“This report unquestionably will fan emotions, raise fears, and bring demand for action,” the president of the American Petroleum Institute (API) told an oil industry conference, as he described research into climate change caused by fossil fuels.

“The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out.”

The speaker wasn’t Mike Sommers, who was named to helm API this past May. Nor was it Jack Gerard, who served as API’s president for roughly a decade starting in 2008.

Earth’s atmosphere

The API president speaking those words was named Frank Ikard — and the year was 1965, over a half-century ago.

It was the same year that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Muhammad Ali felled Sonny Liston in the first round, and Malcom X was fatally shot in New York. The first American ground combat troops arrived in Vietnam and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the law establishing Medicaid and Medicare.

It would be another four years before American astronaut Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon — and another decade before the phrase “global warming” would appear for the first time in a peer-reviewed study.

And 1965, according to a letter by Stanford historian Benjamin Franta published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, was the year that President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee published a report titled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” whose findings Ikard described at that year’s annual API meeting.

“One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts,” Ikard presciently added, according to excerpts from his speech published in Nature.

Fossil Fuels

That prediction was based in part on information that was known to the oil industry trade group for over a decade — including research that was directly funded by the API, according to Nature.

In 1954, a California Institute of Technology geochemist sent the API a research proposal in which they reported that fossil fuels had already caused carbon dioxide (CO2) levels to rise roughly five percent since 1854 — a finding that Nature notes has since proved to be accurate.

API accepted the proposal and funded that Caltech research, giving the program the name Project 53. Project 53 collected thousands of CO2 measurements — but the results were never published.

Meanwhile, other researchers were reaching similar conclusions. Nuclear physicist Edward Teller became known in 1951 as the “father of the hydrogen bomb” for designing a thermonuclear bomb that was even more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Teller warned the oil and gas industry in 1959 about global warming and sea level rise in a talk titled “Energy Patterns of the Future.”

“Carbon dioxide has a strange property,” Teller said in excerpts published earlier this year by The Guardian. “It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.”

Climate science

A researcher at Humble Oil Co. (now known as ExxonMobil) checked results from a study of carbon isotopes in tree rings against the unpublished Caltech results, and found that the two separate methods essentially agreed.

And in 1960, Charles Keeling first published the measurements that became the famous “Keeling curve” — establishing one of the bedrock findings connecting climate change to fossil fuels. The CO2 measurements taken by Keeling back in the late 1950s showed levels of roughly 315 parts per million (ppm) at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii and rising.

Those CO2 levels have since climbed upwards to 410.13 (ppm) on the day that the Nature letter was published — CO2 levels that scientists knew both then and now would be dangerously high, as carbon levels in the Earth’s atmosphere have not been over 410 ppm in millions of years.

In his 1965 talk, the API’s Ikard described the role of oil and gasoline specifically in causing climate change. “The report further states, and I quote: ‘… the pollution from internal combustion engines is so serious, and is growing so fast,’” he told the API conference, “‘that an alternative nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.’”

Three decades later, the API urged a different approach to climate science. “It’s not known for sure whether (a) climate change actually is occurring, or (b) if it is, whether humans really have any influence on it,” the API wrote in a 1998 draft memo titled “Global Climate Science Communications Plan,” which was subsequently leaked.

Effective policies

As of publication time, an API spokesperson had not replied to questions sent by DeSmog.

It’s worth noting that since 1965, the science connecting climate change to fossil fuels has grown stronger and more robust. A scientific consensus around the hazards of climate change and the role that fossil fuels play in causing it has formed.

“Rigorous analysis of all data and lines of evidence shows that most of the observed global warming over the past 50 years or so cannot be explained by natural causes and instead requires a significant role for the influence of human activities,” the Royal Society explains.

Today, the API continues to call for further research on climate change — and expanding the use of fossil fuels in the meantime.

“It is clear that climate change is a serious issue that requires research for solutions and effective policies that allow us to meet our energy needs while protecting the environment: that’s why oil and gas companies are working to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions,” the API’s webpage on climate change states.

“Yet archival documents show that even before Keeling published his measurements,” Franta’s letter published by Nature says, “oil industry leaders were aware that their products were causing CO2 pollution to accumulate in the planet’s atmosphere, in a potentially dangerous fashion.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Two years of negotiations have dragged by to lead up to this pivotal point of Brexit badminton across the Channel.

Theresa May has narrowly passed the Withdrawal Bill through cabinet, amid resignations. But the 27 EU states are yet to finalise their verdict and the Labour opposition and the DUP can still vote it down. Anything could happen. Brexit nonetheless rumbles ahead, and the UK is heading towards leaving EU – irrespective of whether there is a deal or not.

Activists and campaigners are therefore becoming increasingly worried for the future of animal welfare in the UK and what policies will stay standing when the government itself is on its last legs.

Welfare legislation 

According to the government’s draft White Paper, there are 12,000 EU regulations in full force in the UK.

The EU is renowned for its innovative, pro-animal welfare stance. It’s no surprise that 80 percent of current animal welfare legislation in the UK is implemented by the EU, including the regulation and safety of chemicals for animal testing as well as the protection of wildlife, farm animals and domestic companions.

Article 13 (title II) of the Lisbon Treaty sees animals as ‘sentient beings’ and observes that the suffering or distress of animals should be diminished as much as possible.

Not only did the UK government first reject Article 13 last year, but translating all these laws across adequately – and within a ticking timeframe – is proving increasingly difficult since these laws rely on European upkeepers and organisations of which the UK will no longer have access to come March 2019. 

Once the UK is out of the EU trading bloc, the gates of opportunity swings onto the US. Keen to strike a US-UK partnership, the UK is faced with the double-edged sword of worsening trade laws with the EU or adapting the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) book of rules in which standards fall short of the EU and UK’s bar.  

Trading rules

Many Westminster MPs have strongly opposed the idea that a trade deal with the US would see a decline in food hygiene, quality and animal welfare.

Yet the US administration are stern in dictating the trading rules in that the UK must eliminate its “unjustified sanitary or phytosanitary restrictions”.

As a result, the Home Office have failed to write-up any legally binding commitments that uphold food hygiene and humane animal treatment post-Brexit.

Depending on the outcome of the latest Brexit and cabinet squabbles, if the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg – who finds the WTO model and terms favourable – steps up the Prime Minister’s podium, horror stories of chlorine washed chicken, ractopamine riddled pigs and hormone enhanced beef hitting British shores may be closer than we think. 

If the UK’s imports are slacking in hygiene and welfare practices, the UK farmer is tasked with the impossible burden of remaining competitive in the market during a time when a plummeting pound only serves to boost the attractiveness of cheaper and unethical imported meat.

Declining workforce

To avoid profits suffering at the supermarket, farmers will be inclined to lower their current standards and resistant to adopt initiatives that evolve the welfare of farm animals. It’s a lose-lose situation: either the farmer struggles to stay afloat or the animals become the collateral damage.  

Exacerbating an already dire situation for farmers in the UK, animal welfare is not the only consequence of a badly dealt Brexit.

According to a Confederation of British Industry (CBI) report, the farming industry is at a great risk of losing substantial chunks of its workforce. On some farms, up to 40 percent of staff originate from the EU which can rise to as high as 58 percent on poultry farms during seasonal peaks such as turkey farmers for Christmas.

In a bid to alleviate strain, Environment Secretary Michael Gove plans to launch a two-year Agricultural Scheme that would allow up to 2,500 migrant workers into the UK each year and for six months at a time. However, many farming organisations claim the scheme is just a drop in the ocean at filling the 60,000 horticultural and agricultural workers the UK employs from overseas every year. 

Even higher numbers of migrants work in abattoirs and as vets. A House of Lords report on ‘Brexit: Farm Animal Welfare’ found 75 percent of abattoir workers and 90 percent of vets in the UK are EU nationals.

Visa requirements 

However, little has been done to ease recruiters’ concerns as the British Veterinary Association (BVA) warn a severe shortage of Official Veterinarians could be on the horizon post-Brexit. The BVA warn that when the UK’s trading rules change, more Official Veterinarians will be required to supervise imports and exports and sign health certificates for live animals and animal products.

Nigel Gibbens, Chief Veterinary Officer in the UK expects that the volume of products requiring veterinary certification could increase by 325 percent. The shortage of vets is such an oversight that the BVA are urging the government to place vets on the UK’s Shortage Occupation List. 

However, the UK government are aggravating the situation. Since EU settlers in the future will receive “no special treatment”, it is expected that they will be subjected to current visa rules and immigration.

EU farm workers, abattoirs, technicians, animal researchers, scientists, therapists and care takers, will require a Tier 2 Visa to work in the UK. The problem with this is that the majority of these skilled professions fall short at reaching the £30,000 minimum income requirement of this visa category.

For those that do earn past the threshold, migrants can be refused entry once the 20,700 annual cap has been reached. Farmers will also need to fill out a Sponsor Licence application and issue certificates to every non-UK worker they employ, piling on additional financial and administrative strain. 

Inhumane practices

Activists may try and encourage the British consumer to invest in locally sourced and ethically produced meat, but when food banks are rising and poverty is spreading, unethical food practises fly under the radar. The British public have not stopped buying chicken from discount supermarkets despite the hundreds of deaths and food poisoning cases caused by campylobacter every year because it’s cheap.

Oxfam’s latest report, the ‘Barcode on Food’ echoes similarly that cheap food comes at a cost: the produce that the UK currently receives doesn’t always uphold humane practices. The exploitation of workers is rife, yet Aldi, Asda, Lidl and Whole Foods who continue to peddle poverty and injustices through their supply chains are booming in business. 

David Bowles, Head of Public Affairs at RSPCA claimed: “Brexit offers huge opportunities to give animals a better deal in the UK”, which it does if the government can adequately write up and heighten its laws.

However, when a government dares to call its concrete-grey Autumn Budget environmentally “green” because of its initiative to plant a few trees alongside its billion pounds worth of road infrastructures, and when that government can barely agree on whether the cruel practice of fox hunting should be allowed, all hope is lost for the safety and welfare of animals.

On top of this, when immigration is curbed and access to dedicated workers is stifled, the situation for the UK’s voiceless and defenceless creatures is even bleaker.    

This Author 

Olivia Bridge is a content writer and political correspondent at the UK’s leading Immigration Advice Service. 

You can be forgiven for not knowing where South Willingham is. I confess I didn’t, until members of Lincoln Green Party picked me up from their train station and drove me a good half-hour out into the Lincolnshire Wolds to the small village. There’s no other transport option – when I asked Google Maps for a public transport option, it came back “there isn’t one”.

South Willingham doesn’t have a pub. It doesn’t have a shop. It does have a lovely little village hall, which was packed to the rafters for a public meeting when I arrived. That might have been expected for the harvest supper, held a couple of months before, but not for a political meeting.

The community is greatly concerned about what’s threatened in its vicinity just up the road at Biscathorpe, and about what’s happening to our wider world. What’s threatened is oil drilling – and not just drilling, but unconventional drilling.

Extreme energy 

One manifestation of what’s often described as “extreme energy” – ways of extracting the carbon stored over countless millennia in the earth, that some companies are now determined to uncover despite the desperate warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Some companies are expensively trying to work out means of “carbon capture and storage”, ways of extracting carbon and then injecting it back into the Earth. 

This process is similar to fracking, a kind of drilling that’s got a lot more attention around the country, from Preston New Road to Balcombe. It doesn’t fit into quite the same legal category in England, because the government – in a neat sleight-of-hand – defined that term as only applying to extraction from shale. 

Here the plan is to seek oil in sandstone, what’s known as “deep, tight” sandstone. The EU, however, puts both techniques under the same classification, of “unconventional” extraction.

Residents have already seen some of the impacts. A well pad has been constructed, apparently contravening planning conditions that stipulate a special access road. Instead it uses country roads already stretched by regular loads – and threatened with 650 HGV loads over the period of maximum activity.

Acid squeeze

One of the things the local community is deeply fearful of is the risk of spillages of the many noxious chemicals used in the process of what are known as “matrix acidizing” and “acid squeeze” – effectively dissolving the rock to let out the oil, sometimes under pressure.

As a local county councillor told the meeting, planning hearings aren’t allowed to consider risks. They’re told to assume that everything will work out fine.

Yet as a local resident and former army man who’d served in Iraq told the meeting, that’s a very dangerous assumption. He was speaking form his own bitter experience. 

We know that extreme energy extraction has largely developed in the US – a country with little or no regulation, in which cowboys are allowed to try out whatever chemicals and methods they like, without restraint or check on the results.

I told the meeting that promises of “gold standard regulation” ring hollow. One day when I visited the the Misson proposed fracking site the protectors had recorded that every single vehicle entering the site had done so from the opposite direction provided for in the planning approval.

Cavalier disregard

What makes this site a particularly disturbing choice is not that it’s in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but that it’s right beside an internationally rare, rich chalk stream, beside the Viking Path.

One of the people with whom I travelled to the meeting had been on Chris Packham’s March for Wildlife. The action highlighted just how incredibly nature-deprived the UK is, as charted in the 2016 State of Nature report.

We cannot afford the kind of cavalier disregard for risks that’s built into our planning system, as highlighted in Biscathorpe. We also can’t afford new fossil fuel approaches when we have to fast decarbonise out economy.

We have to save every single bit of wild nature we have left: we have to carefully husband and encourage it to spread and grow, to start to restore the desert of nature that is our land.

Extinction Rebellion is bringing this argument to the very gates of Westminster, as did the March for Wildlife, but it is also hitting home in places like South Willingham, very far away from there.

This Author 

Natalie Bennett is a member of Sheffield Green Party and former Green Party leader.

Campaigners have called on the government to again reject an application for an open cast coal mine at Druridge Bay in Northumberland after its original decision was overturned by a High Court judge.

Banks Mining wants to extract up to three million tonnes of coal, along with sandstone and fireclay from land at Highthorn over seven years.

Its application was originally recommended for the green light by a planning inspector, but was refused when then planning secretary Sajid Javid said that it would undermine the government’s attempts to prevent climate change.

Enough evidence

The decision was hailed by environmental campaigners as it was the first time the government had rejected a planning application purely on the grounds of climate change.

However, Banks Mining appealed the decision, with its managing director Gavin Styles calling it “perverse” and “totally contrary to the principles of local decision-making”. 

At the High Court on Friday, Mr Justice Ouseley ruled that the reasoning behind Javid’s decision was “significantly inadequate”, and that he had not provided enough evidence for his decision.

The application will now go back to the government for a new decision by planning secretary James Brokenshire.

Opencast schemes

Simon Bowens, campaigner for Friends of the Earth, which supported the government in the case, said: “The original decision to say no to the Druridge Bay opencast coal mine on climate grounds was the right decision for the right reason.

“Since then, the case for ending our dependence on fossil fuels has only grown stronger, with the world’s leading climate scientists warning that we need to act fast to avoid climate chaos.

“James Brokenshire must take heed of the science and again reject this destructive proposal.

“All opencast schemes should now be banned by the government, and space should be made instead for a low-carbon future,” he said.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for The Ecologist. She was formerly the deputy editor of the Environmentalist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

A draft communique from the leaders of the G20 shows that resolve to stand up for the Paris climate agreement against critical voices, such as the US, may be weakening.

The document, seen by CHN, is the latest version of a text that may change before it is released when leaders meet later this week.

Unlike recent G20 statements, it declines to give full-throated support to the Paris Agreement, simply “acknowledging the different circumstances, including those of countries determined to implement the Paris Agreement”.

Imposed goals

In a nod to those countries defending their coal industries, the text prepared by the Argentinian presidency says there are “varied” energy choices and “different possible national pathways”.

There is no mention of a major scientific report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was released in October; nor any direct reference to the Cop24 climate talks, which start in Katowice, Poland just a day after the meeting ends on SaturdaY.

Speaking to media earlier this month, Argentina’s G20 sherpa Pedro Villagra Delgado said the Paris Agreement text was proving the “most complicated” part of the communique.

“Of course, we want the Paris Agreement to be mentioned, but we want it to be mentioned, encompassing everyone, albeit in an ambiguous way,” he said.

“The United States does not say that nothing should be done [about climate change], but that they do not want to have neither the obligations nor the goals imposed by the Paris Agreement,” he said. “The more assertive mentions are made, the more likely it is that the United States will stay away from it.”

Clash

The text contrasts starkly with a communique agreed by the foreign ministers of the EU and Central Asia on Friday, which expressed “deep concern” over the IPCC findings and a desire to see countries make progress in Katowice and beyond.

It also contrasts with the last G20 leaders statement, in which all countries but the US agreed that the Paris Agreement was “irreversible”. The US stood apart, forcing a paragraph to be inserted that noted their wish to withdraw from the deal.

Sherpas will meet in Buenos Aires this week to work on the draft and try to find agreement.

A former European negotiator, who worked on the G7 and G20 statements in 2017, told Climate Home News the draft would have to change as the climate section was currently “unacceptable” for the ‘G6’ – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK.

“However the changes that the G6 propose won’t be acceptable for the US, so you have a clash there,” said the source.

Climate negotiations

Last year, the German G20 presidency resolved this clash with a clause that allowed the US to opt out of supporting the Paris deal. In other international talks recently, the presidency has been forced to release a chair’s summary, indicating a failure to agree.

At this year’s G7 talks in Canada, Donald Trump rejected the communique after it had been agreed, leaving the body in disarray.

The Argentinian draft looks “much worse” than at the same time before the 2017 G20 in Hamburg, the source said.

“Last year we had G7/G20 presidencies that drafted texts that reflected more accurately the shared position of countries on climate change – with the overwhelming majority in favour of strong climate action.

“This year the presidency is clearly caving in to the request of the US and as a consequence we have such a weak and unbalanced draft.”

Negative impact

Immediately after the G20 meeting ends, countries will convene for the most important round of climate negotiations since the Paris Agreement was struck in 2015.

Delgado said European G20 members were seeking language that would state their intentions for the Cop24 meeting in Poland.

“But we must also bear in mind that, if there is no consensus here, if there is an important rupture here, that will poison the Cop.

“The most important thing is to find a formula that allows everyone to live. And may the Paris Agreement continue to be part of the text. And if they (the United States) leave, it will impact negatively at the Cop in Katowice,” he said.

This Article

This Article first appeared on Climate Home News.

The UK’s premier climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), received hundreds of thousands of dollars of US donations in 2017, recently published tax returns show.

The money was received at a time when the GWPF was allegedly coordinating with eight other right-wing thinktanks based in and around offices at 55 Tufton Street to push for a hard Brexit.

Another of the groups, the Taxpayers’ Alliance, received at least $286,000 (£223,300) from US-based donors in the last five years, the Guardian recently revealed.

Life chairman

This fuels concerns about the influence of foreign money at a time when lobby groups are pushing to cut regulation to secure trade deals with major polluters such as India, China and the US.

Public tax returns filed by the GWPF’s US-fundraising arm, American Friends of the GWPF, show the organisation received $177,001 in grants and gifts in 2017 (worth approximately £137,900 at the time of writing). That includes a single $124,884 donation (worth approximately £97,265), according to the documents.

The 2017 donations were a significant increase on the amount the GWPF received in 2016 — $128,016 (approximately £99,735).

US tax regulations only require the organisation to declare how much it has received in grants, without disclosing the source of the donations.

Nigel Lawson, the GWPF founder and chairman for life  is also listed as chairman of the American Friends of the GWPF. Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director in the UK, is listed as secretary.

Key organisation

Both spend approximately three hours per week working for the US organisation, the documents declare. Neither were paid for this work, according to the filing.

Major US Republican donor David Herro is listed as the group’s treasurer, and apparently spends about five hours per week working for the group.

Herro told the Financial Times in 2015 that he was a funder of the GWPF. One week prior to the FT’s article being published, Herro donated to the Heartland Institute’s appeal to fund its trip to the Paris climate conference in December of that year.

Herro has also donated to the Cato Institute, another U.S. climate science denying think tank. The Cato Institute is a key organisation in a transatlantic web of lobby groups pushing for environmental deregulation post-Brexit.

DeSmog UK recently revealed how this network of US libertarian campaign groups with links to fossil fuel magnates the Koch brothers and data analytics guru Robert Mercer increased their European and UK activities around the time of the Brexit referendum.

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. The American Friends of the GWPF 990 forms can be viewed on the website. 

Humans can live for three weeks without food and three days without water – but only three minutes without air.

Yet we simply take our air for granted. It’s always there. It’s everywhere. The air pollution that we breathe has changed a great deal over the centuries. It is largely invisible to us but it is having a significant impact on our health and the health of our children. 

More than 90 percent of the world’s population is exposed to air pollution concentrations that exceed World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines. Globally, four and a half million people died pre- maturely from particle and ozone pollution in 2015. So why don’t we understand air pollution better? And how have we allowed it to build to the crisis we find today? 

International reputation 

The face of air pollution has changed. Modern air pollution does not look like the thick black industrial smoke from the past. London’s international reputation as the world’s most polluted city, beset with pea-souper smog, has been passed to Beijing.

We are all familiar with images of Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium and the Forbidden City shrouded in haze and the city’s residents wearing protective masks. Despite this coverage in the news, Beijing does not head the WHO list of the world’s most polluted cities. It was 56th in 2016 and dropped to 187th in 2017.

Of the worst fifty, the vast majority are in East Asia: twenty-four cities are in India, eight are in China, three in Iran and three in Pakistan. Six of the worst fifty are in the Middle East, including four in Saudi Arabia.

At the other end of the scale we find small towns in Iceland, Canada, the US and Scandinavia are some of the cleanest. There are some large cities near the bottom of the list too; including Vancouver and Stockholm, showing that air pollution is not an inevitable part of city life. 

As an air pollution scientist at King’s College London, my research has focused on the sources of urban air pollution and how these affect people’s health. I still lead the London network, the largest urban net- work in Europe.

Global problem 

Over the last twenty-five years I have tracked changes in the air that Londoners breathe, given evidence to government and worked alongside health researchers and air pollution scientists from around the world.

I have measured how London’s industrial pollution and problems with petrol cars have been replaced by diesel car pollution and home wood-burning.

Around the world many people look to London’s low emission zone as an example of action to control the problem, but if it is so effective then why are Londoners still suffering from poor air?

Writing this book has allowed me to explore the real, global problem of air pollution. Expanding beyond my London base I will take you from Paris and Los Angeles to India and New Zealand in a bid to understand modern air pollution.

The smogs in London and Los Angeles, Scandinavian forest die-back, the Volkswagen scandal and the recent pollution problems across south-east Asia have all prompted steps to clean our air. We will be exploring the impact that air pollution has on our health; the complex shifting political agenda of air pollution control; the tension between public health and government regulation; and the simple, yet crucial, denial of any problem in the first place.

Shared resource

There are huge injustices at the heart of the air pollution problem. By using our air to dispose of their waste, polluters are destroying a shared resource and avoiding the full cost of their actions. They leave all of us who breathe poor air to pay the price through our health and taxes. 

Scientists have been investigating the impacts of air pollution since medieval times. Increasingly, we tend to focus on the latest discoveries and findings. The lessons from the past are often forgotten but many of them have huge relevance to the challenges that we face today.

I am continually impressed by the insights of scientists who were working with hand-pumped samplers, home-made glassware in their laboratories, and calculating their results with slide rules.

This book will revisit some of these old investigations and discoveries and tell the stories of the people who made them. 

Yet when it comes to the disastrous effects of air pollution on human health, it seems astonishing that insight was sorely lacking for many centuries. This might seem incredible, but it was not until the 1950s that the harm from air pollution was recognised. We are still learning.

Lifelong impacts

In 2016 the Royal College of Physicians drew together the latest research to show how the lifelong impacts from air pollution start in the womb, go on to damage children’s lungs and shorten adult lives. 

There are many calls for action but fewer examples of positive outcomes in the battle for clean air.

Some plans have not worked as well as hoped and many have created new problems.

Air pollution is a global challenge that still needs to be tackled alongside climate change and the creation of healthy cities in which to live. 

This Author 

Dr Gary Fuller is an air pollution scientist at King’s College London. This article is an extract from his forthcoming book The Invisible Killer: The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution – and How We Can Fight Back (Melville House UK, 2018).

As much as 19,000 tonnes of microplastic pollution could be entering UK waterways every year from vehicle tyres, a new report for Friends of the Earth has found. 

The environmental campaign group is calling on the government’s resources and waste strategy – expected later this month – to include measures for tackling microplastics as part of a comprehensive action plan.

Vehicle tyres shed tiny bits of plastic during driving – a mixture of natural and synthetic rubber, and well as various additives. Tyres are believed to be responsible for the greatest proportion of microplastic pollution entering EU surface waters. 

Toxic pollutants 

Microplastics can also absorb and concentrate toxic pollutants from the surrounding seawater, making them even more poisonous to animals that mistake them for food or absorb them through their gills and skin. 

In October 2018, new research revealed that plastic had been discovered in the faeces of people who took part in a Europe-wide study.

Friends of the Earth’s new report – Reducing Household Contributions to Marine Plastic Pollution – estimates that between 9,000 and 32,000 tonnes of microplastic pollution enter UK waterways each year from just four sources.

This figure is of the same magnitude as large plastic waste (estimated to be between 10,000 and 26,000 tonnes), such as plastic bottles and takeaway containers, that’s estimated to enter UK waterways annually. 

Key sources 

The report looks at four key sources of microplastic pollution and estimates that: 

1. Vehicle tyres: 68,000 tonnes of microplastics from tyre tread abrasion are generated in the UK every year with between 7,000 and 19,000 tonnes entering surface waters.

2. Clothing:  As much as two thirds of UK clothing could be made from synthetic plastic material. The report says the washing of synthetic clothing could result in the generation of 2,300-5,900 tonnes of fibres annually in the UK. Somewhere between 150 and 2,900 tonnes of this could be passing through wastewater treatment into our rivers and estuaries [6]. 

3. Plastic pellets are the ‘feedstock’ used to manufacture plastic items. Between 200 and 5,900 tonnes are lost to surface waters in the UK every year.

4. Paints on buildings and road markings weather and flake off resulting in between 1,400 and 3,700 tonnes of this ending up in surface water per year. 

Finding solutions

Friends of the Earth is urging the government to consider a number of measures to tackle tyre car pollution, including: 

• A standardised test to measure tyre tread abrasion rate, and integration into the current tyre labelling scheme 

• A car tyre levy, to pay for research into solutions, and for mitigation measures. Once the test method has been developed, the levy could ultimately be varied based on the tyre tread abrasion rate

• The better management of mitigation measures such as roadside ‘gully pots’ and the use of porous asphalt to capture microplastic pollution before it enter drains

• Industry to prioritise the development of tyres with a reduced tread abrasion rate, while also seeking to reduce airborne particulate emissions from tyres

• Measures to encourage less driving, such as better public transport and cycling facilities. 

The environmental campaign group is also urging industry and ministers to do far more to address the torrent of microplastic pollution pouring into our environment every day.

Friends of the Earth is calling on the government to introduce a Plastics Pollution Action Plan. The plan should aim for near zero plastic pollution by 2042, beginning with the phase-out of unnecessary plastics and the setting up of an expert Committee on Plastics Pollution to advise ministers.

Largely invisible 

Friends of the Earth plastics campaigner Julian Kirby said: “It’s staggering that so little is being done to prevent thousands of tonnes of microplastic pollution from car tyres, clothing and paints pouring into our rivers and seas every year.

“Microplastic pollution may be largely invisible, but it’s having a potentially devastating effect on our natural environment – especially as it can be mistaken for food by some our smallest ocean creatures, which are then eaten by bigger creatures as part of the food chain. 

“Ministers are right to be concerned about the impact of bags, straws and single-use coffee cups on our environment, but we mustn’t ignore the threat from tiny bits of plastic too.”

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a commissioning editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Friends of the Earth UK.

Andrew Sells, Natural England’s outgoing chair, has admitted England’s conservation advisor is no longer independent from government. The frank statement, made under questioning from MPs last week, comes as the government considers proposals for a new post-Brexit environmental regulator.

Theresa May’s government is currently pushing a Brexit deal that includes proposals for a new environmental regulator that could have the power to take the government to court.

Sells revealed that the agency’s financial, press, communications and HR functions are now under the control of Michael Gove’s department for the environment, food and rural affairs (DEFRA).

Monitored

He suggested that as a result Natural England’s ability to fulfill its legal duties is being sidelined under pressure to deliver on DEFRA’s priorities. The agency is responsible for monitoring and conserving protected sites, advising on planning proposals and issuing wildlife licences.

“The difficulty is that all of our money effectively comes from DEFRA,” Sells told MPs.

“There is an inherent contradiction there. They want us to deliver their priorities. We say we have 500 statutory duties and responsibilities. We want to deliver those,” he said.

In September, Unearthed revealed a leaked internal plan from Natural England that warned that the body is too stretched to prevent further extinctions and is no longer working towards a government target to conserve the country’s top wildlife sites.

Around the same time, data emerged in a parliamentary question by Caroline Lucas showing that almost half of these sites of special scientific interest (SSSI) have not been monitored in the last six years.

Repeated cuts

Asked about the lack of monitoring in parliament, Sells told MPs: “You can’t have this level of cuts without having impacts on the ground and these are some of them. I am happy that they are being highlighted and I won’t pretend it’s not the case […] It makes the bill for restoration ultimately bigger.”

DEFRA told Unearthed that Natural England’s independence is “essential” for the work it does on environmental protection.

But Sells told MPs: “Five years ago we could determine very largely what we did with our money and how we made announcements. Now we can’t,” he said.

Asked about the advice he would give his successor, Sells highlighted “never letting go of your independence…..but having said that is not one of my achievements”.

The Wash is England’s biggest site of special scientific interest. Sells said that lack of monitoring on SSSIs is one of the impacts of repeated cuts to Natural England. Photo: Steve Morgan/Greenpeace

Resignations

Sells’ stark interview in parliament comes at a time of rapid re-organisation at Natural England.

He is set to leave his position as chair at the end of the year, a year earlier than planned. It follows the sudden resignation of the CEO James Cross a few weeks ago, which Sells said was “not ideal”.

Meanwhile at least 50 Natural England staff have been moved over to DEFRA to work on Brexit.

Sells added that a further 63 are working on Brexit from within the watchdog and that 20 more may also be affected. He said “of course” this has had an impact on Natural England and that those moved include senior, very experienced people who are “some of the very best”.

“The staff are very hardworking, frankly overworked, underpaid and many of them are stressed and have been through endless re-organisations and uncertainty,” he said. 

None of the people working on Brexit at DEFRA would have the expertise his staff have, but the agency is not reluctant to help, he added.

“Actually the opposite is true. We do this happily because EU exit, deal or no deal, is something approaching a national emergency issue and i think we should support our colleagues in DEFRA on that and secondly, and equally important is that what these people are doing is working on policies for the future.”

Cuts

Even so, Sells said that the “single biggest recurring challenge” under his tenure has been the sharp budget cuts implemented at the body.

Its budget has been almost halved in the last ten years, with the funding for monitoring of SSSI sites down 55% in the last five, he said.

And this year’s budget was cut by £6m – after the financial year had already started.

“It’s very hard to run an organisation with that destablising pressure,” he said.

Sells told MPs that the long-term financial strain at Natural England has the driven the movement of key functions to DEFRA.

“Running Natural England now is a very different thing to running it five years ago,” he said.

“What I think started as cost savings has run over into something which feels more like less freedom, frankly….I think the pendulum quite frankly needs to swing back”.

Sells said that he now has to request financial information from DEFRA, and that “when an inquiry comes into DEFRA, they start to draft a reply and put their interpretation on it”.

He also said that he had been concerned about a conflict of interest in accepting a position on the board of DEFRA but that he had done so because he felt under pressure, after being told that David Cameron wanted him to be.

His concerns about a conflict had not materialised, he said, because the board rarely dealt with Natural England issues.

Employees with concerns now have to go to HR representatives in DEFRA. While he said that he believed DEFRA would deal with concerns appropriately, he added that “in employment law this is not very clever”.

Wildlife crime

Sells also highlighted a couple of areas of work at Natural England that he was unhappy with.

He thought there should be tougher penalties for wildlife crime.

“I think that is an area where we as a society we haven’t been very good. The problem is obtaining the evidence. Once you have obtained the evidence the penalties are very light,” he said.

He thought that magistrates or Natural England should have the power to withhold gun licenses used for vermin control on estates.

But he stressed that this was his personal opinion, as the matter had not been discussed by Natural England’s board.

Hunting convictions are now at a historic low, the Guardian reported two weeks ago.

Sells was also very critical of the government’s Countryside Stewardship Scheme, which provides funding for farmers to do work to protect the environment. It’s set to be replaced after Brexit.

“The Countryside Stewardship scheme is like a really badly designed car, designed by a huge committee of people and various key parts of it have never worked.”

Farmers have faced significant delays in receiving payments.

“Our advisors found it was incredibly inefficient,” he said.

A Defra spokesperson told Unearthed: “The work of Natural England and its staff to protect our invaluable natural spaces, wildlife and environment is vital and its independence as an advisor is essential to this. With the government’s 25 year plan for the environment, Natural England will continue to have a central role in protecting and enhancing our environment for future generations.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

Dirty flood waters, impassable roads and submerged slums have become the norm every time it rains in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city.

In August, the authorities took drastic action, bulldozing around 2,000 buildings in the flood plain, including shopping malls worth millions of dollars. After a lull, they are due to resume demolitions this month, national media reports.

The ongoing October-December rainy season is on track to bring – mercifully – average volumes of water. Yet the city’s flood risk is rising, as climate change brings more extremes of rainfall. Experts tell Climate Home News better waste management, urban planning and warning systems are needed to protect its growing population.

Flooded home

Numerous informal and formal settlements without adequate sewerage and sanitation services edge onto the three Nairobi Rivers: Mathare, Ngong and Nairobi.

At Hazina village, one of 22 villages in south B division along the Ngong, the river chokes with refuse, making the water hardly visible.

“It’s the village’s dumping site,” Anne Keli, a 46-year-old mother of 12 tells Climate Home News. She has lived in the village for two decades and says flooding has been particularly bad in the past two years.

“The water reaches the village at a high force compared to previous years but gets stuck due to the plastics, paper bags and assorted waste in the river, blocking its flow,” Keli says. “Since we are on a lower area, the run-off from higher areas headed to the river has no place to go as the river is full. So, where else does it go? Into our houses.”

During the long rains in April, Keli’s family left their flooded home and camped in the county commissioner’s grounds. She lost around 30,000 Kenyan shillings ($290) worth of goods from the shop she runs less than a kilometre from the river.

Climate models

The provincial administration made some efforts to clean the river during the flooding, but as soon as the rainy season ended it clogged up again, Keli says. “People keep building close to the river, reducing its size by day. People are asked to remove the structures with every flood but after the rains, everything moves back to normal.”

Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) has installed more than 72 monitoring stations across the country in a bid to provide more timely and precise information.

Brian Chunguli, a county disaster management official, says a UK-funded programme will allow them to monitor live flooding levels from satellites and alert residents as waters rise.

“We hope to respond before flooding happens, and collected data will inform the disaster policy and interventions as we will compare long term data showing at what rainfall levels has certain areas flooded,” explains Chunguli.

Long-term projections of East African rainfall vary, with most climate models predicting heavier inundations as temperatures rise.

Mary Kilavi, the Nairobi County director of meteorological services, is mapping the areas likely to flood in Nairobi given a specific amount of rainfall. South B and South C on the Ngong river are hotspots, along with Mathare by the Nairobi river.

Political interference

“We are using a model that simulates surface water flooding using previous city flooding data corrected over time,” she explains. “We want to find out with a specific amount of rainfall, which areas will flood.”

This will help the authorities to move beyond a reactive approach to systematic preparation, she says. “Since weather is given in probabilistic terms, systems don’t act fast. We will establish the probability of achieving the estimated flood causing rainfall, then with stakeholders, agree at what point to act, the actions to take and funds to be set aside for the actions.”

The solutions range from cleaning up waste to creating green urban spaces and changing land management upriver. Many of these face political, as well as practical, obstacles.

There is a directive against building within 30 metres of the riverside, for example, but it is haphazardly enforced. Many owners of the recently demolished structures insisted they had permits to build there.

“It requires funds and land to relocate and rebuild the structures amid political interference, as area politicians incite the residents not to move,” says Barre Ahmed, assistant county commissioner for Starehe sub county.

Keeps coming

Dr Lawrence Esho, chair of the Kenya Institute of Planners, calls for a drainage master plan to cover the entire metropolitan area.

“We have a flooding crisis but the issue is bigger than the illegal buildings. It is more of the uphill destruction of land which we are doing nothing about, too much concrete pavements aggregating the run off flow, blocked drains and climate change,” says Esho. “Over the last 20 to 25 years the city has also gone through the change from bungalows built over a huge area to high-rise apartment blocks… without a drainage city master plan change.”

Builders should leave gaps between pavements for grass “to allow the water sip under when it rains,” he advises.

In the meantime, Keli can only make sure she has a quick exit strategy ready. She says: “I worry at every drizzle. But this time, I am prepared with a bag packed for any eventuality to rescue my children.

“As for the shop, there is little I can do. Until the river is cleaned, I still believe this village will flood if the rain keeps coming as they did these two years.”

This Article

This Article first appeared on Climate Home News.