Palm oil suppliers to the company behind popular brands Cadbury, Oreo and Ritz have destroyed 70,000 hectares of rainforest including 25,000 hectares of orangutan habitat in Indonesia in just two years, according to campaigners.

New mapping analysis by Greenpeace International has revealed that between 2015 and 2017, suppliers to Mondelēz cleared over 70,000 hectares of rainforest, an area bigger than the city of Chicago, where the company is based.

The company pledged in 2010 to achieve zero net deforestation by 2020, along with other members of the Consumer Goods Forum, which represents manufacturers and retailers of consumer goods such as food and toiletries. It also adopted a “no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation” policy in 2014.

Traceability

Mondelēz gets much of its palm oil from Wilmar International, which in turn sources more than 80 percent of the ingredient from third party suppliers. It also has a no deforestation policy, yet still fails to monitor its suppliers to check if they are complying or not, according to the analysis by Greenpeace.

Kiki Taufik, head of Greenpeace Southeast Asia’s Indonesia forests campaign, said: “Palm oil can be made without destroying forests, yet our investigation discovered that Mondelēz suppliers are still trashing forests and wrecking orangutan habitat, pushing these beautiful and intelligent creatures to the brink of extinction. They’re literally dying for a biscuit.”

The report comes as an advert by supermarket Iceland to raise awareness of the environmental destruction caused by palm oil went viral on social media after being banned by regulators.

A spokesman for Mondelēz said that it had been working with its supply chain to improve traceability. “We’re asking our direct suppliers to call on their upstream suppliers to map and monitor the plantations where oil is grown so we can drive further traceability. We’re also excluding 12 companies from our supply chain as a result of breaches,” 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.

Environmental campaigners have succeeded in taking out a private prosecution against a coal mining company over the alleged destruction of a newt habitat.

Banks Group is accused of wildlife crime for allegedly destroying the breeding and resting places of protected Great Crested Newts on the controversial Bradley opencast coal site in County Durham.

Solicitors acting on behalf of Campaign to Protect Pont Valley have been informed that a court summons will shortly be issued to Banks Group to attend a hearing on 12th December at Peterlee Magistrates Court.

Protected species

This comes as Banks Group await the verdict from the High Court on their appeal to start another new opencast coal mine at Druridge Bay in Northumberland.

Great Crested Newts are a European Protected Species and as such destroying their breeding and resting places is a criminal offence under regulation 43 of The Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017.

Solicitor Neil Connell, of Singleton Winn Connell said: “In my opinion there is clearly a prima facie case for Banks Group to answer.” Connell is the solicitor instructed in this case.

In August, Judge Cousins of Teeside Magistrates Court expressed doubt over the legality of the actions of Banks Group regarding the Brooms pond on the Bradley opencast.

She said: “I cannot be satisfied to the criminal standard that Banks would not have committed, be committing, or be about to commit an offence contrary to the Conservation and Habitat of Species Regulations.” 

Judge Cousins’ verdict was issued in the trial of protesters who had been taken to court for peacefully protesting to stop the opencast coal mine from starting.

Legal challenge

During the case the Great Crested Newt Mitigation Guidelines were examined. Judge Cousins said: “There is no doubt in my mind that those standards were not followed” by Mr Lupton of Argus Ecology. 

UK Coal – which had originally secured the planning permission on the site – laid out plans to translocate newts to purpose built ponds to the north of the site. Banks Group alleged there were no newts and therefore claimed they did not need to comply with the procedures to protect the animals.

Campaigners allege that Durham Constabulary – which does not have wildlife crime officers – has refused to fully investigate the actions of the opencast company.

Anne Harris for Campaign to Protect Pont Valley said: “Durham Police force have inexplicably refused to properly investigate the major wildlife crime that happened here in plain sight, choosing instead to arrest people protecting the environment. We are left with no choice but to take Banks Group to court ourselves.”

Don Kent, the from the Campaign to Protect Pont Valley, said: “It’s a very important and fundamental part of our society that the wealthy, both companies and individuals, are not able to escape their obligations under the law.”

Campaign to Protect Pont Valley is currently crowdfunding to raise the money needed to bring Banks Group to justice.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Coal Action. 

The government has resumed its quarterly survey of public attitudes to fracking and shale gas. The latest results show support for fracking stands at 15 percent, down three percentage points, and opposition at 31 percent, down one point.

The previous Wave tracker survey, published in August 2018, dropped questions, for the first time since 2013, on whether people supported or opposed fracking.

At the time, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) said the questions would be asked only annually in future to allow space for “more focused questions” on subjects such as consumer issues or employment rights.

Support and opposition

But BEIS explained last week why the questions had been reinstated. “With the UK entering a new era of shale gas exploration it is only right that we routinely gauge the opinion of the British public and so the questions on supporting/opposing shale gas development will return to each quarter of the tracker,” a spokesperson said.

The fieldwork for the latest results was carried out before a series of earth tremors linked to Cuadrilla’s fracking at Preston New Road near Blackpool.

It found that 15 percent of those surveyed said they supported fracking, the second lowest level recorded since the question was first asked nearly five years ago.

The latest figure was down three percentage points on the result for March-April 2018 when the question was most recently asked. It was up on the record low of 13 percent a year ago.  Strong support for fracking remained unchanged at two percent.

The gap between support and opposition has returned to the level last seen in summer and winter 2017.

Common reasons

BEIS said men were more likely to support fracking than women: 20 percent compared with 10 percent. Other groups more likely to support fracking were:

People aged 65 and over (20 percent) compared with people aged 16-24 (11 percent).

People with household incomes of £50,000 (21 percent) compared with people with household incomes up to £16,000 (15 percent).

People living in the East Midlands (21 percent) compared with people living in Northern Ireland (6 percent).

The most common reasons to support fracking were:

• The need to use all available energy sources (36 percent)
• Reduce dependence on other fossil fuels (25 percent, down from 31 percent)
• Good for local jobs and investment (23 percent, up from 19 percent)
• Reduce dependence on other countries for energy (23 percent, down from 36 percent)
• Cheaper energy bills (17 percent, down from 26 percent)

Community benefits and the shale wealth fund were among the least common reasons to support fracking (4 percent and 1 percent).

Knew a lot

A total of 31 percent of participants opposed fracking. This was down just one percentage point on March-April 2018 when the question was most recently asked and down from the record high of 36 percent a year ago. But opposition to fracking has remained about 30 percent since March 2016.

Strong opposition was down 1 percentage point to 12 percent.

The survey found that people in social grade AB were more likely to oppose fracking than people in social grade DE: 39 percent compared with 25 percent.

Geographically, the people most likely to oppose fracking, according to the survey, were those living in Wales(41 percent), the North West (38 percent) and Scotland (36 percent).

People who said they knew a lot about fracking were more likely to oppose than support (58 percent compared 24 percent).

Opposing fracking

The most common reason for opposing fracking were:

• Loss or destruction of natural environment (58 percent, up from 57 percent)
• Not a safe process (27 percent, down from 29 percent)
• Risk of earthquakes (26 percent, down from 29 percent)
• Too much risk and uncertainty (25 percent, down from 28 percent)
• Risk of contamination to water supplies (25 percent down from 31 percent)

Half those surveyed said they neither supported nor opposed fracking, the highest recorded by the survey so far. This was up slightly on the 47 percent when the question was most recently asked (March-April 2018).

The main reason for neither support nor opposing fracking was a lack of knowledge about it (77 percent).

Just four percent said they did not know whether they supported nor opposed, unchanged on the survey when this was last asked.

Awareness

As many as 75 percent of people said they were aware of fracking. This is down slightly on the 78 percent recorded in the most recent survey and in September 2017.

Moreover, 11 percent said they knew a lot about fracking, 45 percent said they knew a little and 19 percent were aware but did not really know what it was. 25 percent said they had never heard of fracking.

BEIS said the awareness was higher among people aged 65 and above (86 percent) than in 16-24 year olds (56 percent). It was also higher among people in social grade AB (87 percent) than among people in social grade DE (61 percent).

Awareness was also higher among people with household incomes of £50,000 and over (89 percent, compared with 70 percent among people with household incomes up to £16,000).

People living in the north west and Wales had higher level of awareness (83 percent) and those living in London (56 percent).

Widening gap

A spokesman for Frack Free Lancashire said: “The widening gap between opposition and support is hardly surprising and neither is the fact that more than twice as many oppose shale gas as support it.

“This polling clearly shows that acceptance of the industry’s claims for shale gas benefits is vanishing even amongst their supporters.

“Support for the idea amongst those backing fracking that shale gas might lead to a reduction in dependence on other countries for UK’s energy supply has collapsed from 36 percent in March to just 23 percent in September.

“Similar falls can be seen for the claims that shale gas will reduce dependence on other fossil fuels (25 percent compared to a previous 31 percent), with the same story for the claim that fracking may result in cheaper energy bills (17 percent compared to a previous 26 percent).

“It would appear that people are at last seeing through the industry’s spin, and once the impact of the recent earthquakes and the IPCC’s warnings regarding climate change filter through we would expect the gap between opposition and support to widen again.”

The fieldwork was carried out from 19-30 September 2018 on the Kantar TNS Omnibus. The results of the Wave 27 tracker are based on face-to-face home interviews conducted with a representative sample of UK adults aged 16+. The sample size, of 4,258, was more than double that used when questions about attitudes to shale gas were previously asked (March-April 2018).

This Article

This article appeared at Desmog.uk.

The UK trade department is refusing to release any analysis of the economic benefits of a post-Brexit US trade deal, saying it is still a “work in progress”.

Trade secretary, Liam Fox, claimed in July last year that analysis by his department suggested that bilateral US-UK trade could rise by £40bn a year by 2030 “if we’re able to remove the barriers to trade that we have.”

But responding to a freedom of information request by Unearthed, the Department for International Trade (DIT) said it could not disclose its economic modelling on the grounds that “there is limited public benefit in releasing analysis that is not complete”.

Dropping regulations

It added that the department will not publish its analysis of the impacts of a potential US trade deal until after Britain has left the EU.

Shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner criticised the department’s refusal to publish its assessment.

“The Secretary of State is not driven by economic logic but by ideological dogma,” Gardiner said. “This is why he refuses to publish any official analysis done by the department.”

“Fox talks about increasing trade with the USA by removing barriers. But these so-called barriers include our food safety standards, environmental regulations and animal welfare laws like the ban on chlorine washed chickens, hormone injected beef and genetically modified foods,” he continued.

The US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, has warned that any deal will be contingent on the UK dropping EU regulations, such as its ban on imports of chlorinated chicken.

The analysis being withheld by DIT could help clarify the extent to which the benefits from any trade deal would be dependent on removing such regulations.

Conflicting assessments

The news comes as Theresa May prepares for a major showdown with the Eurosceptics in her cabinet, who are expected to be asked to approve a draft Brexit deal with the EU this week.

The ability to freely negotiate trade deals with the US and other major economies has been central to the argument of many Brexiteers that the UK would be better off outside the EU customs union.

They contend that the UK needs to be able to scrap EU regulations in order to strike trade deals with countries like the US, something that would not be possible as part of a close customs arrangement.  

In a major speech in February, Fox was emphatic in arguing that remaining in a customs union with the EU would not be worth the UK losing the opportunity to freely negotiate its own trade deals.

Similarly, former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, said in May that the “massive opportunity” of a US trade deal would only be possible if Britain escaped the regulatory “lunar pull” of Brussels.

Always wrong

But in January an internal government analysis of the impacts of exiting the EU was leaked to BuzzFeed, which found negligible benefits to the UK’s GDP from trade deals with the US and other major economies.

According to the assessment, a trade deal with the US would add between 0.1 to 0.3% to UK GDP in the long-term.

The costs of reduced EU market access would far outweigh the benefits of new trade deals though, the analysis says.   

The paper was disowned by then Brexit minister Steve Baker, who said that it “does not yet take account of the opportunities of leaving the EU”, adding that civil service forecasts were “always wrong, and wrong for good reasons”

During an undercover Unearthed investigation earlier this year, claims surfaced that Fox had turned to the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a right-wing think tank, to ask if they could provide him with an analysis of the GDP benefits of a US trade deal.

Bypassing officials

Speaking to an undercover reporter in June, the IEA’s director general, Mark Littlewood, said: “I went to see Fox a few weeks ago and… he actually said, ‘Look, there are five things that my department hasn’t researched and I bloody well need somebody to come up with the answers here, because I think it will show great opportunities, you know. Nobody’s yet shown how much a US-UK free trade deal could add to GDP, could you guys go and work that out?’”

Littlewood continued: “So we’ve gone back and said yeah we’ll work that out, and so ultimately for some of our research, if the audience is one person, namely the cabinet minister and [he is] likely to do something with it, fantastic”.

DIT meeting logs show that Littlewood met with Fox on 5 February 2018, sources at the DIT said the department has not commissioned research on this subject from the think tank.

A spokeswoman for the IEA said they could not confirm the contents of the recordings without being provided them, however they added:

“IEA representatives will happily meet with any ministers, MPs, policymakers and stakeholders of all stripes and persuasions who wish to speak to us about our ideas and research. Because of the quality of our research, we are asked by policymakers of all kinds for our thoughts and advice on relevant subject areas. We regard this as an indication of the successful pursuit of our mission.”

‘Quick and dirty’

“It would be extraordinary for a think tank to decline these kinds of requests. Whether the policymakers in question take up our ideas is down to them,” she continued.  

A DIT spokesman said: “We are committed to an inclusive and transparent approach to trade negotiations and are currently analysing responses to our consultation, which many businesses, interest groups and members of the public took part in.”

“As previously set out, the Government will publish its approach to new Free Trade Agreements before negotiations begin,” he continued.

According to Gardiner: “Liam Fox is dressing up his Atlantic Bridge agenda as trade policy, and using it to pursue a quick and dirty trade deal with the USA.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

Peter Melchett, a passionate defender of the countryside and the integrity of the natural environment, has died at the age of 70.

It  was my honour and pleasure to know him and to work with him on his contribution to The Countryside We Want, which was published by Green Books.

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

Peter was inspired by Lady Eve Balfour and her book The Living Soil, and also by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Both were outstanding voices of the early environmental movement, and were the source of his idealism and vision of humanity living in harmony with the natural world.

Idealist and activist 

Peter translated his idealism into activism and he became director of Greenpeace, one of the foremost envir­onmental organisations in the world.

During his time at Greenpeace, Peter led a remarkable and historic action to oppose GM crops, as one of a group of 28 activists who destroyed a crop of GM maize in 1999. As a result, he was charged with causing criminal damage and appeared at Norwich Crown Court.

To everyone’s surprise and delight, Peter and his fellow protesters were acquitted by the jury, who ruled that their cause of protecting the environment was just. This victorious outcome was instrumental in stopping the spread of GM crops, not only in Britain but also in Europe.

Peter was no mere idealist, however. He was a practical man and an organic farmer who looked after the land, cared for the soil, cherished the trees, loved the animals and enjoyed watching birds. He was actively engaged in the work of numerous ecological organisations, including Friends of the Earth, WWF, the Ramblers Association and the RSPB.

However, the highlight of his work was promoting organic farming, and he became policy director of the Soil Association. While in that position, he was successful in putting the cause of organic agriculture on both the national and the international agenda.

Brave and compassionate

Peter’s environmentalism was also informed by his experiences as a politician; he was a member of the Labour government under Harold Wilson. That background made it possible to for him to present his ecological values in politically and pragmatically understandable language.

With Peter’s death we have lost a brave, charis­matic, consummate and compassionate campaigner for the countryside in particular and the ecological movement in general.

This Author

Satish Kumar is editor emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist. The latest edition of the magazine is out now!

Bangladesh is on the frontline of climate displacement and one of the countries with the highest child marriage rates in the world.

The country’s vulnerability to climate-related events pushes families to marry off their daughters at an early age, according to a 2015 report by Human Rights Watch.

Steve Trent, the director of the Environmental Justice Foundation in London, said: “Climate change is a gender issue. It affects women first and worst. That is replicated across different geographies, different countries and different cultures”. 

Gender-based violence

Alexandra Bilak, the director of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) in Geneva, has argued: “Since 2008, we have reported an average number of 21.4 million new displacements by climate-related events. 

“The number of climate-related displacements have been far higher than conflict and violence-related displacements across the world.” 

Bilak explained that the numbers reported by the IDMC only refer to people displaced by rapid onset events such as flooding and storms. People displaced by slow onset events such as drought and sea level rise are omitted from the statistics.

Nazhat Shameem Khan, Fiji’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, elaborates: “It is a gender issue because not all decisions made in relation to climate change are made with the full participation of women, because negotiation rooms do not have many women in them, and because it has a disproportionate effect on women and girls in society”.

Elhadj As Sy, the Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said: “We are not all equal in front of shocks and hazards. The elderly, women and children are disproportionally affected.

“And that’s unfortunately the reason why we are seeing horrible things happening even in the context of natural disasters that are related to gender-based violence, sexual exploitation, [and] trafficking.”

Child marriage

Lakshmi Sundaram, the executive director of Girls Not Brides in London, said: “Many of the countries that are really affected by climate displacement are also countries that have high rates of child marriage. 

“Often it is the families and the girls who are on the brink of poverty that are most affected by climate displacement and also turn to child marriage as a coping mechanism when things become really difficult for that family”.

Saleemul Huq, the Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, has argued that climate displacement increases the risk of child marriage and child prostitution in Bangladesh.

The distress of displacement increases the difficulty for parents to feed their children and pushes them to marry off their daughters with strangers at an earlier age than planned. 

Huq said that many displaced families “end up taking [their daughters] into the city of Dhaka and have them work as sex workers”.

Pakhi’s story

Pakhi (who did not want to disclose her real name) is 18. She came from a poor rural family in the Narayanganj District in Bangladesh. She was married off at the age of 11 and had her first child two years later, but she was abused by her husband and decided to divorce him.

She moved back with her parents until their house was washed away by a flood. Pakhi said: “we built a tent with plastic materials and stayed there. I didn’t see any hope at all, because my family was weak and sick. The situation was horrible.

She migrated to Dhaka and joined the sex industry at the age of 14 to help her family. Pakhi explained: “I am the main provider for my family and I support them through my sex work. It is very painful, both physically and mentally.”

Even Pakhi’s mother engages in occasional sex work to feed the family, explained a friend of the family.

Pakhi said: “If the flood wouldn’t have washed away our house, we would still have lived there. If we would have lived there, my parents would still have work and we would have enough to support ourselves. We would not have to pay rent for our house and the income could instead go to savings. The flood was the only reason our lives were ruined.”

Madeline Garlick, the Senior Legal Coordinator and Head of Protection Policy at UNHCR in Geneva, said: “The number of people displaced, whether within their own countries or across borders to other states, is inevitably – as a result of climate change and natural disasters – going to continue in the future to rise.”

This Author

Otto Simonsson is a PhD student at Oxford University and a freelance contributor on climate change issues for the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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

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

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

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

Clever storytelling

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

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

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

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

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

Solitary bees

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

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

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

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

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

Deconstructing diets 

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

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

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

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

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

Arresting decline

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

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

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

This Author 

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

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

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

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

Redundant infrastructure 

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

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

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

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

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

Exceeding estimate

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

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

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

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

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

Carbon capture

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

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

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

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

This Author 

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

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

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

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

Beyond dispute

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pollution limits

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

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

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

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

Carbon cap

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate meeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Financial collapse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passing legislation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunity lost

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

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

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

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

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

This Author

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

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

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

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

Eyes

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

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

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

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

Antarctic ecosystem

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

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

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

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

Streamline

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

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

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

This Author

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