Red Pepper » Climate

A dirty black hole

admin — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 18:50:57 +0000

Opencast mining at Ffos-y-Fran, near Merthyr Tydfil. Photo: Chris Austin
In October 2007, George Monbiot looked at a green hilltop in Merthyr Tydfil where a massive new opencast coal mine was planned and warned of ‘the new coal age’. ‘One thought kept clanging through my head,’ he wrote. ‘If this is allowed to happen, we might as well give up now.’
Covering 367 hectares, Ffos-y-fran was to be a huge mine, involving the excavation of 11 million tonnes of coal by 2025 and so responsible for at least 25 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Monbiot’s article was one spur for a campaign of direct action against the project, in which climate justice activists joined residents opposing the impact on the local environment. The campaign reached its peak in 2009 with a week-long climate action camp of around 500 people in Merthyr Tydfil.
Four years later, mining at Ffos-y-fran is in full swing. It is is just one of a number of new generation opencast coal mines planned for Wales. Over the formerly green hilltop from Ffos-y-fran, near the small town of Rhymney, the same Miller Argent consortium proposes another mine – in effect a further huge extension to the existing one, as residents see it. If Nant Llesg receives planning permission, it will mine up to nine million tonnes of coal, emitting more than 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide when burned.
Meeting demand
Developers such as Miller Argent claim they are merely meeting demand – and, in the case of Ffos-y-fran, reclaiming large areas of derelict land from earlier mining activity ‘at no cost to the public purse’. According to the International Energy Agency, some 41 per cent of world electricity generation is fuelled by coal. In the UK we still depend on coal for 30 per cent our of electricity production, rising to more than 40 per cent in winter periods of peak demand. In 2011, we burned 41.8 million tonnes of coal in power stations.
Driven by the domestic boom in shale gas production, US exports of cheap coal to Europe increased 23 per cent to more than 60 million tonnes in 2012. That same year, the percentage of UK electricity generated from coal rose to its highest since 1995. Meanwhile, the 2008 Climate Change Act binds the UK to at least an 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions against a 1990 baseline by 2050, and 34 per cent by 2020.
In this context, coal is the worst-choice fuel, emitting around 910 grammes of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, per kilowatt hour of electricity generated compared to some 500 grammes for gas and zero for renewable sources such as wind. So, while the US burns cleaner gas, imports of its unwanted, dirty coal serve to impede the development of renewables in the UK. In the valleys of South Wales the UK government’s rhetorical commitment to mitigating climate change meets our greed for cheap energy head on, and the first casualty is the local community.
Exploitation and jobs
Historically, the area around Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney was noted for its natural resources of iron ore, coal, limestone and water. During the industrial revolution this provided ideal conditions for the development of ironworks and associated industry, which contributed enormously to British economic and naval power, with much of the iron being used to build merchant vessels and warships. But most of the vast industrial wealth generated left the area along with the iron and the ironmasters. The people of the area did not benefit in proportion to the labour they provided, while their landscape was scarred and the local environment blighted.
Today, with higher unemployment, lower than average life expectancy and a greater incidence of illnesses, which limit people’s ability to live a full life and to work, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney are among the most deprived communities in Wales. Contrary to any romantic notion, coal remains part of the fabric of everyday life and culture not in song or poetry but as extensive spoil tips and the pneumoconiosis and emphysema suffered by ex-miners. If it continues as proposed, the current round of opencast coal mining will compound this situation.
In the current economic context, the issue of jobs tends to dominate the debate over existing and proposed coal mines. Opencast mining companies highlight job creation, while campaign groups argue that these jobs will be few, highly specialised and thus not open to local people. Established local businesses claim they will be forced to shed jobs as their marketing depends on the clean air, water and green landscapes of Wales. These days, these traditional mining areas strive to offer themselves as tourist attractions, boasting dramatic mountain scenery. No matter how the developers try to present it, opencast coal mining means dust, noise and a dirty black hole in the ground.
Global markets
Any jobs created are also highly vulnerable in the face of unregulated global markets. The current resurgence of opencast mining was spurred by rises in the price of imported coal in 2007 and 2008, before the market was inundated by cheap imports from the US. Despite the high cost of transportation, low prices favour the continued import of coal rather than investment in new opencast mines in the UK.
In April, Scottish Coal announced the closure of its six opencast mines in Scotland with the loss of 600 jobs. If a similar collapse affects companies in Wales, it will be a very mixed blessing. While communities will be spared the dust, noise and visual impacts of opencast mining, the jobs lost will have a significant effect on local economies. And the social and environmental injustices that Wales is spared will simply be exported to communities in places such as Indonesia, Australia, Russia, the US and Colombia.
In Colombia, for instance, the Cerrejón opencast mine, Latin America’s largest, has progressively swallowed whole villages previously occupied by indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities since it was opened in 1976. Further destruction and environmental damage is threatened by a planned major extension of the mine, which is being fought by the local community.
Moreover, whether the UK continues to burn imported or domestic coal makes no difference to the scale of emissions of carbon dioxide. With mounting opposition to wind farm development and an uncertain future for nuclear power, the UK looks set to remain dependent on fossil fuels and thus miss its commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Community groups in Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney may wish the government to make the change to zero-carbon energy sooner rather than later. But instead they are faced with the prospect of their local employment and economies becoming increasingly dependent on the dirtiest and most damaging of fossil fuels.
Alternative vision
Despite George Monbiot’s grim admonishment and the dire circumstances in which they find themselves, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney residents have not given up. By forming the United Valleys Action Group (UVAG) and alliances with others, their struggle against Ffos-y-fran continues. UVAG has pledged to oppose Nant Llesg by all means at its disposal. In the meantime, local campaigners have successfully opposed plans for a ‘monster’ waste incinerator, joining with Friends of the Earth Cymru in researching an alternative vision whereby 3,000 jobs would be created through improvements in recycling and waste management, home energy efficiency and small-scale renewable energy development.
Coal is the extreme energy we are already dependent upon and that situation must change. What UVAG needs now is allies prepared to oppose coal mining and the exploitation of mining communities across the globe at every level: For a just future, we all need to say a resounding ‘No’ to old king coal and ‘Yes’ to energy conservation, public, co-operative and community-owned renewable energy developments, and green jobs.

Fracking is just the beginning: the rise of extreme energy

admin — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 19:46:04 +0000

A few years ago, in the run up to the climate negotiations at Copenhagen, the fossil fuel industry seemed on the defensive, with pressure to cut carbon emissions mounting. With energy prices rising and doubts being raised about the industry’s ability to increase oil production, it seemed like a dinosaur struggling to survive. Today that same industry is on the offensive and, far from facing constraints, is actively driving a massive expansion of fossil fuel extraction into new areas of the globe.
There is no better barometer for this sea change than ExxonMobil, the largest privately-owned oil company in the world. In 2008 Exxon was aggressively funding climate change denial and intensively lobbying against potential constraints on its business. Fast forward to last summer, in the wake of the farcical Rio+20 conference, when Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson was giving a talk to the Council on Foreign Relations, in which he not only acknowledged climate change but embraced it as an ‘engineering problem’ and a business opportunity.
With oil prices still sky high and the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration surpassing 400 parts per million for the first time in human history this year, the facts on the ground remain grim. What has altered radically is the level of spin deployed to counter this reality, as even the pretence of action has all but evaporated. Now the focus is on the appearance of plans for action, principally through the promise of techno-fixes, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) or geo-engineering, in the far future.
Behind all this smoke and mirrors, there is a real world not amenable to such trickery. On one side increasingly extreme weather hints at what climate change has to offer, while on the other rising energy costs mark the ongoing depletion of fossil fuels.
But fossil fuels are not like a petrol tank of a fixed size, which we are burning up and will eventually simply run out. Tar sands, Arctic drilling and fracking demonstrate that as easy-to-extract resources are depleted there is always some more difficult-to-extract resource to take their place, if you are desperate enough. These harder-to-extract fossil fuels come with additional costs beyond their carbon emissions, however.
Extraction effort is almost always strongly correlated with environment destruction. This is well understood for the devastation wreaked, for example, on the boreal forests of Alberta by tar sands extraction, but is true of most energy extraction. Whether it is the shift to opencast mining as coal has become less readily available, or the push out into deeper water for oil, the result has been mounting pressure on the environment. Ever larger areas of the globe must be trashed for continuously diminishing returns.
The social impacts of these more extreme methods are equally troubling. More effort going into energy extraction means more labour and resources consumed. In the past decade the size of the energy sector has more than doubled, from under five per cent to more than 10 per cent of the world economy. Complex market and political mechanisms have obscured the truth behind the headlines: as the energy sector grows the rest of the economy must be squeezed, and those with the least political power are the first to suffer.
Shift to the extreme
The shift towards ever more extreme methods, as easier-to-get resources are exhausted, merits careful consideration. Where will it end? When the energy used in extraction exceeds that produced, at what point do you no longer have an energy source? In reality, severe problems arise long before that point is reached. Imagine a world in which the main energy source requires half the energy produced to run the extraction process. Not only will half of the whole economy be devoted to energy extraction but the level of environmental destruction will be terrifying.
The UK is fairly typical in that, at present, the major new threat is unconventional gas and oil (colloquially known as fracking): shale gas, tight (shale) oil, coal bed methane (CBM) and underground coal gasification (UCG). These methods are highly synergistic, requiring the same large fleets of advanced drilling rigs to be constructed. The common features include dense drilling of horizontal wells, some sort of intense stimulation (hydraulic fracturing or dewatering) and relatively small quantities of energy produced from each well, for only short periods of time.
Underground coal gasification, the most extreme method we face at present, involves setting fire to coal seams underground and bringing the toxic cocktail produced to the surface. The UK is ground zero with 21 UCG licences already sold, just off the coast, including next to major cities such as Swansea, Liverpool and Edinburgh. Unprecedentedly, the newest licence for sale is onshore, in the middle of the Warwickshire countryside, near Leamington Spa. One company, Five-Quarter Energy, plans to start drilling on the coast of Northumberland this summer.

The scale of all this is rarely appreciated. The most fundamental property of unconventional gas (and oil) is its distributed nature. Any one well will produce little gas and only for a short time. It requires thousands of wells to be constantly drilled, coating the landscape in well pads, to produce even moderate amounts of energy. The largest onshore conventional gas field in the UK was Saltfleetby in Lincolnshire, which had eight wells, but to produce the same amount of unconventional gas hundreds of wells would be needed.
Major impacts of fracking include leaking methane, toxic and radioactive water pollution and waste, severe air pollution, wholesale industrialisation of the countryside and accelerating climate change. However, the public discourse in the UK has largely revolved around one non-issue: whether fracking-induced earthquakes could cause surface damage. In the US the straw man is whether there is a provable link between water contamination and the specific step of hydraulic fracturing, regardless of the strong link to shale gas extraction as a whole.
This spin has effectively diverted attention from the massive issue of the cumulative impact on our society and environment. Even the academic system must be corrupted to serve the industry, with pro-fracking academic studies being published that have turned out to be covertly funded by the industry itself.
The fight heats up
Meanwhile, the fight against extreme energy is heating up. The rural village of Balcombe is next in the firing line, as Cuadrilla Resources looks to extend its reach from shale gas in Lancashire to include shale oil in Sussex. Threatened communities are getting organised to resist, following the lead of communities in Australia, which have had considerable success in halting the industry’s advance. While the forces arrayed against them are formidable, these efforts embody Dr James Hansen’s recent call to leave unconventionals in the ground.
While the impacts in rich countries may seem bad, they pale in comparison to what people in the global South face, who cannot afford to drink bottled water and are less insulated from the environmental consequences. The recent announcement that Essar Oil has obtained permission to drill 650 CBM wells in West Bengal, to the north of Kolkata, is just the tip of a looming iceberg. The area has close to the highest population density in India, similar to nearby Bangladesh, and is already highly water stressed.
Exxon’s CEO was recently quoted as saying, ‘What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?’, as if the future of humanity could be separated from the ecosystems on which we depend. In this looking-glass world, Exxon is the people’s saviour, finding us creative new ways to maintain unsustainable levels of energy consumption. In the real world, it is becoming increasingly clear that the future of humanity and the planet depends on keeping fossil fuels in the ground – which will require a complete transformation of the economic and social systems that are driving extreme energy extraction.
More on the UK’s extreme energy action network, Frack Off, at www.frack-off.org.uk

Balcombe: How Osborne’s fracking plans are re-energising the environmental movement

admin — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 11:57:17 +0000

Protesters target Cuadrilla HQ – see report below. Photos: Mark Luscombe

When George Osborne recently unveiled the world’s most generous tax breaks for shale gas extraction, in a desperate effort to kick-start the shale industry here, he might have inadvertently sowed the seed for the largest environmental movement the UK has seen in decades.

He will have watched last week’s events in Balcombe with concern. Local people, anti-fracking groups and environmentalists joined together to protest against shale gas company Cuadrilla’s plan to drill a test well in a picturesque Sussex village.

The birth of a movement

The UK anti-fracking movement effectively launched on 6 August 2011, when the coalition Frack Off unveiled a banner from Blackpool Tower protesting the UK’s first test drillings for shale gas in the town. Several other groups have followed, often local in nature, facilitated with the support of Frack Off and other experienced mobilisers.

The movement draws together a wide range of people, from environmentalists to advocates of the green economy and the large core of local people concerned about water contamination, localised earthquakes, chemical use, pressure on local infrastructure and the impact of local industrial activity on rural villages. It has also been reported that people are struggling to sell their houses in areas near suggested drill sites.

The current protest could have considerable political implications for the Conservatives. Balcombe is in a deeply Conservative constituency, with some locals having voted Tory their whole lives, and these people are now threatening to switch their vote unless the party changes its stance on fracking. They are also calling for more renewable energy.

In an editorial published on Monday, the Telegraph newspaper stated that the protesters in Balcombe ‘would happily return the economy to pre-industrial times’. They should read their own environmental correspondent Louise Gray’s report on Balcombe, in which she writes: ‘Sarah Hirst, 37, a teacher, left with her young children as soon as the protest started. She said she was scared to take part in protests before but felt so strongly she brought along three young children under seven. She said local people would be showing their anger at the Tories at the next general election. “At the last election I voted Tory but I have gone Green because of this.” Mrs Hirst said a wind farm comes down after 25 years, but a faulty well could leak decades afterwards without anyone knowing. “I would happily have a wind farm and happily support it – a lot of people involved would. It is not a blight on the countryside, it is renewable energy in the long term,” she said.’

A controversial industry

The shale gas debate is only just starting in the UK. Judging by the current protests, the industry’s hopes that they could conduct exploratory drilling away from the public eye have been dashed. Instead, communities across the UK worried about fracking are looking at Balcombe in admiration and mobilising anti-fracking movements, ready to strike when Cuadrilla or other shale gas companies move into their communities.

Meanwhile, elsewhere the shale gas industry is facing scrutiny. In Poland, which holds the largest shale gas reserves in Europe, investors are fleeing despite the government welcoming shale gas. US filmmaker Josh Fox’s Gasland Part 2 has just been released – his first film, Gasland, kick-started the anti-fracking movement five years ago, and the follow-up will unveil more revelations about the dirty business of the shale gas industry.

The largest environmental mobilisation for decades is now underway in the UK, due in part to the urgency of climate change but mainly driven by the threat of fracking. It is being directly fuelled by George Osborne and his allies, in opening the door to a fantasy gas future that is far from a safe bet. While George Osborne promises tax breaks for shale gas consumers, energy prices are set to soar once again as we enter the autumn and winter. We should ask ourselves if shale really is necessary to keep our lights on, or whether this is another move to make powerful corporations more money whilst the real cost to the consumers and the environment rises.

Protest targets fracking HQ

Dom O’Dwyer reports

Protesters yesterday stormed the HQ of fracking firm Cuadrilla in Lichfield, near Birmingham, in solidarity with the Balcombe blockade in Sussex.

A man in a suit, calling himself ‘Mr Fracktastic’, was accompanied by another man in a high-vis carrying a fracking rig, which appeared to be made of cardboard. The unsightly duo were chased down the streets of a picturesque city, known by the locals as LichVegas, by an articulate and well-dressed mob armed with well-researched facts and catchy chants. Mr Fracktastic shouted incoherently through a megaphone: ‘It’s going to be fracking fantastic, we’ll produce billions of litres of chemically enriched delicious water for you all to drink.’

The group responded by chanting: ‘No Dash For Gas! Reclaim the Power!’ and handed out leaflets to bemused onlookers. They explained how fracking has become the frontline of the government’s Dash for Gas, its plan to build up to 40 new gas-fired power stations as our existing power stations come to the end of their life. They’ll be pumped full of fracked gas fresh from our devastated countryside, leaving a trail of broken communities behind.

The rag tag bunch finally arrived at Cuadrilla HQ only to find that the doors of the office were locked and de-logo’d, guarded by police and surrounded by a (modest) media frenzy. It was a small victory in a battle that is set to continue in the coming weeks, with the ongoing blockade at Balcombe and the Reclaim the Power camp.

Toxic gas: why we need to stop fracking

admin — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 12:00:13 +0000

Activists take on fracking by turning the Tory club in George Osborne’s constituency into ‘Frack & Go’ HQ. Photo: Steve Morgan
To listen to its advocates, there’s little shale gas won’t do: bring down energy prices, cut carbon emissions, support renewables and bring us out of recession. The ‘climate-sceptic’ Global Warming Policy Foundation even claimed that ‘because of shale gas, wealth and health will be distributed more equitably over the planet’. Add to this newspaper stories with misunderstood numbers saying that we have enough shale gas to heat UK homes for 1,500 years and you can see why some people are getting excited.
In the UK, the initial activity has been in Lancashire, where test drilling in 2011 caused earthquakes that led to a de facto moratorium on further fracking. Energy secretary Ed Davey lifted this ban in December 2012 and interest is now on the rise again. Many areas are already covered by licences giving companies the first option on oil and gas exploration. A few companies have got planning permission for test drilling. Among the areas being eyed up in this current round are Lancashire, Sussex, Kent, South Wales and the East Midlands. And the government is planning more licensing, potentially opening up more areas for drilling.
Do the claims made for shale gas stand up to scrutiny? Green groups and local community organisations think not.
We believe that large-scale shale gas extraction is unnecessary and unwanted.
Environmental experiment
Fracking is rightly a controversial technology. In conventional gas production, the gas flows freely up a well. Shale gas is held within shale rocks thousands of feet underground, which have to be fractured (or ‘fracked’) to allow the gas to flow. This is done by pumping millions of gallons of water – mixed with potentially toxic chemicals to help the gas flow more freely – down the well at extremely high pressure. Only maybe half of this water comes back to the surface – the rest remains underground.
It’s an experiment with the local environment. The European Commission has said the cumulative impacts of fracking at several sites pose high risks of problems for water resources, water contamination and air pollution. There is clear evidence of problems in the US: water supplies contaminated by fracking chemicals and by the gas itself, increased air pollution, communities blighted by traffic.
Nor will shale gas help to tackle climate change. The industry says the UK should go for shale gas as a ‘companion fuel’ for renewables as it’s a ‘clean’ fossil fuel. But tackling climate change means getting off the fossil fuel hook as quickly as possible and exploiting the UK’s abundant potential for renewables – wind, wave and solar. Shale gas will be a dangerous distraction and could hit investment in real low-carbon solutions.
Globally, exploiting shale gas reserves could be disastrous. The International Energy Agency’s so-called ‘golden age of gas’ scenario, with use of unconventional gas such as shale tripling by 2035, would set us on course for a global temperature rise of 3.5 degrees Celsius – well above the threshold for triggering catastrophic climate change. The IEA did admit that a golden age of gas might not be a golden age for humanity.
US expansion
Bills are the public’s top current concern about energy. George Osborne points to the US where natural gas prices fell as a result of fracking and says he doesn’t want the UK to be left behind. Would shale gas deliver lower gas prices in the UK? At best it seems unlikely. Operating costs in Europe could be 30-50 per cent higher than in the US as a result of factors such as higher population density. And claims of cheaper gas prices ignore fast rising global demand for gas, particularly from China and India.
The US shale gas industry is looking to expand internationally, with Europe a key focus. But it is meeting strong resistance. France and Bulgaria have banned the technology, following grassroots protests. And many other countries are concerned about the environmental impacts and want to know more before making any firm decisions.
Despite his welcome commitment to action on climate change, President Obama’s state of the union address reaffirmed his support for shale gas as a way of promoting US energy independence. And the planned free trade agreement between the US and the EU is a real concern, with the EU possibly having to accept US environmental standards on issues such as GMOs and fracking. This is particularly worrying as fracking is excluded from some key US federal environmental regulations, thanks to ex-vice president Dick Cheney – a former CEO of Halliburton, one of the leading fracking companies.
Fracking could be an electoral liability for the government in key constituencies. Seven of Labour’s target Tory seats are in Lancashire, and fracking in the south east could cause uproar in the Tory heartlands. Not that Labour can claim a clearly better policy. It supports tougher environmental regulation, but concerns about climate change don’t seem to feature highly with regard to shale gas.
The message from green groups is simple: we should leave the shale gas in the ground. It’s a gamble we don’t need to take in the UK. The priority is to get our broader energy policy right, and the government’s energy bill offers the chance to do this. We must make sure there is a clear commitment to cut carbon almost entirely from our electricity system by 2030. That won’t just help stop fracking – it will also set us on the right path to tackle climate change, and reap the economic and social benefits of a green energy revolution.
Tony Bosworth is an energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth and Helen Rimmer is Friends of the Earth’s North West campaigner. For more information, see www.foe.co.uk/fracking

The view from the ground

by Eve McNamara, Ribble Estuary Against Fracking
The first I knew about it was when a rig appeared in a field near where I live in Banks, a small village in West Lancashire. I made inquiries and soon found out that the rig was for shale gas exploration – and a company, Cuadrilla, had permission to frack. No one I spoke to in our community knew about it – there had been no community consent.
We called a public meeting and 40 people turned up – Ribble Estuary Against Fracking was born. We started as a small group and our purpose has been to give people more information about the risks to our environment and community. Our area has a thriving market gardening industry – salad crops and root vegetables provide not only local markets but many of the UK’s supermarkets. The beautiful Ribble estuary, an internationally important site for wildlife, is on our doorstep. We’re worried that fracking could devastate our agricultural economy and our environment.
Since we started, our group has grown and several new anti-fracking groups have formed across the county – we’re networking and supporting each other. Now politicians and the local council are listening to us. Together we’ve got hundreds of objections to planning applications from concerned residents and Cuadrilla’s plans have been delayed. We’re also countering the spin from the shale gas industry that they’re going to create thousands of jobs and boost our economy. They’re even taking their PR into our local schools. We know their claims are exaggerated and the real future for our economy and energy security is in renewables.
We often get accused of being Nimbys. We don’t want fracking in our community – but we don’t want it anywhere else either. And we’re not against development. Our county needs jobs and investment – but shale gas in not the answer.
What happens in Lancashire this year is crucial for the development of the shale gas industry across the UK. We’ll be keeping up the fight against Cuadrilla and the shale gas lobby. Our region has the potential to be a leader in green energy with huge offshore wind and tidal resources and a strong manufacturing heritage. Instead of risky shale gas we want investment in a green future.

Confronting the climate crisis: interview

admin — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:34:16 +0000

Kara: What’s the thinking behind the Confronting the Climate Crisis conference and what does it aim to achieve?

Graham: The conference aims to put the climate crisis at the centre of the debate about how to deal with the economic crisis. We need to find alternatives to the government’s austerity programme designed to deliver jobs and move us in the direction of a low carbon economy. We want to provide a forum for trade unionists, climate scientists, politicians and environmental activists. By working together in a broad alliance we can help to build a network with people looking for solutions that don’t trash the planet. I hope the conference will contribute to the efforts being made to make this a core organising issue for the trade union movement.
Kara: There have been a number of initiatives to bring trade unions and environmental activists together over the past few years. Why is this event happening now, and why is it important to bring climate scientists on board this time?
Graham: The UK coalition government is not delivering on its promise to be the ‘greenest government ever’. That will be no surprise to many people, but even their very limited ambitions are being sidelined. At the same time we have a worsening international picture with successive summits failing to deliver. To compound these problems we seem to have fewer people getting involved in challenging this crisis in national and international decision-making. The conference comes at a time when we need a clear assessment of these challenges and the measures needed to tackle them.
Scientists provide us with the research needed to back up our case for a million climate jobs. Scientists also need support against the ongoing attacks from the neoliberals who are pushing even harder to abandon the legal commitments that have been made. It’s important to work with the scientific community on ways to engage with the public to increase awareness. Plus some of them are union members so we have a responsibility to ensure their voice is heard.
Kara: In this ongoing collaboration between unions and environment activists, how have things moved on? What successes have been seen, and where does more work need to be done?
Graham: There is more recognition that environmental action is only one part of sustainable development. The focus is increasingly around issues of social justice and well-being. When we talk of sustainable development we need to address system change. The failure to reduce carbon emissions underlines the weakness of a market-led approach. Science is not neutral. We are talking about the potential for significant planetary change and how that information is interpreted socially and politically. Scientists, like climate campaigners, will have different views about the solutions needed. We must not let these differences prevent us from developing coalitions to mobilise public support. Initiatives like the Energy Bill Revolution campaign show the potential for this.
Kara: What role can trade unions play in the fight against climate change?
Graham: Unions need to recognise that this is central to the fight for jobs and conditions of employment. That is easier said than done. The understandable focus on dealing with the fallout from the recession has often reduced what limited capacity was in place. We need to redouble our efforts to appoint environment/sustainability reps in the workplace.
In UCU we have had some success. In the last two years we have increased the number of reps by over 50 per cent, though this still leaves us with only around a third of branches covered. Many younger members are attracted to this work. It provides an opportunity to be pro-active rather than just being on the defensive fighting job cuts and contract changes. Unions need to ensure that any growth in low carbon employment is based on quality as well as quantity.
Kara: You’re running a workshop on uniting trade unions with community campaigns. How can trade unions work effectively with community campaigns?
Graham: Outside of the workplace unions often have strong community links. These will be vital in building the coalitions of the future. In many areas trades councils have responded to the recent annual congress decision to make this a priority campaign. For example, Battersea and Wandsworth TUC has been instrumental in supporting a low carbon zone in the borough, illustrating the potential of putting community trade unionism into practice. It can open up joint work with organisations that may have had little previous contact. Local action has its limitations but it can often be a welcome relief from banging your head on the national policy wall.
Kara: The Greener Jobs Alliance you work for campaigns for investment in green jobs and skills. The argument for huge investment in green jobs to lift us out of economic and environmental disaster has been being made for a few years now. How seriously has the government taken it?
Graham: The GJA starting point is that without a sustainability skills strategy any future investment will be flawed. The priority is up-skilling, or making existing jobs greener. We are coming to the end of the UN Decade for Education for Sustainable Development and progress has been painfully slow and, in some cases, gone into reverse. In the school sector we have Gove threatening to remove climate change from the curriculum. In further and higher education many institutions are reducing their commitments or not resourcing those that have been made. The uncertainty over government policy measures has threatened some of the growth in the green sector that has occurred. The bottom line is that the government is tied to an employer-led approach that is not delivering.
Kara: How can the argument for investment in these jobs be communicated to a government hell-bent on cutting? How do you see this investment being funded, especially in these times of severe austerity?
Graham: It’s difficult to see how the present government will be won over by our arguments. The most we can expect is that there will be a recognition borne out by the facts that the present policies are not working. For example, the flagship Green Deal policy is clearly not delivering even though the case for a massive energy efficiency programme is obvious. The reliance on consumer-led demand is flawed. It requires a level of state (national and local) funding that does not fit their macro-economic model. Funding through progressive taxation measures to properly finance the Green Investment Bank would be a good start.
Kara: How do you see this movement growing in the future?
Graham: There is real potential in moving this up the trade union and political agenda. We need to link the climate crisis to corporate responsibility failures. There is a growing awareness that corporations need to be held to account. It has to be a combination of linking the international with the local. In the education sector we have an opportunity to do that in an alliance with students. In all sectors we need an alternative vision to the austerity model. The conference is one small step on the road to achieving that.

Graham Peterson is the University and College Union’s environment and Greener Jobs Alliance co-ordinator

Click here for more information on the conference

EDF’s abuse of power

admin — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:56:59 +0000

French-headquartered EDF is the world’s second-largest electric utility company, with operations spanning Europe, Africa, the USA and Asia. EDF’s main revenue stream comes from generating electricity through nuclear power, which accounts for 74.5 per cent of its production. Renewable energy makes up just 0.1 per cent of its portfolio. Founded in 1946, it was a state-owned company until floating on the stock market in 2003. It had an annual turnover of £65.2 billion in 2010 and 5.7 million customer accounts in the UK, where revenues rose 6.4 per cent to £8.4 billion in 2012. It is the country’s largest electricity generator and distribution network operator.
EDF Energy’s parent organisation, EDF Group, operates the largest civil nuclear fleet of power stations in the world, with existing and planned facilities in France, the UK, the US and China. EDF Energy owns and operates 15 nuclear plants at eight nuclear power stations in the UK.
Even by the low standards of the ‘big six’ (the six largest energy companies in the UK, which supply 99 per cent of homes), EDF compares badly. Energy regulator Ofgem reported that it was the most complained about of the big six last year. It received 8,072 complaints for each 100,000 customers in the last three months of 2012 – more than double the 4,001 logged for the next most complained-about firm, Npower. The total complaints numbered 440,317 – more than 1,200 per day.
EDF also performs poorly on carbon emissions – it has the second lowest portfolio of renewables of the big six, spending just £1.6 billion on renewable energy since 2006.
2011 was a bad year for EDF. A French court fined the company £1.3 million and sent two of its staff to jail for spying on Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigners. Two private security company employees hired by EDF were also jailed and Greenpeace was awarded £430,000 in damages.
In the same year, Freedom of Information requests by Green MP Caroline Lucas revealed that EDF, alongside other companies such as Npower and Centrica, had at least 50 employees working within the government on energy issues over a four-year period, including drafting energy policy. The Department for Energy and Climate Change declared 195 ministerial meetings with energy companies and their lobby groups compared to just 17 with green campaign groups. This gives them a huge amount of influence over day-to-day government decisions and access to confidential information.
Also in 2011 the company’s website was brought down three times by Anonymous. The attacks cost EDF an estimated £140,000. Then, in October 2012, its new flagship combined cycle gas turbine power station at West Burton, in Nottinghamshire, was targeted by ‘No Dash for Gas’ climate activists, who shut it down for a week. The new plant will emit approximately 4.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year when operating at full capacity – more than the annual emissions of Paraguay.
Sixteen activists occupied two 80-metre chimneys at West Burton for seven days to protest at plans to build up to 40 new gas-fired power stations and make gas the UK’s primary fuel for the next 30 years. This dangerous and dirty pursuit would crash the UK’s carbon emission reduction targets, breaching legally binding undertakings, and raise fuel poverty and reliance on imported fuel.
The No Dash for Gas activists pleaded guilty to aggravated trespass in February and await sentence on 6 June. In the meantime, EDF slapped an unprecedented civil suit for £5 million on the protesters. This was seen as an attempt to bankrupt protesters and stifle future dissent. EDF’s profits last year alone were £1.7 billion – their £5 million damages claim amounts to just one day’s profits.
The tactic, labelled ‘reputational suicide’ by PR sustainability guru Brendan May, proved a disaster for EDF. In an embarrassing climbdown, the company decided to drop the lawsuit after 64,000 people signed a petition against the action, Naomi Klein recorded a video declaring ‘I Am No Dash For Gas’ and high profile figures such as actors Mark Ruffalo and Lucy Lawless, Noam Chomsky and Margaret Atwood pledged support. Though EDF dropped the damages claim, it still insisted on an injunction preventing the 21 activists from entering EDF power stations in the future. A protest at the company’s AGM has been announced for 1 May.
No Dash for Gas: www.nodashforgas.org.uk. Illustration by Martin Rowson

The secure and the damned

admin — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 14:31:46 +0000

Metro Manila, the Philippines. Photo: Asian Development Bank
The world’s political leaders couldn’t say they hadn’t been warned. In the run up to the UN climate negotiations in Qatar in December, it wasn’t just the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and global accounting firm PWC predicting dangerous levels of climate change. Even nature appeared to sound alarm bells with unseasonal hurricanes devastating New York and islands in the Caribbean and the Philippines. Faced with this chorus, you might have expected a response from the world’s governments. Instead the summit passed almost unnoticed by the international media and the result was another empty declaration, described by Friends of the Earth as a ‘sham of a deal’ that ‘fails on every count’.
Confronted with one of the greatest challenges our planet and its peoples have faced, our political leaders have clearly failed us. In stark contrast to the radical, coordinated action to bail out banks and prop up the financial system, governments have instead chosen to step aside, giving a free hand to the markets and the fossil fuel giants, rather than daring a carefully planned conversion of our carbon-based economies. Their choice is not one of inaction, as is often suggested, but one of actively ensuring dangerous climate change. Every coal plant built in China, oil field mined in the Arctic, or shale gas field fracked in the US locks carbon into the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years and means that even radical steps to decarbonise in future years may not be sufficient to prevent runaway global warming.
The president of the World Bank, Dr Jim Yong Kim, said their report’s predicted rise in temperatures of 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit before the end of the century would create a world that was ‘very frightening’. For the first time, the issue of how to pay for the ‘loss and damage’ that climate change is already causing for the poorest and most vulnerable people worldwide took centre stage at Doha. It is a tragic irony that discussions about stopping or preparing for global climate change (known as ‘mitigation and adaptation’ in UN language) have now been upstaged by demands for reparations and concern, not least in the insurance industry, about who or what is going to pay for the damage.
These narratives are deeply distressing and disempowering. It is now much easier for people to imagine a dystopian future for their children than a world that has pulled together to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Far from prompting mass action, fear and insecurity is apparently prompting people to turn off and tune out in droves, or to seek solace in conspiracy theories.
Profiting from insecurity
This apathy is being exploited by those who welcome – or at the very least are looking to profit from – the politics of insecurity and what the Pentagon has dubbed ‘the age of consequences’. Across the world and often behind closed doors, securocrats and military strategists are engaging in ‘foresight’ exercises that – unlike their political masters – take climate change for granted and develop options and strategies to adapt to the risks and opportunities it presents.
Only a month before the Doha climate negotiations, the US National Academy of Sciences released a report commissioned by the CIA that sought to ‘evaluate the evidence on possible connections between climate change and US national security concerns’. The study concluded that it would be ‘prudent for security analysts to expect climate surprises in the coming decade, including unexpected and potentially disruptive single events as well as conjunctions of events occurring simultaneously or in sequence, and for them to become progressively more serious and more frequent thereafter, most likely at an accelerating rate’.
The military and the intelligence community’s willingness to take climate change seriously has been often uncritically welcomed by some in the environmental community; the agencies themselves say they are just doing their job. The question very few people are asking is: what are the consequences of framing climate change as a security issue rather than a justice or human rights one?
In a world already demeaned by concepts like ‘collateral damage’, participants in these new climate war games need not speak candidly about what they envisage, but the subtext to their discourse is always the same: how can states in the industrialised North – at a time of increasing potential scarcity and, it is assumed, unrest – secure themselves from the ‘threat’ of climate refugees, resource wars and failed states, while maintaining control of key strategic resources and supply chains? In the words of the proposed EU climate change and international security strategy, for example, climate change is ‘best viewed as a threat multiplier’ which carries ‘political and security risks that directly affect European interests’.
The industries that thrive off the ugly realpolitik of international security are also preparing for climate change. In 2011, a defence industry conference suggested that the energy and environmental market was worth at least eight times its own trillion-dollar-a-year trade. ‘Far from being excluded from this opportunity, the aerospace, defence and security sector is gearing up to address what looks set to become its most significant adjacent market since the strong emergence of the civil/homeland security business almost a decade ago,’ it suggested.
Some of these investments may prove welcome and important, but the climate security discourse is also helping fuel the investment boom in high-tech border control systems, crowd control technologies, next-generation offensive weapons systems (such as drones) and less-lethal weapons. Every year a few more applications are piloted, and a few more hit the market. Looking at the consolidation of militarised borders across the world over the past decade, you wouldn’t want to be a climate refugee in 2012, never mind 2050.
It is not just the coercive industries that are positioning themselves to profit from fears about the future. The commodities upon which life depends are being woven into new security narratives based on fears about scarcity, overpopulation and inequality. Increasing importance is attached to ‘food security’, ‘energy security’, ‘water security’ and so on, with little analysis of exactly what is being secured for whom, and at whose expense? But when perceived global food insecurity is fuelling land grabs and exploitation in Africa, and rising food prices are causing widespread social unrest, alarm bells should be ringing.
Winners and losers
The climate security discourse takes these outcomes for granted. It is predicated on winners and losers – the secure and the damned – and based on a vision of ‘security’ so warped by the ‘war on terror’ that it essentially envisages disposable people in place of the international solidarity so obviously required to face the future in a just and collaborative way.
To confront this creeping securitisation of our future, we must of course continue to fight to end our fossil fuel addiction as urgently as possible, joining movements such as those fighting tar sands and forming broad civic alliances that pressure towns, states and governments to transition their economies to a low-carbon footing. We cannot stop climate change – it is already happening – but we can still prevent the worst effects.
However, we must also be prepared to reclaim the climate adaptation agenda from one based on acquisition through dispossession to one based on universal human rights and the dignity of all people.
The recent experience of Hurricane Sandy, where the Occupy movement put the US federal government to shame in its response to the crisis, shows the power of popular movements to respond positively to local disasters. Yet local responses by themselves will not be enough. We need broader international strategies that check corporate and military power while globalising the tools for resilience. This means putting forward progressive solutions around food, water, energy and coping with extreme weather that provide viable alternatives to governments’ market-based and security-obsessed approaches. Perhaps most importantly, we need to start packaging these ideas in positive visions for the future that will empower people to reject dystopia and reclaim a liveable, just future for all.
Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes are co-editors of a forthcoming book on the securitisation of climate change, to be published by the Transnational Institute in 2013

Resistance is fertile over third runway

admin — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 10:00:07 +0000

A third runway at Heathrow is back on the agenda. In 2010 the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition made a formal agreement that plans for a third runway should be scrapped. Yet there have been persistent murmurings from the British Airports Authority (BAA), big business and the chancellor about the need for an expansion of capacity. The issues of climate crisis and the tarmacking over of communities in the name of ‘development’ are being sidelined.
But in Sipson village, one of the places that would be bulldozed were the runway to go ahead, there sits a patch of land where those issues are very much alive. It is home to Grow Heathrow – a community space and growing project that exists to oppose runway expansion. ‘We don’t know what is going to happen with the third runway but the point about this place is that we are ready to resist it and we’re not going anywhere,’ says John Allen, who has been living and working at the space since April 2012.
Grow Heathrow began in 2010 when a group of people from Plane Stupid and Climate Camp moved into the local area to support residents in their resistance to the third runway. Having established relationships with the residents during the 2007 Climate Camp in a nearby field, the plan was to create a project that would be a continuation of this. The campaigners spotted an abandoned junk yard, which was home to three large greenhouses from its past as a plant nursery, and made plans to turn it into a community space. After receiving support from the local residents’ association, they squatted the site and went about transforming what had been a ‘sea of cars’ into a beautiful and inspiring project organising around climate change, food sovereignty, community resilience and squatting.
Their takeover of the site was welcomed by local residents, who were relieved to see the back of the scrapyard. But more important was the support that Grow Heathrow extended to the residents in their struggle against the third runway. As residents watched their village empty after bullying from BAA and the government, the fact that Grow Heathrow has stuck around means a great deal to them. This constant in a landscape of flux and uncertainty gave them ‘a sense of hope’ and made them feel supported, one resident told Allen.
The local residents were in turn quick to stand up for Grow Heathrow. In the early days when the police used to harass the people there, a telephone tree was used to contact a ‘flashmob’ of elderly women who would turn up and demand that the police leave ‘our activists’ alone.
Grow Heathrow is also an experiment in sustainable living. A wind turbine, constructed from scratch on site, and solar panels provide the energy it needs. There are planters full of vegetables at the front and in the greenhouses. The entire site is a maze of incredible eco-contraptions made on the spot from reclaimed materials. There is a clay pizza oven, providing pizza in four minutes flat – ‘the secret is a thin base and lots of ingredients’ – alongside stoves made from gas canisters, compost toilets, a compost mound that provides hot water, an outdoor wood burning shower, and a hay house that is currently in development.
‘What’s been great about this is that people with skills, and willing to share those skills with passion and energy, have come together to make all of this and that’s why I was attracted to it,’ John Allen explains.
Admiring the half-built hay house and listening to their future plans it is hard to imagine that their project and their right to a home is under threat. Yet inevitably the owners are taking them through the courts. In what is a landmark case, Grow Heathrow will argue against their eviction under Article Eight of the Human Rights Act, which guarantees the right to home and family life. While Article Eight currently applies to public landlords, it has not yet been determined whether it applies to the private sector. If the courts were to find that it did, this would have significant implications for privately renting tenants and squatters.
Grow Heathrow’s activists have many fights on their hands, but they’ve also got lots of support. John Allen describes how he was cycling through the town one day and passed a pub with a group of drunken men outside. They shouted at him as he cycled past: ‘Hey! You’re doing brilliant work!’

Doom at Doha, but hope outside

admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 10:00:05 +0000

Campaign group Power Past Coal protests in the US. Photo: Doug Grinbergs
If you’re already thinking that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (UNFCCC COP) process is a bit of a joke when it comes to dealing with climate change, then you may sense a fitting and tragic irony in this year’s summit being held in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Geographically isolated and politically non-democratic, the Qatari emirate not only has the world’s highest GDP per capita but also the highest carbon dioxide emissions thanks to its petrodollar economy.
It would have been difficult and expensive for many climate activists to get themselves to Doha to either participate in or protest against the conference. But arguably the time is past when activists – or journalists, or indeed national governments – took these annual meetings seriously, at least as a forum for getting real action on climate change. At Copenhagen in 2009, which drew the largest crowds both inside and outside the conference hall, those in the streets were already under no illusions as to the likelihood of a fair deal. They went to Denmark to shine a light on the corruption of the negotiations by corporate interests and the inherent structural injustice of the process for those in the global South.
Copenhagen failed to deliver that elusive ‘binding agreement’ and three years on, with the Kyoto Protocol on the point of extinction, plus ca change. At Durban last year the decision was taken to postpone until 2015 an agreement that would only take effect in 2020. The 20th anniversary in June of the Rio Summit, which first gave birth to the Conference of the Parties, was a sad coming of age, barely registering in the public consciousness. It delivered little besides the advancement of a dubious ‘green economy’ agenda that seeks to give an exploitable market value to every last bit of sadly abused nature.
As to the much-lauded Kyoto Protocol, as Oscar Reyes commented after last year’s COP, ‘Durban reduced the protocol to a zombie-like state,’ moving yet further from binding emissions targets. With Canada, Russia and Japan all signalling their intention to abandon the agreement, it’s no wonder Janet Redman of the Institute for Policy Studies questions ‘what the use would be of enforcing the treaty anyway’.
Of course, not all environmental organisations have disengaged completely from the UN process. Of the 17,000 or so expected in Doha, around 7,000 are likely to come from NGOs. The Climate Action Network remains attentive to the negotiations, and continues to optimistically present demands to the new ‘Ad Hoc Working Group’ established in Durban on how to achieve a ‘fair, ambitious and legally binding deal’. There are also those who point out the dangers of simply leaving the negotiators to their own devices, with no civil society eyes upon them. Nele Marien, formerly part of the Bolivian climate negotiating team, admits that ‘the negotiators, they do whatever they want anyway’ but nonetheless thinks ‘it’s better that [NGOs] are there paying attention to them’, for the purposes of public awareness if nothing else.
The Bolivian negotiating team has itself played a particular role in the past few years, establishing itself as a key point of resistance to the corporate-friendly agenda of rich countries and a voice for the dispossessed south. Marien and her colleagues in the team saw themselves as part of the climate justice movement that gathered outside the conference walls, and she considers Bolivian initiatives (such as pushing for carbon budgets) as important alternatives to the business-as-usual approach of many nations. However, she quit the negotiating team ahead of last year’s COP, knowing that Bolivia would sign the Durban Accords, and unwilling to agree ‘with something that is just un-agreeable’.
Surprising alliances
Now, with even these points of resistance seeming to lose their footing, many simply regard the UN process as a waste of climate activists’ time. Post-Copenhagen the ‘movement’ has been through a period of fragmentation and is still at a time of reassessment. I spoke to several people, however, who noted a reinvigoration of climate activism thanks to the spirit that Occupy and similar economic justice movements have inspired for grassroots action and civil disobedience. This is translating into concrete campaigns to block fossil fuel extraction, with these forming behind some occasionally surprising alliances.
Scott Parkin is an organiser with the Rainforest Action Network and has been active for years with Rising Tide North America. The latter group, under no illusions about corporate influence post-Copenhagen, ‘embarked on this strategy – which I would say is playing out well nearly three years later – of putting a really big emphasis on grassroots action at the point of extraction’. Parkin expresses optimism about what he prefers to pluralise as the ‘climate movements’ in the US, describing 2012 as a ‘big year’.
He says the radical wing has been able to push the mainstream ‘big greens’ more and more to the left. ‘Now they all really embrace working with frontline communities, and are more open to the tactics of nonviolent direct action.’ He attributes this to ‘the economic state of the world, Occupy and things like this’.
The big thing happening right now in the US is the Tar Sands Blockade in Texas, the next phase of the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline. Parkin tells me that first on the scene at the blockade were Occupiers from Dallas and Austin, ‘but also they’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Texas landholders, conservatives, some of whom are self-identified Tea Party members.’ Unlikely coalitions are forming on the basis of frontline exposure to ‘eminent domain’ land grabs by companies that go on to poison local communities with pollution from coal mining or transportation, or dangerously toxic crude oil pipelines.
While it looks like Keystone may already be a ‘done deal’, for Parkin ‘the more important thing is that it’s a training ground and a place for strengthening involvement in the direct action movement. We’re giving more power and credibility to what Occupy did, and then we’re doing it on fossil fuels. It’s a movement-building moment for climate.’
Back to the grassroots
Chris Kitchen, a researcher for Corporate Watch and part of the UK Climate Justice Collective, decided after going to COP 14 in Poznań (with the Climate Action Network) that it was ‘a waste of time trying to influence the process’. He went to Copenhagen the following year in order to highlight this failure and help build a network for genuine action. While he acknowledges that the kind of media attention garnered at Copenhagen can sometimes provide good opportunities for messaging, if articulated correctly, he regards the COP as already so ‘overtaken by corporate and national interest that any civil society engagement acts as a legitimising force . . . some street mobilisation can still be interpreted as mobilisation for the process itself, so you have to be very careful.’
The grassroots movement on climate has always seen ecological crisis within the wider lens of a socio-political critique of capitalism per se. Like Parkin in the US, with the global rise of dissent towards the austerity conditions of economic crisis Chris sees UK activism on climate in something of a ‘recovery phase’. It’s a ‘great thing’, he says, ‘this realisation that going on a march and getting your MP to sign something won’t cut the mustard.’
Some of the UK movement’s energy has gone into the fight against fracking. Many of those now involved in Frack Off UK were key organisers in the climate justice protests in Copenhagen. One of them told me that ‘hope of a global deal that would seriously address humanity’s present predicament, if it ever existed at all, has now completely evaporated . . . So called “green capitalism”, which is just business as usual with a load of greenwash poured over it, is centre stage now.’
In the face of this, ‘the only possible hope is concerted grassroots action by communities to force change. While this may seem like a pipe dream, in fact the effects of climate change and energy extraction give us some hope. As the desperate rush to keep fossil fuels flowing is pushing extraction almost literally into people’s back gardens, more and more people are seeing the effects of this system up close and personal.’
Frontline campaigns
A set of recent profiles of climate campaigns by the Bolivia-based Democracy Center provides further evidence that communities on the frontline of climate change-causing decisions, and exposed to their localised effects, are taking matters into their own hands. What is more, their success in winning the support necessary to achieve this is precisely based on strategies that highlight the impacts of these decisions on local people – rather than by talking about ‘global climate change’.
As with Keystone, the Power Past Coal coalition in Washington state – one of the featured campaigns – is targeting the infrastructure that delivers dirty energy (in both these cases designed to take it overseas to Asian markets). It is by talking about the blight that huge coal trains will have on things such as local tourism and air quality that the campaign has gained momentum. This dynamic also demonstrates the importance of fighting to retain the power to affect these decisions at the local level – rather than leaving them up to national institutions, or multilateral ones such as the World Bank, where corporate power is strong and citizen power at its weakest.
The World Bank has been pushing, along with the US State Department, for a new generation of coal power in Kosovo – a small, low income nation vulnerable to such pressure given its currently insufficient and inefficient energy supply system. But campaigners in Kosovo, backed up by allies in the US who object to their country’s financial involvement in the plans, are doing all they can to halt the process, arguing instead for a long-term sustainable energy strategy. Along with academic analysis that busts open the myths about new coal being ‘clean’ because it would replace dirtier and less efficient power stations currently in operation, campaigners in Kosovo have again managed to bring farmers and rural landowners into the coalition and given them a chance to talk about the direct impacts they experience from strip mining on their land.
Things are happening outside the US and Europe, too. In a very different kind of ‘campaign’, one couple in Thailand, well versed in the decision-making processes of the Thai government on energy issues, have steered a quiet revolution in renewable energy by working with ministers and the state utilities companies. Policies that allow for generation and grid feed-in from small energy producers – from solar, biomass, biogas and other sources – are being looked at as a sustainable model for developing economies.
India, meanwhile, is another nation aggressively pushing for coal-fired power to meet its burgeoning energy requirements as it follows the well-trodden path to fossil-fed ‘development’. But here too campaigners – fisherman and farmers, supported by legal activists – are literally putting their lives on the line to block the government’s plans and defend their livelihoods, power station by power station.
So as we gear up for more of the same old nothing at Doha, it is to these multiple and various examples of grassroots mobilisation against the fossil fuel industry that we should be paying attention. That is where the real action lies, and that is where new connections – between peoples and ideas – are being made.
Mads Ryle is the communications director for the Democracy Center

Why being green does not mean being poor

louise — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 10:14:15 +0000

Protesting at British Gas headquarters
Again and again, energy companies – and the politicians, think tanks and corporate media in their pockets – hammer home the message that being green is going to mean being poor. The energy industry’s claim is that renewables are more expensive than fossil fuels; inaction on the climate is justified under the auspices of bringing down the bills, while inaction on fuel poverty is justified under the auspices of cooling down the planet. These lies, told in order to maintain business as usual, have recently come under increasing pressure from some in the environmental movement who are keen to stress that fuel poverty and climate change arise from a common cause and must be tackled together.

However, much of the environmental discourse in the public domain falls trap to the industry’s spin. A recent post on the Guardian Environment blog by Duncan Clark offered a plea for caution within the environmental movement around calls for cheaper energy. As one of the groups criticised in this blog – the Climate Justice Collective – (‘a new climate change direct action group’) we felt the need to respond.

Our bills are not being driven up by the cost of renewables but, rather, by the rising cost of fossil fuels. According to a recent report by the government’s Committee on Climate change, the investment in low-carbon energy accounted for just 7 per cent of the rise in the cost of energy between 2004 and 2010 (pg 6). 64 per cent of this price hike was caused by the rise in the wholesale price of gas (pg 4).

In his blog post, though, Clark attempts to use this same report to support his insistence that renewable energy is more expensive than polluting alternatives. According to Clark, the report tells us that renewable subsidies and carbon taxes will add more to bills than rising gas prices in the coming decade. But this is simply false: the report says that low-carbon measures will add £110 to bills by 2020, in comparison to £175 from rising gas prices (pg 5).

The report in question does, as Clark points out, predict that low-carbon investment will account for 20 per cent of domestic electricity bills by 2020 (pg 17). But the report was written prior to the release of recent research from the LSE, which forecasts that the cost of wind power is set to dramatically fall in the next few years. Secondly, even if the report’s prediction is accurate, this does not support Clark’s conclusion that renewables are more expensive than fossil fuels. The rising price of fossil fuels has been the main driver of bill rises in the past decade and is set to continue escalating. Even if the cost of renewables was to make up a fifth of electricity bills by the end of the decade, this does not mean that bills would not have been higher should we have replaced this new low-carbon energy with more fossil fuels. Clark seems to ignore the introduction to the report, which explicitly states that the evidence ‘disproves’ the claim ‘that future huge investments in low-carbon capacity will drive very dramatic increases in energy bills by 2020′ (pg 6).

In all, Clark’s blog fails to give us any reason to think that avoiding climate change must inevitably lead to higher energy bills. But the problems don’t end there. The view pressed throughout seems to be that people are in a position that would allow them to choose to pay more for their energy, should they be persuaded of the benefits of renewables. Our mission, says Clark, has to be to ‘make people care sufficiently about climate change that they’re prepared to pay more for energy ‘. Is the suggestion here really that the millionsof people that have to choose between heating and eating in the winter should, in fact, be choosing between heating, eating and investing in clean energy? When rocketing energy costs threaten your life and livelihood how could anything – even the threat of global climate catastrophe – persuade you that you should be paying even more for your energy?

The problem is that the rule of the market makes energy access dependent upon ability to pay. This means that the people who are in a position to pay more for their energy – wealthy individuals and powerful corporations – have their excessive and intensely polluting consumption habits subsidised by the poor who are left to freeze. No-one is saying that the solution here is cheaper bills for all. The point is that we need to fundamentally change the way that our energy system – and the economy and society at large – are organised so that energy decisions are made not on the basis of profit but, rather, on the basis of securing people’s rights to heating, eating and other essentials.

What many environmentalists are starting to realise, particularly in light of the latest global failure at Rio+20, is that addressing climate change will require systemic overhaul in this same direction. It is now the energy companies, not politicians, that call the shots, as is evidenced by recent exposés of the Big Six exercising influence over the government through lending staff, informal consultations and buying access to secret lobbying meetings. The energy companies’ business-models are built on fossil fuel extraction as this is most profitable for them. So, as long as the energy companies retain their monopoly power and influence, politicians will keep on the fossil fuel bandwagon. And, as ‘conventional’ modes of extraction become more difficult, fossil fuels will keep on getting more polluting and more expensive.

The profit-driven fossil fuel economy is the root cause of both climate change and fuel poverty. As long as our energy is a commodity designed, first and foremost, to generate private profit, our needs for warm homes and a safe environment will be sidelined. But what if communities reclaimed control, begun to generate their own renewable energy and distributed it according to need, not ability to pay? In fact, this is already happening across the country in the form of energy co-ops springing up everywhere from Brixton to Brighton, Bristol to Manchester. By building our own alternatives like these in the context of a growing broader movement for the radical reorganisation of society along democratic, fair and sustainable lines, we can make a start on tackling both poverty and climate change together.

Building a movement with the numbers and relevance necessary to take on this task, however, means rejecting an environmentalism that refuses to call for cheaper energy for those being deprived of their basic needs by rising bills. As well as swallowing the lies of the fossil fuel industry, this type of environmentalism can only alienate the very people we need on board, ensuring that the twin crises of rising bills and rising sea levels will just keep getting ever-deeper. Instead, we need a climate justice approach which acknowledges the shared systemic causes of environmental destruction and poverty and sees the pursuit of ecological goals and social justice as inseparable.