Scotland’s seabed ‘rainforests’ are under threat from industry dredging proposals, with potentially significant ramifications for climate change.

Kelp is the generic name for several species of large brown algae seaweed which grow in ‘kelp forests’ in Scotland’s coastal waters. Kelp forests have been widely compared to terrestrial rainforests because of the biodiversity and abundance of flora and fauna they support.

The kelp forests are due to be exploited by a company called Marine Biopolymers, from Ayr, in South West Scotland, which is benefitting from a grant from the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC) that helps microenterprises specialising in industrial biotechnology “maximise the value of seaweed”.

Armed forces

But campaigners claim the process puts the marine environment under threat from the mechanical dredging of large parts of the seabed causing a threat to fish stocks such as Atlantic Cod, Pollock and Saithe (also known as Coley), as well as lobsters, crabs and a host of sealife.

As Ailsa McLellan, an oyster farmer from Ullapool and founder of the ‘No Kelp Dredging’ campaign group, told DeSmog UK:

“Marine Biopolymers want to tow a large-toothed dredge in strips through kelp beds ripping the entire plant up by the holdfast (killing it), then throw the holdfast over the side to ‘facilitate survival’ of invertebrates. Assuming any invertebrates survive this treatment, where are they meant to go when chucked back over the side? Their habitat is gone, the other invertebrates are not going to ‘budge up’ and make room for them, that’s not how biology works.”

“Moreover, climate change is happening. Its effects, such as increasing acidity and rougher seas, are already being measured in our oceans. Kelp sequesters significant amounts of carbon, buffers acidity, and acts as a storm barrier for coasts.”

However Marine Biopolymers co-founder David Mackie insisted its plans to harvest the seaweed are “entirely sustainable” and that the product would be turned into “eco-friendly bioplastics” which are fully-biodegradebale and could be used high-strength transparent visors and shields for use by the police and armed forces.

Hand-harvesting

The company claims that a ban would “cost Scotland milllions” in unrealised potential and complained that the process was more akin to “combing” the seabed than dredging.

In a leaked exchange seen by DeSmog UK, Dr Mark Dorris at Napier University, the lead scientist on the project claimed:

“As for the amount we will harvest, at full capacity a yearly harvest represents just 0.15% of the total kelp available. To put that into some context that’s the same percentage of your hair you lose naturally every day. It’s also around 1% of the kelp that is lost naturally due to choppy seas.”

But while Marine Biopolymers stands accused by activists of greenwashing the process faces further controversy as the Scottish Government faces accusation of collusion after a Freedom of Information request revealed a senior official from Marine Scotland had told the company they were “keen to see this kind of initiative proceed.”

Representatives of the fishing industry and the existing seaweed hand-harvesting sector have now written to Scotland’s Cabinet Secretary Roseanna Cunningham MSP, requesting an urgent meeting ahead of a crunch vote on the future of Scotland’s kelp forests on 21 November.

A living sea

This follows an earlier letter opposing kelp dredging signed by representatives of more than 500 businesses that rely on kelp forests, after which Parliament’s Environment Committee voted to put a ban on kelp dredging into the Scottish Crown Estate Bill.

Industry leaders are concerned that this ban may be watered down on Wednesday when the whole Scottish Parliament considers the legislation for the final time.

Over the weekend a petition opposing mechanical kelp dredging, launched by Ailsa McLellan, the founder of the ‘No Kelp Dredging’ Facebook campaign, hit 20,000 signatures. The campaign is also backed by the Sustainable Inshore Fisheries Trust, which runs the Help The Kelp campaign, and works to protect both sustainable coastal industries and the marine environment those businesses rely upon.

Alistair Sinclair, national co-ordinator for the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation, who has written to Roseanna Cunningham MSP requesting a meeting, said:

“I implore MSPs to reject any notion of destroying our marine environment any further. If we are to commit to ensuring a living sea and indeed the opportunity to earn a living from the sea for future generations, we must stop this kelp harvesting at such cost in pursuit of personal gain. Kelp is recognised by many within the scientific community as a building block of life below the surface of the sea.”

Fishing industry

But the issue is deeper than potential environmental destruction. Kelp forests also play an important part in the mitigation of climate change.

They are an important carbon store in Scottish seas, considered one of the main pathways for carbon entering long-term storage in low-sediments (1.8 millions of tonnes of carbon per year) and have the highest carbon sequestration rate for marine habitats in Scotland (1,732,000 tonnes of carbon per year).

Scottish National Heritage’s report into Blue Carbon noted that kelp is the predominant marine plant producer of carbon entering long-term storage.  And the Scottish Government’s 2018 Climate Change Plan stated:

“Coastal marine protected areas have stored the equivalent of four years of scotland’s emissions. This research highlights that kelp forests are of particular importance.”

Guy Grieve, founder of the Ethical Shellfish Company, based on the Isle of Mull and employing 18 full-time and part-time staff, said: “Alongside others from Scotland’s fishing industry, I have this weekend written to Roseanna Cunningham, Cabinet Secretary for the Environment, to see whether we can arrange an urgent meeting ahead of Wednesday’s vote in Parliament.

Kelp forests

“We know from the Norwegian experience that dredging kelp forests disrupts a crucial nursery environment for young fish, and we do not wish to see Scotland’s fish and shellfish stocks face the same threat. The Scottish Government talks a good game about ‘Scotland the brand’, and about being a ‘good food nation’: now it’s time to see if they mean it.

“I cannot understand why hundreds of existing jobs, jobs which will exist indefinitely if we protect our kelp forests, should ever be put at risk for a few dozen short term jobs employing people to uproot those kelp forests.

“Sometimes economics and the environment appear to point in different directions, but on this issue they go hand in hand. The jobs our sector supports are typically in the coastal communities which can least afford to be put under more pressure.”

“I hope the Cabinet Secretary will take the time to meet with us this week and I hope she will decide to protect the kelp forests our sectors all rely on.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Some of the nations most vulnerable to climate change met this week, as part of the world’s first ever zero-carbon, virtual Climate Summit. The meeting was hosted by the Republic of the Marshall Islands in an effort to boost international climate action.

Fourty-seven countries were represented by government officials including more than twenty Heads of State and a raft of new measures were announced. 

These measures included an enhanced national climate action plan from the Marshall Islands – way ahead of the 2020 deadline set for all other countries under the UN Paris Agreement – and a bold initiative from Vanuatu to sue fossil fuel companies and countries failing in their duty to limit global warming.

Collective shock

As a citizen of the Marshall Islands I hope that this helps pile the pressure on big industrialised states with the capacity to do far more to tackle the climate crisis and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius.

My mother country will drown if we don’t step up the fight against major fossil fuel projects.

At our second national conference on climate change this year, projections showing the effects of water levels rising – inundating significant portions of the capital, highly populated villages and the airport – caused a collective, audible gasp in the audience.

Scientists and experts have recommended that the government begins physically elevating the existing land or building artificial islands. The situation is that dire and that urgent.

I’ve been travelling the world to share my experiences of how climate impacts are threatening the destruction of homelands and entire cultures.

Climate impacts

Some people and institutions are reacting to this reality faster, and more effectively than others.

In Japan I attended a gathering of some of the best architects, designers, artists gathered at the Innovative City Forum to consider new ways to future-proof our cities to limit their footprint on the environment and cope with unavoidable climate impacts we have already triggered.

I used this platform to share with the audience my grief with the possibility of blasting apart our reefs to protect against sea level rise and that we are being forced into doing something we would have never considered before.

As I travel I meet people standing up to take action against climate change in a variety of powerful and meaningful ways.

This September I met with poet and activist Aka Niviana high up on a melting glacier in her home country, Greenland. Here I saw for myself an entire mountainscape of rubble and rock that, according to the glaciologist we were with, was covered in ice just five years before.

Climate warriors

As we flew away in a helicopter, we witnessed a massive glacier calving into the ocean. Together, Aka and I filmed a poem, Rise, which reflects the turmoil we collectively experience as one’s homeland melts and the other’s drowns. Here is an excerpt:

“Let me show you

airports underwater

bulldozed reefs, blasted sands

and plans to build new atolls

forcing land from an ancient, rising sea,

forcing us to imagine

turning ourselves to stone”

The voices of impacted communities must be amplified and heard in the fight to keep fossil fuels in the ground. In some places, they are. 

Around this time last year, I travelled to Germany with seventeen other Pacific Climate Warriors – grassroots organisers from around fourteen other islands across Oceania – to join with climate protectors  in their ongoing opposition to Germany’s coal production and use.

In the freezing rain, we served kava in a traditional Pacific ceremony, asking for permission to enter their land. We travelled with them to an open-pit lignite mine near Cologne, singing an island classic at the top of our lungs. 

International petition

We were shocked into silence when we arrived by the chasm that opened out in front of us: a gash across land. An emptiness.

Germany has been a leader in many international climate initiatives – yet it continues to open and expand these devastating coal mines.

Germany needs to stop the production and use of coal by 2025 at the latest in order to make a fair contribution in the effort of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.

People supporting the rights of communities impacted by climate change alongside the grassroots climate change organisation 350.org have launched an international petition demanding that the government immediately put a stop to coal expansion projects and initiate a rapid coal phase out.

Meeting national climate targets for 2020 is only possible by phasing out half of country’s coal capacity immediately but the German government is lacking the political will to do so.

Stand in solidarity

Next month, a commission formed by the German government is expected to suggest a plan for the coal phase out. According to leaked information, it is not very likely that this plan will be in line with the Paris Agreement.

Since my visit to Hambach the people of the anti-coal movement in Germany have been putting their bodies on the line to prevent glaciers melting, to stop islands drowning and to preserve their own lands.

Mass protests and a growing anti-coal movement helped save – at least for now – the pristine, ancient Hambach forest from RWE’s plans to expand an enormous lignite mine in western Germany – the largest source of CO2 in Europe.

The resistance to massive fossil fuel projects is growing all across Europe, anti-fracking in the UK, anti-coal in Germany and NoTAP in Southern Europe to name a few.

As I continue to travel the world to tell the story of the Marshall Islands, and other areas impacted by climate change, I urge others to stand in solidarity with these communities and with those who are placing their bodies on the line to stop the dirty fossil fuel projects that will devastate the rest of the world. Climate change knows no borders.

This Author

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is a poet and climate change activist from the Marshall Islands.

Governments will meet in Katowice, Poland next month for a summit known as the COP24, three years on from the signing of the Paris Agreement.

The meeting comes at a time when the world is undergoing profound changes, with consequences for humans and the ecosystem felt now and for generations to come. 

My country, Ireland, experienced a series of flash floods this August, with a typical month’s worth of rain falling in a matter of hours. These events will unfortunately become more frequent.

Extreme weather

Extreme weather is becoming the new normal. This year, 2018, is on track to become one of the hottest, with each of the three previous years beating new records. Temperatures topped 30 degrees in the Arctic Circle last summer and Finland had the hottest July on record.

In Greece, forest fires in the Attica region killed 99 people. Meanwhile, California is still counting the death toll from the most destructive fires in its history. 

In vulnerable countries, where resources are few, climate change is intensifying existing problems.

Extreme weather patterns are a threat to food security worldwide and increase the risk of hunger. Unprecedented floods in South Asia last year claimed more than 1,200 lives and left almost two million children out of school. Efforts to eradicate poverty are being hampered by the avoidable effects of climate change.

The starkest of warnings came just last month from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which gave us a mere twelve years to limit climate change catastrophe. What is perhaps most remarkable in the report is that the upper limit of two degree warming as defined by the Paris Agreement is no longer a viable target.

Radical rethink

Governments should focus on a maximum of 1.5 degrees warming as this half-degree difference could significantly worsen the risk of floods, droughts and extreme heat. At 1.5 degrees, the proportion of the population exposed to water stress could be 50 percent lower than at 2 degrees, for example. 

All this has implications for policy, as it will require a radical rethink of commitments to date and a total transformation of our societies and the global economy.

The upcoming COP24 will be an opportunity for governments to take stock of progress and to develop a framework to deliver on their commitments. But it will also be an opportunity to renew pledges and up our ambition towards the radical turnaround that is needed.

The UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa calls this upcoming COP24 “Paris 2.0” given its importance at this historical moment. 

Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was a huge setback for our collective efforts, opening the door for other countries to roll back on their commitments.

Growing alliance

Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro has made a mockery out of the country’s commitment to the Paris Agreement by promising to increase tree logging in the Amazon rainforest.

Bolsonaro, backed by big business, wants to replace protected forest with industry and beef farming. Trump and Bolsonaro represent a growing alliance around the world of far-right populists, business elites and climate denialists that want to tear apart multilateral cooperation and return the world to fascism.

What is at stake is not only growing militarism, inequality, and poverty, but the very future of our planet. 

This is why we cannot rely on politicians alone to drive change. To stop climate change and limit its impact, collective action is needed and appropriate finance to support countries unable to pay for the costs of adaptation.

Last month I attended the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco and I was heartened by how some of the US states adhere to Paris targets despite persistent climate change denial by the Trump Administration.

Meeting commitments 

The America’s Pledge movement has pushed cities, states, businesses and universities to reduce emissions. A new global alliance of 20 countries committed to phasing out coal for the production of energy has also emerged. Several countries have pledged to go carbon neutral by 2050.

This would not be possible without the ordinary women and men who have continued to take to the streets and organise around smart ideas, through cross-struggle alliances, pressuring those in power for an end to our addiction to fossil fuel. 

The US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement presents a challenge – and indeed an opportunity – for the EU to fill the leadership vacuum. Europe is responsible for 10 percent of global emissions and 25 percent of all historic emissions.

This year, the EU has adopted legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 from 1990 levels. The Commission claims that it is on track to meet its commitments in the Paris Agreement.

However, according to the Climate Action Tracker, actual EU commitments are consistent with warming above 2 degrees, therefore incompatible with Paris Agreement. This is just not acceptable. 

Net-zero emissions

Already some countries are calling for the EU to be more ambitious. The European Parliament has called for a target of 55 percent below 1990 levels, which would make the EU consistent with the latest IPCC warnings to keep warming to 1.5 degrees.

At COP24, where I will be part of the European Parliament delegation, I will join civil society movements from Europe and around the world to demand true leadership from the EU.

This means a commitment in words and action for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 as the only realistic solution to stop climate change and save our planet.  

This Author

Lynn Boylan is an MEP for Sinn Féin, Ireland and part of the left-wing group in the European Parliament GUE/NGL. Boylan is representing the European Parliament in COP24, Poland. 

Governments will meet in Katowice, Poland next month for a summit known as the COP24, three years on from the signing of the Paris Agreement.

The meeting comes at a time when the world is undergoing profound changes, with consequences for humans and the ecosystem felt now and for generations to come. 

My country, Ireland, experienced a series of flash floods this August, with a typical month’s worth of rain falling in a matter of hours. These events will unfortunately become more frequent.

Extreme weather

Extreme weather is becoming the new normal. This year, 2018, is on track to become one of the hottest, with each of the three previous years beating new records. Temperatures topped 30 degrees in the Arctic Circle last summer and Finland had the hottest July on record.

In Greece, forest fires in the Attica region killed 99 people. Meanwhile, California is still counting the death toll from the most destructive fires in its history. 

In vulnerable countries, where resources are few, climate change is intensifying existing problems.

Extreme weather patterns are a threat to food security worldwide and increase the risk of hunger. Unprecedented floods in South Asia last year claimed more than 1,200 lives and left almost two million children out of school. Efforts to eradicate poverty are being hampered by the avoidable effects of climate change.

The starkest of warnings came just last month from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which gave us a mere twelve years to limit climate change catastrophe. What is perhaps most remarkable in the report is that the upper limit of two degree warming as defined by the Paris Agreement is no longer a viable target.

Radical rethink

Governments should focus on a maximum of 1.5 degrees warming as this half-degree difference could significantly worsen the risk of floods, droughts and extreme heat. At 1.5 degrees, the proportion of the population exposed to water stress could be 50 percent lower than at 2 degrees, for example. 

All this has implications for policy, as it will require a radical rethink of commitments to date and a total transformation of our societies and the global economy.

The upcoming COP24 will be an opportunity for governments to take stock of progress and to develop a framework to deliver on their commitments. But it will also be an opportunity to renew pledges and up our ambition towards the radical turnaround that is needed.

The UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa calls this upcoming COP24 “Paris 2.0” given its importance at this historical moment. 

Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was a huge setback for our collective efforts, opening the door for other countries to roll back on their commitments.

Growing alliance

Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro has made a mockery out of the country’s commitment to the Paris Agreement by promising to increase tree logging in the Amazon rainforest.

Bolsonaro, backed by big business, wants to replace protected forest with industry and beef farming. Trump and Bolsonaro represent a growing alliance around the world of far-right populists, business elites and climate denialists that want to tear apart multilateral cooperation and return the world to fascism.

What is at stake is not only growing militarism, inequality, and poverty, but the very future of our planet. 

This is why we cannot rely on politicians alone to drive change. To stop climate change and limit its impact, collective action is needed and appropriate finance to support countries unable to pay for the costs of adaptation.

Last month I attended the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco and I was heartened by how some of the US states adhere to Paris targets despite persistent climate change denial by the Trump Administration.

Meeting commitments 

The America’s Pledge movement has pushed cities, states, businesses and universities to reduce emissions. A new global alliance of 20 countries committed to phasing out coal for the production of energy has also emerged. Several countries have pledged to go carbon neutral by 2050.

This would not be possible without the ordinary women and men who have continued to take to the streets and organise around smart ideas, through cross-struggle alliances, pressuring those in power for an end to our addiction to fossil fuel. 

The US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement presents a challenge – and indeed an opportunity – for the EU to fill the leadership vacuum. Europe is responsible for 10 percent of global emissions and 25 percent of all historic emissions.

This year, the EU has adopted legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 from 1990 levels. The Commission claims that it is on track to meet its commitments in the Paris Agreement.

However, according to the Climate Action Tracker, actual EU commitments are consistent with warming above 2 degrees, therefore incompatible with Paris Agreement. This is just not acceptable. 

Net-zero emissions

Already some countries are calling for the EU to be more ambitious. The European Parliament has called for a target of 55 percent below 1990 levels, which would make the EU consistent with the latest IPCC warnings to keep warming to 1.5 degrees.

At COP24, where I will be part of the European Parliament delegation, I will join civil society movements from Europe and around the world to demand true leadership from the EU.

This means a commitment in words and action for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 as the only realistic solution to stop climate change and save our planet.  

This Author

Lynn Boylan is an MEP for Sinn Féin, Ireland and part of the left-wing group in the European Parliament GUE/NGL. Boylan is representing the European Parliament in COP24, Poland. 

As the transition to renewables speeds up, governments will have to seriously think about what will happen to people working in the fossil fuel industry.

When governments start planning for national renewable energy transitions, it is important that they are clear about new job creation (in renewables or any other sector) and how to rehabilitate fossil fuel workers and connected communities.

Forward planning 

Ken Smith of Unifor explained the need for governments to have a just transition plan. “Suppose there is a man living by the river in a fire zone. He has children and belongings. He doesn’t want to lose things when fire comes. What should he do?

“He should build the bridge before fire comes. That’s what is required. Similarly, countries have to plan a transition. Give training, and deploy fossil fuel workers in other industries. Create jobs before the transition.” 

Sandeep asked Ken whether he thinks oil sands workers need a transition plan. He replied, “Yes, absolutely. There are all kinds of things that can be done. There is lots for all of us in Canada. The future doesn’t have to be so gloomy. But we have to plan a transition for workers.

“I was unemployed so I had to move here. But I moved away from my family. Now Fort McMurray is my home and people here are my family members.

“It’s like a temporary community. However, it can’t just work on oil. We need to diversify, get training and develop industries like wind, solar and hydro. This will prevent a collapse.”

Just transition 

Ken is not alone. Many other Canadian trade unions are talking about the just transition, along with policy research institutes and non-profit organizations. Throughout India, let alone in Jharia, there is little discussion about it, and even scantier action.

The idea of a just transition has recently started to attract global attention and is being championed by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Just transition was an element in the Paris Agreement, which recognizes “the imperative of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities.”

Since then, the ILO has set out Guidelines for a Just Transition towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for Alland has agreed to team up with the UNFCCC to help boost global action on just transition.

A few global examples of just transition in practice are coming to the forefront. Following the decline of the coal industry in Germany, some German cities have shown examples of a way forward for former coal communities.

Cultural hubs

Essen, in western Germany, has converted old coal mine sites into cultural hubs by creating industrial heritage museums. Each year, millions of tourists visit the Zollverein Coal Mine in Essen, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.

In this area, local coal communities have transformed and reinvented themselves with the help of government, unions and other stakeholders to ensure a sustainable future. This could be one way of helping fossil-fuel-dependent communities transition to a better future.

China and India have also taken some initiative to transform former coal mines. In Liulong, in east-central Anhui province, China has built a huge floating solar project on a lake that covers a now-abandoned coal mine, and the provincial government has plans to expand this project to at least a dozen more sites.

The project employs former coal mining workers from the region, including 57-year-old Yang Xuancheng, who described his switch in professions in an interview for a New York Times article: “This aboveground work is so much more pleasant than the hot air down in a coal mine,” he said.

In India, local governments are mulling over different options to reorient former fossil fuel workers and their communities. Although these initiatives are still at a preliminary planning stage, they are noteworthy developments.

Local initiative 

In the Ramgarh district of Jharkhand, about 130 kilometres from Jharia, the local fisheries department is trying to convert mined-out coal mines into lakes and encourage villagers, including former coal industry workers, to form cooperatives and take up fish farming as a new profession.

Ramgarh is a local initiative; there are others at the national level. In 2015, the federal government passed legislation requiring each mining district in the country to set up a District Mineral Foundation (DMF), an agency with a mandate to help communities living in mining areas by empowering them and improving their economic situation.

“It took us about seven to eight years to convince the government,” explained Chandra Bhushan of the Centre for Science and Environment. “The DMFs are responsible for collecting 10 to 30 per cent of the royalty paid by mining companies, and will also be responsible for using those funds to help the people living in those areas.

“The funds are meant to be used for educating people, improving health services and improving nutrition. A part of the money should also be kept as funds for the future. I think some of this money could be used for the just transition.”

One of the key recommendations of the Centre for Science and Environment is that DMF funds should be used “to revive the economy of the area when mining finishes, to avoid the issue of ‘ghost towns.’”

Climate leadership

Finally, there are some interesting preliminary developments in Alberta. In November 2015, the provincial government announced the introduction of a new Climate Leadership Plan. The plan introduced sweeping changes to Alberta’s electricity sector, including the phase-out of coal-generated electricity by 2030.

The plan also included the implementation of a new carbon price on greenhouse gas emissions, efforts to develop more renewable energy, a 100-megatonne cap on oil sands emissions and deep reductions in methane emissions.

Phasing out coal-generated electricity by 2030 means hastening the closure of Alberta’s coal-fired power plants and associated coal mining and processing operations, affecting over 3,000 workers. In order to help this phase-out process progress smoothly, the provincial government created an Advisory Panel on Coal Communities that met with affected communities, such as Hanna, Alberta, that face large-scale job loss because of the plan.

The panel submitted recommendations to the government with advice and options regarding how to support affected workers and communities. The government has also earmarked $998 million from the carbon levy for “large scale renewable energy, bioenergy and technology, coal community transition and other Climate Leadership Plan implementation initiatives.” The Pembina Institute calculated that the government’s plans for fostering renewable energy development and energy efficiency in Alberta could generate more jobs than those lost by retiring coal power.

As these plans are still very much in the development phase, it remains to be seen how exactly government will help affected workers and communities transition.

New skills

All stakeholders need to think about helping making this transition happen. Several of the people we interviewed are already talking about helping fossil fuel workers make a transition to the renewable energy industry.

They think that some fossil fuel industry workers could be trained to acquire new skills relevant to the renewable energy industry, which would not only sustain their families but also help the world move towards renewable energy faster.

These Authors

Sandeep Pai is an award-winning journalist and PhD student within University of British Columbia’s Department of Forest Resources Management. Savannah Carr-Wilson works in the field of environmental and Aboriginal law in British Columbia. This article is an extract of their book Total Transition: The Human Side of the Renewable Energy Revolution (RMB, 2018). 

Barclays is due to publish an updated energy policy by the end of 2018.

Mary Francis, a non-executive director of Barclays, told shareholders that the bank’s financing of ‘extreme fossil fuels’ was under review, at the 2018 AGM in May.

Barclays now has the chance to make history by pushing the boundaries of climate action in private finance – in the same year that HSBC has excluded all tar sands from its financing regimen and Standard Chartered has excluded new coal-fired power stations,

Fuel markets

Barclays could totally transcend its reputation as being dismissive of concerns regarding ethics, sustainability and justice by introducing sector-leading policy outlawing all of the most extreme fossil fuels.

So far banks have acted on fossil fuels under pressure from NGOs and campaigners – but too often they have only moved on the fuels they have least exposure to.

For example, HSBC excluded tar sands, but its main market is Asia where coal is plentiful. Hence it’s loophole allowing it to finance coal in the emerging markets of Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

But will Barclays ascend to an unexpected position of global leader on climate action? Not likely.

Barclays’ primary market is North America where oil pipelines are big business. This was evidenced as Justin Trudeau’s liberal administration nationalised Trans Mountain to force it through, and the violence used to repress those resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

It would take unprecedented moral leadership from a bank historically devoid of ethics to shun tar sands pipelines from its financing portfolio.

True leadership

If their new energy policy maintains business as usual, Barclays’ current leadership – Jes Staley, John McFarlane and Mary Francis – will at best be consigned to the footnotes of history. At worst, they will be recognised as the climate criminals they would be. But there’s an alternative history.

Barclays’ leaders can demonstrate to the rest of the finance world that climate breakdown is a serious enough crisis for banks to begin thinking in the long term. Rather than leaping from crisis to crisis, with some profits in between, they can contribute to building a sustainable financial system to cultivate a sustainable ecology. 

Such a policy would exclude coal, tar sands and Arctic oil – as others have done – as a bare minimum. Anything less is criminal.

True leadership would take aim and oil and gas too. For too long institutions making divestment commitments have limited their exclusions to ‘the worst fossil fuels’.

With 12 years to avoid irreversible catastrophe, any attempt to demarcate fossil fuels by relative badness is useless. They must all stay in the ground. Banks must stop financing them all.

Civil society

If banks continue to facilitate the most recent dash for gas taking place across Europe, they will lock our economies into carbon emissions causing catastrophic breakdown. If they continue to finance oil and all of the conflict and human devastation that goes with it, there’s no going back to a liveable planet.

Barclays’ energy policy must be positive too. To remain relevant socio-economic institutions, it should play its part in financing zero-carbon technology and infrastructure to lock our economies into renewables.

Considering the widespread suffering they’ve inflicted and profited from, it’s time for banks like Barclays to defer to civil society and community organisations in these projects. We should be demanding they follow our lead when it comes to what just decarbonisation practically looks like for communities across the country and the world. 

This might sound unrealistic. Probably. Is it ambitious? Yes. Is it necessarily? Absolutely.

Those leading banks like Barclays have a choice: depart from business as usual and remake the financial system in service of people and planet, or step aside and let the people have a turn at managing our own economic lives.

Ambitious policy

We shouldn’t sit back, relax and hope that Barclays deliver. In the weeks before they announce the results of their review and in the months afterwards, we must make it crystal clear to Barclays we aren’t going away.

Using a diversity of tactics we must throw everything we have at them.

Switch bank, and let them know why. Campaign for your university, workplace, church or local businesses to boycott Barclays. Get creative disrupting your local branch or other Barclays operations.

Ambitious energy policy excluding all fossil fuels is Barclays’ last chance to stay relevant before it becomes inevitable that we exert our collective power to take back control of the financial system and repurpose it to serve people instead of profit.

Barclays may not be about to make climate history. But we can.

This author

Chris Saltmarsh is co-director of climate change campaigns at People & Planet, where he manages the Divest Barclays and university divestment campaigns. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh.

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

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

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

Earth’s atmosphere

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

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

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

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

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

Fossil Fuels

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

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

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

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

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

Climate science

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

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

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

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

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

Effective policies

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

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

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

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

Welfare legislation 

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

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

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

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

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

Trading rules

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

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

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

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

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

Declining workforce

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

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

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

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

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

Visa requirements 

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

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

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

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

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

Inhumane practices

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

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

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

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

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

This Author 

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

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

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

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

Extreme energy 

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

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

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

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

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

Acid squeeze

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

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

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

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

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

Cavalier disregard

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

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

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

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

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

This Author 

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

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

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

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

Enough evidence

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

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

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

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

Opencast schemes

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

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

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

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

This Author

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