The birds and habitats directives would go”, he said, referring to two key pieces of European environmental law. “A lot of the national directives they instructed us to put in place would stay. But the directives’ framework is so rigid that it is spirit-crushing.”

David Bannerman MEP reinforced the message by describing Brexit as “a huge opportunity” to end “over-regulation”, his comments not targeted specifically at the environment. Owen Paterson, one time environment secretary, welcomed the suggested scrapping of the Renewable Energy Directive, adding: “It’s distorting the whole energy market.”

The Express, the in-house magazine of the extreme right of the Tory party, could barely contain its excitement. “The Renewable Energy Directive is thought to be among of raft of EU policies set for the post-Brexit bonfire of Brussels diktats … [It] resulted in the Government spending billions on subsidies for wind and solar farms…”

And while we’re at it, let’s ditch the Climate Change Act!

The Telegraph, jockeying for position as the extreme right newsletter, wants to see the end of EU regulations as just a beginning for its war on bureaucracy;

“[T]here is a great deal of UK red tape that needs looking at, too. The Climate Change Act 2008 was a unilateral decision to commit Britain to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent within five decades. It proved that the British are capable of making mistakes all by themselves.”

The industrial core of the Conservative party is also well represented by think tanks and lobbyists. Key among them is Open Europe, which has used donations from rabidly right-wing think tanks to fund anti-EU research.

As the country is crushed under government austerity the PR team focused attention on the potential costs of EU laws, while downplaying any benefits. The most expensive regulation, The UK Renewable Energy Strategy, is priced at £4.7bn a year.

This is clearly designed to feed resentment, including among people relying on foodbanks to feed their children. Children who are currently protected by environmental regulation.

As the accumulation of billions in capital swirls into offshore tax havens, the electorate are being told it’s a choice between food or health. As a nation, we apparently cannot afford both.

May promised Red, White and Blue Brexit. The Conservative party promises Hard Brexit. The terrifying reality is we are headlining perilously close to a Dirty Brexit.

 


 

Brendan Montague is a regular columnist for openDemocracy in our ‘Brexit Inc: the environment and corporate power in the new Britain’ series.

Related Articles by Brendan Montague


This article
was first published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Creative Commons License

 

Conservatives’ hard right Brexit plans: UK’s great leap backwards to ‘dirty man of Europe’

As any dodgy dealer knows, the best way to sell something duff is to harry the unsuspecting buyer.

Theresa May in calling an election with less than seven weeks’ notice is bullying the voter into a panic decision: one that could jeopardise the health and happiness of future generations.

The spin from Number 10 is May wants to be even stronger in negotiating in Europe and the Tories want to take advantage of the division in the Labour party.

It seems just as likely that the prime minister wants to shore up her authority before it is undermined by the gaping chasm opening under her among her own warring tribe.

May was after all the compromise candidate: a Remain campaigner trusted to abandon her principles and drive home the Brexit agenda. She is hoping we fail to notice she is quickly becoming the compromised candidate.

The united front between the Dirty Brexit industrialists and the Clean Brexit conservatives cannot hold. So which Tory party is Britain being asked to vote for?

We can unpick them one by one as we please

The Conservatives simply cannot deliver the Brexit the right-wingers promised: the party is now slowing pulling apart under the weight of its internal contradictions. The most significant and serious of these contradictions, in terms of the long-term wealth and health of the country, concerns the environment.

May is proposing that 12,000 regulations are copied and pasted into the UK statute book through the Great Repeal Bill: but an estimated 1,000 will need to be changed in the process. There are more than 200 laws “covering water and air quality, waste management, nature protection, industrial pollution control, chemicals and GMOs, noise and forestry”.

“All EU laws will transfer into British law, May explained. “And then we can unpick them one by one as we please.”

Who would want to unpick environmental protections? The middle-ranking businessmen who funded the Leave campaign, who populate the neoliberal wing of the party, and who supported Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, are desperate to revive their profits.

The environmental splendour symbolic of ‘greatness’

And their claim that capitalist competition drives innovation simply does not hold any more. The return on investment must instead come from creating new markets at the margins, and reducing the costs of production: this means destroying decades of negotiated environmental regulations.

‘The Great Unpicking’. This is the real agenda for many of the bankrollers of Brexit.

A contradiction and split in the party arises because the business class needs the support of millions of workers to win an election. This includes well educated, highly paid workers. It includes those concerned about their own immediate natural environment. And those worried about the impact climate change will have on their children.

A significant number of the Conservative party want to, well, conserve much of this country’s environmental splendour. It forms part of their foundational myth as evidence of the greatness of Britain. It grounds their patriotism.

The environmentalists in the Tory party who have clustered around the Bright Blue think tank recently performed an extremely canny manoeuvre. They polled the membership, and found extraordinary levels of support for the current European Union regime of environmental regulation among its grassroots.

Rebecca Pow, the Conservative MP for Taunton Deane, used the poll to hook her arguments into the news agenda. “I have found huge support among Conservatives from old to young for protecting our precious environment”, she told the press.

“In this Brexit world we should adopt wholesale the current EU environment legislation relating to areas including water, wildlife, habitats, beaches and climate change and tailor it to our particular needs, as time goes on.”

The industrialists again set the agenda

The split between conservative Conservatives and desperate profit-seeking Tories was brilliantly personified by David Cameron and George Osborne not so long ago. Cameron wooed those threatening to defect to the Green party with, Vote Blue, Go Green. Osborne attacked the environmental Taliban to the delight of carbon intensive industry.

Osborne allowed the green rhetoric to continue, knowing that to investors actions speak louder than words. He began the process of cutting subsidies for solar and onshore wind, abandoning Zero Carbon Homes, announcing plans to sell off the Green Investment Bank, and crapping the Green Deal. In addition we have seen scrapping of £1 billion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, reducing tax breaks for clean cars and allowing fracking under National Parks.”

May as the ‘strong’ leader of the Tories now has to hold together the two competing halves of the party. The signal at the beginning, was she would serve the industrialist, climate denying wing. This is why on taking office she abolished the Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. But mostly, she has tried to ignore this issue.

Lord (Kate) Parminter, the Lib Dem environment spokesperson, wrote in the Ecologist magazine: Since Brexit, the Conservative government has avoided questions about the future of environmental protection. For example, Government ministers were asked seven times if the government would retain EU air quality limits following Brexit. They still declined to make a commitment.”

It seems May remains beholden to a small, vocal, hardened and influential faction within the Conservative party which is determined to strip away environmental protections agreed in Europe. This faction seems to be getting the most air time.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a wealthy descendant of Somerset’s coal barons, told a hearing of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee that Britain can and should go “a very long way” towards destroying current environmental standards.

“We could, if we wanted, accept emissions standards from India, America, and Europe. There’d be no contradiction with that. We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that. We could take it a very long way. American emission standards are fine.”

Plans to ditch ‘spirit crushing’ EU regulations?

Andrea Leadsom stood against May in the leadership contest for the climate-denying right wing. She is now Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is responsible for the imposition of an estimated 25% of all EU environmental regulations.

Leadsom argued that a third of these environmental rules “won’t be easy to transpose” during a hearing of the Environmental Audit Committee in October last year. She denied any “ulterior motive” before asserting: “There are roughly a quarter that cannot be brought immediately into law either because it requires technical attention or falls away, and that’s the bit we will be looking at to see what steps need to be taken.”

She said the Great Repeal Bill would bring comfort to environmental groups and businesses alike, with a smooth transition of EU into UK law, but then added that ” … over a period of time, we will be able to repeal, amend, and strengthen laws at leisure.”

George Eustice MP, the farming minister, has advocated an end to “spirit-crushing” environmental regulations. “The birds and habitats directives would go”, he said, referring to two key pieces of European environmental law. “A lot of the national directives they instructed us to put in place would stay. But the directives’ framework is so rigid that it is spirit-crushing.”

David Bannerman MEP reinforced the message by describing Brexit as “a huge opportunity” to end “over-regulation”, his comments not targeted specifically at the environment. Owen Paterson, one time environment secretary, welcomed the suggested scrapping of the Renewable Energy Directive, adding: “It’s distorting the whole energy market.”

The Express, the in-house magazine of the extreme right of the Tory party, could barely contain its excitement. “The Renewable Energy Directive is thought to be among of raft of EU policies set for the post-Brexit bonfire of Brussels diktats … [It] resulted in the Government spending billions on subsidies for wind and solar farms…”

And while we’re at it, let’s ditch the Climate Change Act!

The Telegraph, jockeying for position as the extreme right newsletter, wants to see the end of EU regulations as just a beginning for its war on bureaucracy;

“[T]here is a great deal of UK red tape that needs looking at, too. The Climate Change Act 2008 was a unilateral decision to commit Britain to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent within five decades. It proved that the British are capable of making mistakes all by themselves.”

The industrial core of the Conservative party is also well represented by think tanks and lobbyists. Key among them is Open Europe, which has used donations from rabidly right-wing think tanks to fund anti-EU research.

As the country is crushed under government austerity the PR team focused attention on the potential costs of EU laws, while downplaying any benefits. The most expensive regulation, The UK Renewable Energy Strategy, is priced at £4.7bn a year.

This is clearly designed to feed resentment, including among people relying on foodbanks to feed their children. Children who are currently protected by environmental regulation.

As the accumulation of billions in capital swirls into offshore tax havens, the electorate are being told it’s a choice between food or health. As a nation, we apparently cannot afford both.

May promised Red, White and Blue Brexit. The Conservative party promises Hard Brexit. The terrifying reality is we are headlining perilously close to a Dirty Brexit.

 


 

Brendan Montague is a regular columnist for openDemocracy in our ‘Brexit Inc: the environment and corporate power in the new Britain’ series.

Related Articles by Brendan Montague


This article
was first published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Creative Commons License

 

Conservatives’ hard right Brexit plans: UK’s great leap backwards to ‘dirty man of Europe’

As any dodgy dealer knows, the best way to sell something duff is to harry the unsuspecting buyer.

Theresa May in calling an election with less than seven weeks’ notice is bullying the voter into a panic decision: one that could jeopardise the health and happiness of future generations.

The spin from Number 10 is May wants to be even stronger in negotiating in Europe and the Tories want to take advantage of the division in the Labour party.

It seems just as likely that the prime minister wants to shore up her authority before it is undermined by the gaping chasm opening under her among her own warring tribe.

May was after all the compromise candidate: a Remain campaigner trusted to abandon her principles and drive home the Brexit agenda. She is hoping we fail to notice she is quickly becoming the compromised candidate.

The united front between the Dirty Brexit industrialists and the Clean Brexit conservatives cannot hold. So which Tory party is Britain being asked to vote for?

We can unpick them one by one as we please

The Conservatives simply cannot deliver the Brexit the right-wingers promised: the party is now slowing pulling apart under the weight of its internal contradictions. The most significant and serious of these contradictions, in terms of the long-term wealth and health of the country, concerns the environment.

May is proposing that 12,000 regulations are copied and pasted into the UK statute book through the Great Repeal Bill: but an estimated 1,000 will need to be changed in the process. There are more than 200 laws “covering water and air quality, waste management, nature protection, industrial pollution control, chemicals and GMOs, noise and forestry”.

“All EU laws will transfer into British law, May explained. “And then we can unpick them one by one as we please.”

Who would want to unpick environmental protections? The middle-ranking businessmen who funded the Leave campaign, who populate the neoliberal wing of the party, and who supported Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, are desperate to revive their profits.

The environmental splendour symbolic of ‘greatness’

And their claim that capitalist competition drives innovation simply does not hold any more. The return on investment must instead come from creating new markets at the margins, and reducing the costs of production: this means destroying decades of negotiated environmental regulations.

‘The Great Unpicking’. This is the real agenda for many of the bankrollers of Brexit.

A contradiction and split in the party arises because the business class needs the support of millions of workers to win an election. This includes well educated, highly paid workers. It includes those concerned about their own immediate natural environment. And those worried about the impact climate change will have on their children.

A significant number of the Conservative party want to, well, conserve much of this country’s environmental splendour. It forms part of their foundational myth as evidence of the greatness of Britain. It grounds their patriotism.

The environmentalists in the Tory party who have clustered around the Bright Blue think tank recently performed an extremely canny manoeuvre. They polled the membership, and found extraordinary levels of support for the current European Union regime of environmental regulation among its grassroots.

Rebecca Pow, the Conservative MP for Taunton Deane, used the poll to hook her arguments into the news agenda. “I have found huge support among Conservatives from old to young for protecting our precious environment”, she told the press.

“In this Brexit world we should adopt wholesale the current EU environment legislation relating to areas including water, wildlife, habitats, beaches and climate change and tailor it to our particular needs, as time goes on.”

The industrialists again set the agenda

The split between conservative Conservatives and desperate profit-seeking Tories was brilliantly personified by David Cameron and George Osborne not so long ago. Cameron wooed those threatening to defect to the Green party with, Vote Blue, Go Green. Osborne attacked the environmental Taliban to the delight of carbon intensive industry.

Osborne allowed the green rhetoric to continue, knowing that to investors actions speak louder than words. He began the process of cutting subsidies for solar and onshore wind, abandoning Zero Carbon Homes, announcing plans to sell off the Green Investment Bank, and crapping the Green Deal. In addition we have seen scrapping of £1 billion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, reducing tax breaks for clean cars and allowing fracking under National Parks.”

May as the ‘strong’ leader of the Tories now has to hold together the two competing halves of the party. The signal at the beginning, was she would serve the industrialist, climate denying wing. This is why on taking office she abolished the Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. But mostly, she has tried to ignore this issue.

Lord (Kate) Parminter, the Lib Dem environment spokesperson, wrote in the Ecologist magazine: Since Brexit, the Conservative government has avoided questions about the future of environmental protection. For example, Government ministers were asked seven times if the government would retain EU air quality limits following Brexit. They still declined to make a commitment.”

It seems May remains beholden to a small, vocal, hardened and influential faction within the Conservative party which is determined to strip away environmental protections agreed in Europe. This faction seems to be getting the most air time.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a wealthy descendant of Somerset’s coal barons, told a hearing of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee that Britain can and should go “a very long way” towards destroying current environmental standards.

“We could, if we wanted, accept emissions standards from India, America, and Europe. There’d be no contradiction with that. We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that. We could take it a very long way. American emission standards are fine.”

Plans to ditch ‘spirit crushing’ EU regulations?

Andrea Leadsom stood against May in the leadership contest for the climate-denying right wing. She is now Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is responsible for the imposition of an estimated 25% of all EU environmental regulations.

Leadsom argued that a third of these environmental rules “won’t be easy to transpose” during a hearing of the Environmental Audit Committee in October last year. She denied any “ulterior motive” before asserting: “There are roughly a quarter that cannot be brought immediately into law either because it requires technical attention or falls away, and that’s the bit we will be looking at to see what steps need to be taken.”

She said the Great Repeal Bill would bring comfort to environmental groups and businesses alike, with a smooth transition of EU into UK law, but then added that ” … over a period of time, we will be able to repeal, amend, and strengthen laws at leisure.”

George Eustice MP, the farming minister, has advocated an end to “spirit-crushing” environmental regulations. “The birds and habitats directives would go”, he said, referring to two key pieces of European environmental law. “A lot of the national directives they instructed us to put in place would stay. But the directives’ framework is so rigid that it is spirit-crushing.”

David Bannerman MEP reinforced the message by describing Brexit as “a huge opportunity” to end “over-regulation”, his comments not targeted specifically at the environment. Owen Paterson, one time environment secretary, welcomed the suggested scrapping of the Renewable Energy Directive, adding: “It’s distorting the whole energy market.”

The Express, the in-house magazine of the extreme right of the Tory party, could barely contain its excitement. “The Renewable Energy Directive is thought to be among of raft of EU policies set for the post-Brexit bonfire of Brussels diktats … [It] resulted in the Government spending billions on subsidies for wind and solar farms…”

And while we’re at it, let’s ditch the Climate Change Act!

The Telegraph, jockeying for position as the extreme right newsletter, wants to see the end of EU regulations as just a beginning for its war on bureaucracy;

“[T]here is a great deal of UK red tape that needs looking at, too. The Climate Change Act 2008 was a unilateral decision to commit Britain to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent within five decades. It proved that the British are capable of making mistakes all by themselves.”

The industrial core of the Conservative party is also well represented by think tanks and lobbyists. Key among them is Open Europe, which has used donations from rabidly right-wing think tanks to fund anti-EU research.

As the country is crushed under government austerity the PR team focused attention on the potential costs of EU laws, while downplaying any benefits. The most expensive regulation, The UK Renewable Energy Strategy, is priced at £4.7bn a year.

This is clearly designed to feed resentment, including among people relying on foodbanks to feed their children. Children who are currently protected by environmental regulation.

As the accumulation of billions in capital swirls into offshore tax havens, the electorate are being told it’s a choice between food or health. As a nation, we apparently cannot afford both.

May promised Red, White and Blue Brexit. The Conservative party promises Hard Brexit. The terrifying reality is we are headlining perilously close to a Dirty Brexit.

 


 

Brendan Montague is a regular columnist for openDemocracy in our ‘Brexit Inc: the environment and corporate power in the new Britain’ series.

Related Articles by Brendan Montague


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was first published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

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As government delays pollution plan, study shows how killer nanoparticles cause heart disease

Inhaled nanoparticles – like those released from vehicle exhausts, in particular from diesel vehicles – can work their way through the lungs and into the bloodstream, raising the risk of heart attack and stroke.

The findings, published today in the journal ACS Nano based on research part-funded by the British Heart Foundation, build on previous studies that have found tiny particles in air pollution are associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, although the cause remains unproven.

However, this research shows for the first time that inhaled nanoparticles can gain access to the blood in healthy individuals and people at risk of stroke. Most worryingly, these nanoparticles tend to build-up in diseased blood vessels where they could worsen coronary heart disease – the cause of a heart attack, state the authors:

“Translocation of inhaled nanoparticles into the systemic circulation and accumulation at sites of vascular inflammation provides a direct mechanism that can explain the link between environmental nanoparticles and cardiovascular disease”, they write.

Dr Mark Miller, Senior Research Scientist at the University of Edinburgh who led the study, said: “It is striking that particles in the air we breathe can get into our blood where they can be carried to different organs of the body.

“Only a very small proportion of inhaled particles will do this, however, if reactive particles like those in air pollution then reach susceptible areas of the body then even this small number of particles might have serious consequences.”

Meanwhile government delays publication of air pollution plan

The news of the link between air pollution and heart disease has been released just as the UK government has been  ordered back to the High Court in London tomorrow at 10.30 am to explain its refusal to publish its long-overdue Air Pollution Strategy. The coincidence can only be embarrassing to ministers.

Following legal action by non-profit environmental lawyers ClientEarth the court had ordered the government to publish the document by 4pm last Monday. But on Friday – after the court closed, and less than one working day before the judge-imposed deadline – government lawyers applied to defer publication citing “pre-election proprietary rules”.

Astonishingly, ministers claimed that it would be unfair on opposition parties to reveal their plans now, and that publication claiming must therefore be delayed until after the general election. The original plans had been dismissed by judges as so poor and ineffective as to be unlawful.

James Thornton, CEO of ClientEarth, said: “We are preparing our response to the government’s application. This is a public health issue and not a political issue. Urgent action is required to protect people’s health from the illegal and poisonous air that we are forced to breathe in the UK.

“This is a matter for the court to decide once the government has made its arguments because it is the government which has not met, and instead seeks to extend the court’s deadline for the clean air plan, to clean up our air.”

Why the reluctance to publish?

The government is currently failing to comply with its own pollution laws, which give efecct to the EU’s Air Quality Directive. A total of 37 out of 43 regions of the UK are in breach of legal limits for nitrogen dioxide.

It has been suggested that the real reason for the refusal to publish its new plans is that they may bear heavily on the owners of the diesel cars that are responsible for much of the problem in highly polluted urban areas – for example by restricting the access of diesel cars to urban areas, or forcing the early scrappage of vehicles. This could cost the government votes.

Another fear could be the enormous cost or an early scrappage scheme to taxpayers. For example, to pay £1,000 per car to compensate diesel car owners to scrap 1 million cars would cost a cool £1 billion. A more ambitious scheme to scrap 5 million vehicles with a £2,000 payment would cost £10 billion.

Alternatively the plans may be so feeble as to be little more effective as the last ones – demonstrating the government’s lack of concern for the premature deaths of tens of thousands of people every year – again, costing votes in the general election.

Figures obtained by Labour last week showed that more than 38 million people, almost 60% of the UK population, lived in areas where nitrogen dioxide concentrations were above legal limits. Children are especially vulnerable because exposure to the pollutant restricts lung growth causing long-term health problems.

How pollution reaches the heart and blood vessels

Around the world, air pollution is responsible for millions of deaths from heart attack and stroke each year. But how particles inhaled into the lungs can affect blood vessels and the heart has remained a mystery.

It is not currently possible to measure environmental nanoparticles in the blood. So, researchers from the University of Edinburgh, and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, used a variety of specialist techniques to track the fate of harmless gold nanoparticles breathed in by volunteers.

They were able to show that these nanoparticles can migrate from the lungs and into the bloodstream within 24 hours after exposure and were still detectable in the blood three months later.

By looking at surgically removed plaques from people at high risk of stroke they were also able to find that the pollution nanoparticles accumulated in the fatty plaques that grow inside blood vessels and cause heart attacks and strokes.

Dr Nicholas Mills, Professor of Cardiology and a co-author of the work, said: “We have always suspected that nanoparticles in the air that we breathe could escape from the lungs and enter the body, but until now there was no proof. These findings are of wide importance for human health, and we must now focus our attention on reducing emissions and exposure to airborne nanoparticles.”

‘Government must put forward bold measures’

Cardiovascular disease – the main forms of which are coronary heart disease and stroke – accounts for 80% of all premature deaths from air pollution. The current findings add to a large body of evidence that inhaled particles can damage our heart and blood vessels in many different ways.

Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, which part-funded the study, said: “There is no doubt that air pollution is a killer, and this study brings us a step closer to solving the mystery of how air pollution damages our cardiovascular health.

“More research is needed to pin down the mechanism and consolidate the evidence, but these results emphasise that we must do more to stop people dying needlessly from heart disease caused by air pollution. Crucially, individual avoidance of polluted areas is not a solution to the problem.

“Government must put forward bold measures to make all areas safe and protect the population from harm.”

But nanoparticle risks don’t stop with pollution!

The paper also makes it clear that ill-health from pollution is just one of the risks of environmental nanoparticles. “These findings have immediate relevance for the nanotechnology industry where a diverse range of engineered nanomaterials is being developed for an ever-increasing number of applications“, the authors write.

“The fate of engineered nanoparticles and effect on health following exposure are largely unknown, especially in relation to the cardiovascular system.

“These studies use gold nanoparticles; a commonly used nanoparticle and one that is being developed for clinical therapeutics. However, the biokinetics we observe here for gold, may also extend to other nanomaterials including those with greater surface reactivity.

“Different classes of nanomaterials vary greatly in their ability to cause inflammation and cytotoxicity, thus it follows that there will be marked differences in their impact on health in both occupational settings and in the wider community exposed to nanomaterials.

“While data is still relatively sparse, a number of studies suggest that pulmonary exposure to a range of different inhaled nanoparticles may promote cardiovascular disease. A better understanding of how nanomaterials cross physiological barriers, and their fate thereafter, will be vital to allow for a safe-by-design approach for new nanomaterials.”

 


 

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor at The Ecologist.

The paper:Inhaled Nanoparticles Accumulate at Sites of Vascular Disease‘ by Mark R. Miller et al is published in ACS Nano DOI:10.1021/acsnano.6b08551.

Petition to UK government:Release your air pollution plan!

The authors acknowledge funding from the British Heart Foundation, the Colt Foundation, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructures and Environment and the U.K. Department of Health.