updates on 'Protecting the Planet'

20^th March 2018, Damian Carrington: Action by 12 UK citizens reaches the high court today, and tomorrow in San Francisco the science of climate change will effectively be on trial. The UK group is called Plan B, and has the support of Prof Sir David King, the government’s former chief scientific advisor. In the US, the cities of San Francisco and Oakland are suing big oil companies for damages. There will be a day-long hearing on the science. Other cases have been brought due to rising seas, and more than 1,000 suits are logged by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, NY. Others are seeking to block oil drilling in the Arctic. In Colombia, 25 young plaintiffs are taking to the courts to halt deforestation.

In 2015 in the Netherlands, the court ruled the Dutch state must increase its cuts to reduce emissions (the Urgenda case). In Pakistan a farmer won a judgement against the ‘lethargy’ of the state. In Peru a German energy company RWE is being sued over the melting of glaciers.

6^th March 2018, Arthur Neslen – officials from 24 Latin American and Caribbean countries have signed legally binding pacts with measures to protect land defenders. Two years ago Berta Caceres was killed in Honduras. Last year almost 200 nature protectors were killed across the world, 60% of them in Latin America.

Most cases are in the US, including the Juliana case, filed by 21 teenagers in Oregon (Our Children’s Trust).

The argument is that these companies (like the tobacco companies in the past) knowingly sold products that cause damage. Like the tobacco companies, oil companies have tried to obfuscate and blur the issues.

Agriculture:

April 2019, from Ecowatch, on beef production: https://www.ecowatch.com/beef-and-climate-change-2634244134.html

25^th June 2018. Catherine Bloomfield, who writes on farming and keeps cattle on a grassland farm in Devon, argues Brexit is an opportunity to have a national debate about farming. ‘For 40 years Britain has been subject to [the common agricultural policy]’s perversities, inefficiencies and unintended consequences... creating a generally dysfunctional relationship between farmers and the public.’

She mentions the 25 year environment plan, launched earlier this year, and its bold ambition ‘to leave the environment for the next generation in a better state than we found it.’ But will Gove actually do anything about this? How to keep feeding a growing population should not be left to Defra – it’s beyond farming, and there is a battle between NFU and ‘environmental zealots’ who indulge in ‘mutual myopia’!! But they need to work together. The premise of farming, she says, is to deliver health. The Defra consultation paper talkss about farming and the natural environment but not about health... Farming also has to speak less to itself and more widely with society. Problems also include declining soil fertility, over-consumption of food water and energy.

26^th March 2018, Michael McCarthy: a quite optimistic assessment, that if we leave the EU’s agricultural policies we will have a lot of money to spend on ensuring our agriculture is sound for the environment. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/26/wildlife-modern-farming-insects-birds

17^th Feb 2018 (Tom Levitt): Dutch cows are producing so much waste the authorities don’t have space to store it! The Netherlands is the fifth-largest exporter of dairy. It has 1.8 million cows and there are legal restrictions on where the manure can be deposited. Farmers are dumping it illegally, the country is breaking EU regulations on phosphates, and the high levels of ammonia are affecting air quality. WWF is calling for a 40% reduction in cow numbers over the next decade. Its Netherlands head says they have the lowest biodiversity in Europe after Malta, with only 15% of their original biodiversity left. 80% of farms produce more dung than they can legally use on their farms – the Dutch are already allowed to spread more manure on the land than the rest of the EU. Some political parties support restrictions on the number of cows.

8^th Feb 2018, Fiona Harvey: level of antibiotic use on US farms is five times as much as in UK, and nine times in the case of beef cattle, according to Alliance to Save our Antibiotics. It is three times higher in chicken, twice in pigs and five times in turkeys. Europe has banned the import of beef from America, largely owing to growth hormone use. This issue obviously affects Brexit! The fear is of superbugs developing through the growth of resistance. Nearly three quarters of the total use of antibiotics worldwide is thought to be on animals.

Air quality:

15^th April 2019. https://airqualitynews.com/2019/04/15/car-emissions-down-17-since-2008-figures-suggest/ - largely due to developments in manufacture, so there is now a choice of different types of car, including electric, and emissions are reduced.

April 2019 UNICEF report: www.unicef.uk/healthyairnationalaction

3^rd April 2019. Fiona Harvey, Guardian: ‘the State of Global Air 2019’ reports that, in the world, on average, children born today will have their lives shortened by 20 months because of air pollution. In 2017 it was a bigger killer than malaria and road accidents, and comparable to smoking. In south Asia lives are shortened by 30 months and in sub-Saharan Africa by 24 months – one factor being cooking fires. Alastair Harper of Unicef warns that there is a relationship between exposure to toxic air and low birth weight, reduced lung development and childhood asthma.

In China the situation is improving as there is less reliance on coal, and control over the number of vehicles in some cities.

Last year’s study found that more than 90% of people were breathing in dangerous air. Air pollution has been described as a global emergency. Studies link it to dementia, miscarriages etc.

2^nd April 2019. (G Arthur Neslen). Ryanair is the first non-coal company to become one of the top 10 carbon emitters, according to EU figures.

https://www.theguardian.com/profile/arthurneslen

The Irish airline, which transports 130 million people a year, declared 9.9 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2018, up 6.9% on last year and 49% over the last five years, according to data in the EU’s latest emissions trading system registry.

Andrew Murphy, the aviation manager at the European Federation for Transport and Environment, said: “this undertaxed and under-regulated sector needs to be brought into line, starting with a tax on kerosene and the introduction of mandates that force airlines to switch to zero-emission jet fuel.”

Aviation is responsible for about 3% of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions, but industry forecasts suggest this could rise by up to 700% by 2050 as the sector grows.

18^th Sep 2018, Matthew Taylor: Q Mary Uni has found children are absorbing soot particles – black carbon – during the school day = more than 60% of the air pollution they take in each day. On the way to school and in classrooms and playgrounds. In one school in Holborn levels in the classroom were over three times above WHO limit for pm10 Swedish firm Blueair can provide air filters that reduce levels by 96%.

Murphy described aviation as “Europe’s biggest climate failure”. Europe’s airlines pay about €800m (£680m) a year for their rights to pollute. But some studies suggest this sum is eclipsed by the €27bn they would have to stump up if their fuel tax and VAT exemptions were ended.

Despite increased attention from policymakers, the sector receives up to 85% of its EU emissions trading allowances free, with Ryanair consequently saving €96.6m in 2018.

25^th March 2019. Two letters in Guardian make good points: 1. (From scientific advisor (Dr Robin Russell-Jones) and chair (Geraint Davies) of APPG on air pollution): particulates from exhausts are more dangerous than from friction (brakes, tyres etc) – though government ‘likes to pretend that all particulates are equivalent, regardless of source.’ (It even brings in agricultural particulates...). 2. On modern cars, catalysts take time to warm up, so while CO2 will be reduced by not idling, it could be that more of NOx, unburned fuel, and CO will be emitted.

31^st March 2019. Two book reviews reveal the ‘shocking damage’ done by atmospheric pollution:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/31/clearing-the-air-tim-smedley-choked-age-of-air-pollution-beth-gardiner-review

In 1952, with smog, an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 eventually died. “The fog caused more civilian casualties than any five-day German bombing campaign had managed a few years before,” says Tim Smedley in Clearing the Air...

Our air today may not have the look of a peasouper. Nevertheless, its quality has been worsening relentlessly and is poisoning us as assuredly as it did in 1952, though the deadly airborne contaminants we now inhale consist of microscopically tiny particles rather than gobs of carbon. Polluted air used to stare us in the face. Today, it is an almost invisible threat...

Earlier this month, scientists put the number of early deaths attributable to this atmospheric poisoning at an incredible number: 8.8 million a year. Nine out of 10 people round the world now breathe air containing high levels of pollutants. As a result, nearly 600,000 children die every year from diseases caused or exacerbated by air pollution.

Of the two books, Gardiner’s is the more descriptive, following the story of the harrowing impact of air pollution – from Brooklyn to Poland and Delhi to Berlin – in terms of its human cost. Smedley, by contrast, is more prescriptive and ends his book with a detailed blueprint for saving our cities. Suggested measures include a ban on all petrol and diesel cars in city centres; the replacement of diesel buses and trains with electric vehicles; and an end to the use of wood-burning stoves and coal fires. It’s an achievable vision, he insists. “However, whether it happens in 10 or 100 years is down to public pressure and political will.”

• Clearing the Air: The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution by Tim Smedley is published by Blomsbury (£16.99).

• Choked: The Age of Air Pollution and the Fight for a Cleaner Future by Beth Gardiner is published by Granta (£14.99).

July 13^th 2018. ‘Park and stride!’ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/13/uk-schools-move-to-ban-the-school-run-to-protect-pupils-from-air-pollution

14^th May 2018. Manchester has a very bad problem of poor air quality. It costs the regional economy £1bn every year, and is reducing life expectancy in the region by an average of six months, according to an IPPR North report. Manchester doesn’t have the powers the mayor of London has to enforce clean air zones etc. Emergency admissions to hospital for asthma in Central Manchester are the highest in England, and more than double the national average. North Manchester is second highest. The bus fleet is one of the most polluting in the UK (only 15 electric buses, while more than 500 in London).

28^th Feb: German courts have agreed cities can ban diesels. 13,000 people are estimated to die from NOx each year. EU threshold is 40 mcg/m3 – it’s often 70 in some cities. There is some opposition, and no-one expects widespread banning just yet, as so many cars are affected. 15^th Feb (Philip Oltermann and agencies): the government is considering temporarily scrapping fares for public transport in some cities. Berlin is struggling to meet EU targets and to avoid fines. Cities say they would need federal funds to make up for the losses. The proposal will be tried in five cities by the end of the year. Green Party politician Anton Hofreiter says the idea is vague and the government should concentrate on pressurising the car industry to free technical upgrades on some diesel cars.

UK taken to court: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/23/renewed-calls-for-uk-to-tackle-toxic-air-ahead-of-high-court-hearing - and found for the third time to be breaking legal requirements! Clean air in the UK will now be overseen by the courts rather than ministers, in what was described as a ‘wholly exceptional ruling.’

27th Feb, Matthew Taylor – ClientEarth has found that 60% of parents want traffic diverted away from schools at the beginning and the end of the day. 63% oppose new schools being built where pollution is high, 60% are worried about the effects of air pollution on children, and 70% in favour of the government alerting schools on high pollution days. British Lung Foundation declares the situation ‘simply unacceptable’. The two organisations are launching Clean Air Parents’ Network to work together on this.

16^th Feb, Ian Sample – scientists say that household cleaners, paints and perfumes have become substantial sources of urban air pollution, especially now that traffic pollution is being reduced. These are Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) which react in the air to form ozone or PM2.5. Ground level ozone is harmful to health, affecting breathing. ‘Between one quarter and a third of all particles are made up of organic compounds that originate as VOCs’. (A. Lewis, Prof of chemistry Uni of York). The problem is that many of these substances are not controlled.

Animal rights. Sophie McBain in New Statesman interviews Steve Wise, founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project. Quotes Peter Singer. Inda’s supreme court has ruled all animals should have constitutional and legal rights (2014), a judge in Argentina ordered a chimpanzee to be released using habeas corpus (2016), and in 2017 Colombia’s supreme court ordered a bear to be released under the same principle. Bees and wasps can recognise faces; octupuses use tools; grey parrots have vocabularies with hundreds of words; elephants can recognise themselves (in a mirror).

https://www.newstatesman.com/.../case-man-vs-beast-fight-nonhuman-rights

Antarctica:

14^th June 2018. (Matthew Taylor) Ice is melting at a record-breaking rate, faster than at any previously recorded time, according to a study in Nature, and another study warns it could contribute to sea-level rises of 25cm globally, which on top of other factors would lead to more than a metre rise by 2070. If the entire west Antarctic ice sheet melts, this would bring around 3.5m of sea-level rise. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/13/antarctic-ice-melting-faster-than-ever-studies-show

The Nature article shows that before 2012 the loss was 76bn tonnes a year – now it is 219bn (contributing 0.6mm sea-level rise per year).

The second study looks at different scenarios, and argues there are some changes that can be prevented.

28^th March, Matthew Taylor: Holland and Barrett has agreed to remove krill-based products such as Omega 3 from its shelves, after activists sent 40,000 emails in 24 hours and put protest stickers on products in its shops. Campaigners are calling for Boots and others to follow suit. Boots say that their brands are in line with Marine Stewardship Council products from sustainable sources. Last week Greenpeace campaigners boarded a Ukrainian trawler. (See Facebook https://www.facebook.com/greenpeaceaustraliapacific/videos/10155831450743300/?utm_term=EML2&bucket=Oceans-Antarctic&source=ca_Oceans-Antarctic__

15^th Feb 2018, Matthew Taylor – climate change and industrial fishing together are threatening the krill population. George Watters, lead scientist for the US delegation to the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) warns that the penguin population could drop by almost a third by the end of the century because of changes in the krill biomass. (Published in Plos One). Some areas of krill could decrease by 40% in size. Ocean warming is the main problem, but fishing also affects it. Krill feed on algae and are a food source for whales, penguins and seals – they also remove CO2 from the atmosphere when they eat near the surface, and then excrete at lower levels. Krill populations have declined by 80% since the 1970s. Krill is fished for health products, and the industry is growing by 12% a year.

There is a campaign to turn 700,000 sq miles into a sanctuary, protecting wildlife and banning all fishing, in the Weddell Sea. Krill fishing companies say they are only taking 0.4% of the estimated biomass around the peninsula.

Arctic: 2^nd Feb 2018, Oliver Milman - polar bears are sliding towards extinction faster than previously feared. Research by US Geological Survey and Uni of California Santa Cruz, published in Science, shows polar bears have a 50% higher metabolism than previously thought, and so require more prey to meet their energy needs at a time when sea ice is receding. There are some 26,000 polar bears in the arctic today. They are leading a feast and famine lifestyle. The arctic is warming at twice the average global rate, and has declined by about 13% a decade since 1979. In the past 10 years Greenland has lost two trillion tonnes of its ice mass.

Biodiversity:

April 20 2019. ‘Deep life’: from ‘Up from the depths’ – see #deep time below... Last December scientists revealed their discovery of a vast ‘deep life’ ecosystem in the Earth’s crust, twice the volume of the world’s oceans, containing a biodiversity comparable to that of the Amazon, and teeming with 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms – hundreds of times the combined weight of all living humans.’

Red Squirrels: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150924-how-conservation-is-saving-our-red-squirrels?

2^nd July 2018. Steven Morris. The high brown fritillary, the UK’s most endangered butterfly, may be getting a boost from the warm dry weather. Over 200 have been seen, after a harsh winter which has helped knock back the bracken, then a warm May and June – all of which is ideal for the caterpillars. The butterfly lays eggs singly on leaf litter on dog violets or among moss growing on limestone outcrops. The larvae hatch in early spring and bask on dead bracken or in short sparse vegetation. It is only found at about 50 sites, such as Exmoor, Dartmoor and Morecambe Bay. The larvae have feathered brown spines which make them look like dead bracken fronds.

The things that have worked against the butterfly include the abandonment of coppicing. Other species which may benefit: heath fritillary, nightjar, Dartford warbler.

But the swallowtail could become extinct soon...

30^th June 2018. Patrick Barkham.

The swallowtail, Britain’s biggest butterfly, could become extinct within four decades. It lives on milk parsley only, and this cannot survive in salty water. Rising seas will turn much of the Norfolk Broads into salt marshes. With a sea level rise of 50cm, at least 90% of the current swallowtail breeding sites will become salt marsh. Tidal surges and ‘salination events’ also cause problems. The Norfolk and Suffolk Broads contain 1,500 species of conservation concern, including 66 that rely on the rivers and freshwater lakes.

In Victorian times, marshes elsewhere in southern England were drained, leaving the Broads as its only home. It has also become smaller and is now a subspecies.

It was reintroduced to Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire in the 1990s, but without success. Experts believe it needs a wider area.

14^th June 2018. Some possibly good news: one new species of micro moth is found every year in the UK. However, their abundance is in decline. There will be a three-day ‘moth night’ – from 14^th to 16^th June - organised by Butterfly Conservation, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and Atropos( wildlife publisher). Some new moths arrived from Australia and New Zeeland, via the horticultural trade. Others come here as a result of climate change. 27 of the new arrivals (out of 125 new species spotted this century) have started to breed here. (Patrick Barkham, Guardian)

11^th April 2018. UK Butterfly Monitoring scheme reports that 2017 was the 7^th worst year, and for 2 species – grayling and grizzled skipper - the worst ever. (Patrick Barkham) Long-term falls in population are due to habitat loss, but recently climate change, pesticides (such as neonics) and nitrogen pollution have been the causes. UK has 59 native species. Red admiral and comma have increased, and targeted management plus warm spring has helped the pearl-bordered fritillary. Food crops of the worst affected are harmed by increased nitrogen (transport and fertilizers) which helps more vigorous grasses to grow at expense of their food plants.

Brexit:

12^th April 2018. Risk Assessment by FoE:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/green-brexit-unlikely-despite-government-claims-report-concludes Main risk is a gap between policy statements and concrete regulations. A ‘non-regression clause’ which means that post-Brexit rules would not be weaker is asked for, along with a body to oversee environmental standards.

4^th April 2018 Michael Jacobs, author of Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth – short piece 4^th April warning of dangers if we do not replace existing EU legislation on the environment with something at least as good and preferably stronger. He suggests a new sustainable economy act, with a legal requirement on government to set environmental limits and to produce economic plans to achieve them. These should include: air pollution, soil degradation, resource depletion, plastics pollution and biodiversity loss. Each would need a long-term goal and shorter term targets and plans. These should be based on the advice of an independent expert sustainable economy commission, modelled on the climate change committee.

The Climate Change Act, he says, does impose limits etc, and in effect puts the UK under a sustainability constraint. Every five years the government must adopt a legally binding carbon target, and these must be set fifteen years ahead, and be on the trajectory to the goal of an 80% reduction by 2050 (relative to 1990 levels).

James Tapper, Observer 21^st Jan 2018 quotes a coalition of green groups saying there is a significant risk that our environmental protections will be reduced after Bexit. Greener UK represents 13 groups including WWF, National Trust, RSPB, FoE, Green Alliance and the Wildlife Trusts. Chair Shaun Spiers says there is a lack of willpower to ensure high standards across the UK when we lose the common frameworks currently provided by the EU. MEP Julie Girling (who had the whip withdrawn when she supported an EU resolution saying the UK had not made sufficient progress in the talks) said the UK was no longer working effectively with the EU on environmental issues.

Britain’s wildlife:

Observer, 15^th April 2018, review by Alex Preston of Britain: Our Place: can we save Britain’s wildlife before it is too late? By Mark Cocker. Argues that despite the British love of the countryside etc, we are destroying our wildlife: quoting the 2013 State of Nature report (by 25 British environmental organisations), of the 3,148 species studied, 60% had declined in the last 50 years; 31% had declined badly and 600 were threatened with extinction. We lost 44m birds between 1996 and 2008. We have lost 99% of our wildflower meadows, half of our ancient woodland, three-quarters of our heathland, three-quarters of our ponds. Yet there are 5m members of the National Trust, 1.2m in the RSPB, 800,000 in various wildlife trusts. These organisations are afraid to campaign (and the NT placates the landed aristocracy). The villains of the story are industrial agri-business, moneyed landowners, and the politicians who defend their interest (mostly conservative of course). Monocultures and grouse moors are destroying the natural countryside.

Carbon Taxes: Phillip Inman, 23/12/18, has an interesting slant: we need supranational bodies to get involved, as national governments have failed. The biggest emitters are the major steelmakers, smelters, and energy firms. In 2015, excluding road transport, 81% of emissions were untaxed. (According to OECD). The riots in France have shown that you can’t just slap a tax on fuel. Taxes on carbon will put up the price of .e.g. petrol and diesel. How to find a policy that encourages car-drivers to support it?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/22/war-fuel-tax-cant-be-won-no-green-alternative

Climate Change:

20^th April 2019 (Daniel Grossman, Brazil, Guardian). Experiments are being carried out to see how the Amazon rainforest reacts to increased levels of CO2. The last time levels were as high as now was in the Pliocene, and then beech trees grew at the South Pole... Will the extra CO2 harm the trees or protect them? It seems to depend on other factors... Chambers are being built round some of the trees, and CO2 is pumped into the chambers, to the level predicted for 2050 (50% higher than now, and when temperatures are predicted to be up to 3.5 above now).

19 April, AP: polar bears are prowling in Kamchatka peninsula, hundreds of miles from their usual habitat. The ice is receding and the bears are looking for new sources of food. Ice off the coast of Greenland, normally frozen even in summer, has been melting – twice last year. The bears are sedated and removed to their normal habitat. The oldest ice has melted by 95% over the past 30 years according to the Arctic Report Card last year.

April 2019. Link to Ecowatch article on letter to Guardian, signed by George Monbiot, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and others on restoring nature to capture carbon:

https://www.ecowatch.com/natural-climate-change-solutions-2633669096.html

30^th March 2019. Ice cores: Beyond Epica project aims to extract samples from a 1.7 mile think ice sheet in Antarctica, which will reveal temperatures as far back as 1.5m years ago. In 2004 they drilled a two-mile long core that was 800,000 years old. We know from this that today’s CO2 concentrations are much higher than anything that has been seen in the past 800,000 years. ‘We are on the way tp push the climate system outside its natural boundaries.’

11^th March 2019. Greta Thunberg and school strikes for climate:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/11/greta-thunberg-schoolgirl-climate-change-warrior-some-people-can-let-things-go-i-cant - interview by Jonathan Watts.

27^th Feb 2019. Guardian editorial: Recent survey data shows that while 93% of British people know climate change is happening, only 36% believe that humans are mainly responsible, and only 25% describe themselves as very worried. UK’s target is to reduce greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050, which is more ambitious than many comparable countries.

Dec 2018:

COP24 at Katowice, 2018:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/16/what-was-agreed-at-cop24-in-poland-and-why-did-it-take-so-long

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/15/progress-and-problems-as-un-climate-change-talks-end-with-a-deal

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/12/un-chief-antonio-guterres-attempts-to-revive-flagging-climate-change-talks

18^th Sep 2018. Adam Vaughan coal-fired power stations are being used more now that gas prices have risen. In Sep. Coal-burning increased by15% = 1,000 extra tonnes of CO2 per hour. If the trend continues the sector’s emissions will rise by 1.2m tonnes this year – report by Imperial College London. We need a 80% cut by 2050 to meet target set by Committee on Climate Change. Coal could account for 10.5% of electricity generation this winter, up from 10% last year. In 1990 energy sector produced 200m tonnes. Now roughly 75m? [Diagram in article]

17^th July, John Harris on the amount of electricity needed to run the giant computers for Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon et al. At least the first three have agreed to go carbon-neutral. But Amazon uses massive amounts of energy, as does Bitcoin... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/17/internet-climate-carbon-footprint-data-centres Most of these computers use electricity from non-renewables sources, and already the carbon footprint is bigger than that of air transport.

14^th June 2018. BP chief says (in BP’s annual review of world energy) that the world is struggling to meet Paris agreement goals. There is a renewed increase in global emissions – by 1.6% in 2017, after flat-lining for the previous three years. Renewable power generation grew by 17% last year, led by wind and then solar. But strong economic growth in China increased the use of coal. The main worry for Spencer Dale, chief economist, is the lack of progress in the power sector. Changing the type of car engine doesn’t make as much difference as changes would in power generation. The world demand for oil grew by 1.8% last year. (Adam Vaughan).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/13/rise-in-global-carbon-emissions-a-big-step-backwards-says-bp

12^th April 2018. Changes to the Gulf Stream are more dramatic than first thought:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/11/critical-gulf-stream-current-weakest-for-1600-years-research-finds

‘The new research shows the current is now 15% weaker than around 400AD, an exceptionally large deviation, and that human-caused global warming is responsible for at least a significant part of the weakening.

The current, known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc), carries warm water northwards towards the north pole. There it cools, becomes denser and sinks, and then flows back southwards. But global warming hampers the cooling of the water, while melting ice in the Arctic, particularly from Greenland, floods the area with less dense freshwater, weakening the Amoc current.

Two studies have been carried out, [both published in Nature – see links in original article] and ‘both studies found that Amoc today is about 15% weaker than 1,600 years ago, but there were also differences in their conclusions. The first study found significant Amoc weakening after the end of the little ice age in about 1850, the result of natural climate variability, with further weakening caused later by global warming.

The second study suggests most of the weakening came later, and can be squarely blamed on the burning of fossil fuels. Further research is now being undertaken to understand the reasons for the differences.

However, it is already clear that human-caused climate change will continue to slow Amoc, with potentially severe consequences. “If we do not rapidly stop global warming, we must expect a further long-term slowdown of the Atlantic overturning,” said Alexander Robinson, at the University of Madrid, and one of the team that conducted the second study. He warned: “We are only beginning to understand the consequences of this unprecedented process – but they might be disruptive.”

A 2004 disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, envisaged a rapid shutdown of Amoc and a devastating freeze. The basics of the science were portrayed correctly, said Thornalley: “Obviously it was exaggerated – the changes happened in a few days or weeks and were much more extreme. But it is true that in the past this weakening of Amoc happened very rapidly and caused big changes.”’

27^th Jan 2018, New Scientist, Michael Le Page – scientists do not agree how much warming will result from a given increase in CO2, known as the equilibrium climate sensitivity (equilibrium because there is a time-lag before the temperature settles). The consensus is that if we double the amount, the rise would be between 1.5 and 4.5C. But Peter Cox has narrowed this down to between 2.2 and 3.4 (Nature, doi.org/gcsmn4). Other studies put it higher (e.g. between 3 and 4.2C). There is agreement that the low values are unlikely, but the higher values may be wrong since it takes thousands of years for temperatures to stabilise. In the long run the true figure could be 6C or more. If we continue to emit CO2 at current levels, it is agreed the world will heat by 4C by 2100 – this is a projection of the actual warming, not a measure of sensitivity

17^th Jan 2018: Damian Carrington – UK will miss its Carbon targets if no detail is added to the government’s ‘vague’ plans, according to the Committee on Climate Change. Solid plans must be made if petrol and diesel cars are to be banned by 2040, and more trees will need to be planted. There are also significant risks attached to the Hinkley C project. The government published its Clean Growth Strategy last October. A number of pledges are made with little or no detail on how they would be delivered. Making all homes energy efficient by 2035, for example. The chair, Lord Deben (John Selwyn Gummer) said if the bonus paid to Persimmon’s chief executive had been used on the 18,000 houses it built last year it could have saved everybody electricity bills.

The CCC also argues for more carbon capture and storage: CCS is essential (to save costs...) – George Osborne cancelled a £1bn programme in 2015. Since then only £100m has been pledged for it. Oil and gas companies need to get working on it.

How was the government going to drive up sales of electric cars? At current rates of tree planting it would take a century to plant the 70,000 hectares of trees promised for 2025.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/17/uk-to-miss-legal-climate-targets-without-urgent-action-official-advisers-warn

Coral Reefs see also plastics.

Ecowatch report, 5^th April 2019 https://www.ecowatch.com/coral-bleaching-great-barrier-reef-2633671617.html?rebelltitem=6#rebelltitem6:

A study published in Nature Wednesday found that the death of corals in 2016 and 2017 has significantly decreased the ability of new corals to grow and thrive. In 2018, there has been an 89 percent decline in the number of new corals on the reef compared to the historic record.

Bleaching occurs when warm water forces corals to expel the algae that gives them color and nutrients. Reefs can recover from such events, but it takes about a decade. The Great Barrier Reef has suffered four since 1998 and, if greenhouse gas emissions continue at current levels, there could be two bleaching events every decade beginning in 2035.

The extent of the most recent bleaching events — covering 900 miles of reef — also made it harder for baby corals to replenish impacted coral populations, BBC News explained.

Feb. 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/25/can-tourist-ban-save-dicaprios-coral-paradise-thailand-maya-bay-philippines-boracay

Dark Money...

April 2019 link to Left Foot Forward article on TPA working against Southampton clean air plan:

https://leftfootforward.org/2019/01/secretive-lobby-group-boasts-of-wrecking-southamptons-clean-air-plan/?mc_cid=5ce8ef8ec8&mc_eid=dea8023bf6

The TPA though regarded these penalties as a “stealth tax” and claims it campaigned against the charges by taking volunteers to Southampton and telling visiting football fans that their coach tickets would be more expensive.

The TPA’s campaign was supported by Royston Smith, the Tory MP for Southampton Itchen who said the clean air plans were anti-business.

Labour-controlled Southampton City Council eventually backed down on plans to charge vehicles. Instead, they opted to make the buses greener and allow taxi drivers to try electric vehicles before they buy them.

Deep time.

Taken from ‘Up from the depths’ by Robert Macfarlane, Guardian 20 April 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/20/what-lies-beneath-robert-macfarlane

‘This is a phrase coined by John McPhee in 1981’ – deep time is measured in units of millennia, epochs and aeons, as with geology – deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. It is ‘the catalysing context of intergenerational justice; it is what frames the inspiring activism of Greta Thunberg and the school climate-strikers, and the Sunrise campaigners pushing for a Green New Deal in America. [It] requires us to consider not only how we will imagine the future, but how the future will imagine us. It asks a version of Jons Slk’s arresting question: “Are we being good ancestors?”’

Other thoughts from this fantastic article:

(i) William Gibson: ‘the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’ – because our toxic legacies are being imposed on some of today’s people already.. ‘the affluent experience thew future in terms of technology, while the poor experience the future in terms of calamity’

(ii) the challenges of the anthropocene (from Ghosh: The Great Derangement):

- how to represent unfolding of actions and consequences in deep time

- how to recognise the aliveness of the more-than-human

- how to come to terms with the profound decentring of human presence

Note that Macarlane also refers to the Deepwater Horizon disaster (and the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, the entrapment of 33 Chilean miners and of the boy footballers in Thailand... These stories carry with them all sorts of resonance for us and always have – see Gilgamesh etc!).

On 20 April, 41 miles off the Louisiana coast, the borehole of a semi-submersible oil rig called Deepwater Horizon burst. The rig-level blowout killed 11 crewmen and ignited a fireball that could be seen on shore. The rig sank two days later, leaving oil gushing from the seabed at a water depth of around 1,500 metres. More than 200m gallons of oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, rising as a slick on the ocean that was visible from space. It would take until the autumn to cap and seal the well successfully so that it could be declared “effectively dead”. The consequences for the ecosystems and coastal communities of the gulf persist today.

See next notes!!!!

Deepwater Horizon.

17^th Jan 2018: BP has had to make another payout of $1.7bn for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The total compensation is likely to be $65bn (£47bn). The total for 2017 is $3bn (it expected only $2bn). Eight years after the disaster, BP has processed nearly all the 390,000 claims made under the court-supervised settlement, and hopes to complete the process in coming months.

The spill, at the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 people and affected fishing and tourism.

Deforestation: booklist: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/17/further-reading-the-best-books-about-deforestation?utm_term=RWRpdG9yaWFsX0Jvb2ttYXJrcy0xODExMTg%3D&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Bookmarks&CMP=bookmarks_email

Electric cars:

19^th March 2018, Adam Vaughan: the Green Alliance says 2040 is too far off for the ban on new petrol/diesel cars, and propose 2030. This would cut the gap in meeting the UK target by 85%, or 98m tonnes of CO2. It would save up to £6.63bn a year in oil imports.

This would also boost sales of electric cars, and the UK could even become a net exporter. A fifth of the electric cars sold in Europe in 2016 were manufactured at Nissan’s Sunderland plant.

BMW will make its electric Mini at Oxford, but Jaguar land Rover production will go to Austria.

In 2016, transport overtook energy as the single biggest source of CO2 emissions in the UK (due to changes in power stations) – but the taste for bigger cars has meant that emissions from the average new car rose...

23rd Jan 2018. Adam Vaughan: Provided divers shift charging to off- peak times, the grid will be able to cope. Aurora Energy Research predicts growth of electric cars from about 120,000 today, to 10m by 2035, and then over 17m by 2040. Tariffs need to be offered to get drivers to use ‘smart’ charging (e.g. not on returning from work!). 0.5GW of peak demand would be added, which is not significant. Taking advantage of cheaper charging times could halve the driver’s electricity bill, at £110 a year (as against £280 for charging at peak times).

Energy: 17^th July 2018 - the shift to renewables has slowed down, declining by 7% in 2017 (to $318bn), while oil and gas production investment went up by 4% (helped by rising prices). Adam Vaughan.

Emissions Trading schemes: https://leftfootforward.org/2019/04/brexit-is-an-opportunity-to-improve-on-the-eus-failed-emissions-trading-system-but-the-tories-arent-taking-it/?mc_cid=06e3915a5d&mc_eid=dea8023bf6

Environmental Performance Indicators: link: https://epi.envirocenter.yale.edu/epi-country-report/USA

Fishing: worried by the pro-Brexit anger of our fishermen, I’m not sure what the best view is of the common fisheries policy etc, but here is a charity/NGO that seems to me to have the best line: http://www.bluemarinefoundation.com/about/what-we-do/

Forests: frightening piece by Simon Jenkins Guardian 27^th April 2018:

Forestry Commission has a partnership with a commercial body Forest Holidays, which has been allowed to build chalets in Mortimer Forest outside Ludlow. The agreement allows the company to expand as much as it wishes, and there are clauses which stop publicity. The chalets are very expensive to rent, and part of the profit goes to the Forestry Commission.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/27/privatisation-forests-forestry-commission-commercial-development

And Network Rail is cutting down up to 10million trees alongside railway lines... during the nesting season!

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/29/millions-of-trees-at-risk-in-secretive-network-rail-felling-programme

Fossil Fuel Divestment:

22^nd Jan 2018: Lloyds of London plans to stop investing in coal companies. Insurance is one of the industries worst affected by hurricanes, wildfires and flooding in recent years. Lloyds offers a marketplace for almost 90 syndicates of other insurers (it doesn’t underwrite operations directly). Big insurance companies have moved £15bn away from coal in the past two years, says the Unfriend Coal network (NGOs, Greenpeace, 380.org). AXA has dropped companies with at least 30% coal, and Church of England uses 10% as criterion. Analysis by ClimateWise shows that the ‘protection gap’ – the difference between the costs of natural disasters and the amount insured had quadrupled to $100bn a year since the 1980s.

Fracking:

1^st Feb 2018, letter from David Smythe Emeritus prof of geophysics, Univ of Glasgow: Ken Cronin (Letters, 17 January), of the UK onshore fossil fuel trade body, responds to your editorial on fracking(10 January) by claiming that imported natural gas has “higher [environmental] emissions” than the gas “beneath our feet”. This claim is akin to the 40-a-day smoker with lung cancer telling their doctor that only the last two or three cigarettes of the day do the damage, and promising to stick to 37 a day. There is a global gas glut. The UK is well supplied by imports from stable countries, the price of which is predicted to remain low and stable for years to come. So no additional bridging supply is needed while the 23m UK households that depend on gas are weaned off their fossil fuel addiction over the next one or two decades.

The UK shale basins are far more complex geologically than in the US, and a fully fledged drilling industry will need to be developed from scratch – Lancashire is not Texas. This will require several billion pounds of capital investment, the training of several thousand technicians and engineers, and will take at least a decade to create. UK shale gas will probably cost around double that of US gas. The Committee on Climate Change report only sanctioned shale gas development on condition, among others, that indigenous gas replaces imports and does not add to it. Mr Cronin should tell us whether he favours a tariff on gas imports, an import ban or else a subsidy, to make UK shale gas competitive.

26^th Jan 2018, Adam Vaughan: extra hurdle for fracking as Greg Clark, business secretary, says an application by Third Energy to begin fracking until it had completed a financial resilience assessment, which would include being able to clean up the site afterwards. The company has already met delays because its accounts were not in order. It has overdue accounts for the period ending 31^st December 2016 (due last September). There are 13 other technical tests the company has to pass as well. Cuadrilla and Ineos will now have to go through these financial checks as well. Third Energy wants to start fracking at Kirby Misperton. John Dewar resigned as director this week, and the company’s acting chief executive Keith Cochrane was a director of Carillion which went into liquidation January 20128.

Glaciers:

19^th July 2018, Ashifa Kassam, Toronto (Guardian): Hundreds of glaciers in Canada’s high Arctic are shrinking – using satellite imagery in new research 1,700 glaciers on Ellesmere Island were examined. Journal of Glaciology last month showed they had shrunk about 650 sq miles over 16 years – i.e. a loss of about 6%. A previous study showed slower rate of loss. Average temperature in Ellesmere Island rose by 3.6C between 1948 and 2016. Between 1995 and 2016 there was a ‘sudden increase in warming’ with temperatures rising about 0.78C per decade.

Global warming;

3^rd April 2019. Guardian, Leyland Cecco, Toronto: Canada is warming faster than the rest of the world (apart from the Arctic): Global temperatures have increased by 0.8C since 1948, Caanada has seen an increase of 1.7C (more than double the global average). In the Arctic, temperatures are up by 2.3C. Melting ice (sea ice and glaciers) is leading to positive feedback – which may be affecting Canada too. The country is mired in political battle over climate: Trudeau tried to put taxes on fossil fuels, but four provinces have refused to co-operate, so he may impose taxes. Conservatives say they will reverse the policy if they win the next election.

The global impacts of rising temperatures—including more hurricanes, sea-level rise and drought—will probably sound familiar. But a temperature change of just a couple of degrees can also have dramatic effects locally. Studies have shown that a single-degree rise in temperature can increase local levels of air pollution, allow disease-carrying ticks to expand into an area, cause the local extinction of native species and even cause enough heat stress to increase rates of mental illness. (Ecowatch Sep 2018)

Category 6 superstorms –highest category now is 5, but now there is from 5% - 8% more water vapour in the atmosphere than a generation ago, and warmer global temperatures and warmer oceans, and dry conditions in the parts of the world where superstorms originate means it is only a matter of time before one hits the US. Jeff Nesbit, Guardian 17^th Sep 2018. Author of ‘This is the Way the World Ends’ (pub 25^th Sep.)

Glyphosate:

Unearthed reveals lobbying by farmers is funded by ‘Red Flag Consulting’

https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/10/17/monsanto-red-flag-glyphosate-roundup-eu/

GM: Nov 2018 worrying article on GM potatoes:

https://www.ecowatch.com/gmo-potato-simplot-health-fears-2618087647.html

Hydrogen cars: Jan 20^th Oliver Franklin-Wallis: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/20/hydrogen-cars-hugo-spowers-future

Insects: (Damian Carrington G 2^nd April 2019):

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/01/insects-have-no-place-to-hide-from-climate-change-study-warns Study published in Global Change Biology.

Woodlands and open grasslands are both affected – woodlands could have protected insects from rising temperatures. Aphids are emerging a month earlier, and birds are laying eggs a week earlier. Animals then become ‘out of synch’ with their prey. On farms, aphids are attacking younger plants because they come earlier, and young plants have not developed immunity.

In farmland, however, insects and birds were emerging later in the spring – perhaps because of changes to habitat: loss of wild areas, and changing crop types, along with declining food availability.

Populations of birds that rely on insects fell by 13% across Europe from 1990-2015, and by 28% in Denmark (which was a case study).

Researchers are increasingly concerned about dramatic drops in populations of insects, which underpin much of nature. In February it was said that these falls could lead to a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, and in March there was further evidence of widespread loss of pollinating insects in recent decades in Britain.

Other studies, from Germany and Puerto Rico, have shown falling numbers in the last 25 to 35 years. Another showed butterflies in the Netherlands had declined by at least 84% over the last 130 years.

In February, when the weather was unusually warm, rooks were nesting, ladybirds mating and migratory swallows appearing all a month ahead of schedule.

Kenya, 15th Feb, Jonathan Watts: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/14/kenyas-erin-brockovich-defies-harassment-to-bring-anti-pollution-case-to-courts problem of lead pollution from a metal plant – the Center for Justice, Governance, and Environmental Action has forced closure of the plant in Mombasa, and is now seeking compensation and a clean-up. This could be a landmark case for environmental groups across Africa. Led by Phyllis Omido who was co-winner of the Goldman environmental prize in 2015 with Berta Caceres, a Honduran activist who was murdered a year later. The EPZ refinery was closed, and two other companies are being pursued in a class action.

Meat production and global warming.

Increasing awareness of veganism, some of which is based on research led by Joseph Poore, Oxford Uni, published in May 2018: ‘A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet earth. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car.’

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/dec/31/year-of-the-vegan-record-numbers-sign-up-for-veganuary

Monbiot, George:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/14/earth-death-spiral-radical-action-climate-breakdown (see also activism: Extinction Rebellion, and climate change) ‘Only one of the life support systems on which we depend – soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything else to slide.’ Radical change can be brought about quickly, as when the US joined WWII in 1941. Control by oligarchs is the main problem – says prof. Kevin MacKay. Even the IPPR wants ‘growth’! As Jason Hickel points out: while 50bn tonnes of resources used per year is roughly the limit the earth’s systems can tolerate, the world is already consuming 70bn tonnes – and at current rates of growth this will rise to 180bn tonnes by 2050.

New Zealand: not the pristine environment we might think!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/18/decades-of-denial-major-report-finds-new-zealands-environment-is-in-serious-trouble

Negative Emissions Technology:

28^th Jan 2018, Observer, Robin McKie: (link to follow...) talks of a project set up by Climeworks, which extracts (only) 900 tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere, and uses it in greenhouses to help grow plants.

There will be a report this week from Natural Environment Research Council on techniques for removing CO2 from the atmosphere. These include burying biomass and burying the CO2 that results, adding fertilizers to the sea to boost the growth of carbon-absorbing blooms, crushing and spreading rocks over fields and beaches (‘enhanced weathering’), and planting new forests.

But ocean fertilisation could create too many algae, and increase acidification; ‘beccs’ (biomass energy with carbon capture) would require vast amounts of trees at a time when we need more land for food – and CCS is as yet underdeveloped; enhanced weathering would require large amounts of power to crush and transport the rocks.

Other (myself included!) argue that developing negative emissions technology would be used as a pretext so that ‘we’ could go on burning fossil fuel. The problem is urgent, and such explorations remove the incentive to get to the bottom of it, viz, cutting emissions!

1^st Feb 2018 (Damian Carrington and others): A report from Southampton University says that methods of sucking CO2 from the atmosphere would not work on a large enough scale to help beat global warming. The IPCC had included this method as a way of meeting the Paris targets. It calculated that about 12bn tonnes of CO2 a year would need to be captured and stored after 2050 – about a third of all emissions today. John Shepherd, an author of the report says there is no silver bullet. ‘NETs are very interesting but they are not an alternative to deep and rapid emissions reduction. These remain the safest and most reliable options.’ NETs include tree planting, but this raises the problem of having enough land to grow the food needed for a growing world population.

Nuclear power:

13^th April 2019. Link to Wired article on replacing nuclear with renewables: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/hitachi-nuclear-uk-anglesey-wylfa

3^rd April 2019, Guardian, Rajeev Syal. Astonishing figures for cost of maintaining and decommissioning nuclear-powered submarines: storage of obsolete subs has cost £500m. MoD has twice as many in storage (20) as in operation (10), and has not disposed of 20 decommissioned since 1980 (National Audit Office report 3^rd April). They are being stored in Plymouth and Rosyth, while arrangements are made to safely dispose of their radioactive waste... Seven have been in storage longer than they were in service. The estimated overall cost of disposing of a submarine is £96m.

MoD puts total cost of maintaining and disposing of them all at £7.5bn over the next 120 years...

None of them have been ‘defuelled’ since 2004, when regulators said the facilities did not meet required standards.Meg Hillier, chair of the public accounts committee, said there was dismal lack of progress, and had been promised for more than 20 years.

Letter 5^th April 2018 from Prof Andy Sterling and Dr Phil Johnstone, SPRU, University of Sussex, challenging Mike Clancy of UK Nuclear Industry Council: why do they, and unions generally, support nuclear and not renewables. SPRU have reported on the way the civil nuclear power industry supports nuclear submarines – despite this not being economic.

See: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/newsandevents/2016/publications/submarines

Plans for a new nuclear power station on Anglesey have been delayed because of concerns about the effect of the large-scale building etc on rare sea birds, especially the tern – sandwich, arctic and common terns are protected under the EU habitats and birds directive. About a fifth of the UK’s sandwich terns live nearby. (Adam Vaughan 10^th April 2018). The proposal is for a twin reactor to replace the former magnox one at Wylfa. To be built by Horizon Nuclear power, a subsidiary of Hitachi the power station will generate 3GW – enough for 7% of the UK’s electricity. The power station has already cost £2bn – and £1m is being spent every day on it. It is likely the concerns about the birds will only delay and not prevent construction.

Amazing article by Adam Vaughan, 22^nd Jan (posted on Twitter) describing the lengths that are being gone to, in order to bury highly radioactive waste safely – for ‘hundreds of thousands of years’. Waste mixed with resins, in steel containers, forms insoluble blocks; these placed inside copper and steel sarcophagus; deep underground would be tombs of buffer materials to soak up radiation and minimise water seepage, around each container; this all buried hundreds of metre down under rock, and storage tunnels filled with concrete...

Philosophy:

Timothy Morton: Being Ecological.

(1) Review by PD Smith:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/20/being-ecological-timothy-morton-review - calls for a paradigm shift in our relation to the world, saying it is counterproductive to deluge readers with scary facts about global warming – it’s ‘guilt-inducing’… Our scientific age is characterized by an epistemological gulf between objects and data. Critical of a scientistic approach - the world can be grasped only by moving to a viewpoint that is experiential and reflexive. ‘being ecological includes a sense of my weird inclusion in what I’m experiencing.’

(2) And from another book (Humankind) reviewed by Stuart Jeffries; our thinking became binary (especially when we developed agriculture) and this led to ‘a Severing.’ ‘Our task is to become haunted beings again, possessed by a spectral sense of our connectedness to everything on this planet.’ He adheres to ‘object-oriented ontology, the argument that nothing has privileged status’.(*) We must learn to have solidarity with non-humans – but how? One way, Morton suggests, is to abandon the anthropocentric idea that thinking is the leading communication mode. “Brushing against, licking or irradiating are access modes as valid (or as invalid) as thinking,” he writes. He draws on Buddhism, and anarchism (especially Kropotkin). He writes of the importance of ‘kindness’ (though it seems more like the co-operation of ants etc which is instinctive rather than an ethical position).

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/23/humankind-solidarity-with-nonhuman-people-by-timothy-morton-review

(*) object-oriented ontology, or OOO, which holds that every being, including humans, can only ever grasp the world in its own limited ways. (In other words, we will never know what flies know, and vice versa).

(3) An earlier book was ‘Dark Ecology’ and perhaps his ‘most discussed book’: ‘Ecology Without Nature’…

See an earlier article on Morton, dealing especially with anthropocentrism:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/15/timothy-morton-anthropocene-philosopher by Alex Blasdel

The Anthropocene idea is generally attributed to the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stoermer, who started popularising the term in 2000. Crutzen set out the idea in Nature in 2002.

In the Anthropocene, Morton says, we must wake up to the fact that we never stood apart from or controlled the non-human things on the planet, but have always been thoroughly bound up with them. We can’t even burn, throw or flush things away without them coming back to us in some form, such as harmful pollution. Our most cherished ideas about nature and the environment – that they are separate from us, and relatively stable – have been destroyed.

The chief reason that we are waking up to our entanglement with the world we have been destroying, Morton says, is our encounter with the reality of hyperobjects – the term he coined to describe things such as ecosystems and black holes, which are “massively distributed in time and space” compared to individual humans. Hyperobjects might not seem to be objects in the way that, say, billiard balls are, but they are equally real, and we are now bumping up against them consciously for the first time. Global warming might have first appeared to us as a bit of funny local weather, then as a series of independent manifestations (an unusually torrential flood here, a deadly heatwave there), but now we see it as a unified phenomenon, of which extreme weather events and the disruption of the old seasons are only elements.

See another book of his: Hyperobjects… hyperobjects, in their unwieldy enormity, alert us to the absolute boundaries of science, and therefore the limits of human mastery. Science can only take us so far. This means changing our relationship with the other entities in the universe – whether animal, vegetable or mineral – from one of exploitation through science to one of solidarity in ignorance… we can’t transcend our limitations or our reliance on other beings. We can only live with them.

If we give up the delusion of controlling everything around us, we might refocus ourselves on the pleasure we take in other beings and life itself. Enjoyment, Morton believes, might be the thing that turns us on to a new kind of politics. “You think ecologically tuned life means being all efficient and pure,” the tweet pinned to the top of his Twitter timeline reads. “Wrong. It means you can have a disco in every room of your house.”

“Don’t hide under a rock, for heaven’s sake,” Morton had said to me at one point. “Go out in the street and start making any and as many kinds of political affiliations with as many kinds of beings, human or otherwise, that you possibly can, with a view to creating a more non-violent and just, for everybody, ecological world.”

Critics say he doesn’t understand contemporary science (and is mis-using ideas from quantum physics etc – not the only one?), that his philosophy wouldn’t be taken seriously in an academic context (is that a criticism?!), or from the left that he talks about ‘humans’ damaging the planet, while the main problem is with the wealthy white western capitalists (there’s a point!).

And: His PhD thesis, which is recognised as an important contribution to the study of Romanticism, showed that the vegetarianism of Percy and Mary Shelley was intimately entwined with their politics and art.

Palm Oil: 8^th April 2019:

Environmental groups want a company removed from the London Stock Exchange’s investment index of environmentally friendly companies – because of tis environmental damage, plus a string of allegations of corruption and unsustainable business practices. Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) is on the FTSE4Good indices. Two of its senior executives have been arrested, and it has been accused of polluting a lake in Indonesia. It also produces palm oil and therefore causes deforestation

Plastics:

A proposal from SumOfUs.org

The Basel Convention is a legally binding agreement on cross-border waste disposal signed by almost every country in the world, including the European Union. With one small tweak, proposed by Norway, countries exporting their plastic rubbish would have to get the prior informed consent of the country receiving it -- so developing countries can keep shiploads of plastic pollution from landing on their shores.

But getting all 190 governments on board by May will be no easy task, especially with plastic industry lobbyists desperate to keep the status quo. That’s why we need this campaign right now.

Sign the petition to your government, and all Parties to the Basel Convention, to vote for Norway’s Proposals to amend Annexes II, VIII and IX to the Basel Convention.

https://www.ciel.org/plastic-waste-proposal-basel-convention/

8^th April 2019. (Fiona Harvey) According to the Plastic Rivers report, from Earthwatch Europe and Plastic Oceans UK:

Plastic bottles are the most prevalent form of plastic pollution, followed by food wrappers and then cigarette butts. Plastic bags only comprise 1%, showing the bans etc have had an impact. About 80% of plastic rubbish flows into the oceans from rivers. We need to focus on cleaning up rivers, some say, while we deal with our dependence on throwaway plastic. The report looked at macroplastic in fresh water, and excluded fishing gear (which RSPCA says kills birdlife). It also excluded items from farming and industry, to concentrate on consumers’ contributions.

8^th April 2019.Links to Greenpeace action on plastics, especially with reference to Sainsbury’s:

] Greenpeace: Sainsbury's April Fools
[2] Greenpeace names and shames Sainsbury's in plastic packaging spat
[3] Greenpeace: 'online, offline this April fools is not going well for Sainsburys'
[4] Greenpeace: supermarket plastic league table

April 2019: Global Citizen: Plastic waste is a scourge on the natural environment, and innovation is absolutely key when it comes to ensuring we dispose of our waste sustainably. The UN’s Global Goals include calls to protect life on land and life below water (Goal No. 14 and 15), and to create cities and communities that are sustainable (Goal No.11). Join the movement by taking action here to support the Global Goals.

Tesco supermarket has launched a trial for an innovative recycling scheme specifically focusing on plastics that can’t be recycled on the kerb.

Soft plastics like crisp packets, plastic bags, and pet food pouches generally can’t be recycled by local authorities — blocking efforts to hit 100% recycling rates.

But the supermarket has now partnered with Swindon-based recycling specialist Recycling Technologies to help tackle the problem.

From this week, according to Tuesday's announcement, Tesco is actively encouraging shoppers to bring their non-recyclable plastics to collection points at 10 stores across Swindon and Bristol.

And if the trial goes well, the initiative could be rolled out across the whole of the UK.

The plan is basically to create a closed loop for plastic production. The soft plastics returned to the store will be converted back into oil by Recycling Technologies, and then that oil can be used in the production of new plastics.

According to Sarah Bradbury, Tesco’s director of quality, the technology “could be the final piece of the jigsaw for the UK plastic recycling industry.”

Bradbury added that the initiative will help the store reach its target to have all of its packaging 100% recyclable by 2025.

And environmental campaigners are on board with the initiative too.

Paula Chin, WWF UK’s sustainable materials specialist, said: “It’s great to see Tesco running this innovative trial, looking for new ways to make it easier for customers to recycle plastic materials which would usually go in their waste bins.”

She added: “While we can all do our bit by reducing the plastic we buy and embracing reusable items, we need producers, businesses, and governments to face their responsibilities too.”

The stores involved in the trial are: Bristol Lime Trees Road Superstore, Yate Extra, Bristol Brislington Extra, Bristol Staple Hill Metro, Keynsham Superstore, Bristol East Extra, Cirencester Metro — Farrell Close, Cirencester Extra, Swindon Extra, and Tetbury Superstore.

The announcement is a step in the right direction for achieving the goals set out in the UK Plastics Pact — signed by dozens of companies in the UK in April 2018 to help crack down on plastic pollution.

Tesco was one of the supermarkets that signed, along with Aldi, Asda, Lidl, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, and Waitrose. In fact, combined, those that signed the pact are responsible for some 80% of the plastic packing on products sold in UK supermarkets.

And one of the four targets outlined in the pact is to make 100% of plastic packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable.

According to the most recent government data, from 2017, the UK recycling rate for waste from households is about 46% — still short of the EU target to recycle at least 50% of household waste by 2020.

For packaging waste specifically, plastic falls far short of most other recyclable materials. In 2017, according to the data, about 46% of plastic packaging was recycled; compared to 71% of metal, 79% of paper, and 67% of glass.

But while individuals and local authorities can also play their part in making sure we dispose of our waste sustainably, there is also an ongoing call from campaigners for supermarkets and other businesses to take greater responsibility for disposing of the plastic waste they’re putting into the market.

Supermarkets in the UK currently pay less towards the proper collection and disposal of plastic waste that in any other country in the EU, according to a 2018 Guardian report. Instead, taxpayers pay 90% of the total cost.

The plastic pact, and the actions that are coming as a result, is great — but campaigners have also consistently said that voluntary action isn’t enough, and that we need legal enforcements in place to hold businesses accountable to their pledges.

Julian Kirby, from Friends of the Earth, said of the pact that it must be “accompanied by government measures to ensure that everyone plays their part and these targets are actually met.

1. Since the 1950s, around 8.3 billion tons of plastic have been produced worldwide.

2. In some parts of the world, using plastic is already illegal.

3. 73% of beach litter worldwide is plastic.

4. A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute.

5. Worldwide, about 2 million plastic bags are used every minute.

6. 90% of plastic polluting our oceans is carried by just 10 rivers.

7. Plastic is killing more than 1.1 million seabirds and animals every year.

8. The average person eats 70,000 microplastics each year.

9. The average time that a plastic bag is used for is … 12 minutes. (Then it takes up to a thousand years to decompose!)

10. Over the past 50 years, world plastic production has doubled.

From: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/plastic-pollution-facts/

Polar bears eat plastic when they scavenge on rubbish dumps... https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/35805

Greenpeace has carried out a survey of supermarkets, ranking them by how much they do about plastics:

Best is Iceland, scoring 58% for reducing single-use plastic, 47% for eliminating non-recyclable plastic, 49% for influencing suppliers, and 84% for transparency

Worst is Sainsbury’s, 31%..... 15%.... 36%.... 61%.... https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/supermarket-score-new-plastic-league-table/

Sea salt has microplastics in it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/08/sea-salt-around-world-contaminated-by-plastic-studies The most common type of plastic they found was polyethylene terephthalate, the material used to make plastic bottles.

The health impact of ingesting plastic is not known. Scientists have struggled to research the impact of plastic on the human body, because they cannot find a control group of humans who have not been exposed.

26^th January 2018. Damian Carrington. Plastic has been found to cause disease in coral reefs. 89% of the corals examined that were fouled by plastic were found to be diseased. Scientists examined 125,000 corals across the Asia-Pacific region. At least 8 million tonnes of plastic are dumped in the ocean every year. Corals are not only home to a diverse range of life, but they are vital for at least 275 million people who depend on them for food, coastal protection from storms, and income from tourism. Plastic was found on a third of the reefs examined between 2011 and 2014. They did not assess microplastics... Diseases found include: skeletal eroding band disease, white syndromes and black band disease. These diseases spread across a colony once there is infection. Plastic cuts the living creatures in the coral, and blocks out sunlight. Plastic pollution is estimated as likely to increase to 16bn pieces by 2025 (an increase of 40%) unless action is taken. Repeated bleaching is now the ‘new normal’ according to Prof Terry Hughes of James Cook University’s centre for coral reef studies.

Population growth – Paul Ehrlich strikes again! https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/22/collapse-civilisation-near-certain-decades-population-bomb-paul-ehrlich - ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’ – to start with we must: ‘make modern contraception and back-up abortion available to all and give women full equal rights, pay and opportunities with men.’ This will take a long time to reduce the world’s population, which he estimates should be 1.5 – 2 billion, or 5.6 billion fewer than at present...

However, a letter 28^th March, from Prof. John MacInnes argues Ehrlich’s views are ‘discredited’ – ‘the birth rate in the developing world is now lower than it was in rich countries a few decades ago. ... the carrying capacity of our planet ... is almost certainly well above the likely peak of population that will be reached in the second half of this century. Reducing the vast global inequalities in energy consumption will do far more for the environment than the ultimately racist idea that the poor have too many children.’

Recycling:

8^th April 2019 (Severin Carrell, Scotland Editor Guardian) – disposable cups and the ‘latte levy’ (a charge on single-use cups)...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/07/is-the-future-compostable-scotland-greens-argue-as-sales-soar Vegware has been doing very well from compostable food cups and biodegradable food boxes, but questions have been raised by Scottish Greens about the practicality of composting coffee cups etc: they need to be disposed of in specialist composting plants, or in council food composting bins at home... The CEO of Vegware retorts that there are many other sources of single-use plastic such as sandwich packaging, home takeaway deliveries, lids and stirrers on coffee cups: it would be better to increase the cost of landfill. Supermarkets pay £91.35 a tonne (in Scotland?).High costs would make producers avoid waste.

Vegware is proposing closed loop contracts, where it supplies its products to businesses and then disposes of them. But this only covers Scotland and south-west England. Commercial composting covers only 38% of UK postcodes. FoE Scotland chief executive Richard Dixon suggests a lower ‘latte levy’ for disposable cups.

FROM CPRE EMAIL APPEAL FOR FUNDS 31^ST March 2019

At this late stage, powerful vested interests are fighting to derail the deposit return system and water it down. They want the government to agree to the option of a restricted system, limited to smaller drinks containers of 750ml or less – even though recent research suggests that larger bottles could make up as much as 58% of littered drinks containers.

We must make sure the government does not bow to industry pressure for a restricted system. It would mean that billions of bottles will continue polluting our rivers, beaches, fields, parks and hedgerows for years to come. And industry would once again be able to avoid taking responsibility for the mess they create.

Nothing less than an ALL-IN system, that includes drinks containers of ALL sizes and materials, will truly combat the growing problem of litter in our countryside.

Renewables:

Scottish Power to give up fossil fuels: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45873785 and to use 100% wind power

Solar power:

April 2019, (Daniel Boffey, Guardian). Dutch engineers are building the world’s largest archipelago of islands made up of sun-tracking solar panels. Islands are also being built in China the Uk and Japan. In north Holland there will be 73,500 panels which can move to follow the light, and can re-position themselves in bad weather. Enough energy should be generated to power 10,000 households. Only half of the reservoir will be covered, to avoid damaging the ecosystem. The designer is Floating Solar.

24^th June 2018, (James Tapper). Community Energy England in its 2018 report says that the number of people getting electricity off-grid is not increasing any more. Cuts to subsidies for solar panels and a ‘hostile planning approach’ are behind the decline in interest. Grassroots schemes can cut bills considerably, but are risky to set up – nearly 30% of community energy groups saw some of their schemes fail last year. Fossil fuel subsidies are more than 30 times higher than the green energy subsidies which were pegged at £100m by 2019. Community energy groups were growing by 30 a year until 2015, but last year only one was formed. There are 228, serving 48,000 members. Barnsley has a scheme which helps people at risk of fuel poverty, has installed batteries and solar panels. One customer’s bill dropped from £350 to £185.

28^th Feb 2018 (Adam Vaughan, Guardian). There has been a ‘solar rush’ as prices have gone down by 86% from 2009 – 2017. From 100MW in 1992 there is now (2016) 300GW across the world. At one point last summer solar provided more power in Britain than nuclear... A new crystal may mean another breakthrough: perovskite, which is abundant in the earth’s crust, can improve the efficiency of PV cells. It captures the energy from a different part of the spectrum to silicon, so a layer could be put on top and would add 20% more power. It is light, so can be used for windows. It doesn’t need heating to high temperatures to process (silicon needs 1,000C). Saule Technologies and Oxford PV are working on it as there is more to be done before it is usable.

Trees:

31^st Dec 2018. Willow trees and flood mitigation, also biomass:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/30/flood-defences-cumbria-how-willow-proved-to-be-a-natural-defender

Network Rail and tree-felling (from Change.org petition).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/28/report-urges-network-rail-rethink-scale-line-side-tree-felling?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR1vEdTfxnRRcIJ5SIYlWYg-MkU_7TZfAbXrJPDJHtZSSROESivlB7Dfauc

http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2013/biomass-faq-2/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/31/biomass-burning-misguided-say-climate-experts
[1] http://www.stobartgroup.co.uk/stobart-group/stobart-energy
[2]
https://theenergyst.com/stobart-track-deliver-2-million-tonnes-biomass-per-year/
[3] Biofuel/Biomass – Stobartrail http://www.stobartrail.com/item/network-rail-s-vegetation-management-specialists-2
Network Rail 5G - 'Ministers now looking at “future proofing” rail connectivity to help pave the way for a 5G rollout'.https://www.gov.uk/government/news/better-mobile-and-wi-fi-connectivity-for-rail-passengers

Trees in Sheffield:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/feb/25/for-the-chop-the-battle-to-save-sheffields-trees

War and its impact on the environment:

1^st Nov 2018, Michael McCarthy, author of The Moth Snowstorm – Nature and Joy: damage to nature is usually a secondary consideration – except for agent orange spread on 12,000 sq miles of forest in the Vietnam war, or the mass oil pollution from the Sea Island terminal in Kuwait during the Gulf war 1991. In the second world war 60 million people or 3% of the world population (2.3 billion at the time) died... but the amount of shipping sunk in the battle of the Atlantic was the equivalent of about 250 Brent Spar oil rigs (Greenpeace forced Shell not to sink it but move it for breaking up). Professor Tim Birkenhead of Sheffield University, in the journal British Birds, suggests the war badly affected breeding of guillemots on Skomer Island off the west coast of Wales. He estimates there were 100,000 individuals in 1934, but only 4,856 in 1963, a reduction of 95%. Now the numbers have gone up to 23,746. The worst decline was between 1940 and 1946, and oil pollution is the most likely cause. The ocean is far less resilient than we have thought.

Waste and recycling:

31^st Dec 2018. Food waste: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/31/food-waste-chief-to-target-scandal-of-250m-binned-uk-meals

250m meals a year = 100,000 tonnes of food is sent to generate electricity from waste, for anaerobic digestion, or for animal feed – even though it is still edible...

43,000 tonnes of surplus food is redistributed from retailers and food manufacturers.

19^th Dec. 2018: government has come up with new rules on waste etc.:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/resources-and-waste-strategy-for-england

Guardian editorial: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/18/the-guardian-view-on-recycling-a-system-in-need-of-deep-cleaning

Wildfires. 30^th June 2018.

Fires are burning on the moors near Manchester, and hundreds of fire-fighters are trying to deal with them. Experts are warning that more fires are likely in future as the climate warms. Guillermo Rein, prof of fire science at Imperial College says fires will be more frequent and more severe, especially in northern Europe, including the UK and Ireland. Dr Richard Payne of Uni of York agrees, and warns that such fires will exacerbate climate change as peat stores masses of CO2.

Prof Susan Page of Uni of Leicester says the peat fires release toxic chemicals and small particulates with long-term health implications, especially for children. (Matthew Taylor).

Wind power:

Nov 2018. Letter on amount of space needed for wind power – surely needs refuting? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/14/the-role-of-renewables-in-the-uk-energy-mix

‘To replace the UK’s current nuclear generating capacity with offshore wind turbines like those planned for Triton Knoll, and at similar spacing, would require a sea area equivalent to a 1.6km wide band around the entire coastline of the UK. This assumes perfect power storage, loss-free transmission and an optimistic through-life load-factor of 27%: real figures would almost certainly increase the required sea area. Is the UK population ready for the environmental impact such a programme would create?’
Tim Chittenden
Past president, The Nuclear Institute

Jan 22^nd 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/22/fears-for-future-of-uk-onshore-wind-power-despite-record-growth

Observer Business leader, 29^th April 2018:

The UK went without coal for three days this week, and it was wind turbines that kept the lights on. Public support for offshore windfarms is 83%, onshore: 76%, solar: 87%. There are subsidies for offshore, but no support for onshore and solar. Energy minister is Claire Perry, and she says she will ‘look at’ more onshore windfarms in Scotland and Wales. UK is leading – GE will test its new 12MW turbine here (the world’s most powerful). Onshore windfarms are significantly cheaper, and they could be built without consumers paying any subsidy and for the same price as new gas power plants. They can also be built quickly (unlike nuclear!).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/22/fears-for-future-of-uk-onshore-wind-power-despite-record-growth

Wolves:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/08/wolves-scotland-reintroduction-lister-alladale

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/26/harmless-or-vicious-hunter-the-uneasy-return-of-europes-wolves