The rapidly-evolving nuclear power crisis escalated dramatically yesterday when US nuclear giant Westinghouse, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, filed for bankruptcy.

The Chapter 11 filing took place in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in New York City.

Westinghouse and its parent Toshiba are in crisis because of massive cost overruns building four ‘AP1000’ nuclear power reactors in the southern US states of Georgia and South Carolina.

The combined cost overruns for the four reactors now amount to about $1.2 billion and counting. And it has now emerged that they may never be finished at all. Whether the four reactors will be completed is now subject to an “assessment period”, according to Westinghouse.

The corporate mishap may also signal the end of new nuclear power in the US. No other reactors are under construction in the country and there is no likelihood of any new reactors in the foreseeable future. The US reactor fleet is one of the oldest in the world, with 44 out of its 99 reactors having been operated for four decades or more.

A $10 billion financial hole – and it’s getting deeper!

Toshiba says Westinghouse had debts totalling US$9.8 billion. Plans for new Westinghouse reactors in India, the UK and China are in jeopardy and will likely be cancelled. Bloomberg noted yesterday: “Westinghouse Electric Co., once synonymous with America’s industrial might, wagered its future on nuclear power – and lost.”

The same could be said about Toshiba, which is selling profitable businesses to stave off bankruptcy. Toshiba said yesterday it expects to book a net loss of $9.1 billion for the current fiscal year, which ends on Friday – a record loss for a Japanese manufacturer.

That projected loss is also well over double the estimate provided just last month, raising investor fears that the final figure may be greater still. “Every time they put out an estimate, the loss gets bigger and bigger”, said Zuhair Khan, an analyst at Jefferies in Tokyo. “I don’t think this is the last cockroach we have seen coming out of Toshiba.”

The BBC noted that Toshiba’s share-price has been in freefall, losing more than 60% since the company first unveiled the problems in December 2016. Toshiba president Satoshi Tsunakawa said at a news conference yesterday: “We have all but completely pulled out of the nuclear business overseas.”

Westinghouse is the major member of the Nugen consortium that’s set to build a massive three-reactor AP1000 nuclear complex at Moorside in the UK, next to the Sellafield site. The company has already stated that while it intends to progress the project through planning stages, it is unable to take on financing or construction and intends to sell its share.

Nugen’s other member, the French energy company Engie (formerly GDF Suez) has also gone on record as wanting to extricate itself from the Moorside project in favour of the ‘new energy’ economy based on renewable, storage and smart grid technologies.

It’s now looking increasingly probable that the Moorside project, given the state of the Nugen consortium and the massive failure of the AP1000 design, may never progress to construction.

The good news for the nuclear industry? The UK’s Office of Nuclear Regulation (ONR) today – with impeccable timing – accepted the AP1000 design as “suitable for construction in the UK“ and issued Westinghouse a Design Acceptance Certificate.

Is the nuclear game up at last?

A similar crisis is unfolding in France, which has 58 power reactors but just one under construction. French ‘EPR’ reactors under construction in France (Flamanville) and Finland are three times over budget – the combined cost overruns for the two reactors amount to about €12.7 billion and counting.

The French government is selling assets so it can prop up its heavily indebted nuclear utilities Areva and EDF. The French nuclear industry is in its “worst situation ever” according to former EDF director Gérard Magnin.

Meanwhile a simple comparison of decommissioning provision between France and Germany indicates that EDF has massively under-budgetted for its liabilities. Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission its 17 nuclear reactors (€2.2 billion each), but France has set aside only €23 billion to decommission its 58 reactors (€0.4 billion each).

When the real costs, for which EDF will be liable, come in, they could easily bankrupt the company. This in turn puts the UK’s Hinkley Point double EPR nuclear project, in which EDF is the main partner, in doubt.

The crisis-ridden US, French and Japanese nuclear industries account for half of worldwide nuclear power generation. Other countries with crisis-ridden nuclear programs or nuclear phase-out policies account for more than half of worldwide nuclear power generation.

Meranwhile renewable energy generation doubled over the past decade and strong growth, driven by sharp cost decreases, will continue for the foreseeable future.

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

What is the first thing that Leftists and concerned citizens should be doing, in the wake of Trump? The first step among today’s activists should be the same as the first step for drug addicts: awareness of the problem and acceptance of its seriousness. We need to acknowledge that there are major structural problems in our societies, and that all of us are enmeshed in them, regardless of who we vote for, what zip code we live in, or what we shop for.

We can start by not reacting emotionally, by not organizing protests simply to make us feel better. We can resist better by being calm, rational, and patient: reflecting on where we are as a culture, and how our blood-soaked history of capitalism and imperialism brought us here. Rather than reacting out of anger or sadness, serious activists should take a step back, reflect on the hydra-like nature of capitalism and how their own lives have become ensnared by it, and then begin to organize for the long game – beyond the legitimate grievances against Trump.

We can continue the fight by acknowledging our own complicity as US and European citizens in the ongoing global bloodbath: we use gas, oil, and coal far beyond our basic needs; we pay taxes which pay for the weapons of death our governments wield against weak, defenseless nations.

Between Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the many other not-so-covert operations worldwide, our country is directly responsible for tens of millions of deaths worldwide since WWII, not to mention the countless plants and animals killed from deadly toxins and resource extraction such as indiscriminant and unnecessary pesticide and herbicide use, nuclear radiation, DDT, Agent Orange, strip mining, habitat destruction, ocean acidification, and many, many more disgusting acts of cruelty against the planet and our fellow man. In short, the US, for certain, has become the fourth Reich, with a truly hegemonic, global reach.

A dignified silence, a brief respite to ignore the ignoble Trump administration, could work wonders: imagine if the mainstream media took a few days or a week of not reporting on Trump’s every breath and actually reported real issues, such as the fact that the UN is sounding the alarm about the worst famine crisis since World War Two. 

It is mainstream culture that has embraced who Trump is and what he stands for. It was our US media that slavishly and mind-numbingly ‘normalized’ Trump’s dangerous, irrational, and sociopathic behavior.

The US political system, with its tentacles entangled in the endless distraction of state primaries; using discriminatory policies against third parties; controlled by corporate conglomerates and lobbyists and with public discourse replaced by sensationalist, headline-seeking yellow journalism and sound bites, has denied us the soil in which democracy can grow.

Citizens have been reduced to spectators in elections, where every state is a contest – a trivial competition to be won for Team Red or Blue. There is very little mention that elections exist not just for parties to gain power, taxes to be apportioned, and for our representatives to pass necessary legislation, but that informed and spirited public debate is the wellspring of democracy, where novel ideas can take root and flourish. Yet capitalist exploitation, whether of the Team Red or Team Blue variety, continues to prevent people and communities from redesigning their lives and redefining progress to allow for a peaceful, egalitarian way of life.

Let’s take one recent example of the mis-education of liberals. Mainstream Democratic supporters still prattle on uselessly about possible Russian involvement in the election, although the likelihood is very low. What they fail to understand is that interfering is exactly what governments and foreign intelligence agencies are designed to do: meddle in each other’s affairs abroad, gather and keep secrets for blackmail and leverage over other countries, steal technology and military techniques, use black propaganda to shape national perceptions, etc. Never mind the innocuous pretensions to gathering information for “national security”. The CIA has murderously overthrown dozens of governments since WWII: please see William Blum’s Killing Hope for details.

Instead, we should call for a ban on all intelligence agencies, and for that matter, all nuclear weapons and energy, and all standing armies worldwide: killing is killing, no matter who is doing it, governments or terrorists. The dark arts which the intelligence communities specialize in are kept secret not to keep adversaries guessing about the sources and methods used, but because, exposed to the light of day, the public would never accept such outright, barbaric depravity.

This will require citizens and activists to look beyond our own borders, to see the levels and layers of devastation capitalism has reaped around the world. It will require us to understand that no country can stand alone, that all of our actions are interconnected, and that many of the products we use are ripped from the Earth’s body without any recompense, without any acknowledgment of the grievous injuries we cause. It will require people to learn about the civil war in South Sudan, which is driven by famine, of state repression in Lhasa, to learn about the Kings of Corruption in Argentina and Brazil.

Only an internationalist Left can begin to work towards fighting global warming, deforestation, ethnic wars, and desertification of the planet. Countries using xenophobia and nativism as their raison d’etre simply can’t develop enough solidarity for the many pressing crises of the 21^st century. This can only be done by enlarging a sense of care in our communities to include protection for peoples of all nations, plant and animal life, and future human generations. To survive, we must develop a Planetary Vision.

If the past year has taught us anything, it is that now, after the initial shocks of Brexit (triggered in the UK today) and Trump, we simply don’t have as much time as we previously thought we had. The pace of the unraveling is picking up, and Western governments are continuing to hollow out our social services and environmental regulations against the will of the people, all the while convincing the populace that their interests lie solely in provincial, domestic affairs, with little to no sympathy for international disasters, wars, droughts, etc.

As the pace of social disorientation continues to pick up, we have foolishly deepened our addictions to social media and our screen times, if only to shield us from the rising tides of inequality and social injustice. Digital technologies should be reevaluated as means to the ends of diminishing human suffering and increasing the planetary knowledge base, instead of ends in themselves, becoming the mass distractions of our age.

It’s quite late in the evening for capitalist governments. Their demise is in many ways overdue, but most people in the West haven’t learned to look down yet. Proper political reflection requires this – an unblinking, unflinching gaze at the carnage caused by our culture’s complicity and acquiescence towards industrialism, free-market ideology, and globalization. The mega-corporations, the Federal Government, and our military-industrial complex are not our friends.

The industrialized capitalist nations are headed for a cataclysm, and the worst shockwaves will fall upon the smaller, developing nations.

Can Western activists, concerned citizens, and academics look down, get off their treadmills, go beyond their specialized niches and lecture circuits and unite to form a global Left?

Once we collectively accept responsibility for the sorry state of our union, we can begin the healing process. The first step is always the hardest, but we can’t avoid the facts: our childlike dependency and unquestioning loyalty towards our corporate and political leaders must be broken, starting now. 

This Author

William Hawes is a writer specializing in politics and environmental issues. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, The World Financial Review, Gods & Radicals, and Countercurrents.org. He is author of the e-book Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and Empire. You can reach him at wilhawes@gmail.com

This article first appeared at counterpunch.org

The new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has defied science and common knowledge by claiming that carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to climate change.

This stance from President Trump’s appointee reflects an administration-wide disregard for climate change and caters to the bottom line of billionaire polluters, rather than protecting our public health.

Today, Trump solidified this trend. In a potential blow to America’s climate and public health safeguards, he signed an executive order initiating a repeal of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, while also ending the Interior Department’s moratorium on new coal mining on federal land.

Among other things, the executive order also instructs federal agencies to abandon their policy of factoring the impacts on climate change into government decisions.

And it orders the EPA and the Department of the Interior to dismantle Obama administration rules that reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector and regulate fracking on public land.

The landmark Clean Power Plan puts the US on a path toward seriously addressing climate change by building on and accelerating the transition to a clean energy future that is already underway in the power sector.

Americans’ strong support for clean energy

People across this country – in red and blue states alike – broadly support clean air, clean energy and climate action to protect the health of our communities and families. Not only that, but the US Supreme Court has made clear that the EPA has a legal responsibility under the Clean Air Act to protect the public from dangerous climate pollution that threatens our economy, security and public health.

Trump is inviting more super storms, deadly floods, epic droughts and uncontrollable wildfires with his order to dismantle the Clean Power Plan. At a moment when we desperately need accelerated investment in climate solutions, both at the national and international level, he is trying to block the rise of clean energy to benefit Big Oil and the coal industry. 

But Trump hasn’t stopped at attacking the Clean Power Plan. He’s also trying to dismantle the Department of the Interior’s moratorium on new coal leasing on federal lands.

This moratorium gives the federal Bureau of Land Management time to review outdated policies for managing billions of tons of federal coal and to ensure that taxpayers are getting a fair deal for coal mined on publicly owned land.

By repealing this common sense action, President Trump is ignoring the will of the public, as well as the current market demand for coal, which is at an all-time low. Meanwhile, the need for immediate action to address the threat of climate change could not be greater.

By cutting commonsense regulations that protect our air, water and climate from the oil and gas industry, Trump is taking aim at protections that deliver real benefits for American communities.

And by abandoning a policy that requires federal agencies to factor climate change into decision-making, Trump is allowing our federal government to walk blindfolded into the greatest challenge our society faces.

Corporate President versus The People

The theme is clear. Repeal after repeal, time after time, our president is siding with corporate polluters, especially coal and oil companies, over the health of millions of Americans and the realities of sound science.

He is wasting taxpayer resources and forcing agencies to spend valuable time preparing ineffective new rules to replace those he’s rolling back, which will do far more to protect polluters’ bottom lines than to protect our wellbeing.

Luckily, there’s a lot that can be done at the state level to advance clean energy and combat climate change in lieu of federal action. Earthjustice is already working at the state level to defend and advance clean energy policies, and we’ve teamed up with technology innovators, entrepreneurs, public health experts and community leaders to build a resilient network of clean energy champions.

Together, we will tackle the fossil fuel industry, one state at a time, by using the full strength of our nation’s bedrock environmental laws to protect our communities and secure our future. 

Trip Van Noppen leads Earthjustice’s staff, board and supporters to advance the mission of using the courts to protect our environment and people’s health.

This article was originally published by EarthJustice as part of its Capitol Watch series.

The Capitol Watch series

The 45th US president, Donald J. Trump, is bent on gutting environmental protections, and-with a polluter-friendly Congress at his side-he’ll likely do everything he can to dismantle our fundamental right to a healthy environment. The Capitol Watch blog series will shine a light on these political attacks from Congress and the Trump administration, as well as the work of Earthjustice and our allies to hold them accountable.

Coal mining on our lands comes with serious consequences that we can no longer afford. Earthjustice is preparing to file a lawsuit challenging the result of the executive order on behalf of a coalition of local, regional and national groups working to protect public lands, air and water quality and the health of the planet. Photo courtesy of Ecoflight.

Will our grandchildren look back, 50 years from now, at a time when human beings ate other animals as one in which their grandparents were “complicit in a bloodbath of unnecessary suffering”, a horror show of unremitting violence that is “wholly unimaginable” to them?

That’s the intriguing premise of Carnage, a new feature-length BBC film which depicts a 2067 utopia where humans no longer raise animals for consumption.

Carnage is a mockumentary, written and directed by comedian Simon Amstell, but let’s contemplate its premise seriously for a moment. Is a ‘post-meat’ world possible? Could we manage a transition to a society where farmed animals are liberated and granted equal status, free to live equally among humans?

There are some good reasons why this is an unlikely vision of the future. For a start, the number of animals slaughtered globally is on the increase. Although this includes hunting, poaching, and unwanted pets, by far the biggest point of interaction between humans and other animals is industrial farming.

The statistics are staggering: at least 55 billion animals are killed by the global farming industry each year, and this figure is growing every year. Despite marketing tales of animal welfare and ‘happy meat‘, factory farming means violence, discomfort and suffering on an enormous scale.

This is why Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a history of the human race, calls our treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms “perhaps the worst crime in history”.

Never mind the meat – just keep the blood off my plate!

If we turn to consumers’ willingness to eat meat, psychological research in this area appears to cast further doubt on the utopian vision of Carnage. Most people who eat meat express concern in relation to animal welfare, and experience unease when the death or discomfort of animals is associated with the meat on their plate.

Psychologists refer to this tension between beliefs and behaviour as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We want to reduce the discomfort of such dissonance, but human nature means we often seek the easiest ways of doing so.

So rather than changing behaviour, we change our thinking, and develop strategies like minimising the harm of the offending behaviour (animals don’t have the capacity to suffer like we do; they do not matter; they have a good life); or denying one’s responsibility for it (I am doing what everyone does; it is necessary; I was made to eat meat – it is natural).

Dissonance-reduction strategies often lead, paradoxically, to an increase in commitment to ‘morally troublesome behaviour‘ such as eating meat, to justify them. We then have to work harder to reduce dissonance, creating the need to defend one’s behaviour even more vigorously.

This commitment becomes habitual, and part of our shared routines, traditions and social norms. It’s a circular process that can end up with exaggerated and socially-polarised views, reflected perhaps in familiar attempts to publicly ridicule veganism. On this reading of the psychology research, change on the scale envisioned by Carnage seems unlikely.

The path to a world without meat

There are grounds for optimism, however. A first challenge comes from growing health concerns related to eating meat, and an accompanying lifestyle movement that embraces a ‘plant-based diet‘. Meat substitutes are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, as the tech industry recognises the potential market value of alternative protein sources.

This is matched by a resurgent concern for the welfare of nonhuman animals more generally. Examples include successful campaigns against captive orca whales and circus animals, the widespread questioning of the purpose of zoos, and a burgeoning legal movement defending the rights of animals in court.

This trend is strengthened by growing recognition of the emotional, cognitive and social complexity of nonhuman animals.

What might be the biggest factor of all, however, is the impact on the climate. Meat is an inefficient use of resources (as farm animals eat food that could go straight to humans), while cows famously fart out lots of methane.

The UN says the large-scale industrial farming of animals is one of “the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” A global reduction in meat consumption is one of the best ways to fight climate change. And, as pressure for resources rise, so too might cost, leading to less meat eating.

After half a century, could it be possible?

Taken in isolation, none of these trends suggests social change on the scale Carnage imagines. But together, they just might. It is a combination that could explain significant growth in the number of vegetarians and vegans for example.

This increase is especially marked among younger people – an important point to consider in relation to our imagined 50-year trajectory. And let’s face it, the need to do anything we can to collectively reduce carbon emissions and alleviate the worst effects of climate change is only going to become more pressing as we approach 2067.

The German government seems to have recognised this, recently banning meat from all official functions for environmental reasons. These trends suggest the interlocking psychological, social and cultural dynamics that keep us habitually and routinely eating meat might be beginning to loosen.

Films like Carnage also contribute to this unravelling, opening up our imagination to alternative futures. If you watch it, I hope it raises a few laughs, but also offers some (plant-based) food for thought. 

Watch Carnage here.

Matthew Adams is Principal Lecturer in Psychology, University of Brighton.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Will our grandchildren look back, 50 years from now, at a time when human beings ate other animals as one in which their grandparents were “complicit in a bloodbath of unnecessary suffering”, a horror show of unremitting violence that is “wholly unimaginable” to them?

That’s the intriguing premise of Carnage, a new feature-length BBC film which depicts a 2067 utopia where humans no longer raise animals for consumption.

Carnage is a mockumentary, written and directed by comedian Simon Amstell, but let’s contemplate its premise seriously for a moment. Is a ‘post-meat’ world possible? Could we manage a transition to a society where farmed animals are liberated and granted equal status, free to live equally among humans?

There are some good reasons why this is an unlikely vision of the future. For a start, the number of animals slaughtered globally is on the increase. Although this includes hunting, poaching, and unwanted pets, by far the biggest point of interaction between humans and other animals is industrial farming.

The statistics are staggering: at least 55 billion animals are killed by the global farming industry each year, and this figure is growing every year. Despite marketing tales of animal welfare and ‘happy meat‘, factory farming means violence, discomfort and suffering on an enormous scale.

This is why Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a history of the human race, calls our treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms “perhaps the worst crime in history”.

Never mind the meat – just keep the blood off my plate!

If we turn to consumers’ willingness to eat meat, psychological research in this area appears to cast further doubt on the utopian vision of Carnage. Most people who eat meat express concern in relation to animal welfare, and experience unease when the death or discomfort of animals is associated with the meat on their plate.

Psychologists refer to this tension between beliefs and behaviour as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We want to reduce the discomfort of such dissonance, but human nature means we often seek the easiest ways of doing so.

So rather than changing behaviour, we change our thinking, and develop strategies like minimising the harm of the offending behaviour (animals don’t have the capacity to suffer like we do; they do not matter; they have a good life); or denying one’s responsibility for it (I am doing what everyone does; it is necessary; I was made to eat meat – it is natural).

Dissonance-reduction strategies often lead, paradoxically, to an increase in commitment to ‘morally troublesome behaviour‘ such as eating meat, to justify them. We then have to work harder to reduce dissonance, creating the need to defend one’s behaviour even more vigorously.

This commitment becomes habitual, and part of our shared routines, traditions and social norms. It’s a circular process that can end up with exaggerated and socially-polarised views, reflected perhaps in familiar attempts to publicly ridicule veganism. On this reading of the psychology research, change on the scale envisioned by Carnage seems unlikely.

The path to a world without meat

There are grounds for optimism, however. A first challenge comes from growing health concerns related to eating meat, and an accompanying lifestyle movement that embraces a ‘plant-based diet‘. Meat substitutes are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, as the tech industry recognises the potential market value of alternative protein sources.

This is matched by a resurgent concern for the welfare of nonhuman animals more generally. Examples include successful campaigns against captive orca whales and circus animals, the widespread questioning of the purpose of zoos, and a burgeoning legal movement defending the rights of animals in court.

This trend is strengthened by growing recognition of the emotional, cognitive and social complexity of nonhuman animals.

What might be the biggest factor of all, however, is the impact on the climate. Meat is an inefficient use of resources (as farm animals eat food that could go straight to humans), while cows famously fart out lots of methane.

The UN says the large-scale industrial farming of animals is one of “the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” A global reduction in meat consumption is one of the best ways to fight climate change. And, as pressure for resources rise, so too might cost, leading to less meat eating.

After half a century, could it be possible?

Taken in isolation, none of these trends suggests social change on the scale Carnage imagines. But together, they just might. It is a combination that could explain significant growth in the number of vegetarians and vegans for example.

This increase is especially marked among younger people – an important point to consider in relation to our imagined 50-year trajectory. And let’s face it, the need to do anything we can to collectively reduce carbon emissions and alleviate the worst effects of climate change is only going to become more pressing as we approach 2067.

The German government seems to have recognised this, recently banning meat from all official functions for environmental reasons. These trends suggest the interlocking psychological, social and cultural dynamics that keep us habitually and routinely eating meat might be beginning to loosen.

Films like Carnage also contribute to this unravelling, opening up our imagination to alternative futures. If you watch it, I hope it raises a few laughs, but also offers some (plant-based) food for thought. 

Watch Carnage here.

Matthew Adams is Principal Lecturer in Psychology, University of Brighton.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Winning a Nobel Prize is like having your star added to the walk of fame. Nothing beats a Nobel for name recognition. But the Nobel prize for economics should be different. It was added to the list of awards long after the death of Alfred Nobel. “Against his death wish”, says the Swedish human rights lawyer and descendant Peter Nobel. He adds: “Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society’s well-being”.

That’s why the late Alfred Nobel might have liked the Leontief Prize for Economics more than the award given in his name. The Leontief Prize is given to the world’s economists that have contributed most to support just and sustainable societies. The prestigious award was made in honour of Wassily Leontief. Ironically, he was a Nobel laureate himself, as well as a former member of the Global Development And Environment Institute (GDAE) at Tufts University. This team still looks at how societies can pursue their economic and community goals in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner. Which is why the winners deserve more credit and attention than those that win a Nobel Prize for economics.

James Boyce and Joan Martinez-Alier

This year’s award, entitled Economics, Equity, and the Environment, recognises professors James Boyce and Joan Martinez-Alier for their ground-breaking theoretical and applied work that has effectively integrated ecological, developmental, and justice-oriented approaches into the field of economics.

“It is essential to address the ecological crisis generated by the old-paradigm economy,” said GDAE Co-Director Neva Goodwin. “James Boyce and Joan Martinez-Alier have highlighted the relationship between economic systems, resources (materials and energy) and social issues. Their particular focus on the intersections among economics, poverty, and inequality has strongly informed GDAE’s thinking on these issues.”

Dr James K. Boyce is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and director of the program on Development, Peacebuilding and the Environment at the Political Economy Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Oxford University. Dr Boyce’s current work focuses on strategies for combining poverty reduction with environmental protection, and on the relationships between inequality and environmental degradation. Since 2011 he has served as the president of Econ4: Economics for People, the Planet and the Future.

DrJoan Martinez-Alier is emeritus professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where he received his Ph.D. in 1976. During his long career, he has held positions at Oxford University, Stanford University, University of California-Davis, FLACSO, and Yale University. Most recently he has served as co-director of the EJAtlas and currently directs the EnvJustice Project at ICTA-UAB (2016-2021) on ecological distribution conflicts and the global movement for environmental justice. He has played a crucial role in the development of ecological economics, and served as a founding member and past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics.

During yesterday’s award-ceremony (28th March, 2017) at Tufts University in Medford, Joan Martinez-Alier stressed that even a non-growing industrial economy would require new supplies of fossil fuels and other materials from the commodity extraction frontiers because energy is not recycled and materials are recycled only in part. “The economy is not circular, but entropic: there are therefore many resource extraction and waste disposal conflicts, at different scales, such as those on responsibility for the excessive amount of greenhouse gases.”

Martinez-Alier spoke a lot about the EnvJustice project and the EJAtlas. And whilst he is now beyond the usual age for retirement, he still plans to expand this atlas, the global Vocabulary of Environmental Justice and the understanding of the alliance between the Global Environmental Justice Movement and the Degrowth (Décroissance, Post-Wachstum, Prosperity without Growth) movement in Europe. The main reason his contributions to the growing debate on the macro-economic sustainable degrowth alternative are so important? The currently dominant macro-economic model (based on the neoliberal ideology) offers no answer to the human induced sixth mass extinction of life on earth.

This Author

Nick Meynen is one of the Ecologist’s New Voices contributors. He writes articles and books on topics like environmental justice, globalization and human-nature relationships. When not wandering in the activist universe or when his Facebook page is dead, he’s probably walking in nature.

More info:

Announcement of the 2017 Leontief Prize Winners:

Dr Boyce’s latest book is Economics, the Environment, and Our Common Wealth (2013). His previous books include Reclaiming Nature: Environmental Justice and Ecological Restoration (2007); Natural Assets: Democratizing Environmental Ownership (2003); and The Political Economy of the Environment (2002).

Dr Martinez-Alier is the author of numerous renowned books and articles, including Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society (1987) and The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (2002). He also co-edited the textbook Ecological Economics from the Ground Up (2012) and the Handbook of Ecological Economics (2015).

Previous winners:

In addition to Amartya Sen and John Kenneth Galbraith, GDAE has awarded the Leontief Prize to Paul Streeten, Herman Daly, Alice Amsden, Dani Rodrik, Nancy Folbre, Robert Frank, Richard Nelson, Ha-Joon Chang, Samuel Bowles, Juliet Schor, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Stephen DeCanio, José Antonio Ocampo, Robert Wade, Bina Agarwal, Daniel Kahneman, Martin Weitzman, Nicholas Stern, Michael Lipton, C. Peter Timmer, Albert O. Hirschman (posthumous), Frances Stewart, Angus Deaton, James K. Galbraith, Duncan Foley, Lance Taylor, Amit Bhaduri, and Diane Elson.

Will our grandchildren look back, 50 years from now, at a time when human beings ate other animals as one in which their grandparents were “complicit in a bloodbath of unnecessary suffering”, a horror show of unremitting violence that is “wholly unimaginable” to them?

That’s the intriguing premise of Carnage, a new feature-length BBC film which depicts a 2067 utopia where humans no longer raise animals for consumption.

Carnage is a mockumentary, written and directed by comedian Simon Amstell, but let’s contemplate its premise seriously for a moment. Is a ‘post-meat’ world possible? Could we manage a transition to a society where farmed animals are liberated and granted equal status, free to live equally among humans?

There are some good reasons why this is an unlikely vision of the future. For a start, the number of animals slaughtered globally is on the increase. Although this includes hunting, poaching, and unwanted pets, by far the biggest point of interaction between humans and other animals is industrial farming.

The statistics are staggering: at least 55 billion animals are killed by the global farming industry each year, and this figure is growing every year. Despite marketing tales of animal welfare and ‘happy meat‘, factory farming means violence, discomfort and suffering on an enormous scale.

This is why Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a history of the human race, calls our treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms “perhaps the worst crime in history”.

Never mind the meat – just keep the blood off my plate!

If we turn to consumers’ willingness to eat meat, psychological research in this area appears to cast further doubt on the utopian vision of Carnage. Most people who eat meat express concern in relation to animal welfare, and experience unease when the death or discomfort of animals is associated with the meat on their plate.

Psychologists refer to this tension between beliefs and behaviour as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We want to reduce the discomfort of such dissonance, but human nature means we often seek the easiest ways of doing so.

So rather than changing behaviour, we change our thinking, and develop strategies like minimising the harm of the offending behaviour (animals don’t have the capacity to suffer like we do; they do not matter; they have a good life); or denying one’s responsibility for it (I am doing what everyone does; it is necessary; I was made to eat meat – it is natural).

Dissonance-reduction strategies often lead, paradoxically, to an increase in commitment to ‘morally troublesome behaviour‘ such as eating meat, to justify them. We then have to work harder to reduce dissonance, creating the need to defend one’s behaviour even more vigorously.

This commitment becomes habitual, and part of our shared routines, traditions and social norms. It’s a circular process that can end up with exaggerated and socially-polarised views, reflected perhaps in familiar attempts to publicly ridicule veganism. On this reading of the psychology research, change on the scale envisioned by Carnage seems unlikely.

The path to a world without meat

There are grounds for optimism, however. A first challenge comes from growing health concerns related to eating meat, and an accompanying lifestyle movement that embraces a ‘plant-based diet‘. Meat substitutes are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, as the tech industry recognises the potential market value of alternative protein sources.

This is matched by a resurgent concern for the welfare of nonhuman animals more generally. Examples include successful campaigns against captive orca whales and circus animals, the widespread questioning of the purpose of zoos, and a burgeoning legal movement defending the rights of animals in court.

This trend is strengthened by growing recognition of the emotional, cognitive and social complexity of nonhuman animals.

What might be the biggest factor of all, however, is the impact on the climate. Meat is an inefficient use of resources (as farm animals eat food that could go straight to humans), while cows famously fart out lots of methane.

The UN says the large-scale industrial farming of animals is one of “the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” A global reduction in meat consumption is one of the best ways to fight climate change. And, as pressure for resources rise, so too might cost, leading to less meat eating.

After half a century, could it be possible?

Taken in isolation, none of these trends suggests social change on the scale Carnage imagines. But together, they just might. It is a combination that could explain significant growth in the number of vegetarians and vegans for example.

This increase is especially marked among younger people – an important point to consider in relation to our imagined 50-year trajectory. And let’s face it, the need to do anything we can to collectively reduce carbon emissions and alleviate the worst effects of climate change is only going to become more pressing as we approach 2067.

The German government seems to have recognised this, recently banning meat from all official functions for environmental reasons. These trends suggest the interlocking psychological, social and cultural dynamics that keep us habitually and routinely eating meat might be beginning to loosen.

Films like Carnage also contribute to this unravelling, opening up our imagination to alternative futures. If you watch it, I hope it raises a few laughs, but also offers some (plant-based) food for thought. 

Watch Carnage here.

Matthew Adams is Principal Lecturer in Psychology, University of Brighton.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Will our grandchildren look back, 50 years from now, at a time when human beings ate other animals as one in which their grandparents were “complicit in a bloodbath of unnecessary suffering”, a horror show of unremitting violence that is “wholly unimaginable” to them?

That’s the intriguing premise of Carnage, a new feature-length BBC film which depicts a 2067 utopia where humans no longer raise animals for consumption.

Carnage is a mockumentary, written and directed by comedian Simon Amstell, but let’s contemplate its premise seriously for a moment. Is a ‘post-meat’ world possible? Could we manage a transition to a society where farmed animals are liberated and granted equal status, free to live equally among humans?

There are some good reasons why this is an unlikely vision of the future. For a start, the number of animals slaughtered globally is on the increase. Although this includes hunting, poaching, and unwanted pets, by far the biggest point of interaction between humans and other animals is industrial farming.

The statistics are staggering: at least 55 billion animals are killed by the global farming industry each year, and this figure is growing every year. Despite marketing tales of animal welfare and ‘happy meat‘, factory farming means violence, discomfort and suffering on an enormous scale.

This is why Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a history of the human race, calls our treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms “perhaps the worst crime in history”.

Never mind the meat – just keep the blood off my plate!

If we turn to consumers’ willingness to eat meat, psychological research in this area appears to cast further doubt on the utopian vision of Carnage. Most people who eat meat express concern in relation to animal welfare, and experience unease when the death or discomfort of animals is associated with the meat on their plate.

Psychologists refer to this tension between beliefs and behaviour as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We want to reduce the discomfort of such dissonance, but human nature means we often seek the easiest ways of doing so.

So rather than changing behaviour, we change our thinking, and develop strategies like minimising the harm of the offending behaviour (animals don’t have the capacity to suffer like we do; they do not matter; they have a good life); or denying one’s responsibility for it (I am doing what everyone does; it is necessary; I was made to eat meat – it is natural).

Dissonance-reduction strategies often lead, paradoxically, to an increase in commitment to ‘morally troublesome behaviour‘ such as eating meat, to justify them. We then have to work harder to reduce dissonance, creating the need to defend one’s behaviour even more vigorously.

This commitment becomes habitual, and part of our shared routines, traditions and social norms. It’s a circular process that can end up with exaggerated and socially-polarised views, reflected perhaps in familiar attempts to publicly ridicule veganism. On this reading of the psychology research, change on the scale envisioned by Carnage seems unlikely.

The path to a world without meat

There are grounds for optimism, however. A first challenge comes from growing health concerns related to eating meat, and an accompanying lifestyle movement that embraces a ‘plant-based diet‘. Meat substitutes are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, as the tech industry recognises the potential market value of alternative protein sources.

This is matched by a resurgent concern for the welfare of nonhuman animals more generally. Examples include successful campaigns against captive orca whales and circus animals, the widespread questioning of the purpose of zoos, and a burgeoning legal movement defending the rights of animals in court.

This trend is strengthened by growing recognition of the emotional, cognitive and social complexity of nonhuman animals.

What might be the biggest factor of all, however, is the impact on the climate. Meat is an inefficient use of resources (as farm animals eat food that could go straight to humans), while cows famously fart out lots of methane.

The UN says the large-scale industrial farming of animals is one of “the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” A global reduction in meat consumption is one of the best ways to fight climate change. And, as pressure for resources rise, so too might cost, leading to less meat eating.

After half a century, could it be possible?

Taken in isolation, none of these trends suggests social change on the scale Carnage imagines. But together, they just might. It is a combination that could explain significant growth in the number of vegetarians and vegans for example.

This increase is especially marked among younger people – an important point to consider in relation to our imagined 50-year trajectory. And let’s face it, the need to do anything we can to collectively reduce carbon emissions and alleviate the worst effects of climate change is only going to become more pressing as we approach 2067.

The German government seems to have recognised this, recently banning meat from all official functions for environmental reasons. These trends suggest the interlocking psychological, social and cultural dynamics that keep us habitually and routinely eating meat might be beginning to loosen.

Films like Carnage also contribute to this unravelling, opening up our imagination to alternative futures. If you watch it, I hope it raises a few laughs, but also offers some (plant-based) food for thought. 

Watch Carnage here.

Matthew Adams is Principal Lecturer in Psychology, University of Brighton.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Will our grandchildren look back, 50 years from now, at a time when human beings ate other animals as one in which their grandparents were “complicit in a bloodbath of unnecessary suffering”, a horror show of unremitting violence that is “wholly unimaginable” to them?

That’s the intriguing premise of Carnage, a new feature-length BBC film which depicts a 2067 utopia where humans no longer raise animals for consumption.

Carnage is a mockumentary, written and directed by comedian Simon Amstell, but let’s contemplate its premise seriously for a moment. Is a ‘post-meat’ world possible? Could we manage a transition to a society where farmed animals are liberated and granted equal status, free to live equally among humans?

There are some good reasons why this is an unlikely vision of the future. For a start, the number of animals slaughtered globally is on the increase. Although this includes hunting, poaching, and unwanted pets, by far the biggest point of interaction between humans and other animals is industrial farming.

The statistics are staggering: at least 55 billion animals are killed by the global farming industry each year, and this figure is growing every year. Despite marketing tales of animal welfare and ‘happy meat‘, factory farming means violence, discomfort and suffering on an enormous scale.

This is why Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a history of the human race, calls our treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms “perhaps the worst crime in history”.

Never mind the meat – just keep the blood off my plate!

If we turn to consumers’ willingness to eat meat, psychological research in this area appears to cast further doubt on the utopian vision of Carnage. Most people who eat meat express concern in relation to animal welfare, and experience unease when the death or discomfort of animals is associated with the meat on their plate.

Psychologists refer to this tension between beliefs and behaviour as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We want to reduce the discomfort of such dissonance, but human nature means we often seek the easiest ways of doing so.

So rather than changing behaviour, we change our thinking, and develop strategies like minimising the harm of the offending behaviour (animals don’t have the capacity to suffer like we do; they do not matter; they have a good life); or denying one’s responsibility for it (I am doing what everyone does; it is necessary; I was made to eat meat – it is natural).

Dissonance-reduction strategies often lead, paradoxically, to an increase in commitment to ‘morally troublesome behaviour‘ such as eating meat, to justify them. We then have to work harder to reduce dissonance, creating the need to defend one’s behaviour even more vigorously.

This commitment becomes habitual, and part of our shared routines, traditions and social norms. It’s a circular process that can end up with exaggerated and socially-polarised views, reflected perhaps in familiar attempts to publicly ridicule veganism. On this reading of the psychology research, change on the scale envisioned by Carnage seems unlikely.

The path to a world without meat

There are grounds for optimism, however. A first challenge comes from growing health concerns related to eating meat, and an accompanying lifestyle movement that embraces a ‘plant-based diet‘. Meat substitutes are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, as the tech industry recognises the potential market value of alternative protein sources.

This is matched by a resurgent concern for the welfare of nonhuman animals more generally. Examples include successful campaigns against captive orca whales and circus animals, the widespread questioning of the purpose of zoos, and a burgeoning legal movement defending the rights of animals in court.

This trend is strengthened by growing recognition of the emotional, cognitive and social complexity of nonhuman animals.

What might be the biggest factor of all, however, is the impact on the climate. Meat is an inefficient use of resources (as farm animals eat food that could go straight to humans), while cows famously fart out lots of methane.

The UN says the large-scale industrial farming of animals is one of “the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” A global reduction in meat consumption is one of the best ways to fight climate change. And, as pressure for resources rise, so too might cost, leading to less meat eating.

After half a century, could it be possible?

Taken in isolation, none of these trends suggests social change on the scale Carnage imagines. But together, they just might. It is a combination that could explain significant growth in the number of vegetarians and vegans for example.

This increase is especially marked among younger people – an important point to consider in relation to our imagined 50-year trajectory. And let’s face it, the need to do anything we can to collectively reduce carbon emissions and alleviate the worst effects of climate change is only going to become more pressing as we approach 2067.

The German government seems to have recognised this, recently banning meat from all official functions for environmental reasons. These trends suggest the interlocking psychological, social and cultural dynamics that keep us habitually and routinely eating meat might be beginning to loosen.

Films like Carnage also contribute to this unravelling, opening up our imagination to alternative futures. If you watch it, I hope it raises a few laughs, but also offers some (plant-based) food for thought. 

Watch Carnage here.

Matthew Adams is Principal Lecturer in Psychology, University of Brighton.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Plants growing in warmer conditions are tougher and have lower nutritional value to grazing livestock, inhibiting milk and meat yields and raising the amount of methane released by the animals.

That’s because more methane is produced when plants are tougher to digest – an effect of a warmer environment.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, around 25 times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a century, and 85 times stronger over 20 years.

More than 95% of the methane produced by cows comes from their breath through eructation (belching) as they chew the cud.

The findings come in a published a paper today in the journal Biogeosciences by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) and the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, Frankfurt.

The key finding is a near doubling of ruminant emissions of methane: “Upscaling the GHG footprint of the current livestock inventory to the 2050 projected inventory increases annual GHG emissions from enteric sources from 2.8 to 4.7 GT CO2eq.”

Dr Mark Lee, a research fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew who led the research says; “The vicious cycle we are seeing now is that ruminant livestock such as cattle produce methane which warms our planet.

“This warmer environment alters plants so they are tougher to digest, and so each mouthful spends more time in the animals’ stomach, producing more methane, further warming the planet, and the cycle continues. We need to make changes to livestock diets to make them more environmentally sustainable.”

Harsher climate makes tougher plants

There are several reasons why rising temperatures may make plants tougher for grazing livestock to digest. Plants have adaptations to prevent heat damage, they can flower earlier, have thicker leaves or in some cases, tougher plants can invade into new areas replacing more nutritious species – all of which makes grazing more difficult.

This is a pressing concern, because climate change is likely to make plants tougher for grazing cattle, increasing the amount of methane that the animals breathe out into the atmosphere.

The researchers mapped the regions where methane produced by cattle will increase to the greatest extent as the result of reductions in plant nutritional quality. Methane production is generally expected to increase all around the world, with hotspots identified in North America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia, where the effects of climate change may be the most severe.

Many of these regions are where livestock farming is growing most rapidly. For example, meat production has increased annually by around 3.4% across Asia, compared with a more modest 1% increase across Europe.

The calculations, write the scientists, “suggested a previously undescribed positive climate change feedback, where elevated temperatures reduce grass nutritive value and correspondingly may increase methane production by 0.9% with a 1C temperature rise and 4.5% with a 5C rise (model average), thus creating an additional climate forcing effect.

“Future methane production increases are expected to be largest in parts of North America, central and eastern Europe and Asia, with the geographical extent of hotspots increasing under a high emissions scenario.”

Act now to limit the damage!

Global meat production has increased rapidly in recent years to meet demand, from 71 million tonnes in 1961 to 318 million tonnes in 2014, a 78% increase in 53 years (FAOSTAT, 2016). Grazing lands have expanded to support this production, particularly across Asia and South America, and now cover 35 million km2; 30% of the Earth’s ice-free surface.

However, livestock are valuable. They are worth in excess of $1.4 trillion to the global economy and livestock farming sustains or employs 1.3 billion people around the world (Thornton, 2010). The upward trend in livestock production and associated GHG emissions are projected to continue in the future and global stocks of cattle, goats and sheep are expected to reach 6.3 billion by 2050 (Steinfeld et al. 2006).

If these rises are to continue then the researchers say it will be necessary to limit the growth of livestock farming in the most rapidly warming regions, and, to avoid significant losses in livestock production efficiency and increases in methane emissions. Other measures, including eating less meat and farming more sustainably, are also essential:

“A global switch in human diets and a transition to more sustainable agricultural practices, as well as a greater prevalence of organic and silvopastoral farming, may reduce our reliance on intensively farmed cattle and other ruminants.

“In countries with high or increasing meat consumption, these measures could reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture and contribute to GHG emissions cuts with an associated improvement in human health.”

And the authors emphasise that we need to start implementing policy measures as soon as possible. “Now is the time to act,” said Dr Lee, “because the demand for meat-rich diets is increasing around the world. Our research has shown that cultivating more nutritious plants may help us to combat the challenges of warmer temperatures.

We are undertaking work at Kew to identify the native forage plants that are associated with high meat and milk production and less methane, attempting to increase their presence on the grazing landscape. We are also developing our models to identify regions where livestock are going to be exposed to reductions in forage quality with greater precision.

It is going to be important to put plans in place to help those countries exposed to the most severe challenges from climate change to adapt to a changing world.”

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor at The Ecologist.

The paper: ‘Forage quality declines with rising temperatures, with implications for livestock production and methane emissions‘ is by Lee, M.A., Davis, A.P., Chagunda, M.G.G., Manning, P. and published in Biogeosciences 14, 1403-1417, doi:10.5194/bg-14-1403-2017.