ExxonMobil money was being refined through the London-based offices of free market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) before sloshing into the pockets of British journalists – including one admired environmental correspondent – during the ‘90s and early 2000s.
Richard D North was editor of the radical Vole magazine, the first environment editor hired by the left-liberal Independent newspaper, and “was one of the most respected environment correspondents in the 1980s.” But then, inexplicably, he had a change of heart and by 1995 had “become an apologist for industry”.
Some years later, he wrote an article for the Evening Standard arguing there was no hope of averting climate change so we should now accuse politicians of using the issue as “a tax-raising wheeze”. North was described at the end of the article as a fellow of the IEA.
ExxonMobil grant
A set of accounts that I discovered buried deep in the digital archive at Companies House revealed that a £21,000 stash was being handled for the author. “The ExxonMobil Fund is a research grant for Richard North” explained accounts filed by the IEA.
North confirmed via email: “Exxon’s grant… was given towards general and continuing work I had been engaged on for several years. It was not for any specific project, but simply toward on-going research I did on broad themes around capitalism, free markets, intellectual property, consumerism, climate change and corporate social responsibility.”
This work included his book, Rich is Beautiful. North said: “I am afraid I don’t intend to get into an explanation of how I earn my living and how much corporate funding I have had. My job is to play fair by my readers, and I have always done that.”
Blame fuels
Rich is Beautiful is a curious book published by the Social Affairs Unit – an offshoot of the IEA and funded by British American Tobacco. In his book, North argues that Exxon should not be blamed for the fact that fossil fuels are causing climate change but instead we should look to the drivers and customers that choose its products.
It’s a deeply pessimistic prognosis based on Hayek’s claims that shoppers send ‘signals’ to producers through money, allowing industry to abdicate all responsibility for the environmental impacts of their production.
North wrote: “It is for the people who drive cars to worry about their emissions, not for the oil companies who supply their fuel… Nor is it remotely clear why, say, oil firms should invest in renewable energy systems.
“Oil firms did not ‘cause’ global warming, and they have no obligation to ‘cure’ it… Bullying oil companies to get involved must merely mean making them do something they don’t want to do, which will mean that a politician (or an NGO – Non-Governmental Organisation – campaigner) is insisting on the right to spend shareholders’ money.”
Corporations over campaigners
In the book, the journalist is entirely frank about taking money from vested interests. He explains: “I prefer corporations to campaigners… If I was offered a weekend in New York, I’d take it if the tickets were business class, and refuse if the tickets were tourist (even though I believe that more space equals more global warming, mile for mile).”
However, it would be wrong to assume that North merely took this cynical view to earn a corporate dime. Instead, it appears to reflect a deep malaise and disgust at fellow human beings.
He wrote, in his book about beauty: “I am inclined to think that the poor in the rich world are either stupid or lazy or both, and may soon constitute an embarrassing troubling underclass.”
He then concludes: “On a bad day, people seem ‘needy’ and whining and self-pitying… I am often afflicted with an intense dislike of my fellow man. Sprawling, raucous, mewling and semi-naked as they are, I find them terribly low.”
An amateur psychologist might suggest that this horror at the grotesqueness of humankind was, in fact, a symptom of self-loathing, and would assume this was the result of living off corporate donations and betraying his own values.
The IEA, in this instance at least, acted as a conduit to funnel oil money to an environmental journalist who was willing to raise various doubts about climate change and our ability to avert the crisis – when this would come at the cost for his sponsors in the oil industry.
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 government proposal to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership risks a ‘race to the bottom’ in food and financial standards post-Brexit, campaigners have warned.
The deal also poses threats to the NHS and other public services, and would leave Britain at the mercy of a ‘corporate court’ system which would allow overseas business to sue the British government in secret courts for regulations which they believe damage their profits.
Responding to a consultation from the Department for International Trade which proposes acceding to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, campaign groups War on Want, Global Justice Now and Trade Justice Movement also suggested that signing the TPP ‘jumps the gun’ in terms of public debate about how close we stay to the EU’s common rulebook post Brexit, and would make a European customs union far more difficult to agree.
Corporate systems
The new briefing finds the TPP would entrench the ‘corporate court’ system that gives multinational corporations special powers to bully and sue governments; undermine food standards – threatening to allow chlorine chicken and steroid-fed beef into the UK, lowering the quality of food and jeopardising farmers’ livelihoods; and undermine public services across the world – threatening the NHS and the ability of the developing countries in the deal to build their own public services
It would also give more power to big tech companies to use and abuse our data, and prevent developing countries from building their digital sectors, which are vital for their development and move Britain closer to a US-style system of deregulation that would make it harder to work closely with the EU
Jean Blaylock, from War on Want, said: “We are right in the middle of a huge political debate about how close the UK stays to its EU trade relationships post-Brexit.
“Parliament has not yet made a decision on this issue. So it’s completely premature for the Department for International Trade to suggest we should join a trade deal which would make it near impossible to keep our current standards and continue to be aligned to the EU rulebook.
“Our fear is that this is an attempt to prejudge that decision and force post Brexit UK down the road of a deregulated US-style economic regime which we know Dr Fox supports.”
Nick Dearden, from Global Justice Now, said: “The hard Brexiteers believe that Brexit can achieve all manner of miracles – but the idea of Britain as a pacific state is surely far fetched even for them.
“Here in Europe we defeated a very similar deal to this – called TTIP – because we didn’t want big business to have more control over our laws, our public services and our societies. Liam Fox obviously hopes enough people are looking the other way so he can begin to sign us up to something equally toxic. But if he’s serious, we’ll fight this deal every step of the way.”
This Author
Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from War on Want.
Environmental charity Surfers Against Sewage is calling on the chancellor, Philip Hammond, to tackle the creation and use of avoidable single-use plastic in his forthcoming Autumn Budget on Monday, including the introduction of a plastic tax and support for a world class inclusive Deposit Return Scheme for all drinks bottles.
Hugo Tagholm, chief executive of Surfers Against Sewage, said: “The future health of our oceans and marine life cannot be traded for the convenience culture of today so we need a budget that drives action to make us single-use plastic free. Aggressively cutting the volume of avoidable and pointless plastics is critical in reversing the terrifying scale of plastic pollution currently suffocating our environment from our cities to the ocean.
“Runaway plastic emissions have to be tackled through ambitious and progressive policies that truly stop plastic particulate from being belched out from factories. It doesn’t stop at coffee cups and cutlery – business needs wholesale reform to decouple its profits from finite fossil fuels used to make products that last just minutes but pollute for centuries.
Deposit system
“Eliminating society’s plastic footprint and creating a truly circular economy will require bold and brilliant policies, innovation and sustainable alternatives.”
“Plastic production is set to quadruple by 2050, fuelled by new fossil fuel exploration such as fracking. The government must act with urgency to ensure that manufacturers are truly responsible for the full life-cycle of all of the plastic they produce. 100 percent recyclable should equate to 100 percent recycled.”
SAS has campaigned successfully for the introduction of the 5p plastic bag charge, which has already reduced the circulation of plastic bags by nine billion. It also recently delivered a petition representing the voices of over 325,000 citizens to the prime minister, Theresa May, calling for the introduction of a comprehensive deposit return system (DRS) on plastic beverage bottle and containers.
A DRS is a proven mechanism to trap plastic in the recycling economy rather than on our beaches and in the wider environment. The government will soon be consulting on the design of the English DRS system.
SAS will be calling for it to be fully inclusive of beverage bottle sizes and materials to create a truly world-class and effective system that will protect the environment, create jobs, reduce carbon emissions and prevent littering.
Earlier this year, Surfers Against Sewage, alongside 27 major environmental organisations, issued a joint response to the Treasury’s single-use plastic consultation.
The group called for a plastics tax to incentivise use of recycled plastics, reduce volumes of the most environmentally-damaging and non-recyclable plastics and polymers, and to extend producer responsibility so that producers and retailers are accountable for the full ‘end of life’ costs of the single use plastics they put on the market.
This Author
Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Surfers Against Sewage.
Anti-Trident protestors blockaded all entrances at one of Britain’s nuclear weapons factories, AWE Burghfield in West Berkshire, yesterday.
The direct action halted traffic to and from the site in the morning. The protest is highlighting the role AWE Burghfield plays in the maintenance and replacement of Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system.
The Burghfield bomb factory, administered by the Atomic Weapons Establishment, builds and maintains nuclear warheads.
Increasing groundswell
The Trident Ploughshares activists have blocked access to the site with a car with two people locked to it at one point and with a line of people with their arms in lock-on tubes at another.
Separately, campaigners from local CND group Hereford Peace Council will today travel to Parliament on a ‘peace train’, bringing with them petitions from thousands of supporters who want the government to get rid of its nuclear weapons and join the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Kate Hudson, CND general secretary, said: “I congratulate all of the protestors for drawing attention to the fact that people from across the country object to the government’s plans to spend billions of pounds on a new nuclear weapons system.
“These actions are part of an increasing groundswell of activity against these weapons of mass destruction which do nothing to keep us safe. Economists, defence experts and anyone with common sense are all coming to a consensus that these weapons are expensive, useless and irrelevant in the face of today’s security threats.
“Most of the world don’t have nuclear weapons and indeed 122 countries voted for a UN treaty which would ban all nuclear weapons. It’s time for the government to side with this majority of countries who want a safer and more peaceful world, rather than the small number – led by a dangerous President Trump – who are recklessly pursuing nuclear Armageddon.”
This Author
Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The free marketeer Julian Morris and his team at the International Policy Network (IPN) think tank continued to lead the charge against climate science in the autumn of 2003 – all the while secretly receiving generous funding from ExxonMobil.
In October 2003, Morris unleashed a vitriolic attack on the Kyoto Protocol along the familiar theme that the restrictions on fossil fuels would strangle economic growth.
He said: “Kyoto would slow economic growth in the EU and in Russia without providing any substantive benefits. If Russia does not ratify, Kyoto will not come into force, so both Russia and EU countries will grow more rapidly and then can look for alternative solutions to climate change.”
Warm Welcome
He was warmly received when he spoke at the Mont Pelerin Society – an international group of free market economists, historians and philosophers founded by Friedrich von Hayek – meeting the following year and presented the case for “removing barriers to adaptation as a cost effective strategy to addressing problems associated with the climate.”
Morris also conducted a brilliant ambush in persuading the Liberal-left and broadly environmentalist Guardian to reproduce the IPN allegation that the scientific analysis in the influential 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report was “flawed”.
The Arctic study had already suffered delays from the US State Department until after the 2004 US election cycle – pitting the Republican George Bush against Democrat John Kerry – because its findings were so significant that the administration feared voters would react by electing a president who was promising effective action on the environment.
However, the deniers in the US were able to cite a report from a respectable-sounding British think tank, reported by a respected left British paper, in order to shoot this serious and alarming report down in flames. Tim Radford, the Guardian journalist who published the article, confirmed he did not know the IPN was funded by Exxon at the time of the story.
Morris Attacks
Then, in November, Morris echoed the extreme criticisms made by Myron Ebell, director of the Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), of Sir David King – the then chief scientific advisor to the British government. He called King “an embarrassment to himself and an embarrassment to his country.”
Later that month, Morris attacked Prime Minister Tony Blair for his attempt to use his presidency of the forthcoming G8summit of world leaders to put greenhouse emissions reductions at the centre of the discussions.
The IPN activists also attended the 10th international United Nations COP climate change negotiations in Argentina, translating its reports into Spanish for the occasion.
Bate was advertised as an expert available to discuss the conference by the Koch-affiliated American Enterprise Institute in the United States.
He published an article, titled “Climate Alarmism and the Poor”, in which he attacked the IPCC for allowing developing countries longer to reduce emissions.
“These countries will rightly resist any international efforts to curb their use of energy,” he argued. “What we must do is invest in new technologies with them, not export our anti-energy regulations.”
Exxon Funding
The IPN boasted in its end of year accounts that it had “sponsored, coordinated and enabled affiliates to participate in policy events in Australia, Austria, Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Denmark, France, Ghana, Hungary, India, Iceland, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, the UK and the USA.”
This represented extraordinary good value for the funders of the think tank. During 2004, ExxonMobil piped $115,000 to the US IPN, of which £65,656 flowed through to the London office, which in turn spent £35,511 on its “Climate Change and Sustainable Development” programme.
Morris was personally paid £69,284 in “fees and expenses”, although this cash would not have come from Exxon alone but also from the other corporate sponsors and donors.
The Exxon cash continued to spill into the IPN offices during 2005, with a donation of $130,000 made to the US partner organisation. Moreover, the charity also accepted $25,000 from the Koch-dominated Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
And, a further $130,000 poured in from the Earhart Foundation, which was founded by an oil company that would become part of Exxon and was also, decades earlier, a generous supporter to Hayek and his pioneering free market think tanks.
Morris, working in the office in London, began to have his £69,284 salary paid directly from the US wing of his charity. Okanski, his wife, was paid an additional £28,000-wage and expenses of £4,448 for the year.
Unprecedented Influence
This was a British think tank that recently enjoyed unprecedented and unrivalled influence on the government, secretly banking hundreds of thousands from US oil interests while actively trying to influence international negotiations about climate change: the single most important and controversial debate of the era.
Morris refused throughout to name his funders. But, in the end, Exxon would reveal its support for the think tank through its corporate giving reports in the US.
That year Mother Jones named and shamed the IPN among 40 groups funded by Exxon, many of which attacked the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report. The progressive American magazine stated that “as the world burns think tanks and journalists funded by ExxonMobil are out to convince you global warming is a hoax”.
During the course of the year, Exxon had funnelled $2.9 million to 39 different US groups, including the CEI and the IPN, all of which are accused of “spread[ing] misleading information about climate change”.
In a short diary article published in December 2005, Simon Bowers reported in the Guardian that Morris called the newspaper to deny reports in another newspaper that the IPN had claimed climate change, was a myth having been paid $250,000.
Morris told the Guardian that both claims were “simply not true”, only to concede later that the think tank had received Exxon cash and that a contributor to an IPN publication “may have” referred to “a European myth about climate change.”
Perhaps Morris was unaware of the huge glut of funding from the American oil giant, or perhaps he got his facts confused.
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.
Oceans researcher and campaigner Alex Rogers first experienced the full visual impact of ocean plastic pollution in 2015: “I was diving in Honduras in 2015 at Utila in the Bay Islands and there were all these beautiful coral reefs, but as we came around the island we were faced with a raft of rubbish stretching out as far as you could see: plastic bottles, expanded polystyrene, fibreglass, every kind of human waste you could imagine … I have never witnessed such a huge quantity of debris. It was horrific.”
Not that it was his first brush with ocean plastic. That had come three years earlier, when he and his team were exploring seamounts in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Antarctica.
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“We were taking samples from deep-sea corals and sediments at depths of up to 1,500 metres, in one of the most remote places in the world, and we were finding all these plastic fibres. My initial reaction was, ‘Fantastic – here’s my next paper!’ But a microsecond later I was thinking, ‘But it’s terrible – if this stuff is here, it must be everywhere.’”
Destructive fishing
But while marine plastics are indeed a horrific and truly global problem, they are by no means the only human assault on the health of our oceans and their wildlife. Indeed they aren’t even the most serious.
Rogers said: “The number one problem for the oceans has to be climate change because of the sheer scale and scope of the disruption it threatens – to ocean chemistry, ocean circulation, ocean ecosystems, polar sea ice and ice caps, and the knock-on effects on the planet as a whole. And these changes will be completely irreversible over human timescales.”
Next comes over-fishing, and destructive fishing: entire ecosystems hoovered up by industrial fishing fleets, and seabeds trashed by trawling.
One example: “In the 1960s Russian and Japanese fleets discovered huge stocks of fish over seamounts in the Pacific – the Emperor Seamounts chain – and just started hauling them in without even knowing what was there. The stocks crashed. Soon New Zealand, Australian and EU fleets began deep-sea trawling. One population after another was collapsed, with huge damage to habitats.
“They went for them with bottom trawlers gouging up the seabed and with massive impacts on target species like orange roughy, which grows very slowly, does not mature until it’s 30 or 40 years old, and lives up to 150 years with a very low level of natural mortality. A whole industry ramped up incredibly quickly with no scientific research to even show what was there, or the population dynamics.
“Finally the science has caught up, but not fast enough to stop the damage. And even though catches are much more sustainable now, almost all the fish are taken by bottom trawling, which is about the most destructive industrial fishing method there is.”
Microplastic pollution
While stocks last!
Pollution comes in at number three – including plastics, along with the whole gamut of toxic chemicals, heavy metals and so on that work their way into the oceans once they have served their human purpose. “We know for sure that plastics are a serious hazard, but we still don’t know how bad. We are looking at three main impacts: entanglement of animals, for example in fishing nets; ingestion, which in extreme cases can completely block cetaceans’ digestive tracts, for example; and toxicity.
“Plastics attract and concentrate persistent organic pollutants like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from seawater, and they often contain toxic additives in their own right – such as phthalates, flame retardants and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs, which came in as replacements for PCBs) – and now they are being found in whale tissues.
“Lots of organisms eat microplastic particles, mistaking them for food, so the fear is that they will keep on recycling persistent organic pollutants back into the food chain long after we thought we were rid of them.”
Rogers was recently appalled to discover environmentally harmful chemicals in his supermarket shower gel – oxybenzones, best known as ultraviolet light blockers in sunscreens recently banned from commercial sale in Hawaii from 2021 because of the harm they do to coral reefs.
“At first I was really surprised to see that substance. But then I found that oxybenzones are everywhere – not just in sunscreens and shower gels, but also in shampoos, hair conditioners, make-up, mascara, and even in some foods. The concentrations may be low, but it still goes down the plughole and gets into the environment and into drinking water”.
New research
Rogers continued: “People are using multiple products. It gets into them through their skin, and the impacts of different pollutants can combine. People assume the stuff they buy is benign – if it’s on sale it must be OK. But it’s not. We all need to be aware of all these chemicals and avoid them.”
Amid this litany of oceanic gloom, there is actually some good news – at least, reason to hope that coral reefs and the marine life they support may be better than feared at surviving the warmer oceans caused by global warming.
New research, some of it Rogers’, shows that coral ecosystems extend much deeper than had previously been realised, into cool waters that may serve as biodiversity refuges even as surface waters heat up. These discoveries are now causing oceanographers to rethink their division of the sea into depth zones, with a new mesophotic zone, from 40 metres deep down to 150 metres, that is far more important than previously realised.
“Most of our knowledge of coral reefs comes from scuba-diving depths down to 40 metres, which scientists call the altiphotic – shallow, sun-bathed coral depths. Then below that we have the mesophotic, where there’s still enough light for some light-harvesting corals and algae, but lower temperatures and less disturbance.
“What we have found is that many species inhabit both zones, but the top 40 metres is suffering the most from human activities.”
Deep sea
Rogers explained: “So what we need to know is this: if the altiphotic gets significantly disturbed, can it repopulate from the mesophotic? And that’s how it looks. For example, in Chagos, which has suffered intense coral bleaching, we saw only 10 percent coral cover in the top 10–15 metres. But out of sight at 40–60 metres, in places there was still 100 percent coral cover. So it’s looking like really good news.
“If key species can survive at these depths, that’s very encouraging. But we should still be worried – coral reefs remain highly vulnerable and threatened by climate change and ocean acidification. Another danger is that fishers are increasingly targeting this zone.”
Go down deeper still, and more surprises are lurking in the newly defined rariphotic, which extends from 150 metres down to 300 metres. Its existence as a distinct zone was first revealed in Curaçao by Carole Baldwin of the Smithsonian Institution, who realised that this zone, considered ‘deep sea’ under the old definitions, contained many species from families typically associated with shallow water.
So the Nekton mission – funded by the Nekton Foundation, of which Rogers is chief scientist – decided to take a look in Bermudan waters.
Rogers said: “We have seen the same thing in Bermuda. For example, we found moray eels at 250 metres. The most common rariphotic fish were rough-tongued bass and saddle bass, again from families mainly found in shallow waters. But life on the rariphotic seabed is also distinctive – we have been finding entire new ecological communities at mesophotic and rariphotic depths that have remained undiscovered until now.”
New species
Rogers continued: “Key finds include more than 40 new species of photosynthetic algae that have found a safe refuge from herbivorous fish, which range to a depth of 60 metres, and extensive coral gardens. The corals look like gigantic bedsprings in gigantic fields, along with sea fanssandagiant sponges, each with myriad other animals living on them in fractal fashion. They are known as black corals, but they are actually white.
“In Bermuda we found one entirely new species of black coral, and three new records – species never previously seen there. And we have found dozens of new species living on them, including a dozen or more tanaids –crustaceans that look like mini-lobsters.
“DNA analysis shows that algae of the same genus are found in Australia, with a common ancestor some 5 million years ago – roughly the same time that the Isthmus of Panama rose up and separated the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. We think these algal communities exist over a wide area of the tropics that has not yet been examined.
“Researchers have often focused on obvious, colourful species like corals and fish, but when you look harder you find other, less showy species that have previously been ignored but still have their tales to tell.”
In fact, Rogers added, there are discoveries to be made pretty much wherever you look in the deep ocean: “Whenever we move into a new area, we expect to find new species. So far we have only explored 0.0001 percent of the pelagic zone (the waters from the surface down to 11,000 metres), and less than 0.1 percent of the deep seabed. Even our understanding of the broad patterns of biodiversity distribution is pretty shaky.”
Novel ecosystems
New technologies are constantly opening up opportunities for discovery – like ‘torpedoes with handles’ that scuba divers can ride down to 90 metres using mixed-gas rebreathers, and Triton submersibles with acrylic spheres offering a 360° view of the ocean around.
Rogers said: “They were developed mainly for the mega-yacht market but they’re also great for research. Ours are good to 300 metres, but some models can go to 1,000 metres. And if we go deeper I’ll expect to find even more novel ecosystems.”
But there’s no time to lose. Rogers cautioned: “The ocean is changing so fast, and the negative effects of human activity create a huge urgency. We are having massive impacts on things we don’t even know are there.
“It’s vital that scientists, governments and UN bodies know what is there in the deep ocean before we allow it to be trashed for short-term profit. What we need here is a scale of scientific endeavour similar to space exploration. This is far too big a problem for conventional scientific approaches.”
Rising tensions
The fourth biggest threat to the oceans? Habitat destruction, for example of coastal mangrove forests cut down for fuel or shrimp farms, sea-grass meadows and deep-water reefs ploughed up by trawlers, or uniquely biodiverse hydrothermal vents destroyed by mining for their valuable rare earth metals.
While the seabed is legally defined in the UNCLOS (Law of the Sea) treaty as “the common heritage of mankind, the exploration and exploitation of which shall be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole”, Rogers lamented that the International Seabed Authority “has been giving out licences for exploration for deep-sea mining with very little knowledge or understanding of what life is present, never mind how it will be impacted”.
With the oceans generating an estimated US$2.5 trillion annual value to the global economy, surely a few tens of billions a year for deep ocean research and protection would be both precautionary and affordable? But sadly, as Rogers explains, that prospect is remote.
Rogers concluded: “We are seeing a widespread trend to nationalism, militarism and unilateralism just as we need the reverse – to come together to deal with the really big existential problems of climate change, feeding a growing world population sustainably, and conserving global biodiversity.
“All the rising global tensions are a huge distraction from the real issue we are facing – how to maintain the planet in a habitable condition for 10 billion people.”
This Author
Oliver Tickell is a regular contributor to Resurgence & Ecologist and author of the report International Law and Marine Plastic Pollution: Holding Offenders Accountable. This article first appeared in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, which is out now!
Homeowners considering switching to solar panel systems should do it now – before a cut-off point next year that could strip the opportunity for large financial incentives.
For a long time, the solar technology available to the public for turning sunlight into electricity was beyond the financial reach of many households.
A survey conducted by energy efficiency experts YES Energy Solutions found that 55 percent of homeowners had not invested in solar panels because they believed it was too expensive.
Falling costs
However due to falling costs, improved technology, Government incentives and greater competition between manufacturers, solar panels have become more affordable.
Currently, under the Government’s Feed-in Tariff scheme, you receive payment for any electricity you produce as well as any surplus electricity that you transfer back to the grid.
The latest figures from Ofgem state that as of October 2018, for each kWh you generate you get 3.86p, while for each kWh you export you receive 5.24p.
The total amount you earn depends on your location and how much electricity you use. According to the MoneySavingExpert, in London, the estimated average savings per year came to £340. In Manchester the figure was £305.
However, the Government has confirmed that from April 2019 it will axe the payments for generating electricity. It has also proposed ending payments for exporting electricity.
Additional payments
This means that after the cut-off point, the only benefit to having solar panels will be the electricity savings, as the opportunity to make additional payments through the scheme will be missed.
Without the large financial incentives, it would take an estimated 70 years to recoup the initial investment, which is nearly three times the lifespan of some solar panels.
Crucially, those who have purchased their solar panels before this point will not be affected and can still earn back their investment within 20 years.
In 2007, the average home was billed £415 for its yearly electricity and ten years later, this figure had risen by almost £200 and stood at £619.
Throughout 2018, all of the UK’s ‘big six’ energy providers – npower, E.ON, Scottish Power, SSE, EDF and British Gas – implemented price hikes after Ofgem increased the prepayment price cap.
This will mean millions of customers face average additional payments of around £100 a year on their energy bills.
This Article
This article is based on a press release from YES Energy Solutions.
An investigation has been launched into allegations the judge who handed three fracking protesters “manifestly excessive” jail sentences has family ties to the oil and gas industry.
Judge Robert Altham sentenced Simon Blevins, Richard Roberts and Richard Loizou to up to 16 months in prison after they were convicted by a jury of causing a public nuisance offence. The protesters had their sentences quashed in an appeal case last week.
Under the Judicial Code of Conduct, judges are expected to disclose personal relationships, social contacts and activities that could cause a bias or a conflict of interest and which put their impartiality into question.
Properly investigated
In a statement, the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO), an independent body which deals with judicial complaints of misconduct, has confirmed receiving a complaint regarding Judge Robert Altham and added that it will be considered in accordance with the Judicial Conduct Rules.
The JCIO only deals with complaints regarding the personal conduct of judicial office holders, such as misusing judicial status for personal gain or failing to declare a potential conflict of interest. The body does not accept complaints about a judge’s decision or the way they managed a case.
The Guide to Judicial Conduct states that judges “should avoid situations which might reasonably reduce respect for judicial office or might cast doubt upon their judicial impartiality; or which might expose them to charges of hypocrisy by reason of their private life”.
It adds that the principle of judicial independence extends well beyond the traditional separation of powers and requires “that a judge be, and be seen to be, independent of all sources of power or influence in society, including the media and commercial interests”.
Under the Judicial Conduct Rules, the Lord Chancellor Conservative MP David Gauke, and the Lord Chief Justice Sir Ian Burnett share responsibility for overseeing complaints are properly investigated.
Necessary enquiries
Lord Chief Justice Sir Ian Burnett heard the appeal case against the three fracking protesters’ prison sentence last week and told the court it was “manifestly excessive”.
The Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice are also responsible for the final decision regarding the judicial complaint and there is no right to appeal against their decision.
They are assisted by nominated judges, investigating judges disciplinary hearing panel members and JCIO officials.
The JCIO is responsible for considering allegations of judicial misconduct, assessing whether the allegation could amount to misconduct and making the necessary enquiries for the investigation.
If the JCIO estimates that an allegation could amount to misconduct, the complaint is referred to a nominated judge, appointed by the Lord Chief Justice. Otherwise, the complaint is dismissed.
Family interests
The nominated judge is also responsible for stating what sanctions might be appropriate if they estimate the allegation amounts to misconduct. This could include being removed or suspended from office.
In this case, the subject of the complaint can call for a disciplinary panel to be convened to review the evidence. The panel then submits a report to the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice, who oversee the decision making process.
If the investigation concludes that there is no judicial misconduct, the nominated judge can still suggest that the subject of the complaint receives pastoral support, advice or training.
A spokesman for the JCIO told DeSmog UK he could not comment on how long the investigation into the complaint regarding Judge Altham is expected to last.
Meanwhile, in a written question, Labour MP for Blackpool South Gordon Marsden asked whether the Ministry of Justice will undertake an investigation into allegations Judge Altham breached the Judicial Code of Conduct by failing to declare his family interests.
Ships’ stores
Lucy Frazer MP, the parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Ministry of Justice, replied:“It would not be appropriate for me or any other government minister to comment on cases which are, or have been, before the courts.”
Centrica bought a 25 per cent stake in Cuadrilla and its partner AJ Lucas’ exploration licence in Lancashire in a 2013 deal which included Centrica pumping £60 million into the fracking venture.
John and Linda Altham are listed as the company director of J.C Altham & Sons, a company that provides ships’ stores and offshore supplies for oil and gas platforms.
The company’s website says it is under reconstruction and has been locked behind a login and password.
Sentencing decisions
Jane Margaret Watson is listed on Companies House as the company’s managing director and according to the Mirror she is also the judge’s sister.
Kirsty Brimelow QC, the human rights lawyer who was representing the three men pro-bono, told the Court of Appeal that Judge Altham’s sister had signed a petition in Lancashire in favour of fracking.
The Mirror reported that Jane Watson signed an open letter dated 8 January 2015 which called on Lancashire County Council to “give shale gas a chance” and argued that the new industry could generate a “£33bn supply chain”.
The letter was signed by more than 100 business leaders from the North West of England and Jane Watson signed as managing director of J.C Altham & Sons.
Following the Mirror’s allegations, a spokesman for the Judicial Office said: “Judges are required to base their sentencing decisions on the facts of each case and within the relevant sentencing guidelines and carefully explain their reasoning in court.
Anti-fracking campaigners
“There are longstanding principles, set out in case law, which guide how judges approach possible conflicts of interest. These principles are explained in the publicly available Guide to Judicial Conduct.
“They ensure that when hearing a case, a judge will be mindful of possible conflicts of interest, and can draw relevant matters to the attention of the parties in the case.”
Judge Altham did not wish to respond to the Mirror’s allegations.
Outside the courtroom in London there was an explosion of joy from the three men’s families and girlfriends and anti-fracking campaigners upon hearing the judges’ ruling.
Platon Loizou, Richard Loizou’s father, told DeSmog UK: “I am over the moon and the fight will continue against fracking. The first phase was to get my son out of prison. Now the fight continues”.
Speaking outside the court, Michelle Easton, Roberts’ girlfriend, said that while the men were still convicted of causing public nuisance, the latest sentence was aligned with “the rights that we have in this country”.
“You do not lock up protesters who are peaceful, who have strong convictions and who stand for what is right. That should not be allowed to happen in this country,” she said.
Lidl has announced “industry leading commitments” to sourcing soy from sustainable, deforestation-free sources. Lidl UK will only source soy from sustainable sources from this month, within its own supply chain.
The company claims its sustainable soy policy “is the boldest move by any supermarket in the UK” and “signals a step change in commitments to creating a sustainable soy industry”.
The supermarket has also committed to working with all its UK suppliers to achieve physically traceable, sustainable, zero-deforestation soy in the long term, as well as purchasing Roundtable for Responsible Soy (RTRS) credits.
Responsible sourcing
Lidl UK was also a founding signatory of the Cerrado Manifesto in 2017 – a call to action to halt deforestation and native vegetation loss in Brazil’s Cerrado. The vast majority of soy (90 percent) that comes into the EU, is used to feed livestock in the production of meat, poultry, dairy and eggs.
The supermarket sees the move as a critical first step in creating a sustainable sector. Through a ‘direct trade, book and claim’ approach, Lidl will invest its premiums in specific farms in Brazil, that produce soy to the industry acknowledged social and environmental standards, defined by the respected Roundtable for Responsible Soy.
The company hopes that these commitments will lay the groundwork for a rapid increase in market demand for sustainable soy. Amali Bunter, Responsible Sourcing Manager for Lidl UK commented: “At Lidl UK, we are taking action to ensure that soy production is sustainable and deforestation-free for the long term.
“We want to create sustainable supply chains that protect the environment, while also delivering high quality products at unbeatable value, and as a major food retailer, we recognise the need to accelerate progress towards a secure, resilient supply of sustainable soy. Through the UK Roundtable for Sustainable Soy we look forward to working collaboratively with industry to ensure that this is achieved.”
Huge opportunities
Claire Perry, minister for energy and clean growth, said: “The UK has led the world in cutting emissions whilst growing our economy – with clean growth driving incredible innovation and creating hundreds of thousands of high quality jobs.
“Ten years on from the Climate Change Act, the first ever Green GB week is a time to build on our successes and explain the huge opportunities for business and young people of a cleaner economy.
“I’m delighted to see how many more businesses and organisations such as Lidl are seizing this multi-billion pound opportunity to energize their communities to tackle the very serious threat of climate change.”
This Author
Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Headland Consultancy.
Dr Benny Peiser, a sports anthropologist whose PhD focused on the ancient Olympic games, was chosen by Julian Morris, founder and president of the International Policy Network, to submit a chapter to the think tank’s publication on climate change entitled Adapt or Die.
Peiser’s chapter was called Climate Change and Civilisation Collapse and in it he explained that humans had often panicked about the end of the world, and expressed his view that global warming was just the latest example.
Peiser explained his theory that Marxists, who became disillusioned by the failure of capitalism to collapse in on itself, turned instead to the environmental cause.
Climate credentials
“Deeply infuriated by the failure of their predictions and the unremitting vibrancy of capitalism, many disillusioned believers turned to ecological pessimism and environmental determinism,” he argued.
“However, none of these horror scenarios has alarmed the public as much as the alleged peril of human-caused global warming.”
Elsewhere, Peiser has boasted about his own youthful environmentalism to boost his credentials as a commentator on climate change. He likes to tell the story of how he was a founding member of the pioneering German Green Party in Frankfurt, and would play football with leading Green politician Joschka Fisher.
In his telling, his latter-day conversion to denial represents an intellectual maturity. However, the extent of his teenage radicalism may have come as a surprise to his sponsor Lord Nigel Lawson and his other free market friends – while his late conservatism has been a disappointment to the environmentalists in his family.
Street fighter
Dieter Nentwig is married to Rina, Peiser’s half-sister and, during the 1980s, hired Peiser, a student at the University of Frankfurt, to work as an assistant at his music agency.
Nentwig told me: “He changed his attitude too… he changed everything, you know. Don’t ask me why. He cut his hair short and things like that. He was like a hippy. He was like a left-wing street fighter for a couple of years, taking part in all the big demonstrations going on in Frankfurt, not only against nuclear power, also against the Hausbesetzer – big houses being taken over by the housing agents to remove them, to throw people out and get rich people in.
“And students in those days took those houses illegally, and squatted [in] the house. And he was in that movement too. And there were big street fights in Frankfurt, I know he was part of this.”
He added: “We were certainly surprised he became more bourgeois as we would say. And we didn’t investigate [the question of] why did he change.”
Marxist demonstrators
Peiser managed the musician Frank Wolff and his band, Frankfurter Kurorchester, who would perform before tens of thousands of anarchist and Marxist demonstrators fighting with the police at German nuclear power stations – around the same time that Lawson was suppressing the coal miners’ strike in England.
Wolff said: “He was a pretty radical left-winger – he always does things in some way radical. Arno Lustiger [a German historian] was a fatherly friend to Benny and decidedly left wing. Benny was surely dogmatic – maybe not so much anymore today – but heavily dedicated.”
Wolff believes Peiser was a member of the Maoist Communist Union North. And he was always a contrarian.
“In Germany, everyone bitched about Boris Becker [the former world No. 1 professional tennis player]. Not everyone, but the intellectuals – ‘he can’t even speak German correctly’ and so on. And Benny said: ‘Why, he is a great tennis player’. Yes, he consciously took the opposite opinion. That’s kind of typical for him.”
Research and Writing
Peiser wrote for the hardline radical Frankfurt newspaper Pflasterstrand and knew the Marxist editor, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Cohn-Bendit was also a founder of the autonomist group, Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle), which recently became mired in controversy for the “fictional” accounts he published in the 1980s describing sexualised encounters with young children.
Peiser landed a lecturing post in the sports department at Liverpool John Moores University in 1993 where he met his wife Gillian, who had worked as a language teacher in secondary schools before working at the education department of the university.
Professor Tim Cable, his boss, said that the university tried desperately to convince Peiser to engage in substantive research but, during almost two decades, he produced only three published papers.
Peiser began sending out a newsletter, called CCNet, which began discussing asteroids and moved onto climate science, and would occasionally get quoted in the media. Cable, giving evidence to an information tribunal, said the university simply ignored what Peiser said even though he was breaking media protocol.
He admitted the university was embarrassed when the Times Higher Education Supplement compared Peiser to the moronic Simpsons character, Homer Simpson.
Cable said: “He was not a trained scientist… Dr Peiser’s work in climate science had no scientific credibility… it brought disrepute to the university, not repute.”
Peiser does have a point that some in the environment movement have abandoned their Marxist past. But, he is living proof that former Marxists are well represented among the denier and free market think tank world too.
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.
