The 2000 US election cycle was as high stakes as they come. Congressional balance was in question, and the presidency was up for grabs.

The George W Bush–Dick Cheney partnership was Big Oil’s dream team. Bush, the presidential candidate, had made his early career though oil exploration in his home state of Texas, while Cheney, vice president (VP) candidate, was a Halliburton executive and ex-congressman of Wyoming, the US’s biggest coal producer.

Al Gore, the Democratic nominee for president, on the other hand, had been nothing short of a hate-figure for the sceptics and the oil industry, as VP under Clinton, so they knew which way their bread was buttered.

Republican Funding

More than 75 percent of the oil and gas industry’s direct spending on political candidates went to the Republicans that year.

And, with ExxonMobil, the divide was even starker: more than 95 percent of their $700,000 Political Action Committee spending went to the Republicans.

This is to say nothing of the numerous free market, climate sceptic think tanks funded by ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers who donated to the Republican campaign. Individuals with a declared affiliation to ExxonMobil also gave a total $1.22 million in private donations to the Republicans between 2000 and 2008.

In total, Bush received $1.5 million from the oil industry for his 2000 presidential campaign. At the time, this was the largest donation from the industry to a single political candidate.

And so, on 20th January 2001, George W Bush was inaugurated as President of the United States, floating on oil money.

Exxon and the White House

A mere three weeks later, ‘Iron Ass’ Raymond of Exxon flew to Washington to meet with VP Dick Cheney in the West Wing. The two Midwesterners were old hunting friends who had met in the ‘80s when Cheney was congressman for Wyoming.

Their wives, Charlene Raymond and Lynne Cheney, were friends from the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. They came from the same free market background and, through the nineties, had lived in the same upper middle class leafy Victorian Preston Hollow in Dallas.

Raymond boasted that his access to the Bush administration was comparable to the halcyon years of the Reagan Presidency. Indeed, their private meetings became a regular feature, with two or three meetings scheduled every year through the administration.

ExxonMobil’s influence on the president reached as far as foreign policy. Shortly after Bush was elected, the oil giant’s approval was required for India’s largest state-owned oil company to buy into the Sakhalin-1 energy project in Russia.

When asked by Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister, “why don’t you just tell them [Exxon] what to do?” Bush replied: “Nobody tells those guys what to do.”

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.

Palaeoclimatology is the study of past climates. Scientists determine past environmental conditions via the use of climate proxies, the preserved physical characteristics of the past. 

Modern analogues are an essential part of palaeoclimatic studies because they provide the basis for understanding the geochemical signatures of fossils. Corals are extremely sensitive to variations in their environment so make excellent climate indicators.  

Corals have the potential to record several centuries of highly detailed environmental information in the form of chemical proxies such as trace elements and stable isotopes. They are fantastic sources for isotopes as their calcified skeletons are formed at or near to isotopic equilibrium with the surrounding seawater.

Research methods

Changes in chemical proxies are often correlated with thin growth bands, which are presumed to relate to annual growth cycles, just like tree rings. Larger corals commonly lay down density bands that are used as annual markers, allowing time-series records to be produced.

Scanning Electron Microscopy and backscattered electron imaging studies of the Caribbean species Montastraea faveolata, reveals small microbands that can be used to describe small variations in climate that provides researchers with a very accurate reading of past climates. 

Corals can also be used to help determine day length, Earth’s rotation, and diurnal cycles. By examining the growth rings of corals, we can determine that a year during the Devonian period was around 400 days long.

A limitation of using corals is that they are made almost entirely of calcium carbonate, so they dissolve with an increase in oceanic water acidification. Some parts of corals have also been altered by a process of diagenesis, and can yield false results. In some cases, diagenesis can erase environmental information.

The intermediate shell layers are the most likely to yield well-persevered sample materials and thus provide the most reliable results. This is true for both corals and macrofossils, myarea of research at CSM. 

No climate proxy is perfect so, to get the most reliable results possible, it is best to use multiple lines of evidence. This is especially true if important variables (e.g. sea-surface temperatures, eustatic changes, and ice-level fluctuations) are to be identified. Ideally, it is best to use a mixture of inorganic and organic data combined with model results.

Climate change

A quarter of marine ecosystems are dependent on coral reefs – these ecosystems directly support the livelihoods of millions of people worldwide, mostly from developing nations. 

Current anthropogenic climate change is having a devastating effect on coral colonies. Recent rises in ocean temperatures have already impacted reefs, and mass bleaching and disease outbreaks have already become more frequent. Bleaching occurs when the coral polyps expel the algae that that inside them, draining the corals of colour – hence the term “bleaching”.

These algae form an endosymbiotic relation with the coral: they are protected by the coral, and in turn they provide up to 90 percent of its energy. Without these source of energy the corals begin to starve and, given enough time, die. 

The increase in carbon dioxide in the oceans as decreased their pH, a process called ocean acidification. It is thought that between 30 to 40 percent of CO2 from human activity ends up in bodies of water and that some of it reacts with the water to form carbonic acid. This carbonic acid has already started to reduce calcification rates of coral-reefs.

Unless human-induced climate change is controlled, it will almost certainly destroy most of the coral reefs in the world.  Studies have shown that 93 percent of the almost 3000 individual reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef have been affected by bleaching. Almost a quarter of the reef died during a mass bleaching event in 2016.

The study of ancient corals and their responses to past climatic changes helps place the modern biodiversity crisis, which has been dubbed the Sixth Mass Extinction, in to its historical context. 

The Author

Jack Wilkin is a graduate researcher in the Deep Time Global Change palaeoclimatology research group at the Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter. His research focuses on the isotopic geochemistry of fossil shells from the South German Middle Jurassic. 

Every year on 4 October people around the globe celebrate World Animal Day. It is a particularly special day for me as it marks the day I decided to go vegetarian in 2010, and then vegan in 2012.

In the six years of being vegan, I’ve learned more about the world and myself than I ever have, and it’s important to me to share this knowledge with as many people as possible.

I remember watching a documentary about sustainability called ‘Cowspiracy’ – still available on Netflix – and being blown away by the facts and figures presented in the film.

I was amazed that my relatively new lifestyle choice could benefit the planet this way and I wanted to know more. The scale on which animals are used is truly mind-blowing, as I’m hoping to illustrate in this article.

Here is a selection of facts and statistics for the three major reasons why people are increasingly turning to veganism:

THE ENVIRONMENT

1. Feeding crops to people rather than farmed animals could feed three billion more people.

While veganism is of course an animal rights movement, it can help people too. Vegans are often very unfairly accused of not caring about people but, in fact, our lifestyle can help combat world hunger.

People in developing countries are starving; partially because of our greed for meat, dairy and eggs. If everyone ate the crops directly – rather that feeding them to animals and then eating them – we could feed nearly half of the world’s population!

2. For every 100 calories we feed to animals, we receive back only 12 calories from their meat or milk.

Animal agriculture is inherently wasteful and unsustainable. For every 100 calories fed to animals, we receive back only 12 calories by consuming their flesh and milk.

The dairy industry, far from its perception as an innocent by-product, is every bit as environmentally destructive as meat. Dairy alone accounts for about 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, over half of which is methane – a highly potent greenhouse gas emitted by cows.

We need to be far bolder than “eating less or ‘better’ meat” if we are to protect our precious planet. 

ANIMALS

3. We don’t know how many animals we kill every year.

This one is a non-statistic really but, perversely, it’s the most shocking one. There is no accurate estimation of how many animals die at our hands. We as a society do not value animal lives enough to even note their passing.

There are at least two rough estimates for the number of farmed animals killed every year for ‘food’: 56 and 150 billion. Both are striking and neither includes the number of marine animals killed, which is so great that it’s measured in tonnes. The conclusion is just that we do not know the harm we cause.

4. Milk production per cow has doubled over the last 40 years, with cows typically worn out after just three lactations. 

The exploitation of female cows for their reproductive capacities by the dairy industry is one of the cruellest forms of injustice we perpetrate on animals. Drinking cow’s milk means contributing to the killing of a child, the breaking of a new mother’s heart and abuse of the miracle of bearing children.

With today’s intensive farming systems constantly seeking out ways to minimise costs and maximise profit, cows have been cross bred to the point where they produce much more milk than they naturally would, leading to terrible health consequences.

5. More than 40 million day-old male chicks are killed in the UK by either being gassed or being thrown into a macerator.

We may think that buying organic or free-range eggs means we’re not contributing to animal suffering but the reality is that every egg consumed shows support for the cruel and exploitative egg industry.

The practice of killing day-old male chicks occurs in all egg farming systems, including organic and free-range. Hens’ welfare is compromised as they’re specifically bred to produce two or three times as many eggs as they naturally would. This depletes them from calcium, meaning bone fractures are sadly very common.

HEALTH

6. If the world went vegan, it could save eight million human lives by 2050 and up to $1,000bn per year on healthcare.

A vegan world would not only be a kinder place for everyone, but also very beneficial to our health. Oxford University experts found that billions of dollars could be saved if no one ate animals.

There’s a disconnect between what we’re told we should be eating and the food we’re producing. Animal farming is sadly being prioritised, whereas governments should instead provide support for growers who produce food for human consumption.

7. Eating just 50g processed meat per day – two rashers of bacon – increases the risk of bowel cancer by 18 percent.

You’ve likely heard about the World Health Organisation report in November 2015 that classified processed meat as a carcinogen on a par with tobacco. The news caused many people to make changes to their diets.

While all diets are individual, an off-the-shelf vegan diet is often perceived as one of the healthiest.

Ultimately, every action we take is with a view to make ourselves happy – it is human nature to make choices that personally benefit us. While my decision to become vegan was motivated by my refusal to contribute to animal exploitation, you may find that you care about the environment or want to live a healthier life. Veganism is a great choice for all of us who care about these issues.

If you’d like to learn more about veganism, take up our seven-day challenge this World Animal Day here.

This author

Dominika Piasecka is Media and PR Officer at The Vegan Society and a keen vegan activist.

Climate science denier and hard-Brexiter MP Owen Paterson told the cheering crowd in a packed lecture hall a few hundred metres away from the Conservative Party Conference, “we are the mainstream of the Conservative Party”.

Paterson, a political advisor to the group Leave Means Leave, was preaching to an audience already on his side of the divide as the rift between different factions of the Conservative Party deepens over Brexit.

He was speaking at the Alternative Brexit Conference, a one-day event which ran parallel to the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham on Monday and required no pass or accreditation to attend.

Rising star

It was organised by The Bruges Group, a Eurosceptic think tank created to uphold Margaret Thatcher’s ideas, which has repeatedly spread disinformation about climate change.

Indeed, previous blog posts and lecture notes published on the group’s website have criticised the EU’s “alarmist” views on man-made climate change and accused it of using global warming as an excuse to impose regulations and ramp up energy prices.

Throughout the day, the conference heard from those on the right of the Conservative party pushing for a hard Brexit and making the case for deregulation and the importance of a free trade deal with the US.

It gave a platform to climate science deniers such as David Campbell Bannerman, a Conservative MEP for the East of England, who joined UKIP between 2004 and 2011, and previously accused the EU of being a “green Taliban”.

The conference also heard from Whitham MP Priti Patel and one of the party’s right-wing rising star Andrew Jenkyns, the MPfor Morley and Outwood and an advocate for the group Leave Means Leave.

Passionate calls

Alternative and fringe events in and outside the Conservative Party conference showed how the networks of hardline Brexiters and climate science deniers continue to overlap and at times work together to mount pressure from the right of the party.

Among the crowd at the alternative conference, enthusiastic supporters were proudly wearing union jack ties and “Chuck Chequers” badges, in defiance of Theresa May’s soft Brexit plan.

Instead, the room unanimously backed leaving the EU, whether under a Canada-style free-trade deal or without a deal – resulting to trade under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules.  

Cheers roared across the room at any mention of “taking back control” and that “no deal means no cash” for the EU. A Guardian reporter was booed when asking why the group did not push for a Conservative leadership contest.

Both Jenkyns and North Shropshire MP Paterson made passionate calls to “reject the over-regulated” EU standards and laws and embrace the opportunities of making trade deals with countries outside the EU.

Spread disinformation

Their comments came a week after the free-market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) published an alternative Brexit plan which called on the UK government to cut EU environmental regulations to secure free-trade deals with the US, China and India after Brexit.

The report singled out environmental protection rules as “frequently disguised methods of protectionism” and one of the areas where EU regulation is “moving in an anti-competitive direction”. The report, authored by controversial trade lobbyist Shanker Singham, was criticised for its methodology.

The same arguments were yet carried forward by the conference’s speakers.

Paterson told the audience about his visit to Washington DC last week, when he made the case for a special relationship between the US and UK during a speech at the free-market think tank the Heritage Foundation.

The think tank has repeatedly spread disinformation about climate change, previously describing global warming as “a contentious and unproven scientific theory”.

Science denier

Recalling his conversation with US officials, he said: “They have made it completely clear that they won’t be a free-trade deal with the UK if the laws of this country are made elsewhere [in the EU] and involve regulations that they don’t like.

“We should be starting to actively negotiate with the US but until May’s Chequers’ plan is off the table, they won’t start talking to us.”

The regulations Paterson referred to include for instance allowing chlorine-washed chickens and hormone-fed beef and GMcrops to be imported into the UK for the first time.

Although both environment secretary Michael Gove and international trade secretary Liam Fox have said they would not lower the UK’s food and environmental standards to strike a free-trade deal with the US, the speakers made it clear that deregulation remains a key issue for the right of the Conservative party.

Carbon emissions

The Alternative Brexit Conference also gave a platform to MEP Campbell Bannerman, a climate science denier who also sits on the advisory board of Leave Means Leave, and is a former chairman of the Bow group – a free-market think tank closely linked to the IEA.

In a 2014 opinion piece for the Huffington Post called “The EU’s Green Taliban are another reason to quit the EU”, Campbell Bannerman said he agreed with former Australian Prime Minister John Howard that climate change has become “a substitute for religion”.

Campbell Bannerman accused “the majority of British civil servants” of being “environmental fundamentalists” and ignored the overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue to describe “the mass scientific uncertainties over man-made climate change”.

Campbell Bannerman argued that the EU’s target to reduce carbon emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 “would simply destroy the European economy while at the same time the rest of the world carries on regardless”.

Speaking at the conference, he slammed the Labour Party’s Brexit policies describing Jeremy Corbyn as a “Nazi” and calling Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell “a nasty piece of work”.

Fossil fuels

Steven Woolfe, the MEP for the North West of England, was next to address the conference about “making the Conservative Party conservative again”.

Woolfe has recently been outspoken about the development of wind and solar energy. In a tweet, he described the backers of wind and solar energy as “the next crony capitalists” benefiting from subsidies and tax breaks, adding that this had left “costs soar for the poorest consumers”.

Woolfe was once considered a favourite to replace Nigel Farage as leader of the UKIP, might be best remembered for hisaltercation with a fellow UKIP MEP at the European Parliament which left him in hospital.

Woolfe, who resigned from UKIP in October 2016, was later found to have started the incident after wanting to settle his differences with UKIP MEP Mike Hookem “man to man”.

Educational charity

Woolfe’s renewable energy claims come in stark contrast with current research which show the rapidly declining costs of renewable energy – a trend which is accentuated when taking into account the carbon price of fossil fuels. Earlier this year,a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA) found that renewable energy is set to be cheaper than fossil fuels by 2020.

But one fossil fuel company is keen to retain its close ties with the Conservative Party.

Inside the exhibition area of the conference centre, oil company BP was given a prime advertising stand opposite the government’s “Great Britain” campaign, which aims to boost investment and trade links with the UK around the world.

Even more prominent inside the conference centre were the IEA and TaxPayers’ Alliance, whose event space the “ThinkTent” was located right beside the entrance to the conference centre and alongside event spaces run by Policy Exchange and ConservativeHome.

Both the IEA, which is registered as an educational charity, and the TaxPayers’ Alliance are part of a number of organisations working out of an office at 55 Tufton Street, near Westminster, alongside the climate science denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

Trade deal lobbyist

While these groups have long pushed to influence policy on the fringes of the Conservative Party, their ideas and arguments are increasingly becoming central in swinging the ideological debate to the right.

All three groups were accused by grassroot campaign BeLeave whistleblower Shahmir Sanni of mounting a coordinated campaign to push for a hard-Brexit in the media.

The IEA is currently under a regulatory compliance investigation by the Charity Commission after an undercover investigation by Greenpeace’s investigative unit Unearthed and the Guardian suggested the IEA offered potential US donors access to UK government ministers to promote free-trade deals.

The IEA has denied any allegations of “cash for access”.

The IEA’s event panellists included its director general Mark Littlewood, its trade deal lobbyist Shanker Singham as well asMP Steve Baker, DUP leader Arlene Foster and climate denier MEP Campbell Bannerman.

Ideological debate

From the media, Liam Halligan, a Telegraph columnist and member of the “no-deal” advocate group Economists for Free Trade, and associate editor Camilla Tominey both took part in panel discussions.

On Sunday evening, Daniel Hannan MEP, from the Initiative for Free Trade, together with IEA’s Singham and representatives from the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation presented their visions for an “ideal US-UK free trade”. At the crux of that debate is environmental regulation.

As the UK is about to leave the EU, these campaign groups and think tanks which were used to pushing for a deregulated free-market on the party’s fringes have now taken a front seat in driving the Conservative Party’s ideological debate.

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Lord Lawson courts controversy. The former chancellor of the exchequer is today one of the leading champions of of a no-deal Brexit. He remains founder and chairman for life of the climate denying Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Lawson likes to present his own interests as being aligned with those of the common man. He asserts that his attack on climate change policy is motivated by deep concerns for the working classes – fears environmental measures will cost jobs and undermine prosperity.

Environmentalists have claimed that instead Lawson is acting in the interests of the oil industry, even if he is not funded by any oil companies.

Essential services

A secret government document published after 34 years hidden in the Government archives provides new evidence that Lawson, when a Tory cabinet minister acted in the interests of the oil companies, – but certainly not their workers.

Lawson proposed his top secret LEADBURN plan to the Cabinet on 10 November 1981 which suggested declaring a national state of emergency within a week and confirmed 12,500 British troops had been placed on notice to move in order to keep fuel supplied and break a national strike. 

The document – released for the first time by DeSmog UK – is marked “confidential” and is headlined, Cabinet, Oil Tanker Drivers: Contingency Measures, Memorandum of the Secretary of State for Energy.

The Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) had called for an “all-out strike” demanding an 11 percent pay rise for its members working for BP, Shell, Esso and Texaco.

A meeting of the Civil Contingencies Unit (CCU) was called on 4 November with ministers agreeing “preliminary steps to bring forward plans to protect essential services from fuel shortages.

“If an all-out strike occurred, it would cut off two-thirds of normal supplies of oil products… and would bring almost all road deliveries to a halt…

Body of servicemen

“Shortages of this scale would have early and serious consequences the community and the economy.”

Lawson, who had been in the job about six weeks, warned industry would be “immobilised” preventing “movement of raw materials and products”; reserve stocks would be exhausted, and “there would be increasing difficulties in getting people to work as motorists run dry.”

The government was not about to let this happen. So 160 service instructors were placed on notice the following day to move to undisclosed training locations around the country. Then on 10 November “the main body of 12,500 men were placed on six days’ notice to move.”

The CCU planned to meet the following Friday to decide whether to “confirm the implementation of LEADBURN on 16 November and seek a Privy Council to secure the Proclamation of a State of Emergency on that day (if the situation has sharply deteriorated).”

They would also be asked to agree “to place the main body of servicemen on 24 hours’ standby from Sunday 15 November (if an all-out strike on 16 November looks uncertain). 

Emergency plan

“In this case it may be convenient to authorise the Home Secretary, in consultation with the Prime Minister and other Ministers immediately involved, to take any appropriate decision that may be needed over the weekend or in the early part of next week.”

The TGWU was at the time of the strike the biggest general union in Britain with more than 900,000 members. It has since merged to form part of Unite the Union.

The publication of these documents for the first time shows the significant power transport workers had in Britain during that time, and the lengths the government had to go to meet their demands.

The documents also suggest that people working for energy companies might take it with a pinch of salt when Lord Lawson claims to have their interests at heart when attacking the science of climate change.

The sense of panic and urgency conveyed in Lawson’s emergency plan is brilliantly echoed in the satire of his tendency to fear the worst in Spitting Image broadcast by the BBC (pictured above – video below).

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.

Geoengineering is a concept that can raise some eyebrows. Environmental scientists either love it or loathe it, and the application of large-scale engineered solutions to environmental problems have so far proven largely unpredictable – nature doesn’t always respond the way scientists expect. 

Nevertheless, geoengineering still offers what other branches of science don’t – large-scale potential solutions to global climate system problems. In this case, that problem is sea-level rise, which is influenced by glacial sea-ice melt. 

Even if we hit all the targets of the Paris Agreement, sea level will still increase because the heat caused by global warming to date can be stored in water for much longer than in air. Warm water will heat the bottoms of ice shelves, which will cause more sea-ice melt, which will contribute to sea-level rise. 

Thinking the unthinkable 

As Professor Jonathan Bamber, president of the European Geosciences Union, said: “Present-day sea level rise is about 3mm a year and it keeps accelerating. Even if we cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero tomorrow, we’re committed to some sea level rise, because of inertia in the oceans, glaciers, ice caps and the whole climate system.”

Lead researchers Michael Wolovick and John Moore decided to investigate the potential for glacial geoengineering to prevent sea-ice melt. Moore,  a scientist at Beijing Normal University China and a professor of climate change at the University of Lapland, Finland, said: “Doing geoengineering means often considering the unthinkable.” 

The team examined two methods – the first was to build walls underwater, blocking warm water from reaching the ice shelf’s base and melting it, and the second approach involved constructing artificial mounds on the seafloor to prop up the glacier, and help it to regrow. 

The researchers conducted the study with computer models, and based their modelling on the Thwaites glacier, which is projected to be the largest individual source of future sea-level rise. The idea was that by basing their study on one of the most challenging glaciers in the world, the researchers could reasonably expect it to work on most others. 

Their results have been astonishingly encouraging – they found that a small underwater wall blocking about half of all warm water from reaching the ice shelf base was 70 percent likely to succeed, and large walls would be even more likely to delay or even stop ice-sheet collapse completely.

Diverse consequences 

Even the smallest intervention tested – the building of isolated 300-metre-high mounds or columns on the seafloor, had a 30 percent probability of preventing a runaway collapse of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet for the foreseeable future, according to the models. 

Although the wall is more effective, other constraints could mean that the mounds are more practical in some instances, according to Moore. He said: “There is a trade off in the 2 designs, the long wall is more likely to succeed in stopping ice sheet collapse than the simple pinning points. But it requires a much larger volume of material to construct, so it’s much more difficult, and presumably a higher risk of potential accidents during construction.”

While geoengineering could be an effective tool to prevent sea-ice collapse, the researchers say that reducing greenhouse gases is still the most vital part of the fight against climate change. The solution proposed by the team would limit sea-level rise caused by glacial ice melt, but would not have an effect on other harmful consequences of climate change, such as ocean acidification, floods, droughts and heat waves. 

In the past, scientists have tried out geoengineering solutions that have affected the ecological balance and the environment around, but it is unlikely that the glacial walls will have those kinds of effects. In any case, glacial ice collapse is likely to cause even more disruption to ecosystems and the environment, according to Moore. More analysis is needed, but it is likely that the impacts would probably be localised because the aim would be to preserve the glaciers as close to their current form as possible. 

Moor said: “This is quite different from ideas such as iron fertilization or stratospheric aerosol injection which add new material and reactions to the global environmental system. If the glacier collapses – which it is very likely to do under greenhouse gas warming – then the local changes in oceanic environment and ecology would be far greater, as also would be the global consequences from the rising seas affecting coastal wetlands, agriculture and cities.” 

This Author 

Catherine Collins writes on marine and environmental issues. She has a BSc in marine science and an MA in journalism. You can read more of her work here. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of practicing scientists who are experts in their field, has gathered in Incheon, Republic of Korea, where they will launch the UN Special Report on 1.5°C (SR1.5).

The UN Report on 1.5° forms a major scientific undertaking, compiling all the latest climate change research in one single document spanning over 800 pages. It will inform policy makers and global leaders of the impacts their policy decisions will have on global warming and sustainable development.

Behind Paris

“At the time the Paris Agreement was decided on, there was not yet so much scientific knowledge of what the 1.5° limit – the Paris goal of keeping global warming below 1.5° of average global warming – actually means,”Jonathan Lynn, head of communications at the IPCC explains to me.

The Paris Agreement, created in 2015 and due to be implemented from 2020 onward, sets a long-term goal of holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C.

“Global Leaders at the Paris summit then tasked the IPCC to compile a report of all known science on the global impacts that the warming of 1.5° compared to 2°C would have on the world,” Lynn clarifies.

The 1.5° report describes the impacts of global warming on natural and human systems, but also includes research on the different pathways necessary to mitigate the causes of climate change, as well as the effects of global warming on sustainable development, poverty eradication and reducing inequalities.

Overdue warnings

“Scientists have been warning us for years that we can expect to see more extreme weather with climate change. The heat waves, wildfires, and heavy rainfall events of recent months all over the world underscore these warnings,” Hoesung Lee, the chair of the IPCC, declared at the opening on the one-week gathering in the Republic of Korea.

“Science alerts us to the gravity of the situation, but science also, and this special report in particular, helps us understand the solutions available to us,” Lee explained.

At the meeting this week in the Republic of Korea, representatives of the IPCC’s 195 members governments will agree to a Summary for Policymakers (SPM) that will accompany the full report. Both the summary and full report will be made publicly available on Monday October 8.

“Overall, it is essential that the report is approved at the session in Korea and not blocked by countries hoping to undermine rapid climate action,” Sven Harmeling from CARE International wrote in a piece for Reuters. “It has been a tremendous scientific exercise, triggering and processing a wave of new findings.”

The 1.5° report will feed into decisions made at the upcoming UN climate summit in Poland (COP24), this December. Many environmental organisations hope the science report will activate political commitments for stronger climate targets by 2020.

This Author

Arthur Wyns is an external scientific reviewer for the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°. He is the program manager of Climate Tracker, an organisation supporting environmental journalists worldwide to bring climate change into their national debates. He tweets from @ArthurWyns

ExxonMobil and other industry hardliners came together in 1998 to create an “Action Plan” to combat America’s growing fondness for fighting climate change. 

This plan would provide a blueprint for undermining the climate movement over the next four years.

But, the environmentalists were also well-organised. Having bought shares in ExxonMobil, they attended the corporation’s first annual meeting, held in Dallas in May 2000, and used it as a platform to attack Exxon boss Lee Raymond and the corporation’s policies.

Convincing evidence

When one activist shouted for a “long-term solution to global warming”, applause ripped through the room. Raymond, infuriated, let rip.

Reading from a petition apparently signed by 17,000 scientists, he railed: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that any release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will in the foreseeable future cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate.”

Continuing in his own words, “I’m not saying you’re wrong. What I am saying is there is a substantial difference of view in the scientific community as to what exactly is going on.”

Raymond was not going to be put off by the activists. 2000 was a big year for the corporation as the US election cycle started, pitting industry insider George W Bush against environmentalist Al Gore.

Election funding

It was a chance for the corporation to be free of the threat of the Democrats’ regulatory ambitions, and so the funding of denial organisations continued to increase.

As Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets project has documented, between 1998 and 2010, ExxonMobil spent nearly $25 million funding climate denier groups.

The move to disinformation would prove a defining issue of ExxonMobil’s strategy and influence throughout the first Bush term.

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.

The government has quietly abandoned efforts to meet a longstanding target to improve England’s most important wildlife sites, according to a leaked document seen by Unearthed.

The document also warns that Natural England, the government’s nature regulator, is too stretched to prevent “further human-induced extinctions of known threatened species”.

The environment department (Defra) had an official target, set by the Coalition government in 2011, to conserve 50 percent of England’s sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs), by area, by 2020.

Conserved and enhanced

But a leaked internal Natural England action plan shows that the agency is actually working towards a target of ensuring 38.7 percent of SSSIs are in “favourable” condition – the top grade of the six-point scale Natural England uses to assess sites.

The new target is just 0.07 percent higher than the current level.

An insider at Natural England, which has faced significant budget cuts in recent years, told Unearthed they “would be surprised if we even meet that”.

Labour environment spokeswoman Sue Hayman described the news as “extremely concerning”, while the RSPB said the plan seems “desperately weak”.

The leaked plan, which was signed off by Defra, comes eight months after Theresa May launched the government’s 25 year environment plan, which pledged to ensure protected areas are “not only conserved but enhanced” and introduced a new target to conserve 75 percent of SSSIs within the lifetime of the plan.

This plan feels like the moment of impact between aspiration and reality

Commenting on the story a spokesperson for the government’s conservation watchdog said the agency had not reduced any targets – insisting these were set by central government.

A Natural England spokesperson told Unearthed: “We are working to meet our ambition of achieving 75 percent favourable condition on SSSIs as part of the 25 Year environment plan. We do not comment on leaked documents.”

Protected areas

The law requires the government to “further the conservation and enhancement” of SSSIs, under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000.

They protect England’s most important areas for biodiversity, from the Lake District to the Pennines to Exmoor. Unearthed has found parts of all of these areas that were recorded as being in “unfavourable” condition when they were last assessed. 

Natural England ranks sites as “favourable”, “unfavourable – recovering”, “unfavourable – no change”, “unfavourable – declining”, “partially destroyed” or “destroyed”.

But a source at Natural England told Unearthed the agency could even slide backwards on its target to conserve sites.

“We don’t really know what’s happening,” the insider said. “There is very little monitoring going on and when this is combined with little to no proactive management work, there is very little hope of any gains. We could go backwards on the the target but in reality we are unlikely to know as the site condition hasn’t been checked. It is pretty shocking.”

Three weeks ago, a parliamentary question from Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green party, revealed that almost half of England’s SSSIs have not been monitored in the last six years, as is required by national guidelines.

Labour’s Sue Hayman told Unearthed: “SSSIs protect our most precious natural environment. If ministers are serious about their green credentials, then they need to prioritise protecting our environment.”

Natural England’s budget has nearly halved in the past decade.  In 2017/18 it was £112m, down from £200m in 2006/7, its chairman Andrew Sells told parliament in December.

The agency has recently consulted on new plans to use local enforcement powers to crackdown on damaging activities on SSSIs.

Extinctions

The report lays out key risks that Natural England is facing, alongside measures that will be taken to combat them.

These include a “high” likelihood that “resources, and thus actions, are inadequate to meet the Biodiversity 2020 target to secure an overall improvement in the status of our wildlife and to prevent any further human-induced extinctions of known threatened species”.

The impact of this risk would be “high”, the document states.

Natural England’s plan to combat these risks is to “engage with partners to commit resources”, which could mean NGOs, businesses or other public bodies.

Matt Shardlow, CEO of nature charity Buglife, said this mitigation strategy “is not going to be enough to halt and reverse the huge declines of biodiversity – ever, let alone by the global target of 2020.”

He told Unearthed: “This plan feels like the moment of impact between aspiration and reality.  The clear desire to leave the natural environment in a better condition than we inherited it rests uncomfortably askew atop a jagged heap of colliding aims and financial realities.”

More than one in ten of the UK’s wildlife species is threatened with extinction, making it “among the most nature depleted countries in the world”, according to a major report published in 2016. Atlantic puffins, European turtle doves and wildcats are among the species at risk of extinction in the UK.

Planning

Natural England’s role advising on planning proposals and wildlife licences, which permit culling, disturbance or handling of species, also looks set to change.

The report warns of a high risk that “turn around targets” for this work will be missed.

In response the agency will bring in the “introduction and expansion of chargeable services” – presumably for licences and permits – and “continue to work on longer term reforms” and standardise its responses to casework.

The RSPB, the country’s largest conservation charity, said that standardised responses could be “a useful tool to speed up consenting processes or pose a very real threat to wildlife, depending on how they are used.”

It could also lead to increased charges, less robust advice and leave some unable to pay for it, they said.

Chris Corrigan, RSPB’s director for England, told Unearthed: “Gove and May both signed up to an ambition to leave the environment in a better state than they found it and there was great ambition in the 25 year environment plan.

“But here for the first time there is something tangible that shows how the government is implementing that vision – and it all feels desperately weak.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

The government has quietly abandoned efforts to meet a longstanding target to improve England’s most important wildlife sites, according to a leaked document seen by Unearthed.

The document also warns that Natural England, the government’s nature regulator, is too stretched to prevent “further human-induced extinctions of known threatened species”.

The environment department (Defra) had an official target, set by the Coalition government in 2011, to conserve 50 percent of England’s sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs), by area, by 2020.

Conserved and enhanced

But a leaked internal Natural England action plan shows that the agency is actually working towards a target of ensuring 38.7 percent of SSSIs are in “favourable” condition – the top grade of the six-point scale Natural England uses to assess sites.

The new target is just 0.07 percent higher than the current level.

An insider at Natural England, which has faced significant budget cuts in recent years, told Unearthed they “would be surprised if we even meet that”.

Labour environment spokeswoman Sue Hayman described the news as “extremely concerning”, while the RSPB said the plan seems “desperately weak”.

The leaked plan, which was signed off by Defra, comes eight months after Theresa May launched the government’s 25 year environment plan, which pledged to ensure protected areas are “not only conserved but enhanced” and introduced a new target to conserve 75 percent of SSSIs within the lifetime of the plan.

This plan feels like the moment of impact between aspiration and reality

Commenting on the story a spokesperson for the government’s conservation watchdog said the agency had not reduced any targets – insisting these were set by central government.

A Natural England spokesperson told Unearthed: “We are working to meet our ambition of achieving 75 percent favourable condition on SSSIs as part of the 25 Year environment plan. We do not comment on leaked documents.”

Protected areas

The law requires the government to “further the conservation and enhancement” of SSSIs, under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000.

They protect England’s most important areas for biodiversity, from the Lake District to the Pennines to Exmoor. Unearthed has found parts of all of these areas that were recorded as being in “unfavourable” condition when they were last assessed. 

Natural England ranks sites as “favourable”, “unfavourable – recovering”, “unfavourable – no change”, “unfavourable – declining”, “partially destroyed” or “destroyed”.

But a source at Natural England told Unearthed the agency could even slide backwards on its target to conserve sites.

“We don’t really know what’s happening,” the insider said. “There is very little monitoring going on and when this is combined with little to no proactive management work, there is very little hope of any gains. We could go backwards on the the target but in reality we are unlikely to know as the site condition hasn’t been checked. It is pretty shocking.”

Three weeks ago, a parliamentary question from Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green party, revealed that almost half of England’s SSSIs have not been monitored in the last six years, as is required by national guidelines.

Labour’s Sue Hayman told Unearthed: “SSSIs protect our most precious natural environment. If ministers are serious about their green credentials, then they need to prioritise protecting our environment.”

Natural England’s budget has nearly halved in the past decade.  In 2017/18 it was £112m, down from £200m in 2006/7, its chairman Andrew Sells told parliament in December.

The agency has recently consulted on new plans to use local enforcement powers to crackdown on damaging activities on SSSIs.

Extinctions

The report lays out key risks that Natural England is facing, alongside measures that will be taken to combat them.

These include a “high” likelihood that “resources, and thus actions, are inadequate to meet the Biodiversity 2020 target to secure an overall improvement in the status of our wildlife and to prevent any further human-induced extinctions of known threatened species”.

The impact of this risk would be “high”, the document states.

Natural England’s plan to combat these risks is to “engage with partners to commit resources”, which could mean NGOs, businesses or other public bodies.

Matt Shardlow, CEO of nature charity Buglife, said this mitigation strategy “is not going to be enough to halt and reverse the huge declines of biodiversity – ever, let alone by the global target of 2020.”

He told Unearthed: “This plan feels like the moment of impact between aspiration and reality.  The clear desire to leave the natural environment in a better condition than we inherited it rests uncomfortably askew atop a jagged heap of colliding aims and financial realities.”

More than one in ten of the UK’s wildlife species is threatened with extinction, making it “among the most nature depleted countries in the world”, according to a major report published in 2016. Atlantic puffins, European turtle doves and wildcats are among the species at risk of extinction in the UK.

Planning

Natural England’s role advising on planning proposals and wildlife licences, which permit culling, disturbance or handling of species, also looks set to change.

The report warns of a high risk that “turn around targets” for this work will be missed.

In response the agency will bring in the “introduction and expansion of chargeable services” – presumably for licences and permits – and “continue to work on longer term reforms” and standardise its responses to casework.

The RSPB, the country’s largest conservation charity, said that standardised responses could be “a useful tool to speed up consenting processes or pose a very real threat to wildlife, depending on how they are used.”

It could also lead to increased charges, less robust advice and leave some unable to pay for it, they said.

Chris Corrigan, RSPB’s director for England, told Unearthed: “Gove and May both signed up to an ambition to leave the environment in a better state than they found it and there was great ambition in the 25 year environment plan.

“But here for the first time there is something tangible that shows how the government is implementing that vision – and it all feels desperately weak.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.