The green revolution is on its way

The scale of opposition to ecological devastation and the damage caused by fossil fuels is mounting globally to a point where some are now forecasting a “green revolution” coming to a neighbourhood near you soon.

The “super typhoon” that devastated large parts of the Philippines is one among many extreme weather phenomena that are now occurring more frequently as a consequence of the impact on ecosystems of climate change.

Scientists are warning that we should expect many more such weather-related disasters. These in turn are sure to drive on the resistance to reckless policies like the accelerating logging of the Amazon rain forest revealed in the last few days.

Michael Klare, US professor of peace and world security studies, has mapped the global movement against what he calls a “human created, fossil-fuelled apocalypse” in a new book, The Race for What’s Left.

Last May, protesters blocked bulldozers preparing the “re-development” of a small inner-city park into a shopping mall in central Istanbul. This protest had, Klare notes, “the most modest of beginnings”. The anger over a few trees grew into a movement against a state “ruling over people like sultans”, one protester said. Protests were held in 70 cities across the country.

While the Turkish upheavals hit the headlines, the massive effects of “airpocalyses” and environmental damage in China have been largely hidden. In October 2012, 200 poor farmers blocked a road in the city of Ningbo near Shanghai to halt the construction of a huge petro-chemical facility. Students joined the protest. Eventually the government backed down. 

The issue of nuclear power has ignited protests which across continents. After Fukushima, a quarter of a million people demonstrated against nuclear power in Germany’s main cities. In Japan itself, 170,000 marched against the re-starting of the nuclear reactors in July 2012.

There is a growing anti-carbon movement across north America. In the 2013 elections, three cities in Colorado voted to ban or place moratoriums on fracking within their borders. 

In Britain, anti-fracking groups such as the Extreme Energy Action Network have created on-line resources which track the widespread nature of the movement and helps people link up easily.

Klare concludes that a green energy revolution may well erupt in your neighbourhood “as part of humanity’s response to the greatest danger we have ever faced”. He notes that a “green revolution” is likely to erupt spontaneously and spread like wildfire to different countries.

Klare mourns the fact that the US-global energy crisis of 1979 did not lead to big investment in alternative energy sources by Jimmy Carter and subsequent presidents. Instead the last three decades saw military intervention by the US, UK and France, backed by their allies, in the Middle East.

Finding this strategy deficient, they are now hoping to turn the US (and on a lesser scale) the UK into a “new Saudi Arabia” by way of a disastrous and ecologically-damaging energy policy.

Klare hopes that the green revolution he is forecasting will “ratchet up the pressure for governments to seek broad-ranging systemic transformations of their energy and climate policies”. In this respect, he is basing himself more on hope than expectation as the major economies are moving in the opposite direction.

At the ongoing UN climate change summit in Warsaw, Yeb Sano, the Philippines' lead negotiator who is on hunger strike in solidarity with those affected by the typhoon, attacked the major economies, saying: "We are very concerned. Public announcements from some countries about lowering targets are not conducive to building trust. We must acknowledge the new climate reality and put forward a new system to help us manage the risks and deal with the losses to which we cannot adjust."

Munjurul Hannan Khan, representing the world's 47 least affluent countries, said: "They are behaving irrationally and unacceptably. The way they are talking to the most vulnerable countries is not acceptable. Today the poor are suffering from climate change. But tomorrow the rich countries will be. It starts with us but it goes to them."

That makes Klare’s concept of a “green revolution” not so much a good idea as a practical necessity.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win

ConDemned to a nuclear nightmare

When Japan and Germany decided to halt nuclear power dependency in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, some hoped it was a turning point. But the deal with French and Chinese corporations announced today marks an abrupt end to the dream that nuclear power might be phased out.

Instead, vast amounts of taxpayers’ money is to be handed to French and Chinese state-owned corporations to build a new power station in Somerset and be guaranteed a minimum price for the power it will generate in ten year's time.  

Hinkley Point will become the first new nuclear plant in Europe since Fukushima. That plant continues to leak massively to this day and was the second worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl in 1986. Then, radioactive fallout equivalent to 20 Hiroshima bombs damaged the health of countless people in northern Europe and continues to blight their lives.

The price agreed for power generation at Hinkley is at double the current market rate. This means that the companies are guaranteed longer-term revenues of around £80bn, according to some calculations. A scandal, or what?

The government has agreed to provide some £10bn guarantees to build the power station, thus subsidising nuclear energy at a higher rate than renewables – which are becoming more and more economic.

EDF, which is almost entirely owned by the French state, took over British Energy in 2008-9 and now operates 15 nuclear reactors in the UK. Nuclear expansion received a huge boost after the Blair governments enthusiastically endorsed it.

New Labour’s enthusiasm was matched a few years later by that of former anti-nuclear campaigner George Monbiot, who experienced a strange conversion in 2011 after Fukushima, when he declared himself pro-nuclear and made a vicious attack on the highly respected, Dr Helen Caldicott.

Despite the fact that the nuclear industry is so dangerously accident-prone, the companies chosen by Osborne and his ConDem clique are most obviously the least transparent and least responsible organisations to run such a dangerous industry.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that EDF and CGN will be any less negligent or open to scrutiny than the companies which built and supplied the nuclear reactors behind the Fukushima disaster.

Quite the opposite. Earlier this year, EDF pursued anti-fracking campaigners No Dash For Gas for £5m. EDF dropped its lawsuit eventually but only after the protesters agreed to a permanent injunction against entering EDF sites.

Less well-known is no doubt the fact that the head and deputy head of EDF’s nuclear security operation were jailed for three years each by a French Court in 2011.  They had spied on Greenpeace and hacked into the organisation’s computer systems.

Any misdoings by the Chinese state-owned CGN will virtually untraceable or accountable. Greenpeace campaigner in Hong Kong, Prentice Koo, warns that "Their [Chinese nuclear operators] track record is really bad and that they never give reasons for nuclear accidents.”

He told the BBC’s China reporter that "The nuclear industry in China enjoys such a privileged position that they have to pay only very limited sums in compensation if there is any major incident."

Thus, EDF and its Chinese partners will profit handsomely but are most unlikely to be responsible for any accidents or clean-up. So, cheap power generation, safety, transparency, accountability? You have to be joking.

Going nuclear at vast expense is a desperate act by a country without a sustainable energy strategy. It won’t even help to keep the lights on as it's a decade away. Consumers will pay through the nose and no doubt be asked to foot the eventual bill for storing radioactive waste.

Energy minister Michael Fallon is hailing the process as a “nuclear renaissance”. Actually, it’s more like an expensive nuclear nightmare the ConDems are holding out before us. 

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Japan goes for broke as Fukushima takes it toll

The world is watching as tensions rise in Asia, but attention is not restricted to North Korea. About 650 miles away across the sea, Japan is struggling with the fallout from its own real nuclear hell and has taken a huge financial gamble as a result.

Two years ago, Tokyo Electric Power’s (Tepco) poorly maintained installation at Fukushima was destroyed by a massive earthquake and tsunami. There is a new leakage of contaminated water from underground storage tanks.

It comes after a failure in the cooling system left the plant unable to cool radioactive fuel rods in one of the reactors for about three hours. Last month, a rat chewed through some cables and caused a 29-hour blackout in parts of the plant and led to temperatures in the reactors rising once again.

Other equipment has broken down at the site, including devices to measure levels of radiation in the air, while the company is still finding it difficult to stop groundwater seeping into the damaged reactor buildings.

Attempts to decommission the plant and clean up the surrounding land will continue for many years, but are unlikely to be able to completely remove the radiation. Few of the displaced population will want to return.

A new report from scientists Joseph J. Mangano and Janette D. Sherman shows that in the days following the explosions at the four reactor plants, clouds of the radioisotope iodine-131 floated east over the Pacific Ocean and landed on US West Coast states as well as other Pacific countries.

The levels of that isotope were measured in levels hundreds of times greater than supposedly safe levels. The devastation from the radiation has produced hypothyroidism and increased the likelihood of many other conditions in babies born shortly after the incident in Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California.

The Fukushima disaster led to the closure of several other nuclear plants in Japan, and sent energy prices from all the utility companies soaring. This had a significant negative impact on both the competitiveness of export commodities produced by the corporations operating in the country and on the real incomes of consumers.

So we can be certain that the result of Tepco’s profit-driven decisions to bypass proper maintenance of Fukushima was one of the key causes for the sudden shift in financial policy now introduced by the new governor of the Bank of Japan, Haruhiko Kuroda.

The BoJ has stepped way beyond the failed money-creating quantitative easing it pioneered in the 1990s in attempts to escape the country’s two decades of deflationary slump. Now it is introducing what it calls “quantitative and qualitative monetary easing”.

This new, more desperate programme is intended, in part, to increase export competitiveness by printing more money which will in turn lower the value of the yen. It will see an eye-popping doubling of Japan’s monetary base and a further stretching of credit by more than doubling of the repayment period for government bonds bought by the Bank.

What does it mean? Why are they doing this?

Like all global corporations, those operating in Japan, are in retreat, and haven’t been investing at anything like a sustainable pace.

They’ve been holding on to their profits, knowing that the global economy is contracting, with austerity programmes reducing consumption, and stocks of commodities piling up.

Sony’s profitability lags way behind its South Korean competitor, Samsung, which is Apple’s main competitor (and collaborator) in the mobile phone market. Japan’s car makers are struggling. Mazda said last week that it and its partners’ sales in China, the world’s biggest car market, dropped 21.5% in the three months to March from the same period a year ago.

Nobody much thinks this not-so-new direction from the BoJ will make much impact. If it fails as badly as some are saying it could push the country from years of falling prices – deflation – to hyperinflation.

Japan's combined nuclear and financial crisis is, in its own way, just as threatening as the sabre rattling by its near neighbour.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

The real price of cost cutting

A scientific report on last year’s ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption in Iceland shows that air traffic controllers were right to close European airspace despite loud protests from airline leaders.

Already in a deep crisis, and facing further losses due to the temporary safety shutdown, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, BA chief executive Willie Walsh and boss of Virgin Richard Branson lashed out at the civil aviation authority.

Their bluster revealed much about the dangerous thought processes of the leaders of capitalist enterprises conditioned by the competitive chase for profit-driven ‘economic efficiency’.

Blinded by the bottom-line, O'Leary said at the time that "there was no ash cloud. It was mythical. It's become evident the airspace closure was completely unnecessary... none of us could see a bloody thing." He added: "Some idiot in a basement in the Met Office in London spills coffee over the map of Europe and produces a big black cloud." Walsh portrayed the closure as a "gross over-reaction to a very minor risk" and Branson described the final set of closures as "beyond a joke".

Now, the study by Sigurdur Gislason and colleagues at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik shows the extent of their foolishness. "The particles of explosive ash that reached Europe in the jet stream were especially sharp and abrasive over their entire size range," the scientists say in their study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The very sharp, hard particles put aircraft at risk from abrasion on windows and body and from melting in jet engines," the scientists said. "Concerns for air transport were well grounded."

The scientists found that even after the particles had been mixed continually in water for two weeks, they retained their ability to be dangerous to exposed aircraft surfaces. If the authorities had given in to the airlines’ leaders’ ferocious assault, serious structural damage to aircraft could have occurred if passenger planes had continued to fly.

Tests on the ash revealed that it contained minute particles of glass so sharp and abrasive they could have damaged the exposed surfaces of any aircraft, including the engines and cockpit windows.

The consequences could have been far worse than that for the British Airways 747 which suffered potentially catastrophic damage when it flew through an ash cloud from the 1982 eruption of Mount Galunggung in Indonesia. All four of its engines failed as a result of melted ash on the aircraft's turbine blades, but the pilot managed to restart three of them after descending.

In this case disaster was averted. But the same has not been true for the Mexican Gulf or Japan where bottom-line competitive pressures overrode safety concerns.
BP is trying to pass the responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion to Transocean Ltd, the owner of the rig, and to Halliburton who built it.

At the heart of the failure was the decision to reduce by three quarters the number of concrete collars engineers said were needed to stabilise the drill.
Transocean just gave its top executives bonuses for achieving what it described as the “best year in safety performance in our company’s history”.

Cost-cutting by Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the largest private producer of electricity in the world, was sanctioned by a corrupt and bureaucratic regulatory system. Maintenance programmes were side-stepped for years.

Tepco’s Fukushima nuclear reactor site was destroyed by a once in a hundred years earthquake and the tsunami it triggered, irradiating the people of Japan once again. These three events shed a blinding light on the dangers of allowing the world’s productive capacity to remain in capitalist ownership.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Radiation sickness is not a myth, George

The nuclear industry exudes confidence when setting out its business plans and tying down government subsidies – but when it all goes wrong it’s as if they never studied or understood the dangers of radiation at all.

Workers then give their lives, using chaotic, unscientific, and increasingly desperate measures. Meanwhile populations are terrified, displaced, their homes and possessions abandoned, sometimes for ever, and their livelihoods and education wrecked.

After radiation more than 7.5 million times the legal limit was found in the sea off shore from Fukushima, the leak was finally halted yesterday using, according to reports, “a mixture of sawdust, newspaper, concrete and a type of liquid glass”. A couple of days earlier they tried “cement, an absorbent polymer and rags”.

In a confidential assessment for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, US engineers helping with the crisis in Japan have warned that desperate measures taken were likely to result in further disaster. Seawater pumped to cool waste nuclear rods clogged pipes, so it didn’t reach the rods at all. A build up of hydrogen and oxygen may cause further hydrogen explosions.

This is advanced science? This is safe? This is the energy source that is going to save the planet from global warming?

The same approach dominated the Deepwater Horizon leak in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP and partners were making it up as they went along. Permitting new coal-fired power stations on the basis that “carbon capture and storage” will work eventually, is a further example of this cavalier approach to the health and safety of populations, whilst real science is totally ignored.

Which brings us to that enthusiastic convert to nuclear power, George Monbiot. After declaring that Fukushima actually helped the case for nuclear generation, Monbiot has now turned on campaigners, claiming that there is no scientific evidence that nuclear radiation causes health problems.


Well George, here’s some evidence, published in proceedings
of the Royal Society.

“Scientists working in Ukraine and Israel have found that DNA of children born to members of the Chernobyl clean-up teams has mutated, with a sevenfold increase in the emergence of new DNA strands. This indicates that low doses of radiation can induce multiple changes in the collection of genes that parents pass on to their offspring.”

The report concludes: "The very fact that much lower doses of radiation than previously generally believed can double the number of genomic changes needs serious attention. This is all the more important when a significant proportion of the human population is subjected to increased mutagenic pressure."

The disaster in Fukushima is happening in one of the world’s most densely-populated countries, within 240 kilometres of Greater Tokyo’s 35 million people. We have no idea what the long-term effects of this uncontrolled experiment will be on the human genome.

Campaigners like Monbiot have accepted that with the kind of growth curves demanded by capitalism for its survival (not for our survival), there is a massive energy shortfall and they fear it will be filled by a huge return to coal-fired power, increasing global warming.

They are not wrong there – but their “solution” is absolutely wrong because it’s based on the acceptance of the unacceptable and unsustainable system of production for profit. Monbiot’s is just another version of the There is No Alternative argument.

The solution is to fight for an end to the capitalist growth mania, and remove energy generation from reckless profit-driven corporations. With research and development of alternative energy, we can stop measuring growth by counting profits from sales of commodities. Instead, better health, plenitude, equality and fairness, food for the hungry, land for landless, and a thriving eco-system can be used as the scientific measures of our success.

Penny Cole
Environment editor



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Can capitalism keep the lights on?

The claim that the crisis at the Fukushima power plant is a Japanese problem because they foolishly built nuclear reactors on an earthquake fault is fatally flawed. As climate change brings more and more extreme weather events, there are many other reactors at risk, from inundation by rising sea levels to damage from hurricanes.

What can happen as a result can be seen from the deterioration in the situation at Fukushima, with continual leaks of dangerous radiation into the air, sea and soil. UN nuclear monitors have urged the Japanese government to expand the evacuation zone round the plant from 20km to 40km. The UK and US governments have told their citizens living in Japan to move at least 80km away from the plant.

Emissions of radioactive iodine and caesium, the isotopes most readily absorbed by the human body, are rising towards the levels that followed the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

Austrian researchers using a worldwide network of radiation detectors have found iodine-131 at daily levels 73% of those seen at Chernobyl, and caesium-137 at 60%. Researchers are still trying to assess how many new cancer cases have been caused by caesium released at Chernobyl.

Iodine causes thyroid cancer and caesium builds up in the bones, remaining in the body for up to 30 years. Levels of radioactive iodine in seawater off-shore from the Fukushima plant rose by 25% in one day and are now 4,385 times the legal limit. As the concentration increases, so the affected area spreads. A ban on fishing 20km offshore won’t be enough.

The Japanese government says it will consider the UN’s advice about expanding the exclusion zone, but that it doesn’t seem urgent. Citizens disagree, with big anti-nuclear protests taking place on the streets of Tokyo and other cities.

The plant’s owners, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) have announced that all four reactors will have to be decommissioned and the company cannot survive this disaster. Behind the scenes, the Japanese government is considering nationalising the company.

As a result, Japanese taxpayers will have to cover the cost of decommissioning and the massive clean up operation. Radiation levels around the plant mean crops and milk will not be useable for many years and it could be decades before it is safe for refugees to return to the area.

Many countries have begun to rethink their nuclear future, including Britain according to coalition deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. But without nuclear power, capitalism faces a massive gap in energy supply.

The response is not to immediately invest in renewable energy however – it is the exact opposite. For example, the Spanish government has slashed its subsidies for solar power, as part of its cuts programme and in response to pressure from big fossil-fuel generating companies Iberdrola, Endesa and Gas Natural.

Instead, the rush is backwards, to the dirtiest forms of fossil fuel. The Obama administration has just given the go-ahead for an expansion in coal mining on federal land, enough to raise the country’s annual climate pollution by more than half. And major oil companies, facilitated by governments, are pushing ahead with the polluting process of extracting shale oil from tar sands.

As energy supplies dwindle, the poorest will pay the price, with rising fuel bills and higher prices for basics such as food and clothes. Capitalism is struggling to sustain “business as usual” from the planet’s dwindling energy resources, and now the question is, can it even keep the lights on? There is clearly no solution within the current economic and political framework of production of energy and commodities for profit.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Nuclear regulation in Japan 'amiable fiction'

You would think that of all countries, Japan would be cautious about nuclear power. But no, this is capitalism, stupid! Nothing must be permitted to stand in the way of profits, not even the threat of a catastrophic meltdown.

The consequences of the disaster at the Fukushima plant following the earthquake and tsunami are just coming to light. Radioactive iodine twice the safe level for babies has been found in Tokyo’s water supply, and there are bans on milk and food from a growing contaminated area round the stricken plants.

Three workers are in hospital after being exposed to excess radioactivity when a plume of radioactive steam rose from the plant on Wednesday. Many firefighters are wondering if they have a future at all, in light of what happened to those who fought the fire at Chernobyl. Japan’s farming industry is being devastated as countries including the US, Australia and South Korea, ban imports.

Japan’s prime minister was overheard accusing the plant’s operators Tokyo Electricity and Power Company (TEPCO) of even now not telling the truth about what is happening. TEPCO have a long history of lies and cover-ups, according to Citizens Nuclear Information Center (CNIC), Japan's largest anti-nuclear organisation.

In 2002, TEPCO’s president and four other executives resigned, admitting “dishonest practices”, after covering up the failure of a crucial piece of equipment in all its 17 reactors. In 2007 a TEPCO plant in West Japan was damaged by an earthquake and burned for two hours; hundreds of gallons of radioactive water leaked into the sea. The company claimed there had been just a small fire and covered up the water leak.

The Japanese state is more concerned with marketing TEPCO’s ageing nuclear technology abroad than with regulation. As Philip White, English language spokesman for CNIC, puts it: "There's no true regulation of the Japanese nuclear industry. It's just an amiable fiction."

Writing in the Guardian this week, George Monbiot explained how the Fukushima accident has, bizzarely, converted him to the joys of nuclear power. If old and inadequate reactors can withstand the biggest-ever earthquake with only a low level of leaking radiation, then nuclear power is OK by him, provided certain conditions are met:

“1. Its total emissions – from mine to dump – are taken into account, and demonstrate that it is a genuinely low-carbon option 2. We know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried. 3. We know how much this will cost and who will pay 4. There is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be diverted for military purposes.”

Clearly, this particular nuclear power development is going to take place on Planet Dreamland. Unfortunately here on planet earth, the nuclear future is in the hands of profit-driven corporations, who have always lied about risks, accidents, costs and waste disposal, and governments who either don’t have the guts to stand up to them, or are actually in cahoots with them.

But Monbiot is not alone. Fuelling capitalist business as usual with nuclear power is proposed by an increasing number of otherwise serious green campaigners. This counsel of despair suggests that human society has no other option than to allow capitalism to go on raping and pillaging the planet, and that our role is to propose new ways for it to fuel its activities.

It suggests that the climate crisis – which is certainly caused by fossil fuel burning - exists in isolation from the existential crisis affecting the survival of the whole eco-system for a multiplicity of reasons arising from the capitalist form of production.

Their problem is liberal scepticism about the potential for change, which A World to Win does not share. Human beings have the potential to replace the current corporate-led governments with a global network of People’s Assemblies.

With democratic control of production, we can establish a rational relationship with nature, where production for need using renewable energy sources, replaces the present obscene multiplication of commodities. It can be done and it must be done.

Penny Cole

Environment editor