The gravity of a black hole is so strong that light itself cannot escape. The boundary that separates where light is able to escape and where it is pulled in is called the event horizon. Consider this metaphor: we are nearing the event horizon for the irreversibly destructive impacts of climate breakdown.

We need to stop pretending that the “greening” of business is working if we are going to avoid triggering negative feedback loops.

We’ve reached a point where the very notion that business is in some way working hard to address our environmental and social challenges is laughable. To the contrary, the evidence strongly suggests that the greatest efforts of corporations is to maintain the status quo.

Rigged system

Another absurd narrative is that billionaires are somehow big-brained problem solvers who are graciously bringing their special skills to the table to address our social and environmental challenges — this is nonsense.

Billionaires are simply good business people who got lucky with a trend and who benefit from a rigged system that allows them to legally avoid paying taxes. 

They certainly don’t deserve the esteemed status that society places upon them. The ability to grow a business does not qualify them to lead solutions to the Earth’s biggest social and environmental challenges.

Throwing big dollars around that should have been paid as taxes should not be a pathway to influencing public policy; like everyone else, influence should arise from democratic channels. 

Can we agree that corporate elites and billionaires are not our saviours for progressive change? In fact, quite the contrary, through their direct and indirect lobbying efforts and subtle influence as “elites” business leaders have delivered a unique form of climate-destroying and wealth-hoarding capitalism that is sending us straight into an existential and climate crisis.

MarketWorld

But elites are a sensitive bunch and they dislike bad press almost as much as they enjoy a good money making scheme.

Enter “MarketWorld” – another status-quo-protecting strategy that Anand Giridharadas explores in his book, Winners Take All. 

This approach is an idea cooked up by the winners of the current system, allowing them to engage with social and environmental problems with so called “win-win” solutions. That is, solutions that further enrich the elites by dictating that solutions can only be acceptable if they find a way to kick something upstairs to the corporate elite and billionaire class.

While “MarketWorld” can bring some good to small groups — it doesn’t begin to deal with the structural problems that lay at the core of our broken system.

Greening business though CSR, Impact Investing, and Profit with Purpose appear to be a cover for corporate elites and billionaires that distract the public while they continue to plunder the planet and add to their billions.

Corporate sustainability

Let’s face it, the “elites” have done everything except tell us directly that they don’t want change.

Those of us who work hard, pay our taxes and follow the rules will find our lives more onerous and precarious as a climate “bomb” sweeps across the planet. But fear not for the billionaires, they will be spared from the coming social collapse.

Private estates and bunkers equipped with industrial-sized greenhouses, water purification systems, giant solar arrays, a small farm with animals and a guarded perimeter will keep the elites and their friends nice and safe while the system that they helped to create implodes.

We can say with our heads held high that until now our desire for leadership and solutions has been so strong that we accepted some pretty far-fetched ideas about business and it’s desire to reverse course and protect the planet.

Perhaps we were a little naive or maybe it was out of pure desperation that we took corporations and their puppet politicians at their word, but in the end, corporate sustainability never delivered.

Dangerous trend

The excitement of energy savings and a few quick eco-friendly cost reductions was short-lived and soon the initiatives began to stall – after all, the “business case” can only take you so far without some clear regulations to standardize a new way of doing business.

One thing that did not slow down, however, was the continued decline of every major ecosystem on the planet.

The picture that I’ve painted is harsh. Some of you will be frustrated by what you read and it might make you angry — I might even become the target of that anger. If that’s the case, I would challenge you to do some reflection as to what is really upsetting you.

Others may find themselves in agreement with my depiction of corporate sustainability and as you read this, you may feel a sense of relief that someone understands your frustration.

At some point during the last three or four years I stopped being able to defend the good work being done in the realm of corporate sustainability. It felt like I was just beyond the reach of making meaningful change.

I felt like my work was doing nothing of consequence to reverse a dangerous trend and that I was implicitly being asked to defend the indefensible. Before long, I began to realise just how awkward and illogical my arguments had become: something had to change.

Devastating harm

I suspect that many environmental advocates who work for companies causing devastating environmental harm either feel like I do right now, or they will eventually find that they too can no longer believe that their employer is challenging the system in a meaningful way, in order to prevent our planet from entering a full blown climate crisis. 

At some point the cognitive dissonance (conflicting beliefs) becomes too much to bear and it leads to a sense of mental anguish. It is only by changing your beliefs or by removing the conflicting attitude or behavior, that a sense of harmony can return.

With the conflicting notion that business is working hard to solve our environmental challenges lifted from my shoulders, I was free to take an objective look at the issue of business and the environment.

Enough time had been wasted — I decided to implement the thinking of Occam’s razor. This is the problem-solving principle that states that the simplest solution tends to be the right one. When presented with competing hypotheses to solve a problem, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions.

The corporate sustainability movement is rigged; it’s controlled by the “winners” of capitalism to complicate, stonewall and resist progressive change. Ask yourself, why is it that when an environmental crisis is identified and change is deemed necessary, the first goal of government policy seems to be about maintaining the status quo and the profits of business even when doing so would clearly be an inadequate response to the crisis? 

A simple example is plastic pollution and how we can’t seem to get to a regulation that stops the production of a wide variety of plastic containers. (I explore this in more in my article, “Why Fake Leadership is Dangerous…”)

Held accountable

Besides maintaining the profit gravy train, perhaps an even more pressing concern exists for the corporate elites and billionaires. There’s a little issue out there that is hanging over them — it’s called responsibility and I suspect that they are terrified that it could possibly enter the mainstream conversation.

Imagine if they were held accountable both morally and financially for the devastating harm that they caused during the last 40 years by shifting environmental (climate change) and societal harm (increasing poverty) onto government and taxpayers. They effectively stole billions from average citizens during that time.

It’s no accident that the wages of average Americans haven’t risen in years, health care isn’t provided for tens of millions, life-saving drugs are a fortune, maternity leave is barely offered and that the oil and gas industry continues to receive 4 billion in subsidies every year. (Globally this number is closer to 400 billion and some put the number closer to 5 trillion based on a variety of factors).

It’s becoming a lot easier to see why climate change has become a political issue.

New narrative

Companies are opting to spend a few million here and there to buy politicians who then muddy the issues, ensuring that that money won’t be channeled back to society for retooling a new climate protecting economic system.

To those corporate elites, Wall Street executives, fossil fuel companies and billionaires who crafted and maintained our current form of climate destroying capitalism: your windfall is not the end of the story.

We will get a handle on this challenge and don’t be surprised if you foot the bill. But first we must demand the truth and stop accepting the narrative that business is helping.

Going forward, the concept of the “greening of business” should only be used as a storytelling tactic, a warning about just how desperate we had become when government abdicated its responsibility to protect its citizens; a warning as to what can happen when a faulty cultural narrative is relentlessly pushed.

In my next article I will explore what an honest narrative might look, how the time for moderate thinking as passed and what meaningful metrics and real corporate change might look like.

This Author 

Brad Zarnett is a sustainability strategist, thought leader and speaker. He is athe Founder of the Toronto Sustainability Speaker Series (TSSS). You can follow Brad on twitter: @bradzarnett, LinkedIn: Brad Zarnett and now Medium. This article was first published on Medium. 

A survey of 13 UK rivers has found they all contain microplastics – and one is more polluted than the “great Pacific garbage patch”, Greenpeace said.

Research released by the environmental group found the 13 rivers tested across the UK from the Exe in south-west England to the Lagan in Northern Ireland, found they all had tiny pieces of plastic measuring less than 5mm.

Greenpeace is calling for the Government to introduce “bold” new plastic reduction targets and create an independent watchdog with powers to enforce them.

Garbage

Scientists and campaigners, including Harry Potter star Bonnie Wright, sampled points along the rivers Exe, Thames, Severn, Great Ouse, Trent, Mersey, Aire, Derwent, Wear, Conwy, Wye, Clyde and Lagan.

Analysis of the samples by Greenpeace scientists at the University of Exeter using an infrared detector found microplastics were in 28 out of 30 locations tested.

A total of 1,271 pieces of plastic ranging from fragments of straws and bottle tops to tiny microbeads less than 1mm across in size were caught in a specially designed net by the survey team.

The highest concentrations were in the River Mersey, where 875 pieces were captured in half an hour.

This makes the waterway, at the time it was sampled, proportionally more polluted than the great Pacific garbage patch, considered by scientists to be one of the most plastic-polluted expanses of water on Earth, Greenpeace said.

Wake-up

The research also found that microbeads, tiny spherical pieces of plastic often used in cosmetic and household products, were found in five rivers despite being partially banned in 2017.

Seven locations turned up plastic pellets known as “nurdles”, which are used in the production of plastic products.

The most numerous instances of microbeads and nurdles were found in the River Mersey.

More than four fifths of the polymers found by Greenpeace were polyethylene, polystyrene and polypropylene, which are used to make products such as food packaging, milk and water bottles and carrier bags.

Fiona Nicholls, ocean plastics campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said: “This study is a wake-up call for Government. Fiddling around the edges of the plastic pollution problem by banning straws simply doesn’t cut it.

Waterways

“We need to see bold new plastic reduction targets in the upcoming Environment Bill, and aim to at least halve single use plastic production by 2025.”

Steve Backshall, wildlife expert and TV presenter, said: “Greenpeace’s study has discovered that the River Mersey is even more polluted than the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – surely this will galvanise us all into doing something about this.

“Plastic pollution isn’t just a domestic issue, its impacts are seen on wildlife and humans all over the world. For the sake of nature and for the sake of future generations we need to stop producing so much of it – it’s the only way forward.”

A spokesman for the Environment Department (Defra) said: “The UK is a global leader in tackling plastic pollution and is already making great strides – banning microbeads in rinse-off personal care products, taking fifteen billion plastic bags out of circulation with our 5p carrier bag charge, and announcing plans to introduce a deposit return scheme for single use drinks containers.

“We know there is more to do, which is why we are funding ground-breaking research into how microplastics enter waterways and working with the water industry to find new methods to detect, measure and remove microplastics from wastewater.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the Press Association environment correspondent.

Conservationists in parts of the world claim that free-ranging cats pose such an urgent and serious risk to biodiversity and public health that they’re actually dropping poisoned sausages from the sky to facilitate their demise.

Clark University Research Scientist William S. Lynn calls this panic “unwarranted.”  Lynn is lead author of “A moral panic over cats,” published in Conservation Biology.

The article is authored by Lynn and an interdisciplinary team of scientists, ethicists, and veterinarians. It challenges the dominant narrative that free-ranging cats must be eliminated from the landscape.

Collaborative approach

The article exposes the faulty reasoning that equates this challenge with science denialism, shows the evidence that cats pose a threat is uncertain, calls attention to the ethical and policy questions that must still be fully explored, and supports a more nuanced, dialogic, and collaborative approach to how people, cats, and biodiversity are understood.

Professor Lynn said: “We cannot kill our way back to biodiversity. We should embrace the intrinsic value of all animals, wild and domestic, and work towards win-win solutions that protect native wildlife without scapegoating cats.” 

According to Lynn and his colleagues, the dominant narrative envisions profiling millions of cats world-wide for removal “by any means necessary” which is code for killing them through poisoning, hunting and trapping.

This is already a matter of public policy in Australia, where plans are already in place to use poison bait to kill upwards of two million cats by 2020. Lynn says his co-authors all “share a commitment to the conservation of biodiversity and wild nature” but “argue profiling cats is wrong as a matter of both science and ethics.”

Compassionate conservation

Lynn is a research scientist in the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University. The focus of his work is the ethics of sustainability with an emphasis on animals and alternative paradigms of conservation (eg. compassionate conservation, rewilding, social nature). Schooled in ethics, geography and political theory, Lynn’s interdisciplinary approach examines why and how we ought to care for nature and society.

In the early 2000s Lynn was the ethicist who helped design and lead the ethics review of an experimental removal of barred owls for the benefit of northern spotted owls. This was the first use of an ethics process by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Its final report was an “ethics brief” for the making of environmental policy.

Lynn is also a proponent of “rewilding with compassion.” This is a process that increases the presence of natural habitats to as much as 50 percent of the earth’s surface, with an eye to improving our quality of life, meeting the challenges of global warming and the sixth extinction, and respecting the lives and well-being of the other animals with whom we share the earth.

His article “Setting Aside Half The Earth For ‘Rewilding’: The Ethical Dimension,” originally published on the popular news analysis site “The Conversation” in August of 2015, received widespread media attention.

The mission of the Marsh Institute is to investigate “what is and ought to be our relationship with nature.” The Institute brings together scholars to study human transformation of the environment and responses to this change, and promotes collaborative, systems-based research to address some of the most pressing challenges facing today’s world. 

The coauthors are Francisco Santiago-Ávila (a PhD candidate at the Nelson School of Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison), Professor Joann Lindenmayer (Public Health and Community Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine), John Hadidian (Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University), Research Fellow Arian Wallach, Ph.D. (Centre for Compassionate Conservation, University of Technology Sydney), and Professor Emerita Barbara J. King (Anthropology, College of William and Mary).

This Author

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

A series of proposals aimed at ending the era of throwaway fashion have been rejected by Theresa May’s government, a cross-party group of MPs has said.

The Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) accused the Tory government of being “out of step with the public” and claimed urgent action is needed to make retailers take responsibility for the waste they create.

In a report, the MPs recommended a raft of measures, including charging fashion producers a penny per garment to raise £35 million for better clothing collection and recycling – but all proposals were rejected, the group said.

Impacts

The government said action is already being taken to deal with the issue of so-called fast fashion and plans are in the pipeline for the future.

But Labour’s Mary Creagh, chairwoman of the committee, said: “Fashion producers should be forced to clear up the mountains of waste they create. The government has rejected our call, demonstrating that it is content to tolerate practices that trash the environment and exploit workers, despite having just committed to net zero emission targets.

“The Government is out of step with the public, who are shocked by the fact that we are sending 300,000 tonnes of clothes a year to incineration or landfill. Ministers have failed to recognise that urgent action must be taken to change the fast fashion business model which produces cheap clothes that cost the earth.”

The committee’s report, entitled Fixing Fashion: Clothing Consumption And Sustainability, was published in February and recommended “clear economic incentives” to encourage retailers to “do the right thing”.

It suggested the government reform taxation to reward companies that design products with lower environmental impacts and penalise those that do not.

Forced labour

The MPs proposed extending the tax on virgin plastics, due to come into force in 2022, to synthetic textile products to encourage the use of recycled fibres. And they called on ministers to explore how they can support hiring, swapping or subscription clothes services.

The group also urged the government to change the law to require companies to perform due diligence checks across their supply chains to ensure their products are made without child or forced labour.

They pointed to labour exploitation in the UK, and said the “Made in the UK” label should mean workers are paid at least the minimum wage.

Ms Creagh said: “We presented the Government with the evidence that it has failed to stop garment workers in this country being criminally underpaid, despite its claim that the number of national minimum wage inspectors has increased.

“The public has a right to know that the clothes they buy are not produced by children or forced labour; however, the Government hasn’t accepted our recommendations on the Modern Slavery Act to force fashion retailers to increase transparency in their supply chains.

Policy

“This is plain wrong. The EAC will be closely monitoring steps that the Government claims it is taking to address the problems exposed in our report.”

The government addressed each of the committee’s recommendations in its response and pointed to its voluntary Sustainable Clothing Action Plan (Scap), which sets industry targets for reducing carbon emissions, water and waste. “The Scap along with other actions in our Resources and Waste Strategy reflect the Government’s plans in relation to the sector,” it said.

“The Resources and Waste Strategy also outlines our plans to review and consult on measures such as extended producer responsibility (EPR) for five new waste streams, including textiles, so that producers are responsible for the full net costs of managing their products at the end of their useful life, encouraging greater reuse and recycling.”

It said it had “noted” the committee’s recommendation to charge producers one penny per garment and would consider it as they developed the EPR schemes.

A government spokesman said: “It simply isn’t true to say we are not accepting the committee’s recommendations – we are tackling the environmental impacts of ‘fast fashion’ and much of what the committee would like to achieve is already covered by government policy.”

This Author

Ellie Cullen is a reporter with the Press Association. Image from ‘JamieLondonBoy‘ via Flickr.

Several people have been arrested after climate change campaigners blocked a main route in the centre of Edinburgh.

The action on Lothian Road began at around 4pm on Monday and lasted for around six hours, the campaign group Extinction Rebellion Scotland said.

Some protesters were seen lying on the road, locked together, while others appeared to have glued themselves to the surface of the street.

Greenhouse

Police Scotland, who said they carried out “enforcement action” as a result of the disruption, said that a “small number” of arrests had taken place.

Earlier, protesters also took to the Royal Mile, at its junctions with North Bridge and George IV Bridge, where attempts to stage road blocks were swiftly broken up by police.

The various protests caused travel delays, with a number of bus routes diverted until Monday evening.

At North Bridge, protesters holding banners stood at the four corners of the junction, as they called for Scotland to lead the world in taking the “radical” action required to address what they describe as a climate emergency. Protesters held banners saying, “Climate Emergency” and “Act Now”.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) Scotland is demanding that ministers act to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.

Swift

Campaigners also want to influence discussions about Scotland’s Climate Change Bill, being debated over the coming days at Holyrood.

The action comes during a five-day protest outside the Scottish Parliament, dubbed the Holyrood Rebel Camp, which is scheduled to run until Thursday.

Student Jessica Cowell, 28, an XR Scotland activist, said: “This Bill does not do nearly enough to overhaul our transport system, which could be made cheaper, more efficient and run on renewables. This would decrease harmful air pollution and make public transport more accessible. Electric vehicles remain woefully underfunded, expensive and off limits to the wider public.”

Chief Superintendent Matt Richards, of Police Scotland, said: “We have been facilitating peaceful protest at the Scottish Parliament since Sunday and have been working alongside our partners at the Parliament and the City of Edinburgh Council to mitigate against disruption to the general public.”

He said officers took “swift action” as soon as they became aware of the intention to impact upon the city’s road network. “A small number of arrests have taken place,” he confirmed.

This Author

Hilary Duncanson is a reporter with Press Association Scotland.

Loughborough University have responded to a non-violent chalk protest by fining a student who was involved a total of £430.

Loughborough People & Planet, a student pressure group, had written messages in a water-soluble chalk spray on campus to protest the university’s ties to fossil fuel financiers Barclays.

The campaigners stated that they felt this step was necessary as the university had refused to speak with them.

Disciplinary action

The campaign to boycott Barclays was started in response to the bank’s investments in fossil fuel companies and projects, which totalled more than $85bn between 2016 and 2018.

The students approached the university via email at the start of the year requesting an opportunity to talk about this campaign. This request was dismissed by the university and the group have since resorted to a non-violent direct action approach to get their voices heard.

The university has attempted to silence the group through threats of disciplinary action and now through financial sanctions.

This follows a similar pattern of behaviour from the last year when the group campaigned for their university to divest from fossil fuels. The group eventually won the campaign but were threatened with disciplinary action all year.

A spokesperson for the group said: “We are being ignored by a university that refuses to talk to us. When we take peaceful protest action we get fined. This is despite us not causing any lasting damage to the university property. It just seems like they want us to be quiet and go away”.

Free speech 

The group used a water-soluble chalk solution and say they took precautions to leave no permanent damage. According to the group all marks come out with enough water.

The university mistook the substance for paint and before consulting the group called in external contractors to clean the messages, costing £430. The students have been blamed by the university for not making them aware that the messages were in chalk and are being charged for the cost of the external contractors that did not need to be hired.

Throughout their disciplinary hearing, the group have said they were told that the university were determined to ensure that the campus did not become a political space. Part of how the university intends to make this happen appears to be shutting down alternative views like this on campus as much as possible.

The university appears to be flouting established commitments by UK universities to ensure that peaceful protest is protected.

Indeed, the guidance of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in relation to universities states that everyone has the right to free speech within the law and that universities should seek to widen public debates and never to narrow them. It also states that peaceful protest is a protected form of freedom of expression.

Repeal

The group’s spokesperson added: “The university have tried again and again to kill this campaign, not through discussion or debate, but through suppression and disciplinaries. It’s extremely concerning for everybody that the university is fining students for legitimate political protests but we won’t be going away anytime soon.”

The group are calling on Loughborough University to repeal their decision and to not sanction the group.

In the meantime their campaign will continue and they have every intention of planning over the summer months for more peaceful protests in the next academic year. 

The group’s spokesperson said: “We intend to win this campaign, no matter how long it takes and no matter how hard the university makes it”.

You can donate to the group’s fundraiser to help cover the fines here.

This Author

Marianne Brooker is The Ecologist’s content editor. This article is based on a press release from People and Planet. 

Theresa May’s legacy as prime minister was always going to be shaped by Brexit, but in committing the UK to net zero emissions by 2050, her final act may be her most significant.

The reaction to the announcement has been mixed, with many arguing that it is too limited and that action is needed sooner. However, this is undoubtedly a positive step from government and we should all now hold them to account to ensure the commitment is backed up by action.

Whoever takes May’s place inside Number 10 must now take on that mantle, deliver significant new legislation and secure investment to cut emissions. A key element of this must be to support a new generation of onshore renewables in the UK.

Market volatility

Up until 2015, the UK was a world leader in onshore renewable development, so when the government removed support and changed planning regulations in 2015, it was a setback to the industry. Over 10,000 jobs were lost in the solar industry alone and recovery has been slow.

The growth in the UK’s onshore renewable capacity since then has stalled, hovering at around 15 percent of our total generation. However new planning applications for onshore renewables are beginning to creep up again and there was an impressive 2.7GW of onshore renewable electricity capacity submitted last year, so there’s room for optimism.

Many of those new planning applications are from businesses looking to generate their own energy in response to market volatility.

Macro-economic events such as Brexit and the ‘Trump-effect’ are not typically associated with increased interest in renewables, but the uncertainty these events are creating in global energy markets is making the cost of ‘traditional’ fossil-fuel commodities increasingly unstable.

For instance, oil prices – a key signifier of the state of the global economy – rose to a four-year high in October last year but collapsed by Christmas following reports of rising US stocks. 

Energy bills

That’s why around a third of businesses with high energy bills are looking to find new ways to shelter from volatility and protect their bottom line by installing renewable generation onsite – increasing self-sufficiency, cutting carbon and reducing reliance on market costs.

Businesses are installing renewables as it stacks up both environmentally and financially Onshore wind is the cheapest form of new energy generation.

But where business leads, government must follow. 

To reach our new net zero ambition by 2050, the next phase of the renewables revolution must focus on onshore – it’s the logical and pragmatic choice for any new PM.

Economic inevitability

All attempts at building large-scale ‘conventional’ energy generation over recent years have failed or gone vastly over budget. 

The cost of Hinkley Point C is likely to rise by £1.5bn to £19.6bn and it isn’t likely to generate energy until 2025. Hitachi and Toshiba both decided to halt new nuclear projects at Wylfa in Wales and Moorside in Cumbria.

Attempts to develop the questionable fracking industry have been equally fruitless. 

With much of the UK’s coal plants now decommissioned and many of our remaining power stations reaching the end of their design life there’s sure to be a shortfall between the anticipated generation capacity and what the market looks set to deliver. 

As the most cost-effective option, onshore renewables are now the only sensible option to increase generation while matching our carbon reduction plans.

Small changes

The UK Government doesn’t need to change much to start solving the energy supply crisis that’s developing. A few small planning system amendments could boost investor confidence and support wide-spread and successful subsidy-free onshore renewable generation.

Renewable energy projects are almost unique in receiving planning permission for just 20 – 25 years, which reflected the length of time they received financial support.

But now that support has been removed, we should reflect renewable’s crucial role in the UKs energy infrastructure by granting planning permissions in perpetuity (like any other planning consent) to increase investor confidence and ultimately lower the cost of electricity further. 

Also, when looking at extending the life of renewable generation, local authorities often assume the asset will be removed and treat it like a green-field site. This makes extending the life of onshore wind and solar a challenge.Unless these planning guidelines are changed, the UK renewables portfolio could start to shrink as projects go offline.

These small changes will help keep the lights on while driving the country towards its decarbonisation targets. And best of all, it wouldn’t cost the treasury a penny.

Public support

A significant driver for the change in policy from the Conservatives under Cameron was a perceived lack of public support for onshore renewables, however the landscape has shifted dramatically since 2015.

The Extinction Rebellion and School Strike movements have made the issue of climate breakdown impossible to ignore.

And the public are on board too, with around 80 percent of people supporting renewables according to the government’s own attitudes tracker. This is also demonstrated in a recent video featuring some of the people local to our Caton Moor Wind Farm near Lancaster.

There is a clear and collective ambition to make a change that has now reached politicians and policy-makers.

This year alone, parliament called a climate emergency and both BEIS and the Committee on Climate Change recommend the net zero target which the government has now adopted.

Getting smarter

An increase in onshore renewables will complement the significant growth in battery storage, electric cars and smarter consumption, as we move towards a smart grid.

Our businesses, homes and cars will integrate into the system. They will each have batteries that will charge from rooftop solar, an onsite turbine or the grid when demand for power is low and then release energy when demand begins to rise.  

Our energy bills will change in parallel, as new tariffs will incentivise people by enabling them to save money by using less energy at peak times.

The relationship between demand and supply will become more balanced and dynamic, where supply will no longer be a slave to demand.  By being able to manage peak demand, and ultimately reducing it, we’ll need less infrastructure, saving more money.

Net zero

The appetite for new renewables from business and the public is overwhelming and must now be matched by government if we are to achieve our net zero ambition. 

This week’s announcement could be a major milestone in the UK’s fight to prevent a climate catastrophe, and capitalise our collective sustainable energy expertise, but only if the rhetoric is backed up with action.

This Author

Matthew Clayton is managing director of Thrive Renewables.

The politics of economic growth are complex and contested as never before. In rich countries, rates of GDP growth have declined, decade after decade since the 1960s. The 2008 crash was deep, and the post-crisis recovery has been slow.

This poses problems for governments, given that their ‘performance legitimacy’ requires some degree of popular approval of their perceived success in charting a growth path that satisfies the citizenry’s demand for goods and services.

Where growth is low and governments choose to respond with austerity programmes, these bring additional misery and hardship — including tens of thousands of premature deaths in Britain alone.

Growth scepticism

In the same decades, growth scepticism has thrived. It takes two main forms: one highlights the impact of infinite growth on finite resources and on the natural environment. Recognition of the dangers of climate breakdown has transformed this debate – while mainstream opinion retains the traditional faith in growth, now refashioned as ‘green growth‘, the heretics are rallying to ‘degrowth‘.

The other emphasises the disconnect between growth and social well-being. The days are long gone when growth was seen as the fast track to general prosperity, as normal and natural as sunrise.

It is well established that the relationship between growth and well-being is partial at best. Such a correlation does exist, but weakens after a certain point — roughly speaking when per capita GDP exceeds $15,000. At higher levels, the translation of growth into improvements in health and well-being is tenuous. Other variables, notably levels of equality, are critical.

In combination, these developments have motivated the ‘Beyond GDP‘ agenda. Whether for reasons of growth scepticism or out of concern that if GDP growth remains slack governments’ performance legitimacy will suffer too, political leaders, civil servants and academics — among them Nicolas Sarkozy, Jacinda Ardern, Gus O’Donnell, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen — are promoting alternative yardsticks.

To assess these debates it helps to dig into the history and morphology of the ‘growth paradigm’ — the belief that economic growth is good, imperative, essentially limitless, and the principal remedy for a litany of social problems – and ask the following: when and how did this paradigm originate?

Will to grow

One response was offered in 1960 by Elias Canetti. In quasi-Nietzschean vein, he invoked a transhistorical ‘will to grow’. Humans are always striving for more. Whether the parent monitoring her child’s weight or the state official seeking to augment her power, or the community expanding its population, we all want growth. The desire to accumulate goods, the drive for economic growth, the wish for prosperity – they are all innate to human social being.

Humans in groups are driven to seek increase: of their numbers, of the conditions of production, and of the products they require and desire. The very earliest homo sapiens sought the enlargement of their “own horde through a plentiful supply of children.” And later, in the age of modern industrial production, the growth drive came into its own.

“If there is now one faith, it is faith in production, the modern frenzy of increase; and all the peoples of the world are succumbing to it one after the other. … Every factory is a unit serving the same cult. What is new is the acceleration of the process. What in former days was generation and increase of expectancy, directed towards rain or corn, … has today become production itself.” A straight line runs from the rain dance to the Nasdaq.

But this is to confuse the wiring of our current economy with the wiring of the human brain. Canetti’s ‘will to grow’ doesn’t withstand scrutiny. The diverse behaviours he describes can’t be reduced to a single logic. The ‘will’ behind creating babies is quite unlike the will to accumulate acreage or gold. And the latter is relatively recent.

For much of the human story, societies were nomadic or semi-nomadic, and organised in immediate-return systems. Stashes of food were set aside to tide the group over for days or weeks, but long-term storage was impractical. The accumulation of possessions would hamper mobility. The measures that such societies used to reduce the risks of scarcity centred not on accumulating stores of goods but on knowledge of the environment, and interpersonal relationships (borrowing, sharing, and so on). The moral economy of sharing necessitates a muscular egalitarianism that is undermined by the accumulation of property.

Logics of accumulation

Logics of accumulation — and, in the loosest sense, growth — were not initiated until the Neolithic revolution. Its technological and institutional transformations included settled agriculture and storage, class division, states, warfare and territoriality, and, later, the invention of money. Population growth joined with class exploitation and interstate competition to expand the sway of agrarian empires.

Farmers enlarged the ploughlands, scholars penned proposals for improving the organisation of agriculture or trade, merchants amassed wealth, and rulers, seeking to enlarge population and tribute, extended their domains. Only now — in the post-Neolithic age — did gold achieve its fetish quality as the source and symbol of power.

Scour the documents from ancient civilisations and you’ll find tales of competition for territory and the accumulation of property, but nothing that resembles the modern growth paradigm. No conception of ‘an economy’ that can grow, still less of one that tends to the infinite. And you’ll find little, if any, notion of linear historical progress.

Instead, cyclical cosmologies prevailed. A partial exception is the fourteenth century polymath, Ibn Khaldun. He developed a sophisticated analysis of growth dynamics. But his ideas weren’t widely adopted, and his theory is cyclical: it describes negative feedback mechanisms that ensure any economic upticks will necessarily hit barriers and retreat.

When, then, did the modern growth paradigm originate — and why?

Petty’s arithmetic

The evolution of the growth paradigm was integrally connected to the capitalist system and its colonial thrusts. The basic link between the growth drive and capitalism is transparent. The latter is a system of competitive accumulation. The former, in suggesting that the system is natural and brings benefit also to the ’99 percent’, provides ideological cover in that growth serves as an idealised and democratised redescription of capital accumulation. But there’s more to it than that.

The capitalist transition was to a system of generalised commodity production, in which formal ‘productive’ economic activity takes the shape of commodities interacting through the price mechanism, in a regularised manner. If earlier political-economic thought had construed its subject as the affairs of the royal household, during the capitalist transition a new model emerged, with an interconnected market field posited as essentially outside the state.

In seventeenth-century England, just as the universe was being re-imagined by Newton et al as a machine determined by lawful regularities, the idea that economic behaviour follows natural lawsbecame commonplace. By the close of the following century, Richard Cantillon had presented the market system as self-equilibrating, a machine that functions in a law-like manner; Quesnay’s Tableau had depicted the economic system as a unified process of reproduction; Adam Smith had theorised the dynamics of economic growth; and philosophers (such as William Paley) had developed the creed that steady economic growth legitimates the social system and renders system-critical demands unnecessary and dangerous.

The same centuries experienced a revolution in statistics. In the England of 1600, the growth paradigm could scarcely have existed. No one knew the nation’s income, or even its territory or population. By 1700 all these had been calculated, at least in some rough measure, and as new data arrived England’s ‘material progress’ could be charted. Simultaneously, the usage of ‘growth’ had extended from the natural and concrete toward abstract phenomena: the growth of England’s colonies in Virginia and Barbados, the ‘growth of trade,’ and suchlike.

But the capitalist transition revolutionised much more than the formal economy and economic concepts. As land came to be regarded as a commodity-like object, the idea — found to some degree in antiquity — that nature exists to serve the purposes of landowners and is fundamentally external to human beings, gained definition. The early-modern regimes of abstract social labour and abstract social nature(i.e. the constitution of labour and nature as commodities) were sustained by the scientific revolution, and also by the construction of capitalist time. Over centuries, time became flattened into an abstract, infinite and divisible continuum, one that permitted economic life to be re-imagined as subject to continuous growth and cultivation. Morality was upended, too, most significantly in the discarding of the age-old proscriptions against acquisitiveness.

Colonial mission

The more that economic activity came to be marshalled behind the imperatives of capital accumulation, the more it became subject to regimes of ‘improvement’ and quantification. In Jacobean and Cromwellian England, these practices and discourses proliferated. Agrarian-capitalist improvement was fuelled by scientific discoveries. These, in turn, were spurred on by the navigational and martial demands of explorers, freebooters and conquerors.

European settlers in the New World not only exterminated and subjugated ‘new’ peoples, but turned to objectifying and cataloguing them, drawing comparisons with their own kind and ‘improving’ them. ‘Improvement’ and its theologically-intoxicated transplantation to colonial locations generated new data and new demands for detailed knowledge. How profitable is this tract of land, and its denizens? How can they be made more profitable? Answering such questions was enabled by modern accounting techniques, with their sharper definition of such abstractions as profit and capital.

No surprise, then, that the first statistically rigorous accounting of the wealth of a country (as distinct from, say, a royal household) was conducted by a capitalist on a colonial mission. William Petty planted quantification at the heart of scientific economics, crafted to the purposes of English merchants and empire, and gaining ideological force from the sheen of objectivity with which economic statistics — or ‘political arithmetic’ as he termed it — comes coated. In his work the conquest of nature and the idea of nature as a machine, and of the economy as a productive engine, blended to produce a new concept of wealth as “resources and the productive power to harness them” in contrast to the mercantilist concept, centred on the accumulation of bullion.

Colonisation of the New World contributed powerfully to capital accumulation in Western Europe, but it also spurred Europe’s philosophers to elaborate a racialised progress ideology. The question of what to make of the peoples encountered in the Americas, and what implications followed from their property arrangements, stimulated a new reading of the human story: a narrative of social progress. From the vantage point of the colonialists, if ‘they’ were at the primitive stage, had ‘we’ once occupied it too?

Centred on a mythical ladder that climbs up from barbarism to civilisation, the progress idea hammered the diversity of human populations into a single temporal-economic chain. By indexing the richer and higher-tech nations (and ‘races’) as history’s vanguard, it justified their bossing of the rest. It was a manifesto that drummed out capital’s rhythms, and later found new forms as ‘modernisation theory,’ ‘the development project,’ and so forth, articulated through a grammar of ‘growth.’ Through its marriage to progress and development, in the belief that social advance requires a steady upward ratchet in national income, growth gained its ideological heft.

The globalisation of an ideology

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the consolidation and globalisation of capitalist relations was accompanied by the growth paradigm. The first half of the twentieth century saw its definition sharpen. A pronounced shift occurred from a rather vague sense — long prevalent — that government should preside over economic ‘improvement’ and ‘material progress’ to an urgent conviction that promoting growth is a matter of national priority.

Factors behind the shift included intensified geopolitical rivalry, and the increasing ‘muscularity’ of states, with their expanded bureaucratic apparatuses, surveillance systems and welfare provision, as well as the segue from the age of empires to that of nation states, a shift that helped consolidate the discourse of the ‘national economy.’ In many countries the expansion of suffrage was an additional factor: rights were extended and an infrastructure and ideology of national belonging was constructed with the aim of incorporating the lower orders as citizens into the body politic. With the Great Depression, restoring growth became an urgent project of states, and provided the context for the national income accounting that eventually led to GDP.

The acme of the growth paradigm was reached in the mid twentieth century. Growth was firmly established everywhere: in the state-capitalist economies of the ‘Second World,’ the market economies of the West, and the postcolonial world too. It became part of the economic-cultural furniture, and played a decisive part in binding ‘civil society’ into capitalist hegemonic structures — with social democratic parties and trade unions crucial binding agents. It came to be seen as the key metric of national progress and as a magic wand to achieve all sorts of goals: to abolish the danger of returning to depression, to sweeten class antagonisms, to reduce the gap between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, to carve a path to international recognition, and so on.

There was a military angle too. For the Cold War rivals, growth promised geopolitical success. “If we lack a first-rate growing economy,” cautioned JFK on the campaign trail, “we cannot maintain a first-rate defense.” The greater the rate of growth, it was universally supposed, the lesser the economic, social and political challenges, and the more secure the regime.

The growth paradigm, I suggest, is a form of fetishistic consciousness. It functions as commodity fetishism at one remove. Growth, although the result of social relations among people, assumes the veneer of objective necessity. The growth paradigm elides the exploitative process of accumulation, portraying it instead as a process in the general interest. As Mike Kidron and Elana Gluckstein note, as a system of competition “capitalism depends on the growth of capital; as a class system it depends on obscuring the sources of that growth.”

Environmental despoliation

For a long time, GDP growth was widely assumed to be the route to prosperity. Since then, cracks have appeared. In the rich world, we are beginning to realise that continuous GDP growth leads not simply to wealth and wellbeing, but to environmental collapse and barbecued grandchildren.

But growth is not its own cause. GDP mirrors the power structure and form of value of capitalist society, but it doesn’t define the system’s core goal. That goal is the competitive accumulation of capital, and the accounting principles that guide it are those at the level of the firm, not the state.

Put differently, the relentless increase in global resource throughput and environmental despoliation is not principally the result of states aspiring to a metric – higher GDP – but of industrial and financial firms, driven by market competition to expand turnover, develop new products, and increase profits and interest.

If the above analysis is correct, insofar as critical debates on growth focus solely on GDP while being coy about capital, they are enacting a form of displacement.

This Author 

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He is a co-editor of Green Growth (Zed, 2016). His articles are available online. He tweets at @Gareth_Dale. This article was first published on OpenDemocracy, and is part of a new series on economic growth. 

Food is not a commodity. It is not ‘stuff’ put together mechanically and artificially in labs and factories. Food is life.

Food holds the contributions of all beings that make the food web, and it holds the potential for maintaining and regenerating the web of life.

Food also holds the potential for health and disease, depending on how it was grown and processed. Food is therefore the living currency of the web of life. 

Industrial agriculture 

As an ancient Upanishad reminds us: “Everything is food, everything is something else’s food.” Good food is the basis for good health. But bad food, industrial food, fake food is the basis for disease.”

Hippocrates said: “Let food be thy medicine”. In Ayurveda, India’s ancient science of life, food is called ‘sarvausadha’ the medicine that cures all disease.

Industrial food systems have reduced food to a commodity, to ‘stuff’ that can then be constituted in the lab. In the process both the planet’s health and our health has been nearly destroyed.

As much as 75 percent of the planetary destruction of soil, water, biodiversity, and 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from industrial agriculture, which also contributes to 75 percent of food related chronic diseases.

Chemical agriculture does not return organic matter and fertility to the soil. Instead it is contributing to desertification and land degradation. It also demands more water since it destroys the soil’s natural water-holding capacity.

Food security

Industrial food systems have destroyed the biodiversity of the planet both through the spread of monocultures, and through the use of toxics and poisons that are killing bees, butterflies, insects, birds, and leading to the sixth mass extinction. 

Biodiversity-intensive and poison-free agriculture, on the other hand, produces more nutrition per acre while rejuvenating the planet. It shows the path to Zero Hunger in times of climate change. 

The industrial agriculture and toxic food model has been promoted as the only answer to economic and food security. However, globally, more than a billion people are hungry. More than three billion suffer from food-related chronic diseases. 

Industrial agriculture is based on fossil-fuel intensive, chemical-intensive monocultures, and produces only 30 percent of the food we eat despite using 75 percent of farmed land. Meanwhile, small, biodiverse farms using 25 percent of that land provides 70 percent of the food.

At this rate, if the share of industrial agriculture and industrial food in our diet is increased to 45 percent, we will have a dead planet. One with with no life and no food.

GM

The mad rush for fake food and fake meat is a recipe for accelerating the destruction of the planet and our health. It’s ignorant of the diversity of our foods and food cultures, and the role of biodiversity in maintaining the our health.

Pat Brown, CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, stated in a recent article, ‘How our commitment to consumers and our planet led us to use GM soy’, that: “We sought the safest and most environmentally responsible option that would allow us to scale our production and provide the Impossible Burger to consumers at a reasonable cost.” 

Using GMO soya is hardly an “environmentally responsible option” given the fact that 90 percent of monarch butterflies have disappeared due to pesticides including Roundup Ready Crops, and we are living through what scientists have called an ‘insectageddon’.

In writing this, Pat Brown reveals his total ignorance that weeds have evolved resistance to Roundup and have become superweeds now requiring more and more lethal herbicides.

Bill Gates and DARPA are even calling for the use of gene drives to exterminate amaranth, a sacred and nutritious food in India, because the Palmer Amaranth has become a superweed in the Roundup Ready soya fields of the USA .

At a time when the global movement to ban GMOs and Roundup is growing, promoting GMO soya as ‘fake meat’ is misleading the eater both in terms of the ontology of the burger, and on claims of safety.

Ontological confusion 

Recent court cases have showcased the links of Roundup to cancer. With the build up of liabilities related to cancer cases, the investments in Roundup Ready GMO soya is blindness to the market.

There is another ontological confusion related to fake food. Fake meat is about selling meat-like products.

Pat Brown declares: “We use genetically engineered yeast to produce heme, the ‘magic’ molecule that makes meat taste like meat — and makes the Impossible Burger the only plant-based product to deliver the delicious explosion of flavor and aroma that meat-eating consumers crave.”

I had thought that the plant based diet was for vegans and vegetarians, not meat lovers.

Indeed, the promotion of fake foods seems to have more to do with giving new life to the failing GMO agriculture and the Junk Food Industry, and the threat to it from our increasing awareness that organic, local, fresh food regenerates the planet and our health.

In consequence, investment in plant-based food companies has soared from near zero in 2009 to $600m by 2018. And these companies are looking for more.

Profits and control

Pat Brown declares: “If there’s one thing that we know, it’s that when an ancient unimprovable technology counters a better technology that is continuously improvable, it’s just a matter of time before the game is over. I think our investors see this as a $3 trillion opportunity.”

This is about profits and control. He, and those jumping on the Fake Food Goldrush, have no discernible knowledge, or consciousness about, or compassion for living beings, the web of life, nor the role of living food in weaving that web.

Their sudden awakening to ‘plant-based diets’, including GMO soya, is an ontological violation of food as a living system that connects us to the ecosystem and other beings, and indicates ignorance of the diversity of cultures that have used a diversity of plants in their diets.

Ecological sciences have been based on the recognition of the interconnections and interrelatedness between humans and nature, between diverse organisms, and within all living systems, including the human body. Ecology has thus evolved as a systems science, not a fragmented and reductionist pursuit of profit. 

Food imperialism

Diets have evolved according to climates and the local biodiversity the climate allows. The biodiversity of the soil, of the plants and our gut microbiome is one continuum.  

Technologies are tools. Tools need to be assessed on ethical, social and ecological criteria – they need to be deployed in service to our wellbeing. 

Through fake food, the web of life is being redefined as an “ancient unimprovable technology”. This view is ignorant of the sophisticated knowleges that have evolved in diverse agricultuaral and food cultures, and in diverse climate and ecosystems, to sustain and renew biodiversity and health.

The Eat forum which brought out a report that tried to impose a monoculture diet of chemically grown, hyperindustrially processed food on the world has a partnership through FrESH with the junk food industry, and Big Agriculture such as Bayer, BASF, Cargil, Pepsico amongst others.

Fake food is thus building on a century and a half of food imperialism and food colonisation of our diverse food knowledges and food cultures.

Food cultures

Big Food and Big Money is behind the fake food Industry. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are funding startups.

We need to decolonise our food cultures and our minds. The industrial west has always been arrogant, and ignorant, of the cultures it has colonised. Fake Food is just the latest step in a history of food imperialism.

Soya is a gift of East Asia, where it has been a food for millennia. It was only eaten as fermented food to remove its anti-nutritive factors.

But recently, GMO soya has created a soya imperialism, destroying plant diversity. It continues the destruction of the diversity of rich edible oils and plant-based proteins of Indian dals that we have documented.

Women from India’s slums called on me to bring our mustard back when GMO soya oil started to be dumped on India, and local oils and cold press units in villages were made illegal.

That is when we started the ‘sarson (mustard) satyagraha’ to defend our healthy cold pressed oils from dumping of hexane-extracted GMO soya oil. Hexane is a neurotoxin.

Food sovereignty 

While Indian peasants knew that pulses fix nitrogen, the west was industrialising agriculture based on synthetic nitrogen which contributes to greenhous gases, dead zones in the ocean, and dead soils.

While we ate a diversity of dals in our daily dal roti, the British colonisers, who had no idea of the richness of the nutrition of pulses, reduced them to animal food. Chana became chick pea, gahat became horse gram, tur became pigeon pea. 

We stand at a precipice of a planetary emergency, a health emergency, a crisis of farmers livelihoods.

Fake Food will acclerate the rush to collapse. Real food gives us a chance to rejuvenate the earth, our food economies, food sovereignty and food cultures. Through real food we can decolonise our food cultures and our consciousness. We can remember that food is living and gives us life.

Boycott the GMO made Impossible Burger. Make tofu. Cook dal.

This Author 

Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, and food sovereignty advocate. Read a response from Impossible Food here.

For decades, Vandana Shiva has been an outspoken activist against genetic engineering and the products that result from it, such as crops that could greatly reduce the incidence of blindness and help farmers feed their communities in an era of uncertainty due to climate change.

Impossible Foods is transparent about its use of genetic engineering, so we’ve grown accustomed to reflexive attacks from anti-genetic engineering absolutists. But this latest call for a boycott of the Impossible Burger is particularly illogical and ironic, given that its author seems to genuinely share Impossible Foods’ mission — to make the world’s food systems sustainable.

Ms. Shiva, a long-time vegetarian, also seems to agree with Impossible Foods about how to save our withering natural ecosystems: we need to eliminate animal agriculture, the leading threat to our planet’s health and our own.

Different strategies

Environmentalists, including Ms. Shiva, have been begging people for decades to reduce or eliminate animal meat from their diets, replacing it with garbanzos, lentils and other plant-based foods. They’re fighting righteously for a noble cause. But using guilt and eat-like-me rhetoric to reduce consumption of animal meat is simply not working.

Despite increasing calls from activists for a more plant-based diet, worldwide meat production has tripled over the last four decades, according to Worldwatch Institute.

Global meat production is projected to double again by 2050, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. This is a global catastrophe, and it won’t be averted by extolling the virtues of tofu and dal.

Impossible Foods has a different strategy – one that has a shot at working. Instead of expecting people to give up meat, we accept that people will continue to crave it. And instead of vilifying meat and its consumers — a tried-and-failed strategy that divides communities without slowing the destructive impact of animal farming — we want to provide omnivores with a better choice: uncompromisingly delicious, nutritious, safe and affordable meat made from plants, with a vastly reduced impact on climate and biodiversity.

Instead of telling people what to eat, we offer them a better option and let them make their own choice.

Meat industry

The use of animals to produce meat is by far the most destructive technology on Earth today. The greenhouse gas footprint of animal agriculture rivals that of every car, truck, bus, ship, airplane, and rocketship combined. Animal agriculture pollutes and consumes more water than any other industry.

The global meat, fish and dairy industry is overwhelmingly the primary driver of the ongoing meltdown in diverse wildlife populations and ecosystems on land and in oceans, rivers and lakes.

To avert ecological disaster, our most urgent priority must be to reduce or eliminate the use of animals as technology in the food system. That’s Impossible Foods’ mission — and it’s one that we think Ms. Shiva and her fans wholeheartedly embrace, despite our tactical differences.

At the same time, we need to set the record straight about a couple things Ms. Shiva gets wrong about the Impossible Burger. Impossible Foods is working to satisfy the global demand for meat by producing meat for meat lovers, from plants, with a tiny fraction of the resource consumption and environmental impact of today’s animal-derived meats.

We love vegetarians and vegans; compared to omnivores, their impact on climate and biodiversity is already tiny. Frankly, if everyone were eating virtuous tofu and dal in place of meat, Impossible Foods wouldn’t exist and wouldn’t need to exist.  

Climate change

The Impossible Burger is for omnivores, not vegetarians. More than 90 percent of Impossible Burger consumers regularly eat meat from animals. They are not choosing between an Impossible Burger and tofu; they’re choosing between meat made from plants and meat made from a cow. 

If you like tofu and dal and are happy to avoid meat from animals, by all means keep it up!  But if you love meat and intend to keep consuming it, then please try Impossible meat in your beef tacos, pork dumplings or meatballs.

Impossible’s plant-based meat has similar nutritional value to animal-derived meat – without the destructive impact on public health and the environment.

And if you care about avoiding catastrophic climate change and preserving biodiversity and healthy natural ecosystems, we should be allies, not enemies.

Preserving biodiversity

If you care about the impact of pesticides on wildlife and biodiversity, as we do, you will applaud the fact that the Impossible Burger has a pesticide footprint 8-fold lower than the same, conventional burger made from cows. The Impossible Burger also has a 25-fold lower land footprint, 8-fold lower water consumption, 12-fold lower water pollution and 9-fold lower GHG emissions than a burger from cows, based on a life-cycle analysis conducted by a respected, independent auditor.  

The overwhelming majority of the corn and soybeans in the United States and the world is fed to livestock to produce meat. It’s precisely our appetite for meat that drives most of the mono-cropping and pesticide use that Ms. Shiva blames as the biggest threat to biodiversity. 

Since making meat from plants is vastly more efficient and less wasteful than feeding crops to cows, pigs and chickens and consuming their flesh, the success of Impossible Foods mission would actually greatly reduce demand for corn and soybeans and the pesticides and fertilizers that are used to promote their growth.

Aside from those corrections, we applaud Ms. Shiva for a career spent campaigning to get people to be more conscious about their food.  We understand what she’s trying to convey with her latest mantra, “Boycott the GMO Impossible Burger. Make tofu. Cook dal.” Two-thirds of it is spot-on. But if she were to take the time to understand Impossible Foods’ mission and the benefits to our planet, its climate and biodiversity every time a consumer chooses meat from Impossible instead of meat from an animal, she’d replace that mantra with: “Make tofu. Cook dal. And if you want meat, eat Impossible.”  

Like the Impossible Burger, tofu and dal are products of human ingenuity — brilliant ways to transform ingredients from plants into delicious, nutrient-dense foods. The Impossible Burger isn’t a threat to tofu or dal; it’s a 21st century addition to the same plant-based cornucopia.

Tangible impact

Activism alone has not dented consumption of animal meat. By contrast, the Impossible Burger is already making a tangible impact. And by welcoming consumers instead of shaming them, we’re on track to accomplish our shared mission.

If you’d like a deeper understanding of Impossible Foods, read more in the What IF? blog, which answers all your questions about the extraordinary safety record of our key ingredient, our use of genetic engineering, and our mission to replace the use of animals as food technology.

After you digest all that info, we’re sure you’ll want to find the closest place to try a delicious, plant-based Impossible Burger.

This Author 

Rachel Konrad is chief communications officer at Impossible Foods.