The global wave of student strikes for climate action has come to the UK. We should unequivocally support these young people to have their voices heard, especially as the clock ticks in the 12-year countdown to implement measures to avoid runaway climate breakdown.

Holly Gillibrand, 13, has already instigated protests in Scotland and there are plans for a nationwide day of action on 15 February 2019. These actions come as tens of thousands of students have held similar strikes in countries across the world.

Students from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Japan, Switzerland, the UK and the United States have taken part, having been inspired by sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg’s protests outside the Swedish Parliament.

Strong words

Thunberg’s protests coincided with the World Economic Forum 2019 in Davos, where elites gather to discuss how to keep markets ‘free’. Days before, 35,000 teenagers marched in Brussels, while students in Basel and Berlin planned sit-ins. 

The narrative of the student-led protests has straddled two compelling lines. Naturally, they convey a strong sense of intergenerational injustice. The protests also lay blame for climate injustice primarily at the feet of the rich and powerful.

At the demo after thousands of Australian students brought Melbourne traffic to a standstill, 11-year-old Lucie Atkin-Bolton told crowds, “When kids make a mess, adults tell us to clean it up and that’s fair. But when our leaders make a mess, they’re leaving it to us to clean up.”

Greta Thunberg challenged UN leaders telling them, “you say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.” These are strong words that leaders need to hear. They decisively expose the hypocrisy between their moral intuitions and the consequences of their political choices.

From Davos, Thunberg told the BBC: “My message was that most emissions are caused by a few people, the very rich people, who are here in Davos.” She goes on to assign them “huge responsibility” for safeguarding future living conditions.

Holly Gillibrand of the Scotland protests recently said: “I am striking because we are running out of time. Thousands of children around the world should not be having to miss classes because of our leaders’ inability to treat the climate crisis as a crisis.”

Holly’s right. It’s indicative of the scale of climate breakdown’s injustices that children are forced to become activists. It shows how severely they’ve been let down by our current decision makers and those that have come before.

Intergenerational activism 

These messages show how successfully the analysis of climate change as injustice has become entrenched. It is most starkly understood by disenfranchised children that we are already enduring the impacts of climate breakdown distributed disproportionately along the lines of race and class, experienced by those who contributed least to the crisis.

When climate justice narratives focus on intergenerational injustice, we distract from some of the contemporary realities of the crisis.

When winters get colder and fuel remains expensive, its older people who die. Landgrabs driven by capital’s desire for more coal mines or the displacement of people by flooding, drought and food insecurity are all harms afflicting people disproportionately in the global South today.

As well as her more radical messaging, Thunberg says, “We need to hold the older generations accountable for the mess they have created, and expect us to live with. It is not fair that we have to pay for what they have caused.”

But “older generations” have not acted – or have failed to act – as a homogenous bloc. It is a generation of the wealthy and powerful that have inflicted climate harms on the poor and colonised of their own generation as well as the next.

The younger generation too is not homogenously righteous. Those of it who inherit capital and end up running our society are equally likely to continue the bad work of those who precede them.

We should embrace the energy brought by students taking radical action and use it to catalyse taking our wider organising to the next level. We also mustn’t lose sight of the primary antagonism in the climate crisis.

The rich are waging a class war on the poor and climate change is the symptom. It is not the older versus the young. Intergenerational solidarity is the way forward.   

This Author

Chris Saltmarsh is co-director of Climate Change Campaigns at student activist network People & Planet. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh. 

The government is on course to ditch a landmark EU legal commitment to end overfishing by 2020 – despite the prime minister’s promise not to reduce UK environmental standards after Brexit.

The move represents a dilution of ambitions outlined in the government’s own fisheries white paper, according to MPs and conservationists. It comes after some in the fishing industry called on ministers not to adopt the 2020 target into post-Brexit law.

Under the common fisheries policy, EU ministers will be legally bound – from next year on – to set fishing quotas within a “maximum sustainable yield” (MSY). This is the greatest amount of fish that scientists say can be caught without depleting the stock long-term.

Watering down

The deadline was agreed by EU member states, including the UK, in a bid to finally end the annual spectacle of fisheries ministers caving to industry pressure to set allowable catches at levels their scientific advisors say are unsustainable.

Prime minister Theresa May has promised to incorporate all EU environmental regulations into domestic law, and to ensure “Brexit will not mean a lowering of environmental standards”.

But the government bill intended to replace the EU’s common fisheries policy includes no legal duty to limit catches in line with the scientific advice – and ministers have so far rebuffed attempts to introduce one.

Instead, the fisheries bill – which will return to the House of Commons soon – includes only an “objective” to ensure fishing within MSY. Environmentalists warn this will leave ministers vulnerable to continued industry pressure to overfish.

“It would really be a step backwards and a watering down of existing commitments,” said Sam Stone, head of fisheries and aquaculture at the Marine Conservation Society.

Set catches

“The government has said several times that there should be a green Brexit, and said they want to improve environmental standards. Removing this commitment would certainly not achieve that.”

Liberal Democrat MP Alastair Carmichael, whose Shetland and Orkney constituency plays a major role in UK fishing, told Unearthed that the costs of getting the fisheries bill wrong “would be huge”.

“Fishing unsustainably is in no one’s interests, especially not the interests of the fishing industry and the communities that depend on it,” he said.  

“Maximum Sustainable Yield is a piece of jargon that really means common sense. Fishing is an industry that goes down generations and fishermen themselves want an industry to pass on to their children.”

Mr Carmichael sat on the committee of MPs that examined the bill, and tabled an amendment – blocked by Conservative MPs – that would have introduced a duty to set catches in line with scientific advice. “The absence of MSY from the bill is disappointing,” he said.

Scientific advice

“The white paper that came ahead of the bill was much stronger. The bill looks to me like a botched job coming from a government department that, seized by the challenges of Brexit, has lost sight of what is important.”

But he added: “This Government does not have a majority in the Commons and is in an even weaker position in the Lords. I believe we shall see a lot more changes to the bill and am determined to keep fighting on this issue.”

Fisheries minister George Eustice has offered various arguments for not including a binding MSY duty in the bill.

He has argued it would rob the UK of “flexibility” needed to manage fish stocks shared with countries like Norway, which does not always use scientific advice based on MSY; that it is impossible to set all catch limits at MSY in “mixed fisheries”, where more than one species is caught in the same area; and that “it makes no sense” to include a 2020 deadline in a bill that probably will not take effect before 2021.

He has also said the fisheries bill will require the UK’s four nations to produce a joint statement explaining how they will meet the bill’s objectives. He argues this statement would be the right place to make a commitment to set catches in line with scientific advice.

Safety net

A Department for Food Agriculture and Rural Affairs spokesman told Unearthed: “The UK’s four Fisheries Administrations will set out in a statutory joint statement how they will work together to achieve the Bill’s sustainability objectives, including maximum sustainable yield (MSY).

“The UK Government remains committed to continuing to work under the principle of MSY and restore stocks to healthy conditions as quickly as possible.”

However, Mr Carmichael says there is “no guarantee” that MSY will be “enshrined” in the joint fisheries statement. He told the bill committee: “The fisheries statement will be subject to a negotiation between four administrations.

“There might be any number of reasons why maximum sustainable yield might fall from that particular safety net.”

The MCS’s Sam Stone told Unearthed that in most cases it would be the secretary of state determining “fishing opportunities” – the amount of fish that can be caught – and there was “no requirement anywhere” in the bill for the secretary of state to “ensure that catches are only set up  to the maximum sustainable yield”.

Unachievable

Conservationists say uncertainty about when the bill will take effect does not prevent the inclusion of a legal duty to set catch limits according to scientific advice. They argue this duty could be combined with an allowance for flexibility in negotiations with “third countries” like Norway.

The July 2018 white paper in which ministers set out their principles for post-Brexit fishing regulation boasts about the UK’s role in securing a legally binding commitment to MSY in the most recent reforms of the EU’s fishing policy.

It promises that after Brexit the government “will continue to work with our European partners to regulate fishing and to set harvest rates that restore and maintain fish stocks at least to levels that can produce MSY”.

It adds: “This will mean agreeing catch rates that are based on the best available science. In mixed fisheries, that will include taking account of the interactions between harvested species and with the wider ecosystem.”

Defra consulted on this paper last summer. According to the department’s summary of the results, most respondents backed the objective to fish at or below levels that support MSY. “However,” it added, “some respondents from the fishing industry expressed concern that the [EU] CFP target to achieve MSY for all stocks by 2020 was unachievable.

Fishing mortality

“Industry responses in particular suggested that a more general commitment to work towards achieving MSY in line with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) would be preferable.”

Unearthed asked Defra if the decision not to include a binding MSY duty had been taken in response to fishing industry concerns but it did not directly respond.

A legal duty to set quotas within MSY is backed by NGOs including the Marine Conservation Society, the Pew Trusts, Greener UK, Greenpeace – which funds Unearthed, and the Angling Trust.

Helen McLachlan, of the World Wildlife Fund and Greener UK, told MPs the 2014 common fisheries policy reforms that set a binding deadline for MSY had marked a turning point. “Prior to that, we consistently set limits over and above that recommended by scientists. Since that binding commitment was brought in, we have started to see those trends going the right way: biomass increasing, fishing mortality decreasing…”

According to the Pew Trusts, in 2018 about 44 percent of EU fishing limits were set higher than the scientific advice, but for stocks with an MSY recommendation around 75 percent were set in line with that advice.

Sustainable fisheries

Giving evidence on the bill, Angling Trust campaigns coordinator Martin Salter – a former Labour MP – told Mr Eustice that if “I were in your shoes, I would want a binding duty.

“I would want to make it crystal clear that we are going to end the discredited system that has operated under the common fisheries policy and replace it with a legally backed duty to fish at sustainable levels, just as we have legally backed targets for climate change and emissions.”

He added: “[It] is easy to claim that we are going to be an independent coastal state, but that does not deliver sustainable fisheries.

“Senegal is an independent coastal state, and its fisheries have been wiped out by super-trawlers, which are mainly European and have used their economic power to destroy the livelihoods of artisanal fishermen in independent coastal states.

“You will deliver sustainable fisheries management by having world-leading sustainable fisheries policy.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

Can we feed 10 billion people a healthy diet within planetary boundaries? The recent EAT Lancet report attempts to answer that question – proposing a ‘healthy reference diet’ that, the report suggests, works with and not against the planet.

It has understandably attracted some mixed responses – this is a complex question and one report can’t possibly have all the answers. But EAT-Lancet has made an important contribution to the conversation.

Now that the dust has settled, and people have shared their initial reactions, it’s time to take a closer look at the detail. Here are five things you need to know about the report and about the ‘healthy reference diet’.

1. ‘Sustainable intensification’

The EAT-Lancet report calls for “strategies to refocus agriculture from producing high volumes of crops to producing varied nutrient-rich crops” and makes strong recommendations for agro-ecological farming systems like organic.

It suggests that ‘sustainable intensification’ based on “nutrient cycling” on the farm can contribute towards “large increases in carbon sequestration in agricultural soils and above ground.”

This is hugely welcome, for in reframing ‘sustainable intensification’ in such terms, the report provides an important correction to those who advocate a ‘business as usual’ brand to feed the world.

A ‘business as usual’ brand of ‘sustainable intensification’ fails to meet the needs of healthier diets, and would perpetuate intensively farmed monocultures which are dependent on high levels of chemical input.

It is therefore incompatible with eliminating the use of fossil fuels, restoring soils and biodiversity, and dramatically reducing nitrogen pollution, as this report demands.

2. Less meat

The recommendations on meat consumption have caused a stir, though the proposed ‘healthy reference diet’ does allow for limited quantities of meat, dairy and eggs.

The Soil Association supports a move to “less but better” meat, based on animals reared extensively on grass and ‘leftovers’ where possible.

The Commission recognises that such a ‘livestock on leftovers’ approach could have environmental benefits. It dedicates its appendix to showing how this would produce a similar total volume of milk/meat. However,  the commission gives greater priority to poultry over beef and lamb, for health reasons.

Serious questions need to be asked as to whether poultry should be prioritised over red meat here in the UK, where livestock can play an integral role in sustainable farming systems, and whether the evidence on red meat and health is as strong as the report suggests.

However, the direction of travel – ‘less but better’ meat – is the right one.

3. Sustainable diets

Many of the priorities identified in the report are things the Soil Association has been advocating for years.

This includes a shift from the focus on producing high quantities of food to producing healthy food; halving food losses and waste; governments helping people eat a healthier diet by creating healthier food environments and; making sure systems are in place for wise management of land and seas

The question now is how to go about normalising more sustainable diets here in the UK. Public procurement has an important role to play.

The Soil Association’s Food for Life programme – which has made menus more sustainable in over 10,000 schools – will be engaging with public health nutritionists as well as with school leaders, parents and caterers to understand to what extent a version of this ‘healthy reference diet’ can or should be normalised in schools.

If nut consumption needs to double, should we be finding ways to bring nuts back into schools, or are the risks to allergy sufferers too great to overcome?

Should the government be setting more ambitious targets for ‘less and better’ meat in public settings, including a mandatory meat free day in schools each week?

4. Nitrogen 

Other recommendations in the report are less welcome, including the conclusion that using less synthetic fertiliser in developed countries to reduce pollution will allow for significantly increased use in developing countries to help increase yields there.

This is despite acknowledging that artificial nitrogen fertiliser is linked to significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and helps explain the assertion that food production might contribute half of all GHG emissions in 2050.

A more realistic pathway to improving yields in developing counties would be using approaches that build soil fertility and use legumes to fix nitrogen naturally – which would also help reduce GHG.

5. Global recommendations need to be tailored to local realities

There are many more questions that need to be answered. We would like to see more research looking at the most effective way to produce meat from low input forage and how to minimise methane emissions while maximising the important contribution grasslands make to carbon storage.

Could agroforestry in grassland provide opportunities to produce more nuts and fruit in conjunction with dairy? How do we lower the global nitrogen inputs to benefit local air and water while adopting other ways to build fertility?

What is the role for grazing in maintaining Europe’s precious permanent grasslands, and what are the trade-offs for health and greenhouse gases? If we are to adopt some of the dietary recommendations in the report, how are we going to produce the nuts and pulses sustainably?

There is an inherent problem in looking at the planetary environmental limits for healthy food production without balancing this with a field and farm level look at the best available options.

What we now need is a more dynamic global model that would enable different dietary scenarios to be tested for their impacts on farming, health and the environment, and for different farming options to be tested for their health and environmental impacts.

In conclusion…

The EAT-Lancet report has made an important contribution to the conversation.

But for farmers, who need to plan long ahead, there are many uncertainties and it is not surprising that this radical report has generated some apprehensive responses.

The priority now must be moving from global recommendations to local realities – we must define what healthy and sustainable farming and diets mean here in the UK, and press ahead with the urgent task of making such farming and diets the norm.

Dietary habits are already changing, and farmers and citizens will need all the help available to respond to these huge challenges. 

This author 

Joanna Lewis is policy and strategy director at the Soil Association and chair of the Food Ethics Council. She can be found tweeting at @JoLewisSA.

An investigation conducted by The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) has exposed repeated violations of the Rights of Nature in Bolivia, particularly in the case of the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS). 

These violations include the transgression of rights that were established in the landmark Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, signed in Bolivia itself nearly a decade ago. 

An international GARN Commission, formed by Alberto Acosta (Ecuador), Shannon Biggs (USA) and Enrique Viale (Argentina,) visited Bolivia in August 2018 to verify the difficulties experienced by the indigenous peoples and others that are defending the Rights of Nature, in particular in the TIPNIS case. 

Indigenous resistance

A new 44-page report produced by the investigative team reveals the Bolivian Government’s disregard for the rights of indigenous peoples and the rights of defenders of nature in the country in general. It focussed on the government’s plans for road construction across TIPNIS and Bolivia’s southern Amazon,

Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park, known as TIPNIS (Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure) is considered the most biodiverse region in Bolivia.

It is a transition zone between the Andes and the Amazon with remarkable ecosystem and species diversity. From the sub-Andean foothills to the floodplains, it forms one of the largest pristine forest complexes in the country, essential for national and regional freshwater supplies. It is also an area of high ecological fragility.   

In 1965 TIPNIS was declared a National Park under the following considerations: “That in the provinces of Chapare and Moxos of the Departments of Cochabamba and Beni respectively, the State has areas that due to their particular beauty, location, topography, richness in flora and fauna, deserve to be maintained as virgin reserves.”  

Controversial highway

In 1990, the historic March for Dignity and Life, made by indigenous peoples from the Amazon to the highland city of La Paz, led to the park’s recognition as an Indigenous Territory of Mojeños, Yuracaré and Tsimane, conferring double protection on the region.

The Gaia Foundation, a member of GARN Executive Committee, was one of the early international allies for indigenous peoples in this region.

Liz Hosken, Gaia’s director, said: “At the time the March for Dignity and Life it felt like a huge victory and the protections it gained a safeguard that we hoped would protect TIPNIS in perpetuity. 

“But the ‘untouchable’ status of TIPNIS was shattered when President Evo Morales approved construction of a controversial highway – it cuts through the heart and construction is already underway despite strong local resistance.” 

Environmental impact

Bolivian President Evo Morales gave the go-ahead for the construction of the 190-mile Villa Tunari – San Ignacio de Moxos highway in August 2017, after backing down on plans to build the road after protests in 2011. He said that the new project would favour indigenous peoples and their development.

On 7 and 8 November 2017, at GARN’s International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature held during the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, indigenous leaders from Isiboro Securé told a different story.

Speakers including Marquesa Teco, president of the Women’s Association, denounced the highway, saying that the road would cause permanent and structural damage to their communities, forests and rivers, causing the displacement and extinction of animals. 

They warned about the economic interests that underlie the construction of a highway, which has not been subject to environmental impact studies despite the great ecological fragility of a region the size of Jamaica.

They also shared how the highway would open the park and indigenous territories up to the expansion of the agricultural frontier and facilitate oil and gas extraction, since the Bolivian government approved Supreme Decree 2366 allowing the exploration of hydrocarbons in national parks. 

The testimonies offered at the tribunal spurred GARN to organise the fact finding mission to Bolivia last year.

Universal declaration

In what now appears an ironic gesture, president Evo Morales said in his inaugural speech at the historic World Peoples’ Conference held in Tiquipaya, Cochabamba, in 2010, that “To guarantee Human Rights, it is necessary to recognise and effectively apply the Rights of Mother Earth.”  

According to the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, defence of the Rights of Mother Earth is a duty, and the State has the task of promoting that defence. But can defenders of Human Rights and the Rights of Nature speak freely in Bolivia? 

Data, information and testimonies obtained during this fact-finding mission to TIPNIS suggest this is not the case, and that those opposing nature’s destruction face criminalisation and violence. 

The new TIPNIS report from GARN calls for the government of Bolivia to take action in accordance with its supposed stance on the Rights of Mother Earth.

It demands the definitive halt of the road construction; the cancellation of oil expansion plans; the adoption of measures to stop the advance of colonisation towards the core zone of TIPNIS, and the identification and punishment of those responsible for human rights violations against local peoples. 

The report argues: “For the thousands of Indigenous peoples who have called this place home for millennia, and long before the State designated it a national park, this land is sacred. In caring for this land, they are also protecting a vital part of the Amazonian ecosystem vital to the survival of all of Earth’s inhabitants.” 

The Bolivian State has breached its obligation of respect, protection and conservation of Mother Earth, as established in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth and the country’s national legal framework. 

This Author 

Fiona Wilton is based in Uruguay and works with the Gaia Foundation (UK) and global partners for indigenous self-determination, biocultural diversity revival, the protection of sacred natural sites and Earth Jurisprudence.

Find out more about TIPNIS and this violation of Bolivia’s commitment to the Rights of Mother Earth, view the public presentation and/or download a copy of the full report (Report of the Commission of the International Rights of Nature Tribunal on the case of the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park).

A close advisor to Donald Trump who wants to slash environmental regulation and regards Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro as a “like-minded partner” is acting as the go-between the White House and hard-Brexiters at the top of the UK government.

John Bolton, President Trump’s national security advisor and a pro-guns, pro-war advocate, has been cheerleading for the UK to leave the EU, cut red-tape and strike a free trade deal with the US.

The former US ambassador to the UN, who has has long held anti-EU views, has been revealed to regularly speak on the phone with International Trade Secretary Liam Fox and Transport Secretary Chris Grayling — two hard-Brexiters inside Theresa May’s cabinet.

Campaign operative

In the US, Bolton is connected to some of President Trump’s biggest financiers. His activities have received millions from billionaire businessman Robert Mercer, the man who bankrolled the Trump campaign, and worked with data firm Cambridge Analytica.

He also held a senior fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, which is funded by fossil fuel magnates the Koch brothers, notorious for backing climate science denial worldwide.

Described by Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper as “possibly Washington’s most aggressive hawk”, Bolton sits at the heart of a transAtlantic network pushing for deregulation post-Brexit to advance US right-wing libertarian interests.

Bolton has made no secret of his contempt for the EU and has been publicly calling for a clean cut Brexit which would allow the UK to strike its own free trade deal with the US.

He was pictured with Daniel Hannan, one of Vote Leave’s founders and a senior campaign operative, at the Vote Leave headquarters on the night of the results.

Pesticides

Speaking on Fox News after the referendum result, Bolton said: “Britain can now rid itself of the sclerotic over-regulation of the Brussels bureaucrats. It can reduce its taxes, reduce regulation, be a much more attractive place for foreign investments.”

A month after the EU referendum, Bolton met with the unofficial Leave.EU campaign at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, including Nigel Farage and Andy Wigmore, a businessman and prominent associate of Farage and Arron Banks, the campaign’s main funder.

The group’s most prominent supporters including Jacob Rees-Mogg, former Brexit secretary David Davis, Steve Baker and Boris Johnson all backed the launch of an alternative Brexit plan, which called for the UK to realign its regulatory framework, particularly by cutting environmental protection, to strike free trade deals with the US, China and India.

If these hard-Brexiteers have their way, US products which currently do not meet the EU’s regulatory food and environmental standards — such as hormone-fed beef and chlorine-washed chickens — could enter the UK market.

American agri-businesses recently responded en masse to a consultation by US government’s trade agency demanding food standards be lowered post-Brexit. Some of the responses included dropping safety threshold for pesticides, abandoning existing risk process regarding biotech, getting rid of traceability and and colour warning labelling and removing safety restrictions on beef, pork and poultry.

Marxist plot

Bolton’s endorsement of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who appointed a foreign minister who believes climate change is a “Marxist plot” to stifle western economies and wants to open up the Amazon to miners, farmers and construction companies, highlights the thin line between deregulation and the rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change.

Until he took his post as a Trump advisor, Bolton was a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), one of the most influential right-wing think tanks in the US that has consistently opposed environmental regulation and spread disinformation about climate change.

The AEI has been largely funded by oil giant Exxon Mobil and Koch-related foundations, which aim to advance the world view of fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch.

Bolton has also been a long-time critic of international efforts to reduce emissions and tackle climate change, accusing the UN climate talks of using global warming as an excuse to establish supranational structures of governance.

Speaking to Fox News, Bolton hailed President Trump’s intention to withdraw the US form the Paris Agreement “an excellent decision”.

Election

“The [Paris Agreement] overall objective is more international governance and less national sovereignty,” he said, adding: “We could be dealing with global cooling here […] and these people would be asking for the same [international] structures”.

“We are not going to engage in more blue smoke and mirrors in order to get to more international control,” he said.

Besides his ideological push for a populist low-tax and low-regulation society, Bolton has used data harvesting and micro-targeting to achieve his political ends. This has led him to work closely with Robert Mercer and Cambridge Analytica.

In 2015-16 — in the final stages of the US election campaign — John Bolton’s Super PAC (political action committee) received $3 milllion from Mercer through his hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, according to OpenSecrets data. Between October and December 2017 alone, Mercer gave an additional $1million to Bolton’s Super PAC.

Bolton’s Super PAC was set up to support right-wing Republicans running for election.  

Criminal investigation

Documents provided by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and released by the House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee also reveal how both SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, and Aggregate IQ, the Canadian digital marketing outfit used by the Vote Leave campaign, worked for Bolton during the US 2014 mid-term election.

In one email exchange between the SCL Group, Bolton is described as “a very important client”.

The Super PAC suspended all its political activities when Bolton became a Trump advisor.

In the UK, there remains a host of investigations to establish Aggregate IQ and Cambridge Analytica’s exact role in Vote Leave and Leave.EU’s campaigns.

Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU insit the discussions were preliminary and the company did not carry out work for the Leave campaign. The Met Police is yet to decide whether to launch criminal investigations months after the campaign groups were referred by the Electoral Commission.

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

British scientists have worked out how to make sure of a better-than-even chance that 195 nations can fulfill a promise made in Paris in 2015 to stop global warming at 1.5°C by the end of the century.

The answer is simple: phase out fossil fuel hardware as soon as it reaches the end of its effective life. Scrap the old petrol-powered car and buy electric.

Shut down the coal-burning power generator and get electricity from the wind or the sunlight. Find some renewable fuel for jet planes. Deliver transoceanic cargoes with a marine fuel that isn’t derived from oil or coal.

Lifecycle

There is a catch. Those 195 nations should have already started doing all these things by the end of last year, 2018. To delay a start until 2030 could mean failure, even if – little more than a decade from now – the world then accelerated its escape from fossil fuel addiction.

“Although the challenges laid out by the Paris Agreement are daunting, we indicate 1.5°C remains possible and is attainable with ambitious and immediate emission reduction across all sectors”, the researchers say in the journal Nature Communications.

Their study is based on the match of climate models and a range of possible scenarios and is focused on energy generation, transport and industry: these account for 85 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that have begun to warm the planet and change the climate, and for which researchers have the most reliable lifetime data.

Christopher Smith, of the University of Leeds, worked with colleagues from Britain, Norway, Austria, Switzerland and Canada to model a huge range of possibilities to identify a timetable strategy with a probability of success of 64 percent.

He said: “All fossil fuel infrastructure, such as coal power plants, carries a climate change commitment. A new coal plant will emit carbon dioxide for roughly 40 years across its lifecycle which in turn affects global warming.  

Infrastructure

“Investments into carbon-intensive infrastructure and their development and maintenance lock us in to the associated carbon emissions and make the transition to lower-carbon alternatives more difficult.

“Our research found that the current amount of fossil fuel infrastructure in the global economy does not yet commit us to exceeding the 1.5°C temperature rise limit put forward by the Paris Agreement.

“Climate change policy does need some good news, and [the] message is that we are not (quite) doomed yet”

“We may have missed starting the phase-out by the end of 2018, but we are still within the margin of achieving the scenario the model put forward.”

The implication is that no new oil wells should be drilled, or mines opened; no more coal-burning or oil-burning power plant commissioned. Infrastructure in use now will be retired when it reaches the end of its life, perhaps 40 years from now.

Human history

The scientists don’t discuss how feasible – in political, economic and development terms – such a step will be. Their point is that, to keep the Paris promise, the world must start now.

And their assumption does not incorporate any of the much-feared and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future, as ice caps melt and permafrost thaws to release vast quantities of carbon trapped in once-frozen Arctic soils, and make global warming accelerate.

The study is not the first to warn that the time available for ending fossil fuel dependence and switching to renewable energy resources is limited.

Almost as soon as the world made its historic agreement in Paris many scientists warned that on the basis of pledges made at the time the target would be difficult or impossible to achieve.

The planet has already warmed by 1°C since the Industrial Revolution began to release ever greater levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. One study forecast that a world already at least 1.5°C warmer than it had been for most of human history could arrive by 2026.

Other scientists have welcomed the Leeds research. “Climate change policy does need some good news, and their message is that we are not (quite) doomed yet,” said Phillip Williamson of the University of East Anglia.

“If from now on the greenhouse gas-emitting power plants, factories, cars, ships and planes are replaced by non-polluting alternatives as they reach the end of their lifetimes, then the threshold of 1.5°C warming might not be crossed. Yet that is a very big ‘if’.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

The nuclear energy industry faces severe problems in 2019 – and beyond. Chief among them is the ageing of the global reactor fleet.

The average age of the fleet reached 30 years in mid-2018 and continues to rise. The average lifespan of the current reactor fleet will be about 40 years, according to reasonable estimates.

There will likely be an average of 8‒11 permanent reactor shutdowns annually over the next few decades. This will add up to about 200 reactor shutdowns between 2014 and 2040.

Shutdowns

Indeed, the International Energy Agency expects a “wave of retirements of ageing nuclear reactors” and an “unprecedented rate of decommissioning”.  

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) anticipates 320 gigawatts (GW) of retirements from 2017 to 2050 (that’s about 80 percent of the current worldwide reactor fleet).

Another IAEA report estimates up to 139 GW of permanent shutdowns from 2018‒2030 and up to 186 GW of further shutdowns from 2030-2050.

The reference scenario in the 2017 edition of the WNA’s Nuclear Fuel Report has 140 reactors closing by 2035. 

A 2017 Nuclear Energy Insider article estimates up to 200 permanent shutdowns over the next two decades.

Construction starts

So an average of 8‒11 construction starts and grid connections will be required to maintain current nuclear output. Yet construction starts have averaged just 4.5 over the past five years.

The World Nuclear Association (WNA) claimed that 2018 was a “positive year for nuclear power“. And indeed it was ‒ compared to 2017. That was one of the industry’s worst-ever years.

The WNA cited nuclear power’s net gain in 2018 (nine reactor grid connections compared to six permanent shutdowns). A superficial look at the numbers suggests some more good news for the industry.

The number of reactor grid connections (or start-ups) over the past five years (38) almost doubled the number in the five years before that (21). If the number was to double again, the much-hyped nuclear renaissance would be upon us.

A casual observer might also be impressed by the fact that over the past decade the number of reactor grid connections (59) and construction starts (71) exceeded the number of permanent reactor shutdowns (50).

Nuclear decommissioning

According to the WNA, 41 reactors will enter commercial operation in the four years from 2019‒22. Then the pre-Fukushima mini-renaissance (38 construction starts from 2008‒2010) slows dramatically with an estimated total of just nine reactor start-ups in the following four years.

Ominously for the industry, the 22 construction starts from 2014‒18 was less than half the number (49) from 2009‒13.

The (independent) World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) noted in early January that 49 reactors are under construction worldwide ‒ the first time the number has fallen below 50 in a decade, down 19 since 2013, and the number has decreased for five years in a row.

If all these contradictory good-news, bad-news figures seem a little … contradictory, that’s because nuclear power currently reflects two opposing dynamics: the mini-renaissance is evident but will subside by the mid-2020s, and the era of nuclear decommissioning (discussed later) has begun and will be in sharp focus by the mid-2020s.

Grim prospects

For the first time in many years, perhaps ever, the IAEA was up-front about the grim prospects for nuclear power in a September 2018 report.

The IAEA said: “Nuclear power’s electricity generating capacity risks shrinking in the coming decades as ageing reactors are retired and the industry struggles with reduced competitiveness …

“Over the short term, the low price of natural gas, the impact of renewable energy sources on electricity prices, and national nuclear policies in several countries following the accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011 are expected to continue weighing on nuclear power’s growth prospects.”

The report added: “In addition, the nuclear power industry faces increased construction times and costs due to heightened safety requirements, challenges in deploying advanced technologies and other factors.”

The IAEA’s low and high projections for global nuclear power capacity in 2030 are both 36 percent lower than the same projections in 2010, the year before the Fukushima disaster.

Nuclear suicide

Steve Kidd, a former World Nuclear Association executive, noted in an August 2018 article: “The current upward spike in reactor commissioning certainly looks impressive (at least compared with the recent past) but there are few signs that here will be a further uplift in the 2020s.

“What we see today is largely the result of rapid growth in the Chinese industry, which has now seemingly ended. … In Asia, the sharp downturn in Chinese interest in nuclear is unlikely to be replaced by India or by a combination of the other populous counties there.

He added: “It is clear that without a strong lead from the established nuclear countries, a worldwide uplift in reactor construction is not going to happen.”

And therein lies a fundamental problem for the nuclear industry: it is in a frightful mess in the three countries that accounted for 56 percent of global nuclear power capacity just before the Fukushima disaster: the US, France and Japan.

A 2017 EnergyPostWeekly article said “the EU, the US and Japan are busy committing nuclear suicide.”

Spin

Bright New World, an Australian pro-nuclear lobby group (that accepts secret corporate donations) listed four wins in 2018.

1. Taiwanese voters voiced support for overturning legislation to eliminate nuclear power; 2. Poland announced plans for a 6‒9 GW nuclear sector; 3. China connected the world’s first AP1000 and EPR reactors to the electrical grid and 4. Some progress with Generation IV R&D projects.

Those are modest and pyrrhic wins. To take each in turn:

Taiwan’s government remains committed to phasing out nuclear power although the 2025 deadline has been abandoned following a referendum in November 2018.

Poland might join the club of countries producing nuclear power ‒ or it might not. Currently it is a member of a group of countries that failed to complete partially-built power reactors and have never generated nuclear power, along with Austria, Cuba, the Philippines, and North Korea.

Industrial processes

China’s nuclear power program has stalled ‒ the country has not opened a new construction site for a commercial reactor since December 2016. The most likely outcome over the next decade is that a small number of new reactor projects will be approved each year, well short of previous projections and not enough to match the decline in the rest of the world.

Generation IV fantasies are as fantastical as ever. David Elliot ‒ author of the 2017 book Nuclear Power: Past, Present and Future ‒ notes that many Generation IV concepts “are in fact old ideas that were looked at in the early days and mostly abandoned. There were certainly problems with some of these early experimental reactors, some of them quite dramatic.”

One example of the gap between Generation IV rhetoric and reality was Transatomic Power’s decision to give up on its molten salt reactor R&D project in the US in September 2018 ‒ just weeks before the public release of the New Fire propaganda film that heavily promotes the young entrepreneurs who founded Transatomic. The company tried but failed to raise a modest US$15 million for the next phase of its R&D project.

An article by four current and former researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in July 2018, argues that no US advanced reactor design will be commercialised before mid-century.

Further, the Carnegie authors systematically investigated how a domestic market could develop to support a small modular reactor industry in the US over the next few decades ‒ including using them to back up wind and solar, desalinate water, produce heat for industrial processes, or serve military bases ‒ and were unable to make a convincing case.

Electricity generation

Kennedy Maize, an established energy journalist, recently argued in POWER magazine that Generation IV R&D projects are “longshots”.

He wrote that “highest profile of the LWR apostates is TerraPower” which is “backed by Microsoft founder and multi-billionaire Bill Gates.”

He added: “TerraPower is working on a liquid-sodium-cooled breeder-burner machine that can run on uranium waste, while it generates power and plutonium, with the plutonium used to generate more power, all in a continuous process.”

TerraPower recently abandoned its plan for a prototype reactor in China due to new restrictions placed on nuclear trade with China by the Trump administration.

Bright New World might have cited some other pyrrhic wins in 2018. The French government abandoned previous plans to reduce nuclear power to 50 percent of total electricity generation by 2035 – but still plans to shut 14 reactors by 2035.

Dying industry

The Vogtle project in the US state of Georgia came close to being abandoned but it was rescued despite multi-year delays and monumental cost overruns (the estimate for two AP1000 reactors has doubled from US$14 billion to US$28 billion).

In many countries with nuclear power, the prospects for new reactors are dim and rear-guard battles are being fought to extend the lifespans of ageing reactors that are approaching or past their design date.

A new era is approaching ‒ the era of nuclear decommissioning ‒ following on from nuclear power’s growth spurt from the 1970s to the 1990s, then 20 years of stagnation.

The era of nuclear decommissioning will entail:

• A decline in the number of operating reactors.
• An increasingly unreliable and accident-prone reactor fleet as ageing sets in.
• Countless battles over lifespan extensions for ageing reactors.
• An internationalisation of anti-nuclear opposition as neighbouring countries object to the continued operation of ageing reactors (international opposition to Belgium’s ageing reactors is a case in point ‒ and there are numerous other examples).
• Battles over and problems with decommissioning projects (e.g. the UK government’s £100+ million settlement over a botched decommissioning tendering process).
• Battles over taxpayer bailout proposals for companies and utilities that haven’t set aside adequate funds for decommissioning and nuclear waste management and disposal. (According to Nuclear Energy Insider, European nuclear utilities face “significant and urgent challenges” with over a third of the continent’s nuclear plants to be shut down by 2025, and utilities facing a €118 billion shortfall in decommissioning and waste management funds.)
• Battles over proposals to impose nuclear waste repositories and stores on unwilling or divided communities.

The era of nuclear decommissioning will be characterised by escalating battles (and escalating sticker shock) over reactor lifespan extensions, decommissioning and nuclear waste management.

In those circumstances, it will become even more difficult than it currently is for the industry to pursue new reactor projects. A feedback loop could take hold and then the nuclear industry will be well and truly in crisis, if it isn’t already.

And if that sounds like wishful thinking from someone who opposes the industry, keep in mind that nuclear power supporters have issued any number of warnings in recent years about nuclear power’s “rapidly accelerating crisis” and a “crisis that threatens the death of nuclear energy in the West“, while pondering what if anything might be salvaged from the “ashes of today’s dying industry”.

This Author

Dr Jim Green is the editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter and the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia.

The decision by Japanese firm Hitachi this month to postpone the Wyfla nuclear power station development in Anglesey, as well as its Oldbury project near Bristol, leaves a substantial gap in future low carbon electricity supply for the UK.

Work has started on Hinkley Point in Somerset, but this is the only one of the six major nuclear projects in the pipeline to progress. Last year Toshiba, another Japanese company, pulled out of developing a power plant at Moorside in Cumbria.

The proposed developments by Chinese firm CGN at Sizewell (Suffolk) and Bradwell (Essex) are politically contentious and yet to be agreed.

More renewables

In 2008, the Labour government set out its strategic vision for a future UK low carbon power sector, which had nuclear at its centre. But in the 20 years since, the economics of nuclear have deteriorated, while the remarkable drop in the cost of renewables and flexible energy sources is threatening the profitability of large, inflexible power stations.

There are currently four high-voltage electricity interconnectors that connect Britain to the Netherlands (BritNed), France (IFA), and the island of Ireland (Moyle and EWIC). A fifth connection, running to Belgium (Nemo), is due to go live at the end of January.

At least another eight are planned to be developed by the late 2020s, nearly trebling the supply capacity that currently exists.

Interconnectors are important for energy and climate change for several reasons. They help decarbonise UK electricity consumption by importing lower carbon power from countries such as France which has lots of nuclear power, and – in future – Norway and Iceland which generate electricity from hydro and geothermal.

They also contribute to decarbonisation by helping to match supply and demand, which in turn allows more renewables and electric vehicles.

Negative consequences

Excess electricity can then be exported during periods of low demand or imported when demand is high – something that helps with security of electricity supply, as imports can complement domestic power generation.

Interconnectors also help reduce electricity prices. The UK has higher wholesale power prices than other EU countries, meaning electricity typically flows to the UK from markets where power is less expensive. Buying this cheaper electricity lowers prices here, which reduces consumer bills.

Even though the current and previous governments have actively encouraged the building of interconnectors, the UK leaving the EU threatens their development and operation.

After Brexit the UK is expected to leave the EU’s internal energy market, as well as key EU market arrangements and trading platforms. These allow electricity trade to happen in the most efficient and cost-effective way and losing access to them could lead to higher bills for consumers.

This would also reduce the system benefits of developing interconnectors as they cannot work at their most effective, which in turn would have negative consequences for future development of renewables. But irrespective of the outcome of Brexit, the UK should build more interconnection as it is a ‘no-regrets’ option for the UK.

Decarbonisation

Even after leaving the EU, they can still needed to help with the transition to a low carbon energy system, the least-cost pathway to decarbonisation, and fill the capacity gap from the postponed nuclear plants.

The UK and EU will need to continue cooperating on climate change and energy issues post Brexit, because the connected physical space between them means that choices made by one will impact the other.

As the Brexit negotiations move towards discussions on the future relationship, the UK should prioritise interconnectors in discussion on future cooperation and commit to cross-border initiatives in energy markets around the North Sea region.

The rationale to build interconnectors and their contribution to energy and tackling climate change has long been recognised, but there is now an even greater need to construct them.

Despite Brexit, the UK government needs to bolster its support for new interconnectors and maintain high levels of cooperation with the EU and regional partners to ensure they get built and the UK stays on the path to decarbonisation.

This Author

Joseph Dutton is a policy adviser for the global climate change think-tank E3G. All views are his own. He tweets at @JDuttonUK.

Weak enforcement of environmental law is a trend that is exacerbating environmental threats worldwide, according to a major new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The report presents the first ever global assessment of environmental laws. It found that the number of environmental laws created has grown 38-fold since 1972, including the adoption of a constitutional right to a healthy environment in 88 countries, and the creation of over 350 environmental courts and tribunals in over 50 countries.

However, while international aid helped scores of countries to enter into more than 1,100 environmental agreements since 1972, and develop many environmental framework laws, neither aid, nor domestic budgeting, has led to the creation of strong agencies capable of effectively enforcing laws and regulations.

Harassment and killing

Factors contributing to poor enforcement include poor coordination across government agencies, weak institutional capacity, lack of access to information, corruption and stifled civic engagement.

David Boyd, UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment said: “This compelling new report solves the mystery of why problems such as pollution, declining biodiversity and climate change persist despite the proliferation of environmental laws in recent decades.”

Unless implementation and enforcement is strengthened, even rules that appear to be rigorous are destined to fail and the fundamental human right to a healthy environment will go unfulfilled, he added.

The report also highlights growing resistance to environmental laws which has led to the harassment and killing of environmental defenders. Between 2002 and 2013, 908 people, including forest rangers, government inspectors, and local activists, were killed in 35 countries, with 197 killed in 2017 alone.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.