When  Thor Hanson – biologist and author of Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees – visited the almond orchards in California’s central valley, he found mile after mile of landscape devoted to the growth of this highly profitable crop.

All other vegetation has been erased to facilitate nut harvesting, and here lies a great conundrum. The elimination of flowers from the orchard floor means that no insects, and importantly no bees, can live there, but almond trees require pollination by bees to set fruit.

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

So, for several weeks while the almonds are in flower, thousands of honeybee hives are trucked to California to provide that pollination, at great expense.

Clever storytelling

In the 19th century, the naturalist John Muir called the central valley “the world’s greatest bee-pasture”. But now, thanks to profit-motivated intensive agriculture, it is a bee desert.

Much the same elimination of bees has occurred elsewhere in the world where intensively grown monocultures dominate. It’s not difficult to understand why bees are in decline, and – in his most recent book – Hanson recognises that they need help.

In Buzz, Hanson sets out to raise awareness of these import­ant insects and their plight. His aim is to make people curious so that they will go outside and look at the bees around them and hopefully defend them.

But rather than giving us a list of bee facts in the style of a textbook, Hanson recounts his meetings with people studying or working with bees. This is a clever structure: he lets the experts tell their stories so that along the way, almost without noticing, we learn about bee biology, bee evolution, bee importance and bee threats.

Hanson is an award-winning author and biologist, his style is chatty and open, and we are carried along with his enthusiasm. As I read I often imagined myself watching a TV Nature programme.

Solitary bees

Many readers will, I expect, be surprised to learn that the largest group of bees on the planet is the solitary bees, so called for their non-social lifestyles.

These solitary insects hugely outnumber the more familiar honeybees and bumblebees, which are known for forming large social colonies.

Hanson describes meeting Brian Griffin, who breeds solitary orchard mason bees for fruit pollination. As Griffin tells his story, we learn about the lives of solitary bees and their parasites.

Hanson continues this gentle but persuasive induction into the world of these overlooked insects by visiting a bee cliff, the site of a massive aggregation of solitary bee nests supported by a profusion of wild flowers near his home in the Pacific Northwest of the USA.

It is often said that every third bite of our food depends on bees, so that without them our diets would be poorer and blander. 

Deconstructing diets 

To emphasise this point, Hanson goes “someplace totally unexpected” to look at the contribution of bees to our food.

His unexpected place is the nearest branch of McDonald’s, where – armed with tweezers and a hand lens – he deconstructs a Big Mac to see how much of this highly popular product depends on bee pollination.

He receives “more than a few curious glances” from the family at the next table, and I suppose he is being deliberately ironic, but couldn’t he have chosen a different meal to analyse?

The last section of the book is en­titled ‘The Future of Bees’. Here Hanson confronts the threats facing bees: the four Ps – parasites, poor nutrition, pesticides and pathogens.

Perhaps he could usefully have added a fifth P: people.

Arresting decline

Most of the threats facing bees and causing their decline depend directly or indirectly on people and their actions.

This also means that people have it within their grasp to save bees from these threats, and here I felt that Hanson missed an opportunity.

Hanson ably describes the biology and the import­ance of bees, but surely he could have also set out a manifesto for arresting their decline before it is too late?

This Author 

Philip Strange is a writer, scientist and naturalist who lives in south Devon. The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

Environmental law charity ClientEarth has submitted a written objection to Drax Power’s plans to build four new gas turbines.

If approved the plant will risk locking in high-carbon energy on the grid until 2050.

ClientEarth’s intervention comes just weeks after the historic report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) detailed the drastic carbon emission reductions needed to ensure the planet keeps global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Redundant infrastructure 

ClientEarth climate accountability lawyer Sam Hunter Jones said: “The UK government claims to be a climate leader, yet if major energy projects such as this from Drax are granted planning consent, the UK will risk carbon lock-in that would seriously undermine its ability to meet its climate change commitments.

“The government’s own forecasts published this year show that the UK does not need a major roll out of new large-scale gas generation capacity.

“There is evidence that even those low forecasts overestimate the level of need and are also not sufficient to meet the UK’s decarbonisation targets.

“Approving this new gas capacity risks either throwing the UK’s decarbonisation off course, or locking in redundant infrastructure resulting in significant environmental impacts and costs to the taxpayer.”

Drax’s plans to convert two coal-fired units at its Selby power plant in North Yorkshire, to four combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT), will nearly treble the units’ generation capacity and could lead to a significant increase in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Exceeding estimate

The government estimates the UK will need 6GW of new gas generation through to 2035. However the UK has already greenlit more than 15GW worth of large-scale gas plants. Approving Drax’s project would take this to 18GW – three times the government’s estimates.

With the UK’s coal phase-out planned for 2025, the coal-fired units stand to be decommissioned if the proposed gas conversion does not take place.

The proposed gas conversion therefore threatens to displace low-carbon energy that could otherwise replace the units’ generation capacity once they are retired. This is supported by analysis from energy policy experts Sandbag as well as the government’s own projections.

Hunter Jones added: “The only way this project can survive the future is with carbon capture and storage – a technology that is not economically viable and one not expected to be soon enough to meet the UK’s carbon targets, if at all.

“The IPCC’s recent report comes as a serious warning about the need to decarbonise as fast as possible to avoid catastrophic global warming impacts.”

Carbon capture

Hunter Jones concluded: “The government needs to base its plans on the future not the past. With the cost of renewables and other smart technologies dropping year on year, approving a fleet of large-scale gas plants makes no economic sense.”

The new gas turbines at Drax would have an operational life of 25 years. However the government’s own climate body, the Committee on Climate Change, has warned there should be no more gas on the UK grid by 2030, without carbon capture and storage (CCS) – an economically unviable technology BEIS expects not to be used commercially before 2035.

Drax’s proposal is considered a nationally significant infrastructure project under the 2008 Planning Act. As such the plan must comply with the relevant national policy statements and the requirement in the Act that a project’s “impacts must not outweigh its benefits”.

The policy statements warn specifically against the risk of carbon lock-in from projects such as Drax’s in view of the UK’s long-term decarbonisation targets.

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from ClientEarth.

“We know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime: two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century,” the newly elected president Barack Obama said in 2008 during his victory speech in Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois. 

“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there,” he told the assembled public. “I promise you, we as a people will get there.”

Obama was in his own inimitable style promising to meet the challenge of climate change – while acknowledging that the resistance of the oil monopolies dominating the American energy market would be fierce.

Beyond dispute

The end of the election campaign and the security of four years in office did not result in the new president dropping his commitment to climate action.

His address to a global warming event held by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor of California, was characteristically bombastic.  

“The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season… Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high. The consequences, too serious.”

But the president on taking office would make two strategic decisions – and prove himself to be a pragmatist and a technocrat. Despite what he said during his victory address he would seriously underestimate the intransigence and effectiveness of his opposition.

Obama’s solution for climate change was “cap and trade”. The government would set the maximum permissible emissions of carbon to prevent runaway climate change. It would then issue pollution permits, which could be traded on the open market for ready cash.

Cap and trade was intended to be a smart, cost-effective mechanism. Above all, it did not pose a threat to the neoliberal, free market ideology now dominant in the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the economics departments of US universities and international financial institutions.

Pollution limits

Friedrich von Hayek, considered by many to have been the intellectual inspiration for American and European neoliberalism, had explicitly argued that legal limits on pollution may prove necessary to protect private property.

He wrote in 1944: “Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism.”

He would also very likely have been satisfied with the cap and trade approach. The market would set the price for carbon. Companies would decide whether to use their credits, or whether to reduce carbon emissions and sell their permits for a profit.

Above all, cap and trade was supposed to reduce the risk of government interference in the economy rendering regulation and direct control of the use of fossil fuels while also saving tax dollars otherwise spent on enforcement.

Carbon cap

Obama asked for a “cap on carbon pollution” to “save our planet from the ravages of climate change” during his first address as president to a joint session of the US Congress in February 2009.

Cap and trade was supported by some of the oil majors, and also wrong-footed those who opposed the legislation. It should have been supported by Republicans as a free market solution. It should, therefore, have been the path of least resistance.

As Steve Coll observed in his trailblazing corporate biography, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power: “The greatest obstacle facing Obama on climate regulation as he prepared for inauguration, then, was hardly ExxonMobil.

“With Chevron and Shell in the cap-and-trade lobbying coalition, the oil industry had been split and weakened as a lobbying force on climate policy.”

Indeed, cap and trade could in fact be a major boon for monopoly interests dominating a market.

The scheme would include a ‘grandfather’ system where companies already emitting huge amounts of carbon would be given free permits so they would not be forced out of business. Monopolies could also theoretically buy up vast amounts of permits, creating a barrier to entry for start-up rivals.

Climate meeting

The second strategic decision of the president was to rely on the progression and success of legislation, rather than appealing to the American public and building national support for climate action. It seems the approach was not to scare the Republican horses by rabble rising and building alliances with environmentalists and campaigners.

Betsy Taylor, the president of Breakthrough Strategies & Solutions, Bill McKibben from 350.org and Erich Pica, the president of the US Friends of the Earth Action, were among the elite environmental campaigners invited to the White House by the president on 26th March 2009.

They were audacious enough to hope the meeting would be the beginning of a new era of climate action. The president, they understood, had been gifted perhaps the most important window of opportunity to drive climate legislation through the labyrinthine political process.

Obama was basking in the honeymoon of election victory. His Democrat Party controlled both houses of Congress. And the United Nations Conference of the Parties meeting due to take place in Copenhagen later that year meant climate change was at the top of the global political agenda.

But, as the newspapers reported, any hopes of a revived climate campaign were quickly dashed against the rocks of political pragmatism.

The president’s advisors had decided the best way to deliver climate legislation was to downplay the threat of climate change – Obama would stop using the phrase in public.

Financial collapse

The unprecedented era of free market dominance had ended with the worst economic crisis since the Wall Street crash of 1929. The American public wanted to hear about jobs, and security. Climate action began to sound like even more unemployment.

Obama was represented at the meeting by Carol Browner, an energy and climate adviser, Nancy Sutley, from the Council on Environmental Quality, and Van Jones, his green jobs adviser. They distributed a strategy document which could be summed up with a single cliché: don’t rock the boat.

Taylor said after the meeting: “It was in the context of the financial collapse. With everyone struggling, how do we connect with the public and build political support when everyone’s mind was on the very scary economy?

“What was communicated in the presentation was: ‘This is what you talk about, and don’t talk about climate change’… I took away an absolutely clear understanding that we should focus on clean energy jobs and the potential of a clean energy economy rather than the threat of climate change.”

The environmentalists were not universally persuaded by this highly strategic play. “I thought it was a mistake and I told them,” said McKibben.

“All I said was sooner or later you are going to have to talk about this in terms of climate change. Because if you want people to make the big changes that are required by the science then you are going to have to explain to people why that is necessary, and why it’s such a huge problem.”

Passing legislation

The president had bet the house – his ability to deliver on his promise to prevent catastrophic climate change – on cap and trade legislation.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act was passed in the House of Representatives by a majority of just seven votes (219 to 212) in June 2009. The advocates for the bill in the Senate had come from across the political spectrum, with support from the Republican, Democrat and Independent Democrat representatives.

The oil and gas industries spent $44.5 million lobbying in the first three months of 2009 – 48 percent more than 2008. And much of this cash was spent opposing cap and trade. A Columbia Journalism School report also asserted: “The fossil fuel industry spent $76.1 million on negative advertising between January 1 and April 27.”

The opposition – political and industrial – had gone into overdrive. And Charles Koch and Koch Industries were once more pulling strings and signing cheques. FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, both beneficiaries of Koch largesse, attacked the cap and trade legislation.

Carroll Muffett, Greenpeace USA Deputy Campaigns Director, issued a stark warning the day before the proposed legislation – known as the Waxman-Markey Bill – went before the Senate.

“Yet another fleet of industry lobbyists has weakened the bill even more, and further widened the gap between what Waxman-Markey does and what science demands,” she said in a statement.

“Despite President Obama’s assurance that he would enact strong, science-based legislation, we are now watching him put his full support behind a bill that chooses politics over science, elevates industry interests over national interest, and shows the significant limitations of what this Congress believes is possible.

“As it comes to the floor, the Waxman-Markey Bill sets emission reduction targets far lower than science demands, then undermines even those targets with massive offsets.

Opportunity lost

“The giveaways and preferences in the bill will actually spur a new generation of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to the detriment of real energy solutions.

“To support such a bill is to abandon the real leadership that is called for at this pivotal moment in history. We simply no longer have the time for legislation this weak.”

The American Clean Energy and Securities Act was in the end defeated in the Senate. And an historic opportunity for the leader of the “free world” to protect this “planet in peril” was lost.

As Rolling Stone reported under the headline, Climate Bill R.I.P, the White House switched its attention to health, assuming that victory for Obamacare would leave the president’s team free by 2010 to return to the climate wars.

“It’s a shame, because the window really was 2009,” Eric Pooley, author of The Climate War told the magazine. “It wasn’t going to be easy, but if you don’t even try, you’re not going to get it done – and they didn’t even try.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

A new low cost method to track the breeding and population dynamics of Antarctic penguins has been developed by an international research team.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries and several other nations have developed a system using a network of autonomous time-lapse cameras which can turn static images into useful data on the timing and success of penguin reproduction.

They say that the system monitors penguins as effectively as scientists could in person, for a fraction of the cost.

Eyes

The network includes 51 cameras across the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands, set on posts several feet above ground and programmed to shoot 12 photos a day during daylight hours. 

Researchers typically visit once or twice a year to download photos and replace camera batteries. Funding for the project came from the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).

Jefferson Hinke, a research biologist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author of the new paper, said: “These cameras provide an opportunity to put more eyes on the ground to understand broad-scale responses to changes in the environment.

“It helps us understand what’s happening to these animals in a way that’s affordable, robust, and accurate.”

Antarctic ecosystem

The network was designed to monitor three species of Antarctic penguins: gentoo, Adélie, and chinstrap. For each species, stereotypical behaviours in the nest are the key to turning images into useful data. 

While two penguins typically tend to their nests before they lay eggs, once they have eggs just one penguin stays on the nest. By watching for such telltale signs, biologists reviewing the photographs can quickly estimate when the penguins lay eggs, and how many nests are successful each year.

The penguins, like much of the wildlife in Antarctica, feed on a food web that depends heavily on Antarctic krill, shrimp-like crustaceans that fishing vessels also harvest for use in nutritional supplements and other purposes. 

Tracking penguin numbers and reproduction over time and space with the camera network provides insight into the productivity of the ecosystem. The authors are hopeful that fisheries managers can draw on this new stream of information when managing fishing pressure on krill. The U.S. is the largest consumer of Antarctic krill products in the world.

Streamline

“The camera network is an effort to expand the scale of monitoring to more effectively deliver advice on the status of predators for precautionary fisheries management,” the authors wrote in the new paper. 

Colin Southwell of the Australian Antarctic Division and co-author of the new paper said: “A standardised method is intended to streamline data collection and analyses to support the provision of management advice. Automated, remotely operating time-lapse cameras can’t replace people entirely, but they can make reliable observations of many things, are extremely cheap and reliable, and can be deployed to operate in very remote locations,. 

“Cameras have allowed us to expand the spatial extent of our monitoring dramatically within the constraints of limited budgets, giving a much broader view of how penguins and the marine environment are faring and improving our chances of distinguishing between different kinds of human-induced impacts such as fishing and climate change.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This story is based  on a news release from NOAA Fisheries.

Experts are warning that Britain risks sleepwalking into a health crisis unless the government massively invests in public information on air pollution.

Findings released last week by Clean Air Day, the country’s largest air quality campaign, revealed that people respond well when given accurate information and the means to do something about air pollution.

But this is little comfort – according to the charity behind the research – unless the government commits to an information campaign to match the scale of the problem.

No plans

The research was commissioned by Global Action Plan. Chris Large, one of its senior partners, said: “The UK Government knows that children could stop breathing the most dirty air with simple changes to their routine, but it cannot give this basic health advice due to lack of funding.

“When we have needed to fund previous health campaigns such as smoking, drink driving and healthy eating, the government has found the money.

“It’s time that funding was found to educate the millions of people who live in areas of unsafe air pollution.

“Air pollution is an urgent public health issue that’s up there with heart disease, diabetes and cancer. To properly deal with it we need a campaign on a similar scale to no-smoking.”

At present the Department of Health, Public Health England, Defra or any other national body have no plans to run an immediate national public information campaign on air quality. 

Raising awareness

Neither are there plans to provide any training for healthcare professionals so that they can provide urgent advice to patients and the public on how to protect their health from air pollution.

There are also no plans to educate school children and parents on how to limit the extent to which air pollution affects their health.

This year’s annual Clean Air Day campaign, which is backed by leading academics, sixteen medical colleges and other major health bodies, culminated in hundreds of events across the country on 21 June.

It also inspired the UK’s first Clean Air Summit, a gathering of city mayors and other local politicians representing some 20 million people.

The campaign generated more than 1,750 media items and 50,000 social media posts (including those from MPs and ministers) helping to raise awareness of air pollution and what people can do about it.

Indoor pollution

Before- and after campaign polling showed more awareness of air pollution issues following Clean Air Day.

It also revealed a greater public willingness to address problems when people had reliable information to hand.

Findings included more awareness of the dangers of indoor air pollution following the campaign – up by 12 percent to 74 percent of respondents – while 45 percent of people questioned are now aware that cyclists and pedestrians often breathe cleaner air than drivers.

The same findings revealed that 22 percent chose to cycle or walk a route they had previously driven, compared to 16 percent before the campaign – an increase of 37 percent. And 71 percent now open windows for ventilation when they are cooking or cleaning – an increase of 22 percent.

Profound damage

Large said: “These findings are very positive but we’re still only scratching the surface of the problem so far. 

“Hardly a day passes without more evidence of the profound damage that air pollution is having on the nation’s physical and mental health, especially that of the most vulnerable.

“Clean Air Day is urging the government to fund a major public health campaign to help people avoid pollution every day.

“This should be on the scale of no-smoking or, more recently, Change for Life or Be Clear on Cancer health campaigns. An investment of at least ten million pounds per year is needed.

“Surely there is enough evidence now to demonstrate the need for a nationwide public awareness campaign, funded by the government, to protect the health of the public?”

This author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Global Action Plan, an environment charity that is helping people live more sustainable lifestyles.

US Federal Judge Brian Morris has struck a major blow to President Trump’s pro-business, anti-climate agenda of supporting as much new fossil fuel infrastructure as possible. 

Morris blocked the construction of Keystone XL in response to a lawsuit filed by the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and North Coast River Alliance.

This is just the latest moment in the rollercoaster struggle against the Keystone Pipeline System and its continuous expansion since it was commissioned in 2010 under the Obama administration.

Fossil frontiers

Obama delayed the XL expansion in 2015 due to a mammoth campaign of resistance led by local Indigenous communities.

One of Trump’s first acts in office was to use executive orders to permit the construction of Keystone XL at the same time as the infamous Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Trump’s approval immediately boosted the shares of the two companies behind the pipelines by 3.5 percent.

Dallas Goldtooth of IEN reported: “Judge Morris has ordered a new [environmental impact survey]” to answer five key questions about the pipeline’s contribution to emissions and Trump’s motivations for reversing Obama’s decision. The judge also ordered a cultural survey to consult Native tribes. This survey could take between six months to a year.

For many, these new pipelines are the frontiers of new fossil fuel infrastructure. They may not themselves do the work of extraction, but they are essential to realising the profitability of fossil fuel companies’ oil and gas reserves.

Pipelines make transporting fuels far more efficient. After they are built, the economy is essentially locked into extracting fossil fuels to pass through them to make the infrastructure financially viable.

Political capital

The companies, banks and governments that invest so much financial and political capital in pipeline approval and construction simply cannot afford for them to lie dormant.

Keystone and DAPL both service the controversial and widely opposed tar sands in Alberta, Canada. New pipelines would increase the capacity of companies profiting from the dirtiest fossil fuels to distribute them across North America.

The battles over proposed oil and gas pipelines spanning North America and now Europe exemplify the depth and complexity of the relationship between fossil capital, private finance and the state.

Alongside Keystone XL and DAPL, TransMountain has become a defining wedge in Canadian politics and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline faces fierce opposition in Southern Italy and across Europe. These pipelines would not be possible without the support of banks and governments globally.

Trans Adriatic Pipeline enjoys the benefits of political and financial backing of the unaccountable European Commission and associated banks including European Investment Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

State power

Financiers supporting Energy Transfer Partners’ attempt to construct DAPL included high-street banks Barclays, Wells Fargo and ING. A similar array of banks including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase back TransCanada who are behind Keystone XL.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal administration is Canada is so committed to making Trans Mountain happen that the Canadian Government spent an incredible 4.5 billion US dollars nationalising the project and taking it out of the hands of private companies and finance.

Grassroots opposition has often brought to light contradictions within the state. At Standing Rock, those protesting DAPL suffered the most widely reported police violence. They faced rubber bullets and water cannons in the freezing night.

State repression of this and other kinds – from FBI spying around Keystone XL protests to placing whole communities on lockdown in Southern Italy – is a feature of the battles over new pipelines.

At the same time, it is other levers of state power that are now proving crucial in the resistance to fossil fuel extraction.

Mass movements 

The courts are upholding basic environmental protections on request of grassroots organisations like IEN, in the face of heavily militarised police and the government’s attempt to force these projects through.

Court orders are unlikely to totally shut down projects like Keystone XL, but leveraging existing law and regulation can win campaigners vital time to exercise other elements of a broad strategy against fossil fuel infrastructure.

Organising for banks to stop financing these projects and the companies behind them must be a key pillar of that strategy.

The Governments of Trump and Trudeau alongside the unaccountable technocrats of the European Commission may be totally committed to the narrow economic interests of fossil capital and private finance so invested in these unnecessary pipelines.

But as long as campaigners build mass movements taking advantage of a diversity of tactics in opposition, we have the power to keep filthy fossil fuels like tar sands in the ground.

This author

Chris Saltmarsh is co-director of climate change campaigns at People & Planet. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh.

Young European entrepreneurs are participating in the Copernicus AtmosHack – a competition to come up with ideas that could help to reduce people’s exposure to atmospheric pollution and UV radiation. Participants base their innovations on freely available data from the EU’s Copernicus Programme.

This data includes observations from Copernicus and EUMETSAT satellites, ground-based air quality data, and air quality analyses and forecasts produced by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), implemented by ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts).

The hackathon, organised by Ultrahack, takes place in Helsinki on 16-18 November.

Major problem

Reflecting the importance and topicality of the issue of pollution, the winners can look forward to prizes totalling 30,000 euros.

Judges to nominate the winners include Johannes Flemming from CAMS, Mark Higgins from EUMETSAT and Johanna Tamminen from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

Atmospheric pollution is a major problem around the globe, with WHO’s estimates showing that 91 per cent of the world’s population are exposed to it at least some of the time.

The vast majority of deaths caused by pollution are in developing countries, which have fewer resources available to tackle the problem.

This is why Copernicus is funding the AtmosHack event, which is being organised in collaboration with EUMETSAT, CAMS, the Finnish Meteorological Service (FMI), and the University of Helsinki.

Generous prizes 

Participants are being encouraged to use freely-available data to inform their solutions.

They can decide to develop new mobile or web apps, platforms or other software or hardware solutions; or to add atmosphere-related features to existing platforms. 

Copernicus and its partners will award generous prizes that reflect the importance of the problem of pollution – both today and in the years to come.

For the winners, the award includes a cash prize of €5,000 and acceptance into the Copernicus Accelerator start-up programme with all expenses paid – worth €15,000.

In addition, two teams will win tickets to Slush, a leading start-up event taking place in Helsinki in December. The winning team will also receive free access to WEkEO, the EU’s Copernicus DIAS reference service for environmental data, virtual environments for data processing and skilled user support.

Educational programme

Vincent-Henri Peuch, Head of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, said: “We’re looking forward to being surprised! AtmosHack participants will certainly find new ways to use our CAMS products and kick start the development of innovative business ideas.”

Alongside the AtmosHack hackathon, a free online course about monitoring the Earth’s atmosphere was launched on 5 November 2018.

The Atmosphere MOOC is designed for a general audience and aims to explain atmosphere composition how it is monitored.

Every week, participants can learn from educational videos, interviews with experts in the field of atmospheric science, knowledge-based quizzes and interactive content.

The MOOC is created and carried out by CAMS and EUMETSAT and will run for five weeks.

This Article

This article is based on a press release from Copernicus Accelerator. Copernicus Accelerator is an initiative that pairs high-level professionals with young entrepreneurs with innovative Earth observation ideas.

Extracting bitumen from tar sands to make petroleum products like gasoline has been described as the world’s most destructive industry because of the heavy toll it takes on the environment.

As director of the UK Tar Sands Network, Suzanne Dhaliwal has played an important role in opposing the exploitation of tar sands.

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

Her work has taken her from standing up for Indigenous communities to challenging racism in the green movement.

Indigenous rights

While tar sands deposits exist globally, Canada’s tar sands are the biggest energy project in the world, currently producing 1.9 million barrels of oil a day.

Tar sands are also the fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions in Canada, and deforestation is also a major issue: the tar sands in Alberta stretch across 54,826 square miles, an area bigger than England.

The impact on Alberta’s First Nations communities is devastating: “Tar sands developments scar sacred territories, disturb traditional cultural practices and undermine constitutionally-enshrined treaty rights.” 

The UK Tar Sands Network has been pivotal in internationalising the tar sands issue – Dhaliwal explained: “We were really nimble as a small organisation. Without the restrictions placed on larger organisations, we worked across the spectrum, and used diverse tactics. 

We sowed the seeds for the divestment movement by bringing the frontline voices to BP and Shell to show tar sands extraction was an Indigenous rights and climate disaster.”

WEIRD attitudes

But over time, Dhaliwal said, it became apparent that there were issues with working in this way, as people weren’t used to taking direction from Indigenous leadership:“As the sole person of colour often organising in climate spaces, it was difficult”.

Dhaliwal uses the acronym ‘WEIRD’ – Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (coined by Joseph Henrich et al. in an article published in 2010) – to describe a particular attitude she says she would come up against.

She said: “You can’t talk about the race issue, about the privilege issue, let alone expect people to take direction from frontline communities.”

Dhaliwal has worked for Indigenous rights for over a decade, beginning with Doctors Against Borders, moving on to Survival International and later joining and organising more grassroots campaigns.

As a Sikh, Dhaliwal talks about how the concept of seva, or selfless service, for spiritual growth and contributing to the community is, for her, entwined with the fight of Indigenous cultures and the way she was trained by the Indigenous Environmental Network in climate justice organising.

Toxic structures

Dhaliwal said that a big challenge – one that precipitated the closing down of the UK Tar Sands Network in April this year – was when Greenpeace Canada did a tar sands action outside Canada House with a post on social media saying, “Today, the resistance against tar sands pipelines went international.”

Dhaliwal called this “erasing the history of Indigenous tar sands activism”. She continued: “Directed by Indigenous leadership we internationalised tar sands and supported frontline resistance in Alberta and this is now the environmental justice issue of our generation.”

In their statement following Dhaliwal’s depart­ure, the UK Tar Sands Network said: “We are using this occasion to break away from toxic organising cultures and drawing a line at the white supremacy in our organising spaces.”

The organisation now exists as No Tar Sands, while Dhaliwal decides where to redirect her energy.

In a response to Dhaliwal’s comments, Areeba Hamid, deputy programme director at Greenpeace UK, said: “We’re grateful to the UK Tar Sands Network for the issues they’ve raised about our pipelines action at Canada House. We’re listening carefully to their concerns and are determined to take them on board.”

Overhauling structures 

Hamid continued: “As a large organisation campaigning on multiple issues, we still have much to learn from grassroots groups that have spent years doing the heavy lifting in areas of work that we are new to.

“This is especially true at a time when many smaller NGOs, often representing marginalised communities, are struggling to secure funds. We’re determined to learn from our mistakes and strive to be better allies to the organisations campaigning in the same space.

“The UK Tar Sands Network has worked tirelessly for years on one of the crucial climate issues of our time, and we would very much like them to continue to do so. Tar sands developments are a major threat to our climate – it’s vital that we build the widest and strongest possible movement to stop them.”

Dhaliwal is calling for an overhaul of the non-profit system: “If we look at what has recently happened with Save the Children and Oxfam in a sector-wide context, we see the need for accountability and transparency across the charity sector.”

If we truly believe in fighting for environmental justice, then we need to look at organisations and ask: how many of you are women? How many are people of colour? Also, what protection is there for these voices in the movement?

Indigenous organising

So, I ask her, how do we move forward? “Accountability and anti-oppression need to go hand-in-hand with environmental activism,” she replied.

Organisations need to focus on creating a safe space to start the conversation. She continued: “Keep talking about things. We need a model of Indigenous organising, a diversity of voices and approaches for solutions for the planet. The climate movement has to represent the wider movement.”

Although very little tar sands oil is currently flowing through UK petrol pumps, large amounts of investment are coming from UK banks and corporations, and NGOs have a role to play in the movement.

Ways forward include empowering those fighting on the ground, tackling the uneven distribution of resources between them and larger, more prominent organisations, and ensuring that their voices are not buried or stolen in the process.

This isn’t about finding Indigenous peoples a seat at the table any more, but about forging a new table based on a deeper understanding of environmental justice in the UK.

Decolonising environmentalism 

So what’s next for Dhaliwal? “I speak less about white supremacy now and am focusing more on creative strategies for decolonising our movement.

“I work as a consultant to organisations and brands that want to do things in an intersectional way. I am also working on an exciting podcast dedi­cated to lifting the strategies and voices of women of colour in the climate movement. Stay tuned!”

As for the wider fight, she said: “Like with fascism, we’ve been too nice. Environmental justice must be on the agenda. We need a model of organising that is a mirror of the world that we are trying to create.” Whether it can be done remains to be seen, but it is crucial to the wellbeing of our planet.

Since this article was written, Greenpeace have been in touch with Suzanne  Dhaliwal to apologise for the events that occurred. They are now working with her to help support her anti-racism work in the UK.

This Author

Zion Lights is the contributing editor of JUNO magazine, TEDx speaker and author of The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting. The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

Lord Lawson in 2008 was congratulated in private for his pamphlet attacking climate science and policy by a handful of peers and MPs – mostly from the Tory party. Some even suggest he set up a new foundation to take the fight against climate mitigation to the government of the day.

There was then an intimate groups who were furious that the Climate Change Act had become law. My investigation has shown that almost all had some relationship to Exxon and Koch funded think tanks in the United States, and were accepting funding from British oil and tobacco companies.

David Henderson, a member of free market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs’ (IEA) academic advisory council, regularly attended meetings about climate change, and was often found lobbying Richard Ritchie, the political apparatchik for British Petroleum (BP).

Climate Denier Meetings

Henderson resurrected his climate denier meetings for economists and policy wonks at Westminster Business School. Among the regular attendees was Julian Morris, the director of the fatally damaged International Policy Network, and alumni of the IEA environment unit.

Henderson recruited Sir Ian Byatt, who he knew at Oxford as a bright undergraduate, to the climate denial cause over a series of lunches at a private members’ club in London.

“I see him as the impresario, the intellectual Diaghilev who brought together the stars – in Diaghilev’s case Stravinsky, Nijinsky and Picasso, in David’s case Lawson, Lindzen and McKitrick,” Byatt told me.

Dr Benny Peiser, an obscure academic with a keen interest in asteroids and the human fascination with catastrophe, was also among this circle. His newsletter, CCNET, had transmuted to a conference bulletin about asteroid destruction, to a bulletin of the latest news articles casting doubt on climate change science.

Peiser declared “the death of global manmade warming theory” to the newsletter subscribers in November 2007, reporting that rising temperatures could be attributed to a strange bacteria on the seabed.

The scientific paper he was promoting, and the journal that published it, were part of a transparent hoax. And CCNET issued a rather embarrassing retraction.

The following year, Peiser spoke at the Heartland Institute climate change conference in the United States, not for the first time enjoying complimentary flights, hotel room and a generous £1,000 fee for a 30-minute presentation.

Heartland at the time was funded by ExxonMobil and foundations supported by the oil billionaire and free market cash cow Charles Koch.

Tarring Scientists

The IEA, still receiving funding from BP and British American Tobacco, was also tarring climate scientists with the now predictable claims that they were rent seekers falsifying their results and exaggerating the threats to secure government funding.

The think tank produced Climate Change Policy: Challenging the Activists. The pamphlet was penned by Morris, Henderson, Alan Peacock and Byatt, all free market advocates who were fearful that climate science might prove the need for ‘socialist’ regulation and state planning.

“One of their principal concerns is that large-scale centralised action to combat the supposed ‘threat’ of global climate change is likely to be misdirected and could itself become a threat to freedom and to prosperity,” the IEA reported.

Morris was among the first to promote the argument that climate change action would impact on the poor. He claimed “government attempts to reduce emissions drastically are likely to slow rates of economic growth, thus inflicting harm and reducing the capacity to adapt, particularly in low-income countries”.

Political Mavericks

Lawson, Peiser, Henderson and Chris Horner of the American ExxonMobil-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) were all invited speakers during April 2007 at the European Parliament for the event Climate Change: Evaluating Appropriate Responses charged by the then Tory MEP Roger Helmer. Helmer has since defected to UKIP, where he survived being shamed by The Sun for visiting a massage parlour.

There were only loose connections between these mavericks and the cabal of Tories in Parliament who had become increasingly upset at the Climate Change Act being passed into law.

Lord Lawson met with Peter Lilley and also had lunch with Tory MP Andrew Tyrie who discovered, for the first time, that the former chancellor was now a key anti-science ally.

Tyrie told our researcher: “I worked with Nigel at that time. Nigel discussed with me on numerous occasions how best to create such a body and, indeed, developed from a suggestion I originally made to Nigel that he should not try and carry on on his own but needed some support.

“My original suggestion was that he try and find enough resources to employ a young economist or two to assist him and that developed, I suppose, in his mind to the idea of a think tank. I had considerable interest both in its design, its shape and funding and overhang and was very closely involved in its creation, very closely involved.”

Relying on Deniers

There was some difficulty finding academics willing to go against the almost universal understanding of the climate science. Lawson made contact with economists, but when it came to climate scientists, he had to rely on the reliable American deniers, almost all of whom had some association with oil companies – almost always Koch and ExxonMobil.

Lord Christopher Monckton, already known for being eccentric to the point of incomprehensible, also claims to have been among those Lawson (to whom he is related by marriage) approached for advice about climate science. Monckton has been supported by CFACT, which has been funded by ExxonMobil.

I asked Monckton why he was not a member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He said: “I work very closely… I don’t belong to them but I go to their meetings, I receive their material, Benny Peiser in fact has been sending me his wonderful summary of events for years long before he even went to the GWPF – partly at my suggestion.

“I know Nigel [Lawson] quite well and he told me he was setting it up, and he said, ‘who should we get to direct it’ and I said, ‘oh, Benny Peiser’. So of course I am not on their academic board – I am not an academic. I am dealing mainly with climate science, and they are dealing mainly with climate economics.

“And besides, they know that if they want to try and argue this in the UK, having someone like me there makes it look as though this is just another organisation that is doing some kind of political campaigning, but it isn’t. Neither am I – but the Left has spent a lot of time and money adjusting my image, mainly on the internet.”

He added: “I communicate with Nigel Lawson from time to time, with Benny Peiser quite regularly on various matters…”

Lawson and Singer

Lawson was, during this period, in almost weekly contact with S Fred Singer, the grandfather of US climate denial, according to the latter. Singer spoke alongside Lawson at the Centre for Policy Studies in June 2008 after Lawson had persuaded Thatcher’s old think tank to attack climate science.

Lawson himself had some housekeeping to deal with. He had recently stepped down after the maximum nine-year term as president of the British Institute of Energy Economics, a charity funded by BP and Shell to form links between the oil industry, politicians, civil servants and academics.

The former chancellor, known for simplifying the British tax system, also sold his shares in a company called Central Europe Trust (CET) to an offshore shell company registered to an office of a tax avoidance specialist with its directors and owners hidden from public scrutiny.

CET was established just before the fall of the Berlin Wall as a consultancy to Western corporations keen to buy and strip the assets of companies in the former Soviet Union. By the time Lawson sold out, CET had worked for many of the major oil companies, including the Polish state-owned coal monopoly, and had aggressively sought work among tobacco companies.

The challenge was bringing these fiercely individualistic and iconoclastic individuals together, and presenting climate deniers as considered and well-informed contenders rather than a bunch of eccentrics with no experience of climate research. This was the challenge Lawson chose to accept.

Horner’s Idea

In 2005, Horner, the CEI attorney, set out plans for a new European think tank attacking climate change. He proposed the group be called the Sound Climate Policy Coalition. But his secret plan, set out in an apparent funding proposal to energy companies, was exposed.

So the name would never be used. Lord Lawson, some three years later, came up with an entirely different name for his entirely unrelated initiative: the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

However, Dr Peiser, now director of the GWPF, has a very different and sometimes contradictory understanding of the history of his own charity. He has denied the IEA played a role in its formation.

And he denied S Fred Singer was influential at the beginning. “Fred Singer is not involved with the GWPF. He is not one of our advisors. We’re not taking any advice, so I don’t know what you’re trying to establish but there is no link. Absolutely zero link,” he told me.

“You see, he is more into the science. We are more into the policy. That was not… and we have different views on a lot of issues anyhow. So he was not involved and we didn’t ask him, we didn’t look for his advice and, to my knowledge, this claim that he was somehow communicating with Lord Lawson is nonsense.”

Singer later spoke alongside Lawson at the IEA event where he announced the founding of the GWPF.

Peiser also argues that Lord Monckton was not involved in the GWPF. “Yes, but you know from what we do that we don’t deal with Christopher Monckton, and we never have, and so you should know there is no relationship.” He added: “Lord Monckton has had no, absolutely no, contact with me or Lord Lawson. Zero.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

A combination of growing awareness, an emerging movement for change and the prospect for political breakthrough all signal that the world is waking up to the scale of the threat.

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

It is not only among activists and campaigners that there is an emerging sense of urgency, but also in the boardrooms of major consumer goods companies, multi-billion-dollar investment houses and among some governments.

All this not least because of the growing realisation that properly functioning natural systems are vital for people’s health, wealth and security.

Environmental restoration 

Here in the UK, public demand is also growing. For example, the political think tank Bright Blue published a report in the wake of the UK’s 2017 general election setting out how one reason the governing Conservative party did poorly among younger voters was its apparent lack of commitment to environmental causes.

These findings help explain the subsequent very welcome rise in profile of environmental issues in politics, laying the foundations for stronger cross-party consensus.

This shift in the public mood offers a rare opportunity to build a new movement for Nature, one that could create a bigger political and public space for action.

The information and research telling us what governments and companies need to do has been in existence for years. What’s been missing is the public demand for action, and the political will to deliver it.

But just as in 2008 there was a polit­ical moment that allowed the passage of the Climate Change Act, the public mood is shifting in favour of change.

Ambitious agenda

We need to grasp this moment to deliver strong new environmental laws at home, in the form of a new environment act requiring the recovery of Nature, alongside new farming policies that promote environmental restoration.

National leadership in key countries, including the UK, would help take forward proposals for a Global Deal for Nature and People, to be agreed in 2020.

This would be a commitment from heads of state when they meet at the 75th United Nations General Assembly, spelling out how it is no longer rational or acceptable to degrade Nature, and instead placing us on a path toward the restoration of the natural world.

Underpinning this would be a series of agreements forged in 2020 in a series of important summits, including new national targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

It would also involved a renewed ambition for the Paris Agreement on climate change, a strengthening of the environmental commitments in the Sustainable Development Goals, and a new agreement on the conservation of wildlife in the high seas.

Join together

This is an ambitious agenda, and needs to be. With sufficient public support and political will, we can halt the long-term decline of Nature and begin restoring the planet that sustains us.

Whether world leaders rise to the challenge is a matter of choice, including in individual countries, such as the UK, which if it wished could show the kind of leadership needed.

The scale of human impacts on the Earth is now utterly unsustainable.

The question now is not whether the world is under threat, but rather whether we will act in time. We need to join together in a movement to demand that the world take action and give us a Global Deal for Nature and People.

This Author

Tony Juniper is Executive Director for Advocacy and Campaigns at WWF-UK. This article first appeared in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, which is out now!