Category Archives: Environment

UK government’s fracking ‘ban’ has a convenient loophole

With a general election underway, Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, recently announced that fracking has been halted in the UK – but a closer look at this moratorium covers reveals a loophole. The suspension applies in the north of England, but the smallprint reveals that similar fossil fuel exploration in many traditionally safe Conservative constituencies in south-east England will be just as open for business as before.

The term fracking (from “hydraulic fracturing”) has come to describe a range of methods of drilling for oil and gas that are more correctly known as unconventional extraction. These are techniques reserved for oil and gas that is hard to access. Fracking – the injection of sand, water and toxic chemicals at high pressure to widen small fractures in shale rock, releasing trapped gas or oil – is just one of them.

The government’s moratorium makes clear that fracking in Lancashire is a no-go. After government agency the Oil and Gas Authority reported that it was not possible to predict the probability or size of tremors from fracking, Cuadrilla’s operations at the now infamous Preston New Road site – which caused a magnitude 2.9 earthquake – are no longer lawful. The same is true for other fracking sites in earlier stages of development in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.

But the north of England is not the only region in the UK that unconventional exploration for oil and gas is afoot. In the rolling hills south-west of London, work is also underway to extract gas and oil using similar methods. At numerous sites in Surrey and Sussex, companies are in the process of – or are planning to – inject acid in boreholes to widen fractures in the rock below.

This may be at a low pressure (a technique termed acidisation) or a higher pressure (acid fracking). But, crucially, both of these techniques tend to use pressures lower than the threshold at which the government’s moratorium outlaws fossil fuel extraction. So, fossil fuel exploration in south-east England usually encompassed under the term “fracking” is in fact exempt from this “ban”.

Similar to the opposition to fracking in Lancashire, many local residents in Surrey have expressed serious concern at earthquakes as strong as magnitude 3.2 in the area. Researchers at the British Geological Survey and Imperial and Bristol universities ruled out a link to oil and gas exploration, but the earthquakes alone indicate that there are faults, or cracks, underground that could potentially be further destabilised by fossil fuel extraction. As such, there is strong local opposition to the operations.

Interestingly, the constituencies surrounding these sites are largely safe Conservative seats that are expected to be held relatively comfortably. In contrast, Leave-voting seats in the North are key targets for the Conservatives this election.

The party may struggle to reverse its distant second to Labour in the constituency of Preston itself, which houses the epicentre of local resistance to fracking in the Preston New Road protest camps. But in a region largely opposed to fracking, the ban may well be a boost to efforts to win over the so-called “Workington Man” – older, white, Leave voters who could be tempted to deviate from their usual Labour leanings.

Read more:
Can the Conservative Party win in the North of England?

Consistent with the notion that government policy on domestic fossil fuel production is aimed at winning votes rather than coming from a desire to cut emissions, it has just approved the opening of the Woodhouse Colliery coal mine. The mine sits in the Cumbrian constituency of Copeland, where the Conservatives hold a marginal lead over Labour and the Liberal Democrat vote barely registers. Importantly, unlike the broad opposition or ambivalence to fracking, the promise of new jobs from the coal mine has helped build local support.

Deliberately or not, the current party of government’s “ban” on fracking hears local opposition in seats it is targeting in the north of England, but ignores similar opposition to unconventional extraction in its southern strongholds. Whether this will help the government to remain in their position come election day remains to be seen.

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Keith Baker is a Co-founder of the Energy Poverty Research initiative; a member of the Energy Working Group within the Scottish 'think and do tank' Common Weal; a member of Scientists for Global Responsibility; and a member of the Green Party of England and Wales.

Peter Styles does not receive funding from anyone. He has in the past received Grants from European and UK governments, energy companies, and environmental groups.

source: The Conversation: Environment

Fracking: how the police response is threatening the right to protest

The UK government has announced an immediate moratorium on fracking. The decision came after new scientific analysis concluded it was not possible to “rule out future unacceptable impacts”.

Opponents of the controversial process of shale gas extraction have long argued that it is inherently risky. Since exploratory drilling began in the UK in 2011, campaigners have highlighted the risk of seismic instability, harm to the environment and human health, and the implications of opening up new fossil fuel reserves in the face of a global climate emergency.

The strength of opposition has meant significant conflict in recent years. Drilling operations have been the target of major protests around England since the first community blockade in Balcombe, West Sussex in the summer of 2013.

The scale and impact of these protests meant that they were the focus of large and costly policing operations, resulting in hundreds of arrests and complaints about the police response. And now new research by myself and colleagues suggests that protests which seek to move beyond a purely symbolic show of opposition are being policed as though they are dangerous.

‘Violence, intimidation and aggression’

I have been examining the development of both police policy and practice in relation to fracking since 2013, as part of a team of researchers who study the policing of protest. Our first studyof protests at Barton Moss in Salford, Greater Manchester, identified serious issues with the nature of the police operation, highlighting protesters’ routine experience of police violence.

We have since visited protest sites across England – in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Sussex and Surrey. At these sites, we observed the protests and their policing, and conducted in-depth interviews with protesters. We have just published a national study based on this research.

Our work echoes many of the concerns we raised in relation to Barton Moss and questions the extent to which lessons were learned by police from earlier operations. Protesters alleged they experienced violence, intimidation and aggression from police officers at multiple fracking sites across the country.

This was most prevalent during intense and extended protest situations where protesters used forms of direct action to try to disrupt fracking. These included slow marches or blocking roads to delay deliveries, “lock-ons” where protesters lock themselves together to block an entrance to a drilling site, and “truck-surfing” where protesters jump on top of trucks making deliveries so that they can’t be moved.

In response, police operations focused on preventing or limiting disruption. In many cases this involved very physical interventions to remove protesters or block them from sites. We spoke to people who reported being pushed, shoved and knocked to the ground on numerous occasions in ways that were understood by protesters to be unnecessary acts of aggression rather than responses to a threat.

This type of response has also been highlighted by other observers and has led to calls for a review of policing at anti-fracking protests by Keith Taylor MEP. We also heard from women who accused police of groping and manhandling them in ways that left them feeling violated and frightened.

Protesters said the large number of police and their physical response was excessive, and many told us it felt like an attack on the right to protest. This in turn has exacerbated a breakdown in trust between protesters and police.

Our report concludes that the police response since 2016 to peaceful – albeit disruptive – forms of non-violent direct action has been disproportionate. We agree with the protesters that it has had the effect of undermining the right to protest.

Our report details police definitions of “protester”, “activist” and “extremist” that have been developed to guide its responses to protest. We suggest that these definitions, which include the construction of activism as synonymous with criminality, are inaccurate but appear to be informing police responses on the ground. It would appear that in police policy and practice there is an increasingly clear view that only non-disruptive protest is considered legitimate.

We also document the chilling effect of protest injunctions, sought by fracking companies from the High Court to prohibit various protest and campaigning activities. Taking these two issues together, our findings echo comments by other observers about the criminalisation of non-violent protestin the UK.

These aren’t ‘domestic extremists’

We also interviewed a diverse cross section of protesters to understand who is involved in anti-fracking protests. In part we wanted to critically examine the routine labelling, by police, of those involved as “domestic extremists”. This label, in our view, misrepresents who is involved and what motivates them (the UN Special Rapporteur also raised concerns about this labelling).

In fact, many we spoke to were new to protest and saw it as a last resort – the only option available to them when other forms of opposition had been closed down. We did also speak to many experienced campaigners who travelled to protests, but again the label of “domestic extremist” misrepresents their motivations and creates a false divide between local residents and a wider anti-fracking movement. We found that participants of different ages, levels of experience and political backgrounds were united by a concern with both the local impacts of fracking and with the global climate emergency.

The National Police Chiefs Council has recently conducted a public consultation on how protests should be policed. Organisations such as the Network for Police Monitoring are right to call for a review, and our findings suggest that the voices of the full range of protesters must be taken seriously.

As the climate change movement grows in this country we have to give serious thought to the available means by which communities are able to protest.

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Will Jackson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

source: The Conversation: Environment

Stabilising the global population is not a solution to the climate emergency – but we should do it anyway

A global coalition of 11,000 scientists has come up with a plan for dealing with the climate emergency. Most of these are things scientists have been saying for a while: decarbonise the economy, eliminate pollutants, restore ecosystems and reforest, and reduce meat consumption. However, the last action point is somewhat more controversial. It calls for stabilising the global population.

The reason it is controversial is because not everyone in the world is equally to blame for the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change. Much more important than how many people are being born is where – as it is the richest countries that are responsible for the vast majority of emissions. But its in the poorest countries that populations are rising.

The global population has more than doubled since 1970. The main reason for this massive increase is something called the demographic transition. In the earlier stages of a country’s development, societies tend to have high child mortality rates that are offset by high fertility rates, leaving the population relatively stable. Couples have as many children as they can to ensure that some – on average two – survive to adulthood.

As societies develop a more stable food supply, better sanitation and widely available treatment for common diseases, mortality rates drop rapidly. But in many cases, fertility rates stay high for a while. The number of babies born stays the same, but as nearly all of them make it to adulthood, the population expands rapidly. Depending on how the time lag between mortality and fertility falling, the post-transition population can be between four and ten times higher than pre-transition, and in rare cases even more.

Many people assume that universal access to family planning and the availability of contraception are key to reducing fertility rates quickly. But the first demographic transition can be traced to the European Enlightenment, just before the 19th century – when these services were not available. Instead, it seems that women’s education up to and beyond secondary school level is the critical control of fertility.

Rising population

The rapid spread of vaccinations and the expanded food supply created by the green agricultural revolution in the 1960s meant that at its peak, global population was growing at over 2% per year. In 1950, each woman gave birth on average to five live babies. Now that the demographic transition has already happened in many countries around the world, the figure is below 2.5.

Of course, while the average birth rate is falling every year, the world’s population is still growing by 200,000 a day. The United Nations predicts that the population will rise to between 9.4 and 10.1 billion people by 2050, and stabilise by 2100. That’s another 1.7 to 2.4 billion people.

This projected rise has been the subject of much emotive debate in the context of the increasingly urgent climate emergency – which has allowed some key myths to spread.

The first is that we cannot produce enough food for everyone – according to the World Food Programme there are 821m people on the brink of starvation today. But in fact, we produce enough food to feed 10 billion people – easily enough to cover the predicted increase in population this century.

The reason there are so many people starving is because they cannot access this global food surplus – usually through lack of money. When the very poor lose their livelihoods through civil unrest, war or crop failure, they have no resources to fall back on and no money to buy the food they need to survive.

Unequal contribution

The second myth is that stabilising population is a key solution to climate change. This is misleading and unhelpful because it makes a simplistic assumption that everyone’s contribution is equal.

A third of the carbon pumped into the atmosphere to date has come from the US, and another third from the EU. Africa has contributed just 3%. So a small percentage of the world population has created the climate crisis. If you divide current emissions by individuals rather than countries, you find that the richest 10% of the world’s population emits 50% of greenhouse gas emissions. The richest 50% emits 90%, meaning the poorest 3.8 billion people in the world emits just a tenth.

If it were the richest countries whose populations were rising, population control would be a solution to the climate emergency. But it’s not – it’s the poorest.

Over-consumption by the wealthy is causing climate change, not rising population. Put another way, the average American emits nine times more CO₂ than the average Indian – so population reduction in the US would be much more effective in curbing greenhouse emissions than stabilising growing populations elsewhere.

Some may argue that new populations will eventually emit more as societies continue to develop. But the climate crisis is now and the world needs to go carbon neutral by 2050. So by the time poorer nations have developed enough to have a large middle-class, we must have developed a fully functioning global green sustainable economy and weaned ourselves off of excessive consumption – otherwise, it will already be too late.

Right answer, wrong reason

While it might not be an immediate solution to the climate emergency, stabilising the world’s population is still important. This is because human impacts go beyond just changing the composition of the atmosphere. Globally, human activities move more soil, rock and sediment each year than is transported by all other natural processes combined. We have cut down 3 trillion trees, roughly half of those on the planet, and made enough concrete to cover the Earth’s surface in a layer 2mm thick. There are now more mobile phones than people.

With the global economy set to double in the next 25 years and a population that could reach 10 billion, the potential increase in our impact is immense. The challenge of this century is to achieve a stable global population supported by a sustainable economy that reduces our burden on the planet.

Having a stable population is also essential at the country level. It allows governments to better ensure food, water and resource security for all their citizens. It also makes it easier to provide improved healthcare services and economic opportunities for a greater proportion of citizens. Imagine the huge challenges that Nigeria faces with a population that has grown by 100m people in less than 20 years.

While women’s education and universal access to family planning around the world would undoubtedly help stabilise population and bring major benefits, they are not a global solution to the problems of climate change. The roles of urbanisation, wealth distribution and consumption patterns are much more important to understand and control greenhouse gas emissions. We cannot use population as a way of blaming the world’s poor for the climate crisis.

Click here to subscribe to our climate action newsletter. Climate change is inevitable. Our response to it isn’t.

Mark Maslin is a Founding Director of Rezatec Ltd, Director of The London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership and a member of Cheltenham Science Festival Advisory Committee. He is an unpaid member of the Sopra-Steria CSR Board. He has received grant funding in the past from the NERC, EPSRC, ESRC, Royal Society, DIFD, DECC, FCO, Innovate UK, Carbon Trust, UK Space Agency, European Space Agency, Wellcome Trust, Leverhulme Trust and British Council. He has received research funding in the past from The Lancet, Laithwaites, Seventh Generation, Channel 4, JLT Re, WWF, Hermes, CAFOD and Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.

source: The Conversation: Environment

Belgium’s first wolf in 100 years is presumed dead – have hopes of coexistence died with her?

When Naya arrived in Belgium in January 2018, she was the first wolf to be tracked in the country for at least 100 years. She’d been followed with a radio collar since she was a cub, so scientists knew when she left her family pack in eastern Germany to start a new life across the border. They also knew when she met another interloper, the male wolf, August, in August 2018.

Their cubs were the first Belgian-born wolves in over a century. A handful of fleeting wolf sightings in Belgium and the Netherlands in recent years led many to believe that the species is back for good in northeast Europe, reoccupying the territories they vacated after centuries of hunting. Instead, Naya is now almost certainly dead.

Naya was a bit special. Wolves will often strike out for new territory, but Naya’s was an adventurous trek west, captured by radio and camera traps. Her journey seemed the culmination of the gray wolf’s recolonisation of western Europe from old strongholds in Poland and Romania.

The wolf’s return to old European haunts is matched by the comeback of brown bear, Eurasian lynx and wolverine in other parts of central and western Europe. These species are increasingly at home outside of nature reserves, sharing the land with humans. Wolves are expanding their range in North America too, increasingly into urban areas.

But the last photos of Naya, taken by the Belgium government’s Nature and Forest Research Institute, were in May 2019. Her mate, August, has reverted to lone wolf behaviours and is no longer caching food for cubs. Government and conservation groups agree that Naya and her cubs are dead. A €30,000 reward for information has been raised, petitions launched seeking justice against Naya’s “murderer” and a furious war of words has ignited between conservationists and hunters, who have been fingered as Naya’s killers.

From such high hopes only a year before, does Naya’s death endanger the idea of modern societies living alongside large predators like wolves?

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

There is a grim inevitability to Naya’s fate. Wolves, above all predators, seem to provoke intense reactions. We either revere them as an incarnation of essential wildness, spawning hundreds of t-shirt designs – usually with added moon and a bit of howling – or they prove an irresistible target for hunters. In the latter category, wolves are an intruder, an existential affront that must be wiped out, regardless of wider public tolerance or legal protection.

The survival of large carnivores sharing our landscapes depends as much on public mood and knowledge as it does practical conservation. A recent study set out to untangle different influences on people’s attitudes to wolves in Germany, where the species returned in 2000. The researchers wanted to know which information sources had the greatest impact in forming opinions about these new neighbours.

The study compared the responses from people living in an area with wolves to those from people living further afield. In the region with wolves, people held more neutral views compared with the positive responses elsewhere. People who lived alongside wolves had more knowledge about them, but were also less positive about the species if they got their information from the press or TV news. Unfortunately, that’s where most people heard about the wolves.

If people got more of their information from books or films, they were more likely to have positive attitudes about wolves. Clearly, wolves like Naya need better agents – more film roles or sympathetic novels could swing public opinion in their favour.

There are only a few wolf celebrities to counter the blood-stained cliché, notably the Jungle Book’s wolf pack, a loving family, who adopt and protect Mowgli. There is also the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, the brothers who founded Rome, although Romulus later murdered his brother, so maybe his upbringing left something to be desired.

The benefits and drawbacks of wolves are widely known, or, quite often, widely assumed. Wolves can attack people and livestock, but they also create jobs and generate tourism. They can also reinvigorate landscapes by hunting the herbivores that stop trees and forests from growing. As with most things when it comes to wolves, both the positives and negatives seem to be exaggerated.

The main challenge remains that wolves have a terrible branding problem; wherever wolves and people have lived side by side, their place in our folklore and faiths is malevolent and unusually rapacious. As Naya’s death shows, they may be irretrievably typecast.

Mike Jeffries does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

source: The Conversation: Environment

How small states can cut their carbon emissions to net zero – Wales has already started

Efforts to tackle climate change often focus on international agreements and the actions of large countries such as the US and China. But most of the world’s countries or autonomous states have fewer than 10m people.

What happens in small states is critical to the world’s transition to low-carbon energy. This isn’t necessarily because of the amount of emissions small states can cut (although that is important). Instead, their policies can help develop the renewable energy infrastructure the whole world needs, and send important signals to other governments, private investors and the general population about how the fight against climate change is developing.

The Welsh government recently became the latest small state authority to announce an ambition to become carbon neutral by 2050. Looking at what Wales is already doing and what it still needs to do to reach its carbon targets can provide some useful lessons for other small states hoping to decarbonise.

First, Wales has not just an ambitious target but also a unique legislative framework for climate policy through the Well-being of Futures Generation (Wales) Act 2015. This act emphasises the value of preventing problems from occurring rather than addressing them after they emerge. It aims to merge policy issues, such as public health, climate change and economic prosperity, and mandates that all policy must contribute to sustainability and not undermine long-term goals. And it says people must be seen as part of the solution to climate change, not part of the problem.

This framework is a perfect fit for ambitious climate policy, as it takes a long-term perspective, engages citizens and prioritises sustainability. Climate policies are easier to develop when seen as flowing from such prior commitments. Other states could take a similar approach to provide the basis for more ambitious climate goals and policy.

But Wales’s experience also shows that a forward-looking legislative framework doesn’t automatically lead to a bolder climate policy. Similarly, the Welsh government’s grand political commitment of declaring a climate emergency in April 2019 hasn’t been backed up with concrete policy innovation.

Bottom-up approach

More specifically, current Welsh climate policy has a lack of urgency, tending to favour waiting for more information rather than acting now. It relies too much on a top-down approach of government inadequately regulating and providing economic incentives to the markets, rather than directly supporting the population to produce and consume clean energy in efficient ways. There is also no strategic plan that will set out how much clean energy Wales needs to fully decarbonise its economy over the next two to three decades, and bewilderment over how to start decarbonising the transport sector.

Instead, Wales and other small countries should opt for a bottom-up energy transition built around citizens taking action. This boils down to encouraging and opening up energy efficiency schemes and small-scale and community energy generation. And it means exploiting the benefits of a decentralised, integrated electricity system, such as using people’s electric car batteries to store renewable electricity overnight.

To overhaul the transport sector, Wales needs to install a large number of fast charging points to encourage people to buy electric vehicles. This should be relatively easy in the country’s densely populated south-east, but more challenging in its more sparsely populated and rural regions.

All these things need an upgraded electricity grid and an increase in clean energy. As things stand, Wales’s dependence on centralised UK-wide financing remains a significant barrier. For example, a proposed tidal lagoon scheme was recently cancelled by the UK government. Independent states, of course, will have more freedom in this area.

But something Wales could do is establish a public energy company to oversee a reduction in energy demand, rolling out smart meters, financing smart, energy efficient appliances, and audit residential energy consumption to where it is most inefficient. This innovative proposal was debated by the National Assembly for Wales but rejected by the Welsh government.

Another particular challenge for Wales – and many other small states – is the significance of agriculture to its economy. The UK government’s advisory Committee on Climate Change has argued that Wales should only target a 95% reduction in carbon emissions because its agriculture would make it too difficult to reach net zero emissions. Agriculture emissions can’t be eliminated so, to overcome this challenge, Wales will need more schemes to absorb carbon dioxide, such as forest planting.

Despite the country’s small size and carbon footprint, Wales’s climate policy is critical for supporting the wider climate agenda and the same is true for other small autonomous states and countries. Wales’s experience shows how an innovative legislative framework can lay the ground for policy breakthroughs, but countries still need strategic plans and a sense of urgency to make an impact.

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Filippos Proedrou undertook a fellowship with the National Assembly for Wales (Senedd) Research’s Academic Fellowship Scheme on Wales’ climate policy gap.

source: The Conversation: Environment