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Will the badger cull cost the Tories the election? It certainly should! Updated for 2026

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We are now just under 50 days from a general election and the badger cull issue has taken centre stage in a wider debate about wildlife protection and animal welfare, which could help decide the outcome.

The Labour Party have even put the badger on the front of their wildlife protection and animal welfare manifesto, as they make a clear election commitment to stop both the pilot culls and a wider national roll out of the policy should they form a Government.

With a recent MORI poll showing that badger culling was the 5th most common issue of complaint to MPs in 2014, both MP’s and prospective candidates know the disastrous policy is political poison on the door step during the election campaign. However, David Cameron is now stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to killing badgers.

Despite recently telling first time voters on Sky News that the badger cull is “probably the most unpopular policy for which I am responsible”, he cannot afford to lose the votes – and money – of landowners and farmers by dumping the policy this side of the election.

The answer? Easy! Let Liz Truss take the flak

So he’s playing for time by letting his Environment Secretary Liz Truss hold out the possibility of an extension of the policy should the Tories form another Government after 7th May, without making any concrete commitment on how this will be achieved.

On 3rd March after almost six months of avoidance and delay and a personal intervention from the Prime Minister, Liz Truss finally sat down with members of the Badger Trust Board to have a frank and open discussion on the badger cull policy.

Just how sensitive the badger cull issue has become was clear from the start, when Liz Truss suggested our discussions should remain private and off the record. This request was ludicrous in view of the level of public interest in our meeting and the fact that both the BBC and ITV News were waiting on the steps of DEFRA’s offices, to interview me the minute I left the building.

The meeting did not deliver any surprise U-turn on killing badgers, but it was noticeable how lacking in confidence and isolated the Secretary of State appeared when it came to defending the disastrous cull policy.

Despite trotting out the now familiar statements about following the advice of her Chief Vet Nigel Gibbens, on the need to control the spread of TB in wildlife as well as cattle, it was clear her heart was not really in it.

Nigel Gibbens, the UK’s Chief Veterinary Officer, was also very noticeable by his absence from the meeting, which sent a clear message that he is unwilling to enter into any further political controversy on the failed culling policy, this side of the General Election.

Policy in paralysis

And despite statements made at the NFU annual conference a few weeks week before, the Secretary of State was unable to give any clear commitment on a national roll out of the policy should the Conservatives form a Government after 7th May.

Bold statements from her predecessor about a 25-year cull rolled out to 40 new areas of England by 2020 were not repeated. With over £15 million being spent on just 2 years of culling in Somerset and Gloucestershire alone, this came as no great surprise.

The fact that Natural England are also considering revoking the Gloucestershire cull licence due to major failures in meeting cull targets, is also no doubt causing a major political headache for the Secretary of State.

The NFU sense the Government is losing its appetite for badger culling and this explains why their President Meurig Raymond, was willing to risk the reputation of the NFU by backing claims by livestock vet Roger Blowey that culling badgers in Gloucestershire has significantly lowered TB in cattle, without any supporting independent scientific evidence.

These claims also fly in the face of public statements from Nigel Gibbens, that any lowering of TB rates in cattle is down to tightening of cattle TB testing and movement controls, not badger culling or vaccination.

Owen Paterson might have been willing to throw caution to the wind to back the NFU’s claims on social media. But Truss knows she would be risking what little is left of DEFRA’s reputation for science based policy making, if she followed his example.

Badger cull has failed tax payers, farmers and wildlife

The level of incompetence, negligence and deceit surrounding the badger cull policy is staggering. The policy has cost huge amounts of public money, free shooting the killing method being tested has proved a disastrous failure, none of the badgers killed have been tested for TB, cull targets have been missed and many badgers have died long painful deaths.

What makes all this worse is that the Government together with the NFU developed a risk register for the badger cull policy in secret in 2010, which accurately foresaw all these failures. However this document was hidden from public view and was only released after a two year fight in the High Court, with the Badger Trust and the Information Commissioner joining forces against the Government on freedom of information grounds.

The badger cull policy has driven a wedge between the public and farming industry, led to a significant increase in the illegal persecution of badgers and proved a dangerous distraction from the need for more effective TB cattle testing systems and the introduction of a TB cattle vaccine.

Playing politics with wildlife has proved a dangerous game with no clear winners. The badger cull policy has failed tax payers, farmers and our wildlife and the vast majority of the public, MPs and scientists with expertise in animal health and disease control, now believe it should come to an end.

However the badger cull was a political policy agreed by David Cameron prior to the 2010 election to help win votes from the farming and landowning community.

Despite its catastrophic failure the Prime Minister is holding on to the wreckage for his political life and he will keep playing the badger blame game, as he needs every vote to remain in office after 7th May.

 

 

Dominic Dyer is CEO of the Badger Trust & Policy Advisor for Care for the Wild.

 




391303

Dear Bryony – don’t dump your nuclear waste on us! Updated for 2026

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Dear Baroness Worthington,

I watched on in horror as you championed the removal of local authority’s right to decide over the disposal of nuclear waste in their communities.

I didn’t know who you were at the time, and your position of the matter left me thinking perhaps you were a stakeholder in some nuclear power supply chain company.

I was dismayed to learn that you used to be a key member of Friends of the Earth. Further research shows that you have a background in environmentalism and appear on the surface to be concerned with climate change.

So I ask myself, why would someone with your background be a champion of nuclear power? And why would you champion the disposal of nuclear waste underground at levels where groundwater circulates?

And why would you want this done without allowing the full scrutiny of councillors and planning officers? Why would you prefer to remove power from locally elected representatives and place decisions in the hands of one person, creating a potentially corruptible situation?

Nuclear power is not low carbon!

Nuclear power is not a low carbon energy source. There is a wide range of data on the carbon footprint of nuclear waste, much of which is industry rhetoric. Benjamin Sovacool’s review found the average carbon footprint of nuclear power to be 66 gCO2/KWh, breaching the Committee on Climate Change’s recommended limits. Keith Barnham’s article in The Ecologist has more detail:

The fact is the carbon cost of decommissioning and waste handling is difficult to estimate – and if Sellafield’s soaraway clean-up budget is anything to go by, carbon costs as well as financial ones could spiral.

Building geological disposal facilities to handle waste would not necessarily reduce these costs. Vitrification and construction are not low carbon pursuits. What would the carbon cost of a water contamination event be? The human cost would be far greater.

Then there is the issue of uranium mining, a carbon-costly enterprise. As this finite source depletes, ever lower quality of uranium ore will be sought, further increasing the energy required to extract the uranium, and raising the carbon price tag.

Fast breeder reactors technologies that could avoid some of the uranium ore issues have been tried, at enormous cost – and repeatedly failed due to intractable technological hurdles and monstrous expense, while their purported advantages in reducing long-lived nuclear waste have been hugely over-hyped.

Moreover despite bullish promises by the nuclear industry and its cheerleaders, for example over Hitachi’s Prism design, they do not exist – and probably never will.

As for the ‘molten salt’ thorium reactor technology you espouse, it is fraught with most of the same issues as any other nuclear fission technology.

And thanks to serious and possibly unsolvable technological difficulties, it’s a very long way of becoming a practical reality. Any large scale deployment is at least half a century away – by which time low cost renewables will surely dominate the world’s power supply, and it will be completely redundant.

Finite investment funds must go into renewables!

The amount of subsidies the government wishes to funnel into the greedy jaws of nuclear power is quite frightening, locking us into ridiculous contracts for decades and guaranteeing fuel poverty in the future.

Who knows what the energy market will look like in ten, twenty years? Yet energy consumers may be having to pay inflation-proofed subsidies for Hinkley Point C – if it’s ever built – to 2060 and beyond!

If renewable technology received the proper support – and that includes people like you ceasing to defend the nuclear industry that is threatening to grab almost all the UK’s ‘low carbon’ energy funding –  we could be online to meet our carbon targets.

Cheerleading for new builds that take years to get off the ground, even if you do believe they are low carbon – in the face evidence that clearly suggests otherwise – could delay action on climate change that should be happening right now, but is being deliberately starved of funds.

What if those nuclear energy subsidies were instead promised to the solar, wind, tidal, anaerobic digestion and retrofitting industries? Wouldn’t that be a far better way to tackle climate change?

There’s nothing ‘natural’ about fission products!

But back to radioactive waste, which is a sticky issue. We have to deal with what we have, but most environmentalists and humanitarians agree that adding to that pile is madness. Why would someone with your credentials think otherwise?

You have risen to a position of great power. You stood in the Moses room as someone who is known for their actions in protecting the environment, and damned it by championing nuclear power and nuclear waste dumping and stressing that it was a nationally significant issue that extends beyond the lifetimes of the people living in the area.

You spoke about a pendulum of nuclear regulation and how radiation is ‘natural’. Background radiation is natural. Mining ores, processing, enriching etc, is most definitely not natural. Even less so are the myriad fission products emitted by nuclear power plants, concentrated in spent nuclear fuel, and discharged during fuel reprocessing – and comparing the two through insinuation is both wrong and immoral.

How is reducing regulation ever a good move for protecting public health and safety?

You may be thinking right now that I am part of a public that is somewhat hysterical about radiation and its effects. I have a PhD in cancer biology and have studied the response of cells to irradiation.

I’m not frightened of a bit of background radiation, but I do have grave concerns about burying highly radioactive nuclear waste underground where it has to stay isolated for hundreds of thousands of years, without any of it ending up in our water supplies.

The one thing we know for certain about deep hydrogeology is that we don’t know all that much about it. How can you guarantee the safety of our water supplies, and those of our children and their descendants? I suggest you read the ‘Rock Solid?‘ review produced by GeneWatch on behalf of Greenpeace on geological disposal if you have not done so already.

I also very concerned about climate change, and quite aside from the radioactive waste issue, I am opposed to nuclear new builds due to their carbon emission consequences.

I would urge you to rethink your position on nuclear new builds and geological disposal on both pragmatic and ethical grounds.

 

 

Note: Baroness (Bryony) Worthington, a Labour peer, spoke in the House of Lords debate on the Infrastructure Planning (Radioactive Waste Geological Disposal Facilities) Order 2015.

Dr Becky Martin earned her PhD at the Institute of Genetics, University of Nottingham and went on to work at the University of Oxford studying DNA repair gene expression in bladder cancer for three years. She is now a full time mother and environmental campaigner, and blogs here. Together with several other mothers she co-founded the group No Geo Nuke Dumping @NoNukeDumping. 

 

 




391182

Dear Bryony – don’t dump your nuclear waste on us! Updated for 2026

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Dear Baroness Worthington,

I watched on in horror as you championed the removal of local authority’s right to decide over the disposal of nuclear waste in their communities.

I didn’t know who you were at the time, and your position of the matter left me thinking perhaps you were a stakeholder in some nuclear power supply chain company.

I was dismayed to learn that you used to be a key member of Friends of the Earth. Further research shows that you have a background in environmentalism and appear on the surface to be concerned with climate change.

So I ask myself, why would someone with your background be a champion of nuclear power? And why would you champion the disposal of nuclear waste underground at levels where groundwater circulates?

And why would you want this done without allowing the full scrutiny of councillors and planning officers? Why would you prefer to remove power from locally elected representatives and place decisions in the hands of one person, creating a potentially corruptible situation?

Nuclear power is not low carbon!

Nuclear power is not a low carbon energy source. There is a wide range of data on the carbon footprint of nuclear waste, much of which is industry rhetoric. Benjamin Sovacool’s review found the average carbon footprint of nuclear power to be 66 gCO2/KWh, breaching the Committee on Climate Change’s recommended limits. Keith Barnham’s article in The Ecologist has more detail:

The fact is the carbon cost of decommissioning and waste handling is difficult to estimate – and if Sellafield’s soaraway clean-up budget is anything to go by, carbon costs as well as financial ones could spiral.

Building geological disposal facilities to handle waste would not necessarily reduce these costs. Vitrification and construction are not low carbon pursuits. What would the carbon cost of a water contamination event be? The human cost would be far greater.

Then there is the issue of uranium mining, a carbon-costly enterprise. As this finite source depletes, ever lower quality of uranium ore will be sought, further increasing the energy required to extract the uranium, and raising the carbon price tag.

Fast breeder reactors technologies that could avoid some of the uranium ore issues have been tried, at enormous cost – and repeatedly failed due to intractable technological hurdles and monstrous expense, while their purported advantages in reducing long-lived nuclear waste have been hugely over-hyped.

Moreover despite bullish promises by the nuclear industry and its cheerleaders, for example over Hitachi’s Prism design, they do not exist – and probably never will.

As for the ‘molten salt’ thorium reactor technology you espouse, it is fraught with most of the same issues as any other nuclear fission technology.

And thanks to serious and possibly unsolvable technological difficulties, it’s a very long way of becoming a practical reality. Any large scale deployment is at least half a century away – by which time low cost renewables will surely dominate the world’s power supply, and it will be completely redundant.

Finite investment funds must go into renewables!

The amount of subsidies the government wishes to funnel into the greedy jaws of nuclear power is quite frightening, locking us into ridiculous contracts for decades and guaranteeing fuel poverty in the future.

Who knows what the energy market will look like in ten, twenty years? Yet energy consumers may be having to pay inflation-proofed subsidies for Hinkley Point C – if it’s ever built – to 2060 and beyond!

If renewable technology received the proper support – and that includes people like you ceasing to defend the nuclear industry that is threatening to grab almost all the UK’s ‘low carbon’ energy funding –  we could be online to meet our carbon targets.

Cheerleading for new builds that take years to get off the ground, even if you do believe they are low carbon – in the face evidence that clearly suggests otherwise – could delay action on climate change that should be happening right now, but is being deliberately starved of funds.

What if those nuclear energy subsidies were instead promised to the solar, wind, tidal, anaerobic digestion and retrofitting industries? Wouldn’t that be a far better way to tackle climate change?

There’s nothing ‘natural’ about fission products!

But back to radioactive waste, which is a sticky issue. We have to deal with what we have, but most environmentalists and humanitarians agree that adding to that pile is madness. Why would someone with your credentials think otherwise?

You have risen to a position of great power. You stood in the Moses room as someone who is known for their actions in protecting the environment, and damned it by championing nuclear power and nuclear waste dumping and stressing that it was a nationally significant issue that extends beyond the lifetimes of the people living in the area.

You spoke about a pendulum of nuclear regulation and how radiation is ‘natural’. Background radiation is natural. Mining ores, processing, enriching etc, is most definitely not natural. Even less so are the myriad fission products emitted by nuclear power plants, concentrated in spent nuclear fuel, and discharged during fuel reprocessing – and comparing the two through insinuation is both wrong and immoral.

How is reducing regulation ever a good move for protecting public health and safety?

You may be thinking right now that I am part of a public that is somewhat hysterical about radiation and its effects. I have a PhD in cancer biology and have studied the response of cells to irradiation.

I’m not frightened of a bit of background radiation, but I do have grave concerns about burying highly radioactive nuclear waste underground where it has to stay isolated for hundreds of thousands of years, without any of it ending up in our water supplies.

The one thing we know for certain about deep hydrogeology is that we don’t know all that much about it. How can you guarantee the safety of our water supplies, and those of our children and their descendants? I suggest you read the ‘Rock Solid?‘ review produced by GeneWatch on behalf of Greenpeace on geological disposal if you have not done so already.

I also very concerned about climate change, and quite aside from the radioactive waste issue, I am opposed to nuclear new builds due to their carbon emission consequences.

I would urge you to rethink your position on nuclear new builds and geological disposal on both pragmatic and ethical grounds.

 

 

Note: Baroness (Bryony) Worthington, a Labour peer, spoke in the House of Lords debate on the Infrastructure Planning (Radioactive Waste Geological Disposal Facilities) Order 2015.

Dr Becky Martin earned her PhD at the Institute of Genetics, University of Nottingham and went on to work at the University of Oxford studying DNA repair gene expression in bladder cancer for three years. She is now a full time mother and environmental campaigner, and blogs here. Together with several other mothers she co-founded the group No Geo Nuke Dumping @NoNukeDumping. 

 

 




391182

Greening transport – we can do it, if we want to! Updated for 2026

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Lou Gerstner, when CEO of IBM, famously observed of behaviour in organisations that “you get what you inspect, not what you expect.”

So if we who travel are to expect greener ways of getting from home to work on public transport, for example, why inspect mainly cost and punctuality, as transport regulators and managers do?

A well-functioning transport system should of course run to time and not cost too much, but greener travel will require a lot more than that.

In 2010, 39% of the UK’s use of energy was attributable to travel and transport. Reducing this significantly is a necessary contribution to reducing the UK’s overall carbon emissions by 80% of the 1990 level by the year 2050, as mandated by the Climate Change Act of 2008.

It’s also entirely feasible – and urgent, because the Act is only a reflection of the harsh realities of climate change: even if we make this reduction in time, we stand barely a coin-flip chance of maintaining a reasonably equable global climate.

Where’s the political leadership to drive change?

Although there’s no strong political leadership (except in the Green Party) or policy framework aimed at reducing carbon emissions attributable to travel and transport, some useful changes in behaviour and policy are taking place.

For example the railways are being progressively electrified, people are choosing to switch to smaller, more economical cars, hybrid and electric vehicles are increasingly popular, and some cities are improving their cycling networks. And crucially, video Skypeing is making a lot of journeys unnecessary.

These changes are welcome, but more needs to be done on both national and local scales. And sadly our national and devolved governments are slow to act to make public transport work better, even on those matters where only they can make it happen.

Travel by public transport is significantly greener than simply hopping into the car (think of the pollution and congestion as well as the carbon footprint) – but how can we expect people to change their travel habits and leave the car at home if public transport regulators and managers don’t inspect the right things?

Whether we’re travelling in order to work, socialise or shop, all but the simplest journeys on public transport are multi-modal – that is, they involve several modes of transport. Perhaps we take a bus or cycle to the station, then take a train, and finish our journey by bus, taxi, tube or a short walk.

But then again, perhaps we can’t – because the bus and train timetables are out of kilter, services are unreliable, there’s a dangerous roundabout you don’t dare cycle across, the cost of that taxi ride at the end is prohibitive, and the bus you need to catch only runs on alternate Tuesdays, or the day’s last service leaves at 2.30pm.

In setting overall transport policy for the nation, how much thought is given to improving the cost, time and general convenience of switching between transport modes? Answer: distressingly little. And if regulators fail to inspect these matters, and require public transport operators to coordinate, for example, bus and train timetables, how can people be expected to change their established travel patterns and habits?

Joined up transport policy, joined up transport

Greens would address this by forcing operators to build a coherent and integrated national transport system in which multi-modal journeys are easy to plan, inexpensive to buy and convenient to take, and local authorities would ensure that cycling is safe and pleasant. This is the only way that people can be tempted to leave the car at home more often.

In some cases, this will require taking assets into public ownership. The railway system is a good example, because a joined-up railway system run for the common good (as opposed to private profit) is just common-sense. And though public ownership of the railways enjoys a high level of public support, only the Green Party is committed to this win-win policy.

Re-regulation is also a powerful policy instrument (which should be applied to buses outside as well as inside London), as are direct economic signals such as provided by congestion charging. This is something of a ‘stick’ to discourage city centre motoring – but there are plenty of ‘carrots’ to be had too, for example:

  • Greatly improved information about travel times, interchanges, fares and parking charges for planning a multi-modal journey, as well as real-time information while on a journey
  • Integrated timetabling, as found in Germany, where the departure times of bus, coach and local train services leaving a railway station are co-ordinated with the arrival times of longer-distance trains bringing passengers who want to change modes; and that will require …
  • … a higher priority for interchanges and transport hubs in infrastructure planning; which will require careful attention by town and city planners, and more investment. Busy interchanges like Clapham Junction and Crewe are far more useful to the travelling public than white-elephant ‘showcase’ schemes like HS2.
  • Integrated, contactless payment methods. The growth and development of the Oystercard system, now extended to suburban rail journeys in the London area, and the ability to pay by debit card for all journeys, bring convenience and lower fares to millions of travellers daily. Other conurbations with high travel density would benefit from similar, and ideally compatible, payment systems. As would the counties surrounding London.
  • Cycleways that are segregated from dangerous traffic, don’t come to a sudden halt just when you need them most, and follow travel ‘desire lines’. And no, repeat no, ‘Cyclists Dismount’ signs!


We can do it – but if only we elect politicans who want to

None of these elements of a greener transport system is difficult to bring about and all of them are measurable and inspectable. With the vision and political will, of course we can de-fragment our national travel and transport sector.

In the process we can attract more people onto public transport, improve the quality of the travelling experience, and reduce transport emissions. And curiously enough, by putting all this before the short term profits of public transport operators, we can actually grow the entire sector and so make it more profitable, not less.

If what I’ve said so far sounds on the right track to you, then take a look at the report I recently authored setting out a transport ‘greenprint’ for the greater Cambridge area to deal with the city’s very serious traffic and air-pollution woes.

All the proposals outlined above are contained in that document, showing that Greener travel can be achieved – lower carbon, less expensive, better used, more popular and providing a vastly improved service to travellers – provided we elect politicians committed to make it happen.

 


Rupert Read is transport spokesperson for the Green Party of England and Wales, and prospective Green candidate for Cambridge in the 2015 general election – a seat which registered the 3rd highest Green vote in the UK in 2010.

Web: rupertread.net

Twitter: www.twitter.com/GreenRupertRead

 




390279

Farmageddon – the true cost of cheap meat Updated for 2026

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Whatever happened that led a great part of humankind to give the animal kingdom such a lowly status in the overall evolutionary pattern of life on Earth?

How is it that we have subjected millions and millions of our animal cousins to concentration camp conditions so utterly abhorrent that to call their brief time on the planet ‘living’ would constitute a serious misnomer?

One of the critical factors that drove me to develop a mixed organic farming system back in the mid 1970’s, was to give the cows, pigs, sheep and hens that formed the basis of my farming enterprise, the chance to grow up in a setting designed to replicate as closely as possible the conditions that these creatures would experience in their native environment.

It is important to recognise that farming is an enclosed agricultural system which has built-in compromises deemed necessary for the controlled raising of both livestock and crops. Within this context we have to be aware that the word ‘natural’ does not accurately describe this scenario, even when the best and most humane principles and methods are applied.

However, those who embark upon an organic farming management practice commit to a set of standards that places strong emphasis on animal welfare as well as forming a close affinity with the soil and the cyclic patterns of nature that underlie rotational, non chemical farming practices.

Under such a system the farmer has the chance to develop a strong affinity with nature and a deep respect for the animals and plants under his or her care. But unfortunately, the great majority of people living in post industrial Westernised societies ingest a daily diet that has little or nothing to do with such a caring approach.

On the contrary, the majority of individuals negotiating their way through 21st century urban and suburban life styles demand cheap, uniform foods that, in order to fulfil the consumers’ supermarket groomed expectations, are grown according to methods that are about as different from ‘natural’ as plastic is to wood.

Enter the factory farm …

Philip Lymbery and Isobel Oakshot, in their book ‘Farmageddon – the True Cost Cheap Meat‘ have gone to great lengths to raise awareness of just how devious and deceptive is the globalised ‘cheap food’ conveyor belt that churns out the Western World’s daily diet.

Philip Lymbery is the director of Compassion in World Farming, a remarkable farmer pioneered organisation formed in 1967 which now has worldwide offices and an equally eclectic swelling membership.

I met Philip on a number of occasions during the 1990’s and recall his quietly profound concerns about the state of our toxic food chain with its heavy reliance upon animals given next to no chance to express their normal psychological needs and fundamental freedoms.

At that time Philip was somewhat sceptical of the Soil Association’s welfare standards for organically raised livestock which I and my colleagues were moulding and refining for publication, seeing any form of commercial farming as synonymous with animal exploitation.

I understood his reticence: too many organisations make unrealistic and sometimes downright untruthful claims for the production methods that they espouse. Who hasn’t seen those adverts depicting perfect looking farmsteads full of ‘happy hens’, smiling cows and contented pigs rooting around in ye oldie traditional farmyards – and then ends by displaying a mass produced product that bears no relationship whatsoever with such scenes.

The hell we inflict on the animals that feed us

During their specially planned world trip that makes up the body of evidence in this book, Philip Lymbery and Elizabeth Oakshot, political editor of The Sunday Times, come across scenes which would incriminate the perpetrators to a lifetime in gaol if the World possessed a justice system that dispensed genuine justice for man and beast alike.

On describing their visit to the hen houses of the UK’s largest egg supplier in Nottinghamshire, the authors state: “The egg farm was a series of giant sheds clad in corrugated iron. Inside were a million hens. Throughout their short seventy two week life span (chickens can live eight to ten years) they would never see daylight.

“They lived in cages around five metres long, known in the business as ‘colonies’. Suspended lights brightened and dimmed at particular times to create the impression of night and day, all geared to regulating the egg-laying process.”

Pigs, suffer a very similar fate to hens and a chapter in the book is devoted to laying bare the tortuous conditions suffered by the great majority of large scale pig farms which supply the main supermarket chains.

In the part of the voyage that takes them to the USA the authors report how, in California, thousands of dairy cows (8,000 in one herd is not unusual) are milked to death in vast purpose built mechanised sheds featuring robotic cow carousels and antibiotic laced genetically modified feeds dispensed by automatic conveyors.

The whole thing working around the clock in what is the ultimate ‘factory farm’ format. The unfortunate animals that must endure this hideous regime are milked-out after just two to three years and sold off into the ubiquitous hamburger trade.

There is an alternative!

By contrast, my organically managed Guernsey herd of forty cows lived an average of fourteen years, very rarely needing any form of vetinary intervention throughout their milking careers.

This is due to the fact that we never pushed our cows to produce maximum yields, always treating them with respect and love while feeding them a diet of home grown grasses and clovers plus other green matter that fulfils the natural needs of herbivorous ruminant quadrupeds.

The glorious unpasteurised milk and cream that resulted was eagerly purchased by the local community and I seldom needed to go further than ten miles to complete my sales round.

Farmageddon also plunges into the fish farming phenomena; another form of concentration camp where fish are kept in intense confinement with high rates of mortality and where sea lice proliferate leading to a catastrophic decline of wild fish stocks.

‘The illusion of cheap food’ is smashed to smithereens as the reader is taken behind the largely closed doors of a ruthless global multinational industry supplying the World’s largest supermarket chains and industrial food giants.

To the authors’ credit, they never sensationalise the shocking scenes they witness, preferring to simply convey the facts and expose the reality of a brazenly exploitive empire conveniently sanitized and dressed-up as a caring, quality controlled production system bringing you, the consumer, everything you could ever wish for and all in the air conditioned convenience of your local hypermarket food dispenser.

Fortunately, the reader is guided towards both personal and more general solutions, under such headings as “how to avoid the coming crisis” and “consumer power – what you can do”. They are both pragmatic and realistic guides for the perplexed – sensibly encouraging readers to buy ‘local’ from producers one comes to trust and respect. Not wasting food by over-buying and avoiding over-eating meat products.

Human health is recognised as being dependent upon soils, animals and plants being treated as vital living organisms whose optimum growth is achieved by using natural ingredients and through the adoption of a caring, loving attitude, that is the antithesis of the subhuman battle ground that epitomizes the twenty first century factory farm.

All in all, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants a grounded, undiluted account of the machinations of the global food industry and its devastating affect on the lives of millions of sentient beings, including ourselves.

 

 

The book: ‘Farmageddon – the True Cost Cheap Meat‘ is written by Philip Lymbery and Isobel Oakshot and published by Bloomsbury.

Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, broadcaster and activist. He is currently the President of the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside. His most recent book ‘In Defence of Life – A Radical Reworking of Green wisdom’ is published by Earth Books. Julian’s website is www.julianrose.info.

 

 




389904

We shall defend our island – if the cost-benefit analysis stacks up Updated for 2026

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England’s flood defenses aren’t getting nearly the funding they need to respond to climate change: particularly if you live in a poorer area.

Faced with the threat of invasion in 1940, Winston Churchill defiantly declared: “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be”.

Today, faced with the threat of climate change, our leaders are pathetically pusillanimous. “We shall defend our island”, they croak, “if the cost-benefit analysis stacks up.”

The crumbling state of our defences was recently laid bare by the National Audit Office (NAO), in a new report on the state of England’s flood preparedness.

“Current spending is insufficient”, it states, “to meet many of the maintenance needs the [Environment] Agency has identified” for its flood defence assets. “This will increase the danger of asset conditions degrading, so increasing flood risk.”

All this, the NAO warns, at a time when climate change is increasing flood risk. The result is that the Environment Agency will have to let maintenance of some flood defences ‘lapse’ – or put less euphemistically, ‘collapse’. The government’s auditors conclude, tersely, that “the achievement of value for money in the long term remains subject to significant uncertainty”.

Atrocious neglect

Their verdict is a damning indictment of government neglect. It comes after Ministers quietly admitted that flood defence repairs from last winter have fallen behind schedule; and after insurers wrote to the Chancellor demanding he plug the £500m shortfall in flood defence investment needed to keep pace with climate change.

Yet the case for climate action shouldn’t have to come down to such a cold, calculating totting up of ledgers. The moral case for protecting people from rising seas and worsening floods is overwhelming.

Climate change is not something that has been caused by the people most affected by it. This is most patently true globally, when the world’s poorest in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia are set to suffer the brunt of climate change. But it is also true of how climate change will hit the British Isles.

A recent analysis by Oxfam showed that the most deprived English neighbourhoods have been three times more vulnerable to flooding than the most well-off in the past quarter-century.

The low-lying east coast of England, for example, is especially vulnerable to rising sea levels and storm surges, as witnessed last December when the worst tidal surge in six decades struck settlements from Essex to the Humber.

It is also an economically deprived part of the country, a coastline dotted with declining seaside towns often forgotten about by Westminster: the flood-prone town of Jaywick near Clacton, for instance, is the poorest ward in the country.

These communities bear scant responsibility for the pollution driving climate change – but they are in the front line of its impacts.

Flood defence money follows the money, not the need

All this is lost in the cold budgetary calculations of Whitehall. The Treasury enforces a system of payments for flood defences that places weight on the economic value of the properties being protected. Richer, urban areas inevitably attract more cash; poorer and smaller settlements get less.

The Chancellor’s latest wheeze is to oblige local businesses to chip in to the cost of flood defences whilst he cuts the public sector contributions. Make businesses pay by all means, but this will only exacerbate the inequality of flood protection: poorer communities with fewer businesses will simply not get defences.

Tellingly, the only part of the country where there is a legal duty to build flood defences is – yes, you guessed it – central London. Protect the metropolis; the rest can swim.

Alarmingly, the communities whose flood defences have been left to crumble may not even know the risks they are being exposed to. The report by the NAO states that the Environment Agency “has not communicated to communities the local effect on future flood risk from the de-prioritisation of maintenance in some areas.”

If true, this is genuinely shocking. But it wouldn’t be a great surprise if the communities being quietly neglected were more deprived and far from London.

When last winter’s floods struck, David Cameron was generous in his rhetoric, declaring that “money was no object” in helping people recover from the disaster.

Such apparent largesse meant little, however, coming after years of cuts to the flood defence budget – cuts that have clearly affected the state of our country’s defences and left them in a more fragile state.

Needed now – a £500 million investment

The Coalition needs to invest £500m to keep pace with climate change; the cost of last winter’s floods has already run to at least £1bn. To take a cost-benefit approach, it would have been better to invest in maintenance earlier, rather than have to pay out much more to mop up the mess later.

Yet even if the numbers did not stack up so clearly, there would be an overwhelming moral case to protect the whole country from climate change.

The more fossil fuels we burn, the more it will flood; the more we neglect our defences and force households to fend for themselves, the more the poorest will suffer.

We must prevent climate change getting any worse, and we must protect society from its impacts – the whole of society – not just those parts of it the Treasury deem most economically useful.

 

 

Guy Shrubsole is climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth. Previously he worked for the Public Interest Research Centre and the Department of the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

This article was published by Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.

Creative Commons License

 

 




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Solar power is getting cheaper quicker than the IPCC thought Updated for 2026

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IPCC figures are already out of date when it comes to the price of solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation, according to analysis by the Fraunhofer Institute.

The numbers suggest that the IPCC’s capital expenditure figures for solar PV – provided in a minimum / maximum range to account for the variations from country to country – are actually higher than recent figures for key regions, including Germany, China and the US.

This matters because policymakers will compare the costs of reducing emissions using solar and other technologies in the coming negotiations to reach a global climate deal.

So why are the figures somewhat overstating the cost of solar? Usually when calculating and comparing the cost of energy generation options – which the IPCC do all the time – the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) is used.

This the overall cost of each unit of power, and accounts for all the costs involved in generating the power: capital expenditure, operating costs, maintenance etc.

The Fraunhofer Institute has also been calculating the cost of different energy generation technologies for a number of years – levelled out to account for startup costs and subsequent operation and maintenance.  

The most expensive bit – starting out – actually costs less now than the IPCC reports

It found the IPCC’s most recent levelised costs of electricity for solar may be based on much higher capital expenditure costs than is currently the case. Put simply, solar panels have got cheaper.

That means the ‘overnight capital expenditure’ of solar PV is significantly lower, both for small-scale, distributed models such as rooftop solar and for larger-scale solar infrastructure such as a solar thermal plant.

For example, you would only have to spend between $1,500-4,900 per kWp for rooftops installed with solar PV if you were using the Fraunhofer figures (on average), compared to the IPCC’s $2,200-5,300, which refer to the 2012 situation.

The figures fall even further when looking at utility-scale solar PV (think fields, with panels, and maybe sheep, or geese). The institute calculates that now, to start a solar plant the cost would be $1,300-3,300, rather than $1,700-4,300 as the IPCC had reported.

David de Jager, Managing Consultant at Ecofys and Operating Agent for the IEA-RETD agrees that the IPCC’s costs for solar are already outdated.

“Costs of solar photovoltaics have been declining so fast, that almost any publication will be outdated at the moment the ink has dried”, says de Jager who was involved with the IPCC report’s energy chapter as a Contributing Author. “The growing market will drive further cost reductions even further.”

Both minimum and maximum costs from the Fraunhofer ISE are lower than the most recent IPCC estimates from 2012, for both utility and rooftop capital expenditure.

Overall average cost levelled out across the life of the project is therefore also too high

If the capital expenditure figures are outdated, then the LCOE figure will also be calculated on an inaccurate basis, particularly because the capital expenditure for renewables is higher than fossil fuels like gas.

Economically it follows too that the cheaper installation gets, the cheaper the cost of solar gets overall, because of the much lower (and steady) operation and maintenance costs.

If the capital expenditure is higher than it should be, the levelised cost in solar-producing countries will also be higher.

The Fraunhofer institute have calculated the average cost of generating power from solar panels in a range of countries using the latest data. The ‘median’ cost of solar from the IPCC report is at the higher end of their LCOE values.

The IPCC looked at literature reflecting a wide range of PV-applications and regions. If you look at the key markets today, the study shows that PV costs are already at or below the low end of the range presented by IPCC.

Money for solar is cheaper too

Borrowing costs may also have been overstated by the IPCC, says Fraunhofer.

The IPCC uses a uniform 10% weighted average cost of capital so as to be able to compare costs across different energy generation methods which has a large impact on renewables because of their large up front capital costs.

Because the costs of borrowing capital in many parts of the world is cheap at the moment due to low interest rates – and certainly in places like Germany and the UK  – this number may also therefore inflate the cost of installing solar.

In fact, loan finance for solar installations is readily available at 5% or less – half the assumed interest rate.

However it’s impossible to verify the PV cost figures actually used in the most recent IPCC report, published last weekend, as no actual figures are quoted. Rather, assumed costs are opaquely woven into ‘scenario’ models.

 

 

Helle Abelvik-Lawson blogs for Greenpeace UK. Her background is as an academic in energy and human rights, and she now reports on global energy issues.

This article was originally published by Greenpeace.

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/newsdesk/energy/analysis/how-solar-power-getting-cheaper-quicker-ipcc-thought

 




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Hinkley C gets the go-ahead – but will it prove a dodgy nuclear deal too far? Updated for 2026

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The European Commission has just voted today to allow the UK to subsidise two new EDF nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point C to the tune of £20 billion.

This sets an important precedent, and will have consequences not just in UK but also throughout the EU. If the UK can throw billions at subsidising nuclear, then countries throughout the EU could do the same.

Given there’s only so much money to go round, if nuclear power is allowed to grab a huge share of the European energy finance pot, that will seriously diminish the funds available to develop the renewable energy revolution.

At least we now know that this is indeed a subsidy paid for by public money. The UK Government had contrived a position, by which they argued that the support for Hinkley C would not be a subsidy if it was also available to other low carbon technologies, including of course renewables.

But the subsidies the UK is determined to dole out with such largesse to EDF are not available to renewable energy. In particular renewable energy support contracts typically last for 15 or 20 years – compared to the 35-year contract on offer to EDF.

UK’s billions will compensate EDF, no matter what

This is compounded by a new agreement between Ed Davey, the Secretary of State, and EDF which now allow direct compensation from DECC to EDF if the project runs over-cost or if future UK governments or environmental conditions derail the project.

EDF is building two reactors in Finland and France, and they are both hugely over-cost and over-time. EDF’s Flamanville reactor in France was due to be completed by 2012 at a cost of €3.3 billion, but is now projected for completion in 2016 at a cost of €8.5 billion.

Finland’s Olkiluoto-3 reactor, the first EPR construction project, is likely to be a decade behind schedule upon delivery, with a projected completion date of 2018. Construction of the 1.6GW plant began in 2005 and was originally due for completion in 2009. Cost figures are similar to those for Flamanville.

There is no reason to believe that Hinkley C, with its two 1.6GW reactors, will perform any better. This puts the UK tax payer as well as the energy consumer on the hook for the enormous costs of Hinkley Point, already the most expensive nuclear power station in the world on official estimates.

A rushed decision under pressure – strengthens case for legal challen​ge

Earlier this year, The Commission published a landmark report which detailed at great length a substantive set of concerns with the deal.

Originally, the Commission said that UK State Aid for nuclear would distort the EU and UK energy markets, precisely because it shields nuclear from financial risks that other energy operators are subject to.

The Commission also doubted that the level of profit for the UK deal was a reasonable rate of return taking into account the level of risk involved.

Furthermore, it said, UK subsidies would provide the certainty of a stable revenue stream under lenient conditions by eliminating market risks from the commercial activity of nuclear electricity generation for the amazingly long 35-year contract period.

As the Commission said in it’s original report: “Nuclear energy generation has the capacity to crowd out alternative investments in technologies or combinations of technologies, including renewable energy sources, which are likely to emerge in the absence of specific UK State Aid subsidies for new nuclear.”

Now the Commission has performed a 180 degree volte face. But it’s not because the facts of the case have changed. It’s the result of enormous political and industry pressure.

Why now – at the tail end of a Commission that’s run out of steam?

The timing of the decision also warrants attention, coming as it does right at the tail end of Barroso’s increasingly discredited Commission. The outgoing administration simply rushed it through at the last moment. And it only got its way by a narrow margin, with the support of just 16 Commissioners out of 28.

Among those raising concerns ahead of today’s meeting were Connie Hedegaard, Climate Commissioner, and Environment Commission Janez Potocnik. Regional Policy Commissioner Johannes Hahn, from Austria, expressed outright opposition.

The decision deprives the new Commission the opportunity to review and reflect on a decision which will set a significant precedent for pan-EU energy and competition policy. That this decision has been taken in undue haste only strengthens the grounds for, and likely success of, a legal challenge, and one is current,y being prepared by Austria.

Also, the EC decision document refers to a significant body of new evidence from the UK and EDF, yet there is no access to this information – which means that it is impossible to check its veracity, or challenge the arguments made.

Since it is this evidence that has – so we are told – persuaded the Commission to change its mind, it should be made public to make sure it can be properly scrutinised and validated.

We do know that the ‘strike price’ of £92.50 per megawatt hour, guaranteed and inflation-proofed for for 35 years remains in place. But Commission Vice-President Joaquin Almunia assures us that the revised deal includes ‘profit-sharing’ provisions that will limit the gains to EDF and return them to tax payers:

“After the Commission’s intervention, the UK measures in favour of Hinkley Point nuclear power station have been significantly modified, limiting any distortions of competition in the single market.

“These modifications will also achieve significant savings for UK taxpayers. On this basis and after a thorough investigation, the Commission can now conclude that the support is compatible with EU state aid rules.”

But until the whole deal is published, we simply cannot tell if this represents a great victory for the British public – or a dodgy under-the-table political fix.

Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for Southwest England, clearly believes the latter: “It is a scandal that one of the final acts of the Barroso Commission is to turn a blind eye to the illegality of the Hinkley deal as some kind of quid pro quo for Germany’s renewable energy support scheme.”

Why is this a European issue?

Distorting nuclear subsidies in the UK will have a big impact across the whole EU electricity market. Increased renewable energy ‘pooling’ between countries will mean much more European-wide balancing to match supply and demand on a continental scale.

For example, solar power in Germany and southern Europe, hydro electric power in Norway and Sweden, and wind in the west may all produce local surpluses that can be transmitted afar to reduce fossil fuel burning on the far side of Europe.

But with very big nuclear subsidies, the market for renewable technologies will be reduced. And the inflexible output of nuclear power stations will increase the difficulty of establishing new renewable generation capacity, and pooling its output, across the whole EU – not just in the UK.

If the precedent is accepted for nuclear specific subsidies in the UK, then other countries are likely to follow the UK’s lead – beginning with Poland and the Czech Republic.

We will challenge this disgraceful decision

A number high-level energy sector people and I are working with a large set of pan-EU and pan-UK energy associations, corporations and small companies who will be significantly – and negatively – affected by this decision.

We are convinced that this state aid will distort the UK and pan-EU energy market, and that, in any case, subsidies should not be provided to a mature technology like nuclear power – a point argued by the Commission argued in its original report.

We now intend to join Austria and press a legal challenge through the EU Court of Justice. In consultation with our legal team we have identified key criteria that will allow us to challenge the legality of this decision.

We argue that the decision by the European Commission to allow a support mechanism for new nuclear installations from public funds and guarantees will directly impact investment plans and business strategies in the UK and across Europe.

Those adversely affected include renewable energy generators, installers, equipment manufacturers, other efficient technology providers, fitters of insulation and other energy saving equipment, and investors in decentralized renewable energy projects.

Do we feel lucky today?

But at root, the argument is all about what we want – a plutonium economy, or a renewable one? In the UK and across Europe, public opinion is firmly on the side of renewables, and against nuclear power – all the more so following the triple nuclear reactor meltdown at Fukushima, Japan.

Maybe the question we need to ask ourselves is, ‘do we feel lucky?’ Because if we opt for a nuclear future, we had better be feeling very lucky, indeed.

 

 

Dr Paul Dorfman is a Senior Researcher at the Energy Institute UCL, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust Nuclear Policy Research Fellow; Founder of the Nuclear Consulting Group, Member, European Nuclear Energy Forum Transparency and Risk Working Groups, served as Secretary to the UK government scientific advisory Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters.

Paul is also ‘Expert’ to the European Economic and Social Committee Opinion: ‘European Energy Dialogue: Towards a European Energy Community’, and led the European Environment Agency response to Fukushima in ‘Late Lessons from Early Warnings’ Vol 2.

Subscribe to Daily Nuclear News.

 

 




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