Electric cars have come a long way, both literally and figuratively, in the past few years. I remember when the green-minded father of a school friend bought a G-Wiz, the dinky electric car that blazed a modestly-paced trail among early adopters. In 2007 Top Gear named it the worst car of the year and co-presenter James May described it as “the worst car for this year – and indeed for every year whilst we have breath in our bodies.”  They blew one up later in the episode.

It’s amazing to think that 10 years later, Tesla’s Model X, a seven-seater, electric SUV would be beating a Lamborghini Aventador in a quarter mile drag race and UK Environment Minister Michael Gove would be announcing that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars would be banned in the UK by 2040.  It’s probably fair to say the beleaguered G-Wiz and its descendants have had the last laugh.

The rise of the electric car has given us a tantalising glimpse into a world of clean city air, free from choking vehicle fumes, cheaper running costs (as the many moving parts in the complicated combustion engine won’t need fixing), not to mention a reduction in our national carbon emissions. 

But a new report published today shows that electric vehicles will also dramatically improve Britain’s energy security by reducing its dependence on foreign oil as well. The study, by the Green Alliance in conjunction with organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace and Christian Aid, shows that if Michael Gove and his Government were to bring forward the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2030 Britain could reduce its oil imports by 51 per cent in 2035 compared to current projections.

Considering the world’s biggest oil producers include such delightful regimens as Russian, Iran and Saudi Arabia it seems obvious that we would want to spare ourselves having to rely on countries with such questionable human rights records as these, not to mention being wedded to potentially volatile and unreliable trading partners. When combined with the other benefits of electric vehicles it seems like a no brainer.

Bringing forward the era of new electric vehicles would see the UK starting to catch up with other countries which are already ahead of the curve. Norway has nearly ten times more charging points per head of the population than the UK and 29 per cent of new cars and vans sold there in 2016 were electric, compared to 1.4 per cent in the UK.

The report comes before the launch of the Government’s plan, which will set out how the UK plans to cut its emissions and boost the nation’s low carbon industries.  Laura Taylor, Head of Advocacy at Christian Aid, said: “The UK Government’s long-overdue Clean Growth Plan needs to prove that this government is serious about speeding up the low carbon transition, not slackening the pace.”

That pace may well come faster than we expect. Technology advances often accelerate at surprising speed. The Daily Telegraph’s Juliet Samuel recently told the story of consulting firm McKinsey, which was asked in the nineties to predict what the global market for smartphones would be by 2000. It guessed just under 1 million – wrong by a factor of 109.  She concluded: “The decarbonisation of energy is coming. It’s time for governments, investors and industry to plan for it, rather than sticking their heads in the sand.”

Likewise, if the British Government is to put the UK in the fast lane for the coming low carbon vehicle revolution then it needs to publish a truly bold and transformative Clean Growth Plan next month.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor at the Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe

Cumbrian farmers have a problem.  Although Cumbria is in the Low Risk Area (LRA) for bovine TB, the disease has quietly been on the increase for some years.

The county was badly hit in the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis. A total of 3500 farms lost all or some of their stock, and when they started re-stocking the following year, it included cattle from an area in the South West that was known to have a high incidence of bTB.

TB testing had been suspended during the crisis so the cattle that went up north were a risk. But, given that farmers were literally in the depths of despair, it was thought best to restock as quickly and cheaply as possible. We now know, as they didn’t then, that the TB skin test is pretty unreliable, and can leave many unidentified infected cattle in the herd.

However, farmers that had been to hell and back in 2001 were hypersensitive to disease risks and somehow managed to contain any possible bTB, so much so that Cumbria was rarely troubled. In 2013 in the northern half of Cumbria there were only three incidences of bTB (between Penrith and Carlisle).  There were a further eight incidents in southern Cumbria.

But since then, in the north and in less than four years, there have been around 61 separate outbreaks, with yet more in the south.  Bovine TB now surrounds the Lake District (see http://www.ibtb.co.uk/ – select all types/all years)

That infection had to come from somewhere, so what went wrong?

Cumbrian cattle farmers buy stock imported from other areas of England (even some from High Risk Areas), Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  Tanis Brough from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) said that strain-typing has shown that the strain of TB infecting Cumbrian cattle comes from Northern Ireland – a strain that had never previously been present in the rest of the UK.

APHA believed that this particular strain came from Northern Ireland in an animal imported prior to autumn 2014. “How this strain M.bovis 17Z came to be in the Cumbrian herds remains unclear,” said Ms Brough.  “We do not know if this original animal is alive. It is probably dead.”

Because of the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis, the tracking system for all farm stock was quickly improved. All cattle can now be individually identified and their movements followed. Yet here the system failed. In LRAs the default bTB testing is still every four years instead of annually. Trading is easier. But does farming in an LRA give a false sense of security? Security which turns out to be not so secure?

The first sign that the LRA was being compromised was in 2011, when Plumpton Head Farm, near Penrith, lost 103 of its 260-strong dairy herd. This herd was said to be a ‘closed herd’ (that is, not bringing in cattle from elsewhere). One possible cause was nose-to-nose contact with cattle on a neighbouring farm.

Slowly the incidence of bTB in Cumbria has increased without any real outcry from the agricultural lobby. Why then, at the beginning of this month (August), has all of this information suddenly become news?  Because, accompanied by a typical knee-jerk reaction from farmers and the NFU, they have now found bTB in some Cumbrian badgers – the first time since the 1980s.

It is admitted that the cattle must have infected the badgers. Seeing that the original source of this outbreak is Northern Ireland, they have to – unless they insist that badgers swam across the Irish Sea.  And with so much disease now in the area it would be hard for the badgers to avoid it.

But of course the answer, as always, is to cull the badgers to stop them spreading the disease. Given the rise of bTB across Cumbria in the last four or five years, one would think that the cattle trading, farming practices and inadequate biosecurity are doing a pretty good job of spreading TB without any help from Mr Brock.

But no… badgers have to be ‘controlled’.

And we return to ignorant and uninformed statements about badgers.  Take this Penrith vet, talking to the BBC:

“Badgers live in the same fields as cattle; they can move into cattle buildings and eat the feed and poo in the troughs.  It’s very easy for badgers to spread the disease to cattle.”

Defra has issued some fairly comprehensive advice on the biosecurity measures farmers should take to prevent badgers from accessing yards, feed stores and cattle housing.  And farmers are advised to fence off any areas in their fields where cattle could get close to badgers.  But it is only ‘advice’ that, sadly, most farmers ignore.

Study after study has found that badgers avoid cattle and cattle housing (when the cattle are there). Despite many efforts, no one has yet managed to demonstrate how badgers are supposed to give TB to cattle. And badgers don’t ‘poo in troughs’. Why ever would they? They are clean creatures and dig latrines to defecate in.

You would hope that this succession of events would persuade Defra, Natural England, the NFU and farmers that badgers really are not the problem. It is farming-based. But no; to deal with the disease one of the options would be to kill the badgers which have had the misfortune to become infected.

There is hope. Recent research by a Nottingham University team has developed a new bTB blood test.  This identifies bTB in cattle at a much earlier stage than current testing methods do. Their study, carried out over four years at a Devon farm, also identifies many more infected cattle than the standard testing does. And that appears to show that the reservoir for the disease was within the herd, not the wildlife – news that won’t be welcome to farmers.

This Author

Lesley Docksey is a campaigner and regular contributor to the Ecologist

Electric cars have come a long way, both literally and figuratively, in the past few years. I remember when the green-minded father of a school friend bought a G-Wiz, the dinky electric car that blazed a modestly-paced trail among early adopters. In 2007 Top Gear named it the worst car of the year and co-presenter James May described it as “the worst car for this year – and indeed for every year whilst we have breath in our bodies.”  They blew one up later in the episode.

It’s amazing to think that 10 years later, Tesla’s Model X, a seven-seater, electric SUV would be beating a Lamborghini Aventador in a quarter mile drag race and UK Environment Minister Michael Gove would be announcing that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars would be banned in the UK by 2040.  It’s probably fair to say the beleaguered G-Wiz and its descendants have had the last laugh.

The rise of the electric car has given us a tantalising glimpse into a world of clean city air, free from choking vehicle fumes, cheaper running costs (as the many moving parts in the complicated combustion engine won’t need fixing), not to mention a reduction in our national carbon emissions. 

But a new report published today shows that electric vehicles will also dramatically improve Britain’s energy security by reducing its dependence on foreign oil as well. The study, by the Green Alliance in conjunction with organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace and Christian Aid, shows that if Michael Gove and his Government were to bring forward the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2030 Britain could reduce its oil imports by 51 per cent in 2035 compared to current projections.

Considering the world’s biggest oil producers include such delightful regimens as Russian, Iran and Saudi Arabia it seems obvious that we would want to spare ourselves having to rely on countries with such questionable human rights records as these, not to mention being wedded to potentially volatile and unreliable trading partners. When combined with the other benefits of electric vehicles it seems like a no brainer.

Bringing forward the era of new electric vehicles would see the UK starting to catch up with other countries which are already ahead of the curve. Norway has nearly ten times more charging points per head of the population than the UK and 29 per cent of new cars and vans sold there in 2016 were electric, compared to 1.4 per cent in the UK.

The report comes before the launch of the Government’s plan, which will set out how the UK plans to cut its emissions and boost the nation’s low carbon industries.  Laura Taylor, Head of Advocacy at Christian Aid, said: “The UK Government’s long-overdue Clean Growth Plan needs to prove that this government is serious about speeding up the low carbon transition, not slackening the pace.”

That pace may well come faster than we expect. Technology advances often accelerate at surprising speed. The Daily Telegraph’s Juliet Samuel recently told the story of consulting firm McKinsey, which was asked in the nineties to predict what the global market for smartphones would be by 2000. It guessed just under 1 million – wrong by a factor of 109.  She concluded: “The decarbonisation of energy is coming. It’s time for governments, investors and industry to plan for it, rather than sticking their heads in the sand.”

Likewise, if the British Government is to put the UK in the fast lane for the coming low carbon vehicle revolution then it needs to publish a truly bold and transformative Clean Growth Plan next month.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor at the Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe

Cumbrian farmers have a problem.  Although Cumbria is in the Low Risk Area (LRA) for bovine TB, the disease has quietly been on the increase for some years.

The county was badly hit in the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis. A total of 3500 farms lost all or some of their stock, and when they started re-stocking the following year, it included cattle from an area in the South West that was known to have a high incidence of bTB.

TB testing had been suspended during the crisis so the cattle that went up north were a risk. But, given that farmers were literally in the depths of despair, it was thought best to restock as quickly and cheaply as possible. We now know, as they didn’t then, that the TB skin test is pretty unreliable, and can leave many unidentified infected cattle in the herd.

However, farmers that had been to hell and back in 2001 were hypersensitive to disease risks and somehow managed to contain any possible bTB, so much so that Cumbria was rarely troubled. In 2013 in the northern half of Cumbria there were only three incidences of bTB (between Penrith and Carlisle).  There were a further eight incidents in southern Cumbria.

But since then, in the north and in less than four years, there have been around 61 separate outbreaks, with yet more in the south.  Bovine TB now surrounds the Lake District (see http://www.ibtb.co.uk/ – select all types/all years)

That infection had to come from somewhere, so what went wrong?

Cumbrian cattle farmers buy stock imported from other areas of England (even some from High Risk Areas), Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  Tanis Brough from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) said that strain-typing has shown that the strain of TB infecting Cumbrian cattle comes from Northern Ireland – a strain that had never previously been present in the rest of the UK.

APHA believed that this particular strain came from Northern Ireland in an animal imported prior to autumn 2014. “How this strain M.bovis 17Z came to be in the Cumbrian herds remains unclear,” said Ms Brough.  “We do not know if this original animal is alive. It is probably dead.”

Because of the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis, the tracking system for all farm stock was quickly improved. All cattle can now be individually identified and their movements followed. Yet here the system failed. In LRAs the default bTB testing is still every four years instead of annually. Trading is easier. But does farming in an LRA give a false sense of security? Security which turns out to be not so secure?

The first sign that the LRA was being compromised was in 2011, when Plumpton Head Farm, near Penrith, lost 103 of its 260-strong dairy herd. This herd was said to be a ‘closed herd’ (that is, not bringing in cattle from elsewhere). One possible cause was nose-to-nose contact with cattle on a neighbouring farm.

Slowly the incidence of bTB in Cumbria has increased without any real outcry from the agricultural lobby. Why then, at the beginning of this month (August), has all of this information suddenly become news?  Because, accompanied by a typical knee-jerk reaction from farmers and the NFU, they have now found bTB in some Cumbrian badgers – the first time since the 1980s.

It is admitted that the cattle must have infected the badgers. Seeing that the original source of this outbreak is Northern Ireland, they have to – unless they insist that badgers swam across the Irish Sea.  And with so much disease now in the area it would be hard for the badgers to avoid it.

But of course the answer, as always, is to cull the badgers to stop them spreading the disease. Given the rise of bTB across Cumbria in the last four or five years, one would think that the cattle trading, farming practices and inadequate biosecurity are doing a pretty good job of spreading TB without any help from Mr Brock.

But no… badgers have to be ‘controlled’.

And we return to ignorant and uninformed statements about badgers.  Take this Penrith vet, talking to the BBC:

“Badgers live in the same fields as cattle; they can move into cattle buildings and eat the feed and poo in the troughs.  It’s very easy for badgers to spread the disease to cattle.”

Defra has issued some fairly comprehensive advice on the biosecurity measures farmers should take to prevent badgers from accessing yards, feed stores and cattle housing.  And farmers are advised to fence off any areas in their fields where cattle could get close to badgers.  But it is only ‘advice’ that, sadly, most farmers ignore.

Study after study has found that badgers avoid cattle and cattle housing (when the cattle are there). Despite many efforts, no one has yet managed to demonstrate how badgers are supposed to give TB to cattle. And badgers don’t ‘poo in troughs’. Why ever would they? They are clean creatures and dig latrines to defecate in.

You would hope that this succession of events would persuade Defra, Natural England, the NFU and farmers that badgers really are not the problem. It is farming-based. But no; to deal with the disease one of the options would be to kill the badgers which have had the misfortune to become infected.

There is hope. Recent research by a Nottingham University team has developed a new bTB blood test.  This identifies bTB in cattle at a much earlier stage than current testing methods do. Their study, carried out over four years at a Devon farm, also identifies many more infected cattle than the standard testing does. And that appears to show that the reservoir for the disease was within the herd, not the wildlife – news that won’t be welcome to farmers.

This Author

Lesley Docksey is a campaigner and regular contributor to the Ecologist

Electric cars have come a long way, both literally and figuratively, in the past few years. I remember when the green-minded father of a school friend bought a G-Wiz, the dinky electric car that blazed a modestly-paced trail among early adopters. In 2007 Top Gear named it the worst car of the year and co-presenter James May described it as “the worst car for this year – and indeed for every year whilst we have breath in our bodies.”  They blew one up later in the episode.

It’s amazing to think that 10 years later, Tesla’s Model X, a seven-seater, electric SUV would be beating a Lamborghini Aventador in a quarter mile drag race and UK Environment Minister Michael Gove would be announcing that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars would be banned in the UK by 2040.  It’s probably fair to say the beleaguered G-Wiz and its descendants have had the last laugh.

The rise of the electric car has given us a tantalising glimpse into a world of clean city air, free from choking vehicle fumes, cheaper running costs (as the many moving parts in the complicated combustion engine won’t need fixing), not to mention a reduction in our national carbon emissions. 

But a new report published today shows that electric vehicles will also dramatically improve Britain’s energy security by reducing its dependence on foreign oil as well. The study, by the Green Alliance in conjunction with organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace and Christian Aid, shows that if Michael Gove and his Government were to bring forward the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2030 Britain could reduce its oil imports by 51 per cent in 2035 compared to current projections.

Considering the world’s biggest oil producers include such delightful regimens as Russian, Iran and Saudi Arabia it seems obvious that we would want to spare ourselves having to rely on countries with such questionable human rights records as these, not to mention being wedded to potentially volatile and unreliable trading partners. When combined with the other benefits of electric vehicles it seems like a no brainer.

Bringing forward the era of new electric vehicles would see the UK starting to catch up with other countries which are already ahead of the curve. Norway has nearly ten times more charging points per head of the population than the UK and 29 per cent of new cars and vans sold there in 2016 were electric, compared to 1.4 per cent in the UK.

The report comes before the launch of the Government’s plan, which will set out how the UK plans to cut its emissions and boost the nation’s low carbon industries.  Laura Taylor, Head of Advocacy at Christian Aid, said: “The UK Government’s long-overdue Clean Growth Plan needs to prove that this government is serious about speeding up the low carbon transition, not slackening the pace.”

That pace may well come faster than we expect. Technology advances often accelerate at surprising speed. The Daily Telegraph’s Juliet Samuel recently told the story of consulting firm McKinsey, which was asked in the nineties to predict what the global market for smartphones would be by 2000. It guessed just under 1 million – wrong by a factor of 109.  She concluded: “The decarbonisation of energy is coming. It’s time for governments, investors and industry to plan for it, rather than sticking their heads in the sand.”

Likewise, if the British Government is to put the UK in the fast lane for the coming low carbon vehicle revolution then it needs to publish a truly bold and transformative Clean Growth Plan next month.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor at the Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe

Cumbrian farmers have a problem.  Although Cumbria is in the Low Risk Area (LRA) for bovine TB, the disease has quietly been on the increase for some years.

The county was badly hit in the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis. A total of 3500 farms lost all or some of their stock, and when they started re-stocking the following year, it included cattle from an area in the South West that was known to have a high incidence of bTB.

TB testing had been suspended during the crisis so the cattle that went up north were a risk. But, given that farmers were literally in the depths of despair, it was thought best to restock as quickly and cheaply as possible. We now know, as they didn’t then, that the TB skin test is pretty unreliable, and can leave many unidentified infected cattle in the herd.

However, farmers that had been to hell and back in 2001 were hypersensitive to disease risks and somehow managed to contain any possible bTB, so much so that Cumbria was rarely troubled. In 2013 in the northern half of Cumbria there were only three incidences of bTB (between Penrith and Carlisle).  There were a further eight incidents in southern Cumbria.

But since then, in the north and in less than four years, there have been around 61 separate outbreaks, with yet more in the south.  Bovine TB now surrounds the Lake District (see http://www.ibtb.co.uk/ – select all types/all years)

That infection had to come from somewhere, so what went wrong?

Cumbrian cattle farmers buy stock imported from other areas of England (even some from High Risk Areas), Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  Tanis Brough from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) said that strain-typing has shown that the strain of TB infecting Cumbrian cattle comes from Northern Ireland – a strain that had never previously been present in the rest of the UK.

APHA believed that this particular strain came from Northern Ireland in an animal imported prior to autumn 2014. “How this strain M.bovis 17Z came to be in the Cumbrian herds remains unclear,” said Ms Brough.  “We do not know if this original animal is alive. It is probably dead.”

Because of the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis, the tracking system for all farm stock was quickly improved. All cattle can now be individually identified and their movements followed. Yet here the system failed. In LRAs the default bTB testing is still every four years instead of annually. Trading is easier. But does farming in an LRA give a false sense of security? Security which turns out to be not so secure?

The first sign that the LRA was being compromised was in 2011, when Plumpton Head Farm, near Penrith, lost 103 of its 260-strong dairy herd. This herd was said to be a ‘closed herd’ (that is, not bringing in cattle from elsewhere). One possible cause was nose-to-nose contact with cattle on a neighbouring farm.

Slowly the incidence of bTB in Cumbria has increased without any real outcry from the agricultural lobby. Why then, at the beginning of this month (August), has all of this information suddenly become news?  Because, accompanied by a typical knee-jerk reaction from farmers and the NFU, they have now found bTB in some Cumbrian badgers – the first time since the 1980s.

It is admitted that the cattle must have infected the badgers. Seeing that the original source of this outbreak is Northern Ireland, they have to – unless they insist that badgers swam across the Irish Sea.  And with so much disease now in the area it would be hard for the badgers to avoid it.

But of course the answer, as always, is to cull the badgers to stop them spreading the disease. Given the rise of bTB across Cumbria in the last four or five years, one would think that the cattle trading, farming practices and inadequate biosecurity are doing a pretty good job of spreading TB without any help from Mr Brock.

But no… badgers have to be ‘controlled’.

And we return to ignorant and uninformed statements about badgers.  Take this Penrith vet, talking to the BBC:

“Badgers live in the same fields as cattle; they can move into cattle buildings and eat the feed and poo in the troughs.  It’s very easy for badgers to spread the disease to cattle.”

Defra has issued some fairly comprehensive advice on the biosecurity measures farmers should take to prevent badgers from accessing yards, feed stores and cattle housing.  And farmers are advised to fence off any areas in their fields where cattle could get close to badgers.  But it is only ‘advice’ that, sadly, most farmers ignore.

Study after study has found that badgers avoid cattle and cattle housing (when the cattle are there). Despite many efforts, no one has yet managed to demonstrate how badgers are supposed to give TB to cattle. And badgers don’t ‘poo in troughs’. Why ever would they? They are clean creatures and dig latrines to defecate in.

You would hope that this succession of events would persuade Defra, Natural England, the NFU and farmers that badgers really are not the problem. It is farming-based. But no; to deal with the disease one of the options would be to kill the badgers which have had the misfortune to become infected.

There is hope. Recent research by a Nottingham University team has developed a new bTB blood test.  This identifies bTB in cattle at a much earlier stage than current testing methods do. Their study, carried out over four years at a Devon farm, also identifies many more infected cattle than the standard testing does. And that appears to show that the reservoir for the disease was within the herd, not the wildlife – news that won’t be welcome to farmers.

This Author

Lesley Docksey is a campaigner and regular contributor to the Ecologist

Electric cars have come a long way, both literally and figuratively, in the past few years. I remember when the green-minded father of a school friend bought a G-Wiz, the dinky electric car that blazed a modestly-paced trail among early adopters. In 2007 Top Gear named it the worst car of the year and co-presenter James May described it as “the worst car for this year – and indeed for every year whilst we have breath in our bodies.”  They blew one up later in the episode.

It’s amazing to think that 10 years later, Tesla’s Model X, a seven-seater, electric SUV would be beating a Lamborghini Aventador in a quarter mile drag race and UK Environment Minister Michael Gove would be announcing that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars would be banned in the UK by 2040.  It’s probably fair to say the beleaguered G-Wiz and its descendants have had the last laugh.

The rise of the electric car has given us a tantalising glimpse into a world of clean city air, free from choking vehicle fumes, cheaper running costs (as the many moving parts in the complicated combustion engine won’t need fixing), not to mention a reduction in our national carbon emissions. 

But a new report published today shows that electric vehicles will also dramatically improve Britain’s energy security by reducing its dependence on foreign oil as well. The study, by the Green Alliance in conjunction with organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace and Christian Aid, shows that if Michael Gove and his Government were to bring forward the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2030 Britain could reduce its oil imports by 51 per cent in 2035 compared to current projections.

Considering the world’s biggest oil producers include such delightful regimens as Russian, Iran and Saudi Arabia it seems obvious that we would want to spare ourselves having to rely on countries with such questionable human rights records as these, not to mention being wedded to potentially volatile and unreliable trading partners. When combined with the other benefits of electric vehicles it seems like a no brainer.

Bringing forward the era of new electric vehicles would see the UK starting to catch up with other countries which are already ahead of the curve. Norway has nearly ten times more charging points per head of the population than the UK and 29 per cent of new cars and vans sold there in 2016 were electric, compared to 1.4 per cent in the UK.

The report comes before the launch of the Government’s plan, which will set out how the UK plans to cut its emissions and boost the nation’s low carbon industries.  Laura Taylor, Head of Advocacy at Christian Aid, said: “The UK Government’s long-overdue Clean Growth Plan needs to prove that this government is serious about speeding up the low carbon transition, not slackening the pace.”

That pace may well come faster than we expect. Technology advances often accelerate at surprising speed. The Daily Telegraph’s Juliet Samuel recently told the story of consulting firm McKinsey, which was asked in the nineties to predict what the global market for smartphones would be by 2000. It guessed just under 1 million – wrong by a factor of 109.  She concluded: “The decarbonisation of energy is coming. It’s time for governments, investors and industry to plan for it, rather than sticking their heads in the sand.”

Likewise, if the British Government is to put the UK in the fast lane for the coming low carbon vehicle revolution then it needs to publish a truly bold and transformative Clean Growth Plan next month.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor at the Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe

Cumbrian farmers have a problem.  Although Cumbria is in the Low Risk Area (LRA) for bovine TB, the disease has quietly been on the increase for some years.

The county was badly hit in the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis. A total of 3500 farms lost all or some of their stock, and when they started re-stocking the following year, it included cattle from an area in the South West that was known to have a high incidence of bTB.

TB testing had been suspended during the crisis so the cattle that went up north were a risk. But, given that farmers were literally in the depths of despair, it was thought best to restock as quickly and cheaply as possible. We now know, as they didn’t then, that the TB skin test is pretty unreliable, and can leave many unidentified infected cattle in the herd.

However, farmers that had been to hell and back in 2001 were hypersensitive to disease risks and somehow managed to contain any possible bTB, so much so that Cumbria was rarely troubled. In 2013 in the northern half of Cumbria there were only three incidences of bTB (between Penrith and Carlisle).  There were a further eight incidents in southern Cumbria.

But since then, in the north and in less than four years, there have been around 61 separate outbreaks, with yet more in the south.  Bovine TB now surrounds the Lake District (see http://www.ibtb.co.uk/ – select all types/all years)

That infection had to come from somewhere, so what went wrong?

Cumbrian cattle farmers buy stock imported from other areas of England (even some from High Risk Areas), Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  Tanis Brough from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) said that strain-typing has shown that the strain of TB infecting Cumbrian cattle comes from Northern Ireland – a strain that had never previously been present in the rest of the UK.

APHA believed that this particular strain came from Northern Ireland in an animal imported prior to autumn 2014. “How this strain M.bovis 17Z came to be in the Cumbrian herds remains unclear,” said Ms Brough.  “We do not know if this original animal is alive. It is probably dead.”

Because of the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis, the tracking system for all farm stock was quickly improved. All cattle can now be individually identified and their movements followed. Yet here the system failed. In LRAs the default bTB testing is still every four years instead of annually. Trading is easier. But does farming in an LRA give a false sense of security? Security which turns out to be not so secure?

The first sign that the LRA was being compromised was in 2011, when Plumpton Head Farm, near Penrith, lost 103 of its 260-strong dairy herd. This herd was said to be a ‘closed herd’ (that is, not bringing in cattle from elsewhere). One possible cause was nose-to-nose contact with cattle on a neighbouring farm.

Slowly the incidence of bTB in Cumbria has increased without any real outcry from the agricultural lobby. Why then, at the beginning of this month (August), has all of this information suddenly become news?  Because, accompanied by a typical knee-jerk reaction from farmers and the NFU, they have now found bTB in some Cumbrian badgers – the first time since the 1980s.

It is admitted that the cattle must have infected the badgers. Seeing that the original source of this outbreak is Northern Ireland, they have to – unless they insist that badgers swam across the Irish Sea.  And with so much disease now in the area it would be hard for the badgers to avoid it.

But of course the answer, as always, is to cull the badgers to stop them spreading the disease. Given the rise of bTB across Cumbria in the last four or five years, one would think that the cattle trading, farming practices and inadequate biosecurity are doing a pretty good job of spreading TB without any help from Mr Brock.

But no… badgers have to be ‘controlled’.

And we return to ignorant and uninformed statements about badgers.  Take this Penrith vet, talking to the BBC:

“Badgers live in the same fields as cattle; they can move into cattle buildings and eat the feed and poo in the troughs.  It’s very easy for badgers to spread the disease to cattle.”

Defra has issued some fairly comprehensive advice on the biosecurity measures farmers should take to prevent badgers from accessing yards, feed stores and cattle housing.  And farmers are advised to fence off any areas in their fields where cattle could get close to badgers.  But it is only ‘advice’ that, sadly, most farmers ignore.

Study after study has found that badgers avoid cattle and cattle housing (when the cattle are there). Despite many efforts, no one has yet managed to demonstrate how badgers are supposed to give TB to cattle. And badgers don’t ‘poo in troughs’. Why ever would they? They are clean creatures and dig latrines to defecate in.

You would hope that this succession of events would persuade Defra, Natural England, the NFU and farmers that badgers really are not the problem. It is farming-based. But no; to deal with the disease one of the options would be to kill the badgers which have had the misfortune to become infected.

There is hope. Recent research by a Nottingham University team has developed a new bTB blood test.  This identifies bTB in cattle at a much earlier stage than current testing methods do. Their study, carried out over four years at a Devon farm, also identifies many more infected cattle than the standard testing does. And that appears to show that the reservoir for the disease was within the herd, not the wildlife – news that won’t be welcome to farmers.

This Author

Lesley Docksey is a campaigner and regular contributor to the Ecologist

Electric cars have come a long way, both literally and figuratively, in the past few years. I remember when the green-minded father of a school friend bought a G-Wiz, the dinky electric car that blazed a modestly-paced trail among early adopters. In 2007 Top Gear named it the worst car of the year and co-presenter James May described it as “the worst car for this year – and indeed for every year whilst we have breath in our bodies.”  They blew one up later in the episode.

It’s amazing to think that 10 years later, Tesla’s Model X, a seven-seater, electric SUV would be beating a Lamborghini Aventador in a quarter mile drag race and UK Environment Minister Michael Gove would be announcing that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars would be banned in the UK by 2040.  It’s probably fair to say the beleaguered G-Wiz and its descendants have had the last laugh.

The rise of the electric car has given us a tantalising glimpse into a world of clean city air, free from choking vehicle fumes, cheaper running costs (as the many moving parts in the complicated combustion engine won’t need fixing), not to mention a reduction in our national carbon emissions. 

But a new report published today shows that electric vehicles will also dramatically improve Britain’s energy security by reducing its dependence on foreign oil as well. The study, by the Green Alliance in conjunction with organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace and Christian Aid, shows that if Michael Gove and his Government were to bring forward the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2030 Britain could reduce its oil imports by 51 per cent in 2035 compared to current projections.

Considering the world’s biggest oil producers include such delightful regimens as Russian, Iran and Saudi Arabia it seems obvious that we would want to spare ourselves having to rely on countries with such questionable human rights records as these, not to mention being wedded to potentially volatile and unreliable trading partners. When combined with the other benefits of electric vehicles it seems like a no brainer.

Bringing forward the era of new electric vehicles would see the UK starting to catch up with other countries which are already ahead of the curve. Norway has nearly ten times more charging points per head of the population than the UK and 29 per cent of new cars and vans sold there in 2016 were electric, compared to 1.4 per cent in the UK.

The report comes before the launch of the Government’s plan, which will set out how the UK plans to cut its emissions and boost the nation’s low carbon industries.  Laura Taylor, Head of Advocacy at Christian Aid, said: “The UK Government’s long-overdue Clean Growth Plan needs to prove that this government is serious about speeding up the low carbon transition, not slackening the pace.”

That pace may well come faster than we expect. Technology advances often accelerate at surprising speed. The Daily Telegraph’s Juliet Samuel recently told the story of consulting firm McKinsey, which was asked in the nineties to predict what the global market for smartphones would be by 2000. It guessed just under 1 million – wrong by a factor of 109.  She concluded: “The decarbonisation of energy is coming. It’s time for governments, investors and industry to plan for it, rather than sticking their heads in the sand.”

Likewise, if the British Government is to put the UK in the fast lane for the coming low carbon vehicle revolution then it needs to publish a truly bold and transformative Clean Growth Plan next month.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor at the Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe

Cumbrian farmers have a problem.  Although Cumbria is in the Low Risk Area (LRA) for bovine TB, the disease has quietly been on the increase for some years.

The county was badly hit in the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis. A total of 3500 farms lost all or some of their stock, and when they started re-stocking the following year, it included cattle from an area in the South West that was known to have a high incidence of bTB.

TB testing had been suspended during the crisis so the cattle that went up north were a risk. But, given that farmers were literally in the depths of despair, it was thought best to restock as quickly and cheaply as possible. We now know, as they didn’t then, that the TB skin test is pretty unreliable, and can leave many unidentified infected cattle in the herd.

However, farmers that had been to hell and back in 2001 were hypersensitive to disease risks and somehow managed to contain any possible bTB, so much so that Cumbria was rarely troubled. In 2013 in the northern half of Cumbria there were only three incidences of bTB (between Penrith and Carlisle).  There were a further eight incidents in southern Cumbria.

But since then, in the north and in less than four years, there have been around 61 separate outbreaks, with yet more in the south.  Bovine TB now surrounds the Lake District (see http://www.ibtb.co.uk/ – select all types/all years)

That infection had to come from somewhere, so what went wrong?

Cumbrian cattle farmers buy stock imported from other areas of England (even some from High Risk Areas), Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  Tanis Brough from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) said that strain-typing has shown that the strain of TB infecting Cumbrian cattle comes from Northern Ireland – a strain that had never previously been present in the rest of the UK.

APHA believed that this particular strain came from Northern Ireland in an animal imported prior to autumn 2014. “How this strain M.bovis 17Z came to be in the Cumbrian herds remains unclear,” said Ms Brough.  “We do not know if this original animal is alive. It is probably dead.”

Because of the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis, the tracking system for all farm stock was quickly improved. All cattle can now be individually identified and their movements followed. Yet here the system failed. In LRAs the default bTB testing is still every four years instead of annually. Trading is easier. But does farming in an LRA give a false sense of security? Security which turns out to be not so secure?

The first sign that the LRA was being compromised was in 2011, when Plumpton Head Farm, near Penrith, lost 103 of its 260-strong dairy herd. This herd was said to be a ‘closed herd’ (that is, not bringing in cattle from elsewhere). One possible cause was nose-to-nose contact with cattle on a neighbouring farm.

Slowly the incidence of bTB in Cumbria has increased without any real outcry from the agricultural lobby. Why then, at the beginning of this month (August), has all of this information suddenly become news?  Because, accompanied by a typical knee-jerk reaction from farmers and the NFU, they have now found bTB in some Cumbrian badgers – the first time since the 1980s.

It is admitted that the cattle must have infected the badgers. Seeing that the original source of this outbreak is Northern Ireland, they have to – unless they insist that badgers swam across the Irish Sea.  And with so much disease now in the area it would be hard for the badgers to avoid it.

But of course the answer, as always, is to cull the badgers to stop them spreading the disease. Given the rise of bTB across Cumbria in the last four or five years, one would think that the cattle trading, farming practices and inadequate biosecurity are doing a pretty good job of spreading TB without any help from Mr Brock.

But no… badgers have to be ‘controlled’.

And we return to ignorant and uninformed statements about badgers.  Take this Penrith vet, talking to the BBC:

“Badgers live in the same fields as cattle; they can move into cattle buildings and eat the feed and poo in the troughs.  It’s very easy for badgers to spread the disease to cattle.”

Defra has issued some fairly comprehensive advice on the biosecurity measures farmers should take to prevent badgers from accessing yards, feed stores and cattle housing.  And farmers are advised to fence off any areas in their fields where cattle could get close to badgers.  But it is only ‘advice’ that, sadly, most farmers ignore.

Study after study has found that badgers avoid cattle and cattle housing (when the cattle are there). Despite many efforts, no one has yet managed to demonstrate how badgers are supposed to give TB to cattle. And badgers don’t ‘poo in troughs’. Why ever would they? They are clean creatures and dig latrines to defecate in.

You would hope that this succession of events would persuade Defra, Natural England, the NFU and farmers that badgers really are not the problem. It is farming-based. But no; to deal with the disease one of the options would be to kill the badgers which have had the misfortune to become infected.

There is hope. Recent research by a Nottingham University team has developed a new bTB blood test.  This identifies bTB in cattle at a much earlier stage than current testing methods do. Their study, carried out over four years at a Devon farm, also identifies many more infected cattle than the standard testing does. And that appears to show that the reservoir for the disease was within the herd, not the wildlife – news that won’t be welcome to farmers.

This Author

Lesley Docksey is a campaigner and regular contributor to the Ecologist