Response to flooding shows the system isn't working

The current weather crisis has shown up the illegitimacy of politicians in charge of a system that is unable and unwilling to act for the common good. They greatly fear this exposure – it's the reason for the tide of government rhetoric about "money no object" and promises of future help.

In 2010, government chief scientist Sir David King warned of the need to plan for increased floods resulting from climate change. He proposed pulling flood defences inland, sacrificing some areas to the sea, establishing flood plains at the heads of rivers, modernising weirs, widening bridges and replacing sewers to separate sewage and floodwater.

This is the current policy of the Environment Agency and it has a backlog of hundreds of measures based on this approach. It can't complete them because of cuts and a Treasury rule that they can't invest more than £400,000 in any one project. The government's fantasy was that business and the insurance industry would step up as co-funders. As a result, of course, nothing happened.

The Met Office explains that the storms have their source in south-east Asia, where warming seas are evaporating huge quantities of water into the atmosphere. This caused a weather "chain reaction" which disrupted the Pacific jet stream, diverting it over north America and causing the extremely cold conditions there. This in turn affected the Atlantic jet stream, which moved more and more rapidly, bringing storm after storm to Britain and Ireland.

But Lord Lawson, former Tory Chancellor, knows better. He berated the Met Office for suggesting climate change could be involved. Instead, the floods should spur the government to stop spending untold millions littering the countryside with pylons and solar panels. This at a time when 80,000 homes are without power and probably the only  people with electricity are those with their own solar panels or turbines!

But it isn't just the Tory fringe who deny climate change as energy and climate change Secretary Ed Davey suggests in a speech today. Cabinet member and environment secretary Owen Paterson thinks climate change has been happening for centuries and is great because farmers will get longer growing seasons! Transport secretary Philip Hammond yesterday blamed "natural solar rhythms” for the weather. Help, we’ve been transported back to the Middle Ages!

David Cameron only “very much suspects” that the flooding is linked to climate change. He is running scared of the lunatics in his own party and Ukip (remember the Ukip councillor who said the floods were God’s retribution after the passing of the gay marriage law?) His chancellor is not a denier, he's a couldn't-care-lesser, a fossil-fuel profit freak, whose response to soaring energy costs was to let the Big Six drop spending on energy saving or renewables.

The ConDems want the UK fracked to bits and Somerset – which is largely under water - is one of the areas earmarked. You don't have to imagine the effect on water quality of flooded wells and waste water ponds. It happened in Colorado last year – as the headline here says: "Flooding and Fracking - a double disaster".

When King published his report he thought the floods would come in the 2030s at the earliest, and yet here's the wild weather, two decades early, and not only in Britain but across the world. Capitalist states thought they could treat climate change like they do the electorate – blandish, fool and bully people, whilst permitting corporate business as usual. 

The only issue now is whether we are prepared to permit them to go on down this road. There is nothing in it for us to maintain the status quo. Politicians of any political stripe wading about flooded towns won't help us.

We are on our own here, and so we should put all the resources at our disposal under democratic local control and start acting co-operatively to prepare for what is ahead, including halting any plans to increase fossil fuel burning.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

EU ditches climate change action for growth

New climate change targets announced by the European Union are a major step backwards and virtually end any chance of keeping global warming below 2ºC. They are the result of pressure from governments desperate for growth, whatever the cost environmentally.

Naturally, that’s not how the EU is putting it but the reaction from business on the one hand and climate change campaigners on the other says it all. EU officials talked up the agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below the 1990 level by 2030, claiming this puts Europe at the forefront of action on global warming.

But they are not fooling anyone. The Financial Times reports the announcement as a major step back from the "ambitious environmental agenda that made the EU a global green leader" adding that it is all about "the need for economic growth and industrial competitiveness".

Officials spoke excitably about a binding agreement to produce 27% of European energy from renewables by 2030. But Europe already reached 22% renewables in 2012. They are saying that in the next 17 years, Europe will achieve the same percentage increase in renewable energy that was reached in the five years from 2007 to 2011. Germany could practically reach that on its own, with its current programme of replacing nuclear with renewables.

Britain's energy and climate change minister Ed Davey fought hard to prevent even that weak ambition. He didn't want any binding agreements at all because his ConDem government has withdrawn support for renewables in favour of fracking for gas. He got his way because each country is left to work out its own renewables target.

Just to reinforce what the energy commissioner called the need for “mainstream competitiveness”, the EU – under UK pressure – has backed off from any regulation of fracking. As the Financial Times noted, the announcement “in effect gives the green light for shale exploration throughout the region”.

The Climate Action Network (CAN), a coalition of more than 120 environmental groups, said the agreement "could lock the EU into such a low level of climate action it would make keeping the EU's international pledge to stay below 2 degrees of global warming all but unattainable".

The most disgraceful response came from the UK's energy generators who want the government to use it as a basis for reducing the UK's own internal emissions target from its current 50% by 2030 level.

The industry’s trade body stated: "It has been clear for a while that others in Europe have little appetite to match the UK’s binding 50% target and this announcement merely serves as confirmation. Government must ...bring the UK back in line with Europe and send a clear signal that it is committed to ensuring the UK will remain a competitive place to invest through the 2020s."

These targets have nothing to do with climate science. They reflect life in the bubble of unreality where corporations and states live, and where nothing matters except growth, competition and profits. Governments will not act to halt climate change because the corporations will not allow them to even if the political will existed (which it doesn’t).

Today's deal is what Europe will put on the table at international climate talks in Paris in 2015. Connie Hedegaard, the European Commissioner for climate action, claimed: "We have made it possible for EU to play its role to the full..."

Europe's weak targets and failure to consider energy saving or even the regulation of fracking, sets the tone for a summit that will - like the previous summits - fail to act. It will become a game of "how low can you go" in capitalism’s race to the bottom on climate action.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Cameron's fracking big lies

Prime minister David Cameron is the snake oil salesman for the fracking companies, making claims about jobs and he knows are false while attempting to bribe councils to speed up controversial planning applications that local people oppose.

Visiting a drill site in Lincolnshire this week, he claimed that a fracking boom would create 74,000 jobs and bring investment of £3.7 billion a year to local areas. But those are figures from the crazy free marketeers at the Institute of Directors.

Why is the government using these figures, instead of the more measured claims from research commissioned by its own environment department?

Energy consultants and engineers Amec have said even if the UK goes all out for fracking, the number of new full-time jobs at the absolute peak would be between 16,000 to 32,000. Indeed, the very same figures are quoted in a government press release published only last month!

Amec’s forecast amount to just 7% of the total number of people already employed in the gas industry; the government could achieve that increase just by making a modest investment in helping people replace out of date gas boilers!

Yet, incredibly, the government’s own web page carrying Cameron’s speech sends you to the IoD research, rather than its own!

Cameron knows fracking will not cut energy bills, because energy secretary Ed Davey told him so. “North Sea gas didn’t significantly move UK prices – so we can’t expect UK shale production alone to have any effect,” Davey said in a speech last September.

As economist Lord Stern explained, fracked gas will simply be hurled on to the world energy market. “I do think it’s a bit odd to say you know that it will bring the price of gas down. That doesn’t look like sound economics to me. It’s baseless economics,” he told The Independent.

Cameron is slavering over the US fracking boom, but gas prices there are rising. At the boom's peak they were $2 per million thermal units in 2012 but a year later doubled to $4 per million thermal units. In 2013, US power companies switched back to coal, and for the first time in eight years the country’s CO2 emissions rose, by 2%.

The volume of gas in a shale is very different from the volume that can be profitably extracted. Wells become unproductive rapidly, so more and more must be drilled to keep production up. It costs more to produce less; profits fall and investors pull out. The shale gas bubble in the US is already bursting.

The point is that whatever the fracking companies do – drill, not drill, profit, not profit – the consumer is always at the mercy of the world energy market and that never operates in their interests.

Cameron announced a series of desperate bribes aimed at overcoming local opposition. All the business rates from fracking will go to the local council, and communities will get pay offs from the frackers. Along with that paltry carrot goes a big stick. The time between application and decision will be cut to just two weeks, giving communities no time to organise opposition.

The government boasts it has created the most competitive tax regime in Europe for shale gas, even lower than in the US, so the Treasury will get very little from frackers to put towards paying off the deficit.

So why is the government going down this road? They are desperate to find new areas to attract speculators with even a sniff of profit-driven growth. But in reality they are simply pushing another asset bubble, as we wrote in Fracking Capitalism:

"The insatiable global demand for energy drives speculation in shares of the fracking companies, causing an asset price bubble that, like all bubbles, will burst. When over-optimistic production goals are not met, and it becomes impossible to go on producing the gas at the prevailing low market price, the massive debts of the fracking companies will be another phase of sub-prime junk debt."

Still, when growth at any cost is the only game in town fracking looks worth a punt. But whatever Cameron says, there is absolutely nothing in it for us. Get your copy of Fracking Capitalism and join the debate about alternatives.   

Penny Cole

Environment editor

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

Fracking capitalism is the way to go

The campaign against fracking the UK is building on all fronts, including the legal one. Greenpeace is encouraging actions for trespass against the companies like Cuadrilla. But will they be enough to bring a halt to shale gas exploration?

Unlike in France, where the constitutional court this week upheld a government ban on fracking introduced in 2011, the UK state is heavily committed to the dash for gas.

Planning laws and new technical guidance introduced in the summer are heavily weighted in favour of applications to frack.

For example, the guidelines state: “Mineral extraction is essential to local and national economies. As stated in paragraph 144 of the National Planning Policy Framework, minerals planning authorities should give great weight to the benefits of minerals extraction, including to the economy, when determining planning applications.” [emphasis added] The guideline say:

• Planning applications for exploration of shale gas should not take account of “hypothetical future activities” – actual extraction.
• Planning authorities should not consider demand for, or alternatives to, oil and gas when determining applications.
• Councils should understand that government policy is clear that energy supplies should come from a variety of sources.
• Planning authorities should give great weight to the “benefits of minerals extraction, including to the economy

Jon Gateley, principal planner at property firm Savills, told Planning magazine that the guidance was akin to a presumption in favour of shale gas. "Rather than just introducing controls over how decisions would be made, the guidance implies that government wants to see them go through," he said.

As the hot summer rolled on into September, the government stepped in again with plans to change the current notification requirements on underground gas and oil applications to make it easier for the corporations, naturally.

At present, companies have to serve a notice on any other person who owns or is a tenant of land to which the application relates. They also have to publish a notice in at least one local newspaper and display a notice in every parish affected ahead of submission.

But under the draft proposals,  the requirement to serve notice on individual owners and tenants of land would be dropped where solely underground operations would be involved.

Enter Greenpeace. They are assembling home owners to mount a legal challenge to prevent fracking companies drilling underneath the homes of people who don’t want it. The campaign group says that such drilling would amount to trespass and be illegal.

“This is about people asserting their legal and democratic right,” said Anna Jones, senior campaigner with Greenpeace. They’ve launched a website wrongmove.org where homeowners can find out, using their postcode, whether they are living near a potential fracking operation.

While under English law, mineral rights beneath the surface belong to the state, Greenpeace argues that companies will still need permission from landowners. Lancashire dairy farmer Andrew Pemberton has joined the legal action. “My biggest worry is pollutants,” he said. Water supplied that feed his animals come from aquifers beneath the Lancashire Fylde.

But as Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, pointed out yesterday, the state is heavily committed to fracking. She was actually speaking outside court, where she pleaded not guilty to alleged offences following her arrest outside the Cuadrilla site in Balcombe in the summer.

She said: "The government is not only refusing to listen to the evidence, it is choosing to become a flag-waver-in-chief for the fracking industry, offering them generous tax breaks as well as allowing them senior roles within the government itself.”

Among those she was referring to is Lord Browne, a former BP boss, who is now holding a cross-departmental role in government, reporting to the minister for the Cabinet Office, at the same as he holds significant shares in Cuadrilla. Coincidentally, the minister concerned, Francis Maude includes Balcombe in his constituency.

You have to conclude that it will take more than local legal challenges to halt fracking. And it will also take more than a change of government, as rebranded One Nation Labour is totally silent on the issue, leading campaigners to suspect Ed Miliband’s party has fallen for discredited “cheap energy” claims. We will have to put fracking capitalism on the agenda.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Dash for gas exposes corporate-state fix

"Baseless economics" underlie the mad dash for unconventional gas, says economist Nicholas Stern. And whilst Cameron and Osborne link their fate to the fossil fuel corporations, Lord Stern has rubbished their claim that fracking will bring down consumer bills.

Gas, he points out, is an international commodity and will be sold to the highest bidder. UK households already experienced this effect when North Sea gas was pumped on to the world market, leaving fuel costs in the UK unchanged. And when the gas ran out, the price to consumers soared.

As we showed in last week's blog, this has been the experience in the United States where gas exports have increased but household fuel bills remain high and subject to volatile market forces.

Lord Stern lashed the Government for making no real impact assessment. Do we have enough water for fracking, especially in areas where supply is already fragile? Would fracking pollute the water supply? Will it release dangerous quantities of methane? “We’ve not had a proper discussion on these serious issues," says the economist whose pivotal 2006 report called climate change "the biggest-ever market failure".

But the Con-Dems don't care about all that. They are a desperate clique pursuing any financial bubble that might keep greasing the wheels of the state. And unconventional gas is a classic bubble with companies rampaging from one drill hole to the next, causing environmental and financial mayhem.

Dart Energy, which is seeking permission for coal-bed methane capture at the former Airth Colliery in the Forth Valley, has seen its share price collapse after its plans were thwarted by local opposition in Australia. Dart denounced new environmental regulations by the New South Wales government and pointed to the Con-Dems as an example of forward thinking on energy supply (yeah, right!).

The company had to stop trading shares whilst they formulated a new plan and yesterday issued £14m worth of new shares on the Australian securities exchange. They told investors it will kick start operations in Scotland, though they don't yet have Scottish government permission.

So this is a company in trouble by any standards, but Alex Johnstone, Conservative MSP for North East Scotland, demanded campaigners stop attacking such "legitimate businesses". He denounced what he described as “some disgraceful scenes south of the border by environmental organisations “ and said that “we need to encourage companies which have a lot to offer Scotland.”

This yawning gap between the ruled and their rulers, is pushing people to start making their own very different plans for the future. Local campaigners in the area around Airth have worked with their Community Council (Scottish equivalent of a Parish Council) to develop a Community Charter. It sets out their "cultural heritage" which they declare to be: 

"the sum total of the local tangible and intangible assets we have collectively agreed to be fundamental to the health and well-being of our present and future generations. These constitute an inseparable ecological and socio-cultural fabric that sustains life, and which provides us with the solid foundations for building and celebrating our homes, families, community and legacy within a healthy, diverse, beautiful and safe natural environment. This is the basis of a true economy, one which returns to its root meaning (oikos - home, nomia - management)."

Now the big challenge is how to see such a new vision can become our future. As an AWTW network member reports from a meeting in Havant (a possible future target for fracking): 

"People are making the connections between the system that is breaking up lives and communities through austerity, and the shortcomings of a corrupt financial system, and the law-unto themselves that are fossil fuel companies who are continuing to do what they have always done, ever more aggressively. It goes to show you the majority know who is public enemy number one - and they are beginning to see the crucial role the state plays."

Transforming the state to create a real democracy that gives people power over what happens in their communities has to be the way forward.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

They take the profits - we pay for the clean up

Somehow, the public always ends up with the bill for dirty energy operations, whilst the corporations take the profits and run. In 2010, it was estimated that dealing with the UK's nuclear waste would cost £49bn. Now that has more than doubled and some say it could rise to £100bn.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is on the point of taking back in house the clean up of the UK's biggest nuclear headache at Sellafield though it has already paid a private company billions.

The US/UK/French consortium NMP has had £70bn so far but the work is way behind schedule and there have been criticisms of how they operate. Indeed they have been fined £700,000 by a court in Carlisle for sending low-level radioactive waste to an ordinary landfill site.

That didn't stop the NDA giving them £54m in performance bonuses in 2012 – now it seems even the authority has had enough.

Next year, the NDA will award contracts for cleaning up the old Magnox power stations and the agency is so nervous that it will not even give an estimate of the cost.

But the question is, why are WE paying for this? Didn't the new operators, when the companies were privatised, take on these responsibilities as well as the chance to make money? No, they did not.

Another example of corporations walking away is in Scotland, where KPMG acting as receiver for bankrupt coal companies Scottish Coal and Aardvark, won a court ruling saying any buyer will not have to fulfil obligations to control pollution and restore land at existing sites. So these will remain as scars on the landscape with no remedy in sight, other than by throw piles of public money at the problem.

Anne McCall, of wildlife charity RSPB, says: “It is unthinkable that private companies can cause such damage and then walk away when finances get tight. We simply cannot wipe the slate clean when such a terrible legacy has been left by Scottish Coal and Aardvark."

So what would the legacy be if fracking is allowed across the UK? Fracking pumps a mix of water, sand, and chemicals into fissures in shale rock made by controlled explosions. The water loosens the shale, the chemicals dissolve minerals and the sand props open fractures so that the gas or oil can be extracted.

Chemicals used include acids, detergents and deadly poisons. After the fuel is extracted, deposits of radioactive elements and huge concentrations of salt are left in the earth's surface as well as thousands of gallons of dirty water to disposed of.

The Con/Dem coalition are giving huge tax breaks to the fracking companies, and have changed planning laws so local communities have little chance of keeping them out.

And when the gas has been extracted and the companies have fracked off to the next project? Those communities will have to live with the long-term damage.

Of course, as far as Lord Howell is concerned that only matters if the damage is in nice, rural areas; it is OK if fracking takes plae in the former industrial areas of the north of England.

This is not just some old buffer speaking. Howell is a former energy secretary, up until three months ago an energy adviser to the government, and president of the BP/Shell sponsored British Institute of Energy Economics which promotes fossil fuels.

He is worried that if the middle classes in leafy areas in the south-east are affected, they might rise up and in a spirit of fair play, demand an end not only to their own local problem but to the whole fracking project across the country. Let's hope they do!

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Climate chaos is also the failure of political systems

While you enjoy the warm weather, consider this. “Atmospheric Rivers” will become more frequent and intense as global temperatures rise this century in response to increasing concentrations of  carbon dioxide in the  atmosphere

You might ask what these “rivers” are. They are described as narrow regions of intense moisture flows in the lower troposphere that deliver sustained and heavy rainfall to mid-latitude regions such as the UK. And, according to a new study, they are on the increase while winter flood events will become more frequent and more severe.

This is just one of the variety of consequences arising from the burning of coal, oil and gas which fuelled the industrial revolution of the 19^th century and the globalisation of capitalist production and consumption from the last period of the 20^th century.

Globalisation and war have seen the extraction, refinement and distribution of fossil fuels concentrated into the hands of a small handful of giant corporations. Their shareholders demand ever greater efforts to extract what remains of the resources buried deep beneath the surface by millions of years of planetary evolution.

They rub their hands with increasing glee as their lobbyists for continued economic growth stir dissent and confusion ensuring that no agreement on action to slow, let alone stop or reverse global warning is reached between the governments of the world. There’s every reason to expect no better outcome from the climate treaty talks scheduled for 2015 than all those that have taken place in the last 25 years.

Even if there were agreement, the International Energy Agency is warning that any action would come too late to give even a 50% chance of keeping the global temperature increase since the start of the industrial revolution below 2 degrees centigrade.

Why? Because competition between the remaining corporate contenders under intense pressure from their customers also competing on costs in the industrial sectors, drives investment in a continuing technological revolution. This provides previously unimagined access to “new” reserves.

Ultra-deepwater drillships, subsea oil and gas infrastructure and multi-well-pad drilling to machine-to-machine networking, floating LNG facilities, new dimensions in seismic imagery and supercomputing for analogue exploration make fracking – hydraulic fracking –  look positively old-fashioned.

Investment advisers Oil and Energy Insider – one node in a network of private intelligence networks looking like an offshoot of the CIA – big up the prospects, saying these technologies put the idea of peak oil to bed for the foreseeable future.

And the IEA is looking both ways. Originally set up in the wake of the 1972 oil crisis, its mission was to ensure continuity of oil supplies. Now it claims it works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy – but without compromising growth.

Academic Robert Manne says a rapid, global-wide, consciously engineered transition from a fossil fuel to a clean energy civilization would involve one of the largest transformations in the history of humankind. And he’s right.

But he’s pessimistic. The post-war international “system” of nations is entirely unfitted to the kind of broad-ranging international cooperation now required, he believes. “The domestic political systems of the nation states potentially of greatest importance in the struggle against global warming – that is the advanced Western democracies — tend to paralyse the possibility of necessary emergency action.”

To put it another way, the democratic system prevailing in the global capitalist system of nation states has failed. So that means building a new system, more suited to the task of taking human society into a new not-for-profit age, one in which care for the “oikos”, Mother Earth, our home, becomes the overriding priority.

One way would be to rapidly establish a global network of local people’s assemblies, using the worldwide communications networks as the foundation for wide discussion and participation as the precursor to the takeover and redirection of the resources currently in the hands of the 1%.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Obama's greenwash won't wash

President Obama's much-publicised climate change speech this week was simply a smokescreen for the forthcoming decision to allow the second phase of the Keystone tar sands pipeline to go ahead.

Obama claimed to be boldly taking on the climate change deniers in Congress, by issuing a presidential memo instructing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to use Clean Air laws to cap greenhouse gas emissions.

But there's little to get excited about here, because the level of the cap is unstated. It won't be announced until next year for possible implementation in 2015. No doubt the level will still be mired in political and legal battles long after Obama has left the White House.

Campaigners are convinced this is a sleazy trade-off to silence opposition to Keystone 2.

And it seems to be working, with the Sierra Club, one of the US's biggest environmental organisations and a key member of the anti-Keystone campaign, issuing a gushing call on its members to "thank the President".

But what Obama actually said was "climate change issues" will be "relevant" to the decision on the pipeline carrying heavy crude tar sand products from Canada to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Relevant maybe, but not decisive. As Tom Steyer, former hedge fund investor turned environmental activist said, curbing emissions will be meaningless if Keystone goes ahead.

Obama made much of the fact that the US is now the world's biggest gas producer. He failed to point out that this "natural gas" (sounds nice doesn't it?) mostly comes from fracking. Across the US, communities are being destroyed by this process, which pollutes water supplies and makes people ill. But he mentioned none of that.

Obama claimed the fact that the US is once again building nuclear power stations as a positive. But given that there are already some 65,000 tons of dangerous nuclear waste in temporary storage throughout the US, it is hard to see how this can be a good thing!

He used this speech to herald federal support for stepping up gas exports, but isn't that just what the Thatcher government did and look where it got the UK. The North Sea gas supplies are all gone, burned up or sold cheap on the world market.

Energy supply relies on Russian imports, pushing prices through the roof. No wonder the state is so excited about shale gas as an alternative. A new survey by the British Geological survey showing there is a greater quantity of shale gas than was previously thought is being presented as some wonderful bonanza.  

The boom in unconventional oil and gas is a mark of how desperate governments are to keep the fossil fuel market stable. The question is, do we want to pay the price in pollution and health risks? The British and US governments say yes, but then they would, wouldn't they?

Obama pointed out that since 2006 the US has made the world's biggest emissions reductions. But just as in the UK, most of this was achieved by switching power stations to natural gas.

He also claimed natural gas is a 'transition fuel' whilst the economy switches to renewables but that will turn out to be as much of a fraud as here in the UK where renewables still amount to just 7% of the UK energy mix. In fact the only fuel that increased its share in 2012 was coal!

What Obama described was a fantasy climate change policy. It delivers big profits, needs no significant public investment, pushes fundamental change far in the future and requires no change in behaviour by companies. This may be the corporate government's dream scenario but for the rest of us, it's a total nightmare.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

The market recipe for cooking the planet

The economic logic of the capitalist system is obstructing the critical transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources.

Though nothing could be more urgent than curbing the amount of coal, oil, and gas which is burnt, the market demand for the solar photovoltaic (PV) goods is far lower than the industry’s capacity to make them.

Last year the world had 60 gigawatts of PV manufacturing capacity, but fewer than 30 gigawatts were produced.

Far from a green revolution leading to growth and jobs induced by the scent of profit, hundreds of small German installers are now closing down, with the consequent loss of thousands of jobs.

After a period of expansion, the number of new solar power installed in Europe fell sharply for the first time in a decade last year. Globally, the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry had installed a total of 102 gigawatts by the end of 2012, up from less than two in 2001.

But new installation fell dramatically in 2012, taking Europe’s share of new capacity down from 74 per cent to 55 per cent in what the solar industry said was a “turning point in the global PV market that will have profound implications in coming years”.

Now European solar panel makers battered by a declining market have persuaded the European Union to propose import tariffs ranging as high as 68% to reduce cheaper imports from Chinese companies. This European initiative follows a similar US move last year.

Solar entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett places the blame for the developing, protectionist trade war on ‘a campaign by the companies that dominate energy markets, seeking to hold back renewables in defence of their interests’, leading to severe cuts in government support for alternative energy.

Leggett says ‘the incumbents in carbon fuels and nuclear are the root cause of the trade war. They have managed to curb soaring demand for solar, accelerating global price-cutting beyond what manufacturing economies of scale would have produced.’

A key contribution to the declining European PV market is to be found across the Atlantic in the USA where the relatively cheaper gas released by fracking has in turn reduced the demand for, and hence the price of coal.

North America’s turn to fracking pushed down US natural gas prices to 10-year lows last spring, prompting electricity generators to switch to gas from coal. Unwanted at home, US coal increasingly found its way on to European markets, where it has displaced more expensive gas as a fuel for power stations.

American coal exports to Europe increased by 29 per cent last year. The resulting oversupply, exacerbated by a slowdown in Chinese demand, sent European coal prices plummeting from $130 a tonne in March 2011 to around $86 now.

So there was a sharp increase in the level of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming emitted by the European Union’s coal-fired power stations in 2012, as plant owners rushed to take advantage of high profits.

The rise was as high as 17 per cent according to Brian Potskowski of the Bloomberg New Energy Finance research group, while Europe’s total power plant emissions rose 3 per cent over the same period.

“I would say that the increase in power emissions is due in large part to the increased attractiveness of burning coal relative to gas in 2012,” he said.

In the capitalist dream world inside Leggett’s entrepreneurial head, the leaders of the countries where solar panel production takes place will issue ‘instructions to their ministries to think of common global energy security rather than narrow national energy insecurity.’

The rise in burning dirty fuels confirms a recent International Energy Agency’s report which showed that, “despite a boom in renewable energy over the last decade, the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago”.

In the harsh reality of capitalist economics, the search for the highest profits determines the retreat to coal and accelerating climate change. The notion that market mechanisms, or indeed consumer choice, can even begin to solve the eco-crisis is a non-runner if there ever was one.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

ConDems consign Kyoto to the dustbin

Big and dirty - that's the energy future envisaged by the Coalition government and backed up with tax breaks in the budget.

The ConDems are progressively dismantling the measures put in place to implement the Kyoto Protocol – the better-than-nothing emissions reduction treaty – which Britain signed but is now left withering on the vine.

The decrease in Britain's greenhouse gas emissions (GGE) achieved by the switch from coal to gas can only be maintained if a switch is made now to renewable energy sources, along with huge energy-saving measures.

The new policy is the exact opposite.

Chancellor Osborne is ready to let rip, exempting industries with high GGEs from the Climate Change Levy and using taxpayers’ money to subsidise fossil fuels.

Exploiting the big lie that tackling climate change means lost jobs and high fuel prices, he announced exemption for the ceramics industry and confirmed he will add others to add to the list.  The industrial lobbyists are queuing up outside his office in Downing Street.

Osborne confirmed that Drax Group plc will get a share in a billion pound subsidy to build a 425MW coal-burning power station in Yorkshire fitted with unproven carbon capture and storage technology. This will be, to all intents and purposes, a new coal-fired power station.

Oil corporations will get tax breaks to cover the cost of decommissioning North Sea rigs. This is part of the price they’re demanding for taking on expensive, environmentally-disastrous but very profitable, contracts for deep sea drilling in the North Sea.

Osborne promised to kick start shale gas drilling – fracking – with a "generous new tax regime" and looser planning regulations.

"Shale gas is part of the future," Osborne says, "and we will make it happen." The ConDems are oblivious to the disastrous environmental, health and human cost people in the US are paying for the fracking boom.

And it does not offer any kind of an energy future, as the new publication Drill, Baby, Drill explains. The authors note that once hooked up to a pipeline, shale gas wells decline rapidly: "For five of the biggest shale plays that account for 80% of US gas production, the well declines are such that production of the average well is down 80-90% after three years."  

The dash for shale gas in the US has put the country on a financial treadmill. As production rose in the initial boom, so gas prices fell. That made drilling in marginal areas unprofitable, so companies are holding off until prices rise again. Instead of being held to ransom by foreign oil, the US consumer is being screwed by home-grown profiteers.

Osborne boasted of the planning permission granted to EDF to build a Leviathan nuclear power plant at Hinkley point. But with no for storage for the waste and the energy corporation EDF demanding price guarantees, how sustainable is that?

China already has 16 nuclear plants and plans 24 more. As demand for uranium increases, prices will rise and consumers will have to pay to sustain EDF's profits. Uranium is a finite fossil fuel too, in case you didn't notice.

"Creating a low carbon economy should be done in a way that creates jobs rather than costing them," says Osborne. Or not at all - that's the real policy.

While the ConDems use our money to underwrite the profits of the energy giants, many small to medium renewables companies balance on the edge of bankruptcy.

Sooner or later we will have to switch to renewables, but that incontrovertible reality cuts no ice in an economic system that sees no further than this week's share values and next year's profits.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Dirty gas gets the green light

As the government’s experts on renewable energy form a queue at the exit, the gas specialists are moving in, counting the zeros on their budgets. Dirty gas will get big tax breaks following George Osborne’s budget.

He wants big investment in “unconventional gas” to match the big money British banks have already invested in Canadian tar sands. These are huge deposits of bitumen, a tar-like substance that’s turned into oil through energy-intensive processes. 

Now a quarter of Scotland has been earmarked for drilling for gas to replace declining stocks from the North Sea. Companies will be invited to apply for licences next year. At the same time, the ban on fracking has been lifted.

The process involves drilling down and creating tiny explosions to shatter and crack hard shale rocks to release the gas inside. Cuadrilla, whose operations caused earthquakes in Blackpool, is back on site and ready to resume this dangerous dash for gas.

There is clear evidence from Australia and the United States, about the dangers of fracking. Water supplies have been contaminated with toxic chemicals that make people constantly ill, with the potential to cause cancer and even to change people’s gender.

The most advanced proposition is coal-bed methane capture. Australian corporation Dart Energy has already drilled 16 exploratory wells around Falkirk and Stirling. They have agreed a £300m deal to supply Scottish and Southern Electricity and plan to expand rapidly with at least 20 more wells in short order.

Campaign group Frack Off has raised serious questions about Dart’s operations. But the Scottish government led by the SNP has nothing to say – they smell they money, not the methane. So much for the promise that Scotland’s energy future lies in becoming the world leader in wind and tide!

Coal-bed methane extraction pumps water into the seam and gas bubbles through. But nobody seems to have planned what to do with the contaminated water. It’s the nuclear waste disposal story all over again.

The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) will wait until companies apply to start work to examine the list of chemicals they plan to use. But fracking licences have already been issued in the south-west of Scotland and companies can simply move from exploration to production without any further discussion

Hundreds of objections from community groups and individuals are pouring in to SEPA. Network Rail is worried that wells drilled near the main line to the north might blow it up.

But these concerns are not high on the list of government priorities. It’s as if some ruthless Victorian coal owner travelled forward in time to take charge of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (causing it). It’s all back to the fossil fuel future for capitalism’s energy policy.

Chancellor Osborne, told a meeting in New York: "I see with admiration what has happened in the US in the way your shale gas revolution has made a contribution to GDP.”

In the interests of short-term profits governments will permit absolutely anything corporations propose. They know the dangers – they know about climate change – but remain paralysed by the economic and social changes needed to tackle it. And when a system can only move backwards, it is in terminal crisis.

So it’s over to us – we call on all those who want to defend the environment to form or join People’s Assemblies, popular forms of alternative government that can challenge the power of the corporations to befoul the land for profit and replace the governments, national or local, that facilitate them.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Coal leads the way as fossil fuels burn up the planet

The rapid expansion of fossil fuel burning which is frying the planet’s atmosphere faster than ever is entirely unnecessary and economically unjustifiable. And that’s official.

According to the International Energy Authority’s 2012 annual assessment, simple, economically-useful, energy efficiency measures could cut the growth in global energy demand by half and as a result, the demand for oil would peak before 2020.

The reduction in demand would be equivalent to the current combined production of Russian and Norway.

There would be greater energy security for countries worried about having to import their fuel and there would be huge economic growth as buildings and infrastructure were made more energy efficient. Hundreds of thousands could be employed and fuel bills cut by 20% on average.

But the direction of travel of global capitalism is the exact opposite. Subsidies are instead being poured into fossil fuel production – six times more than those available to renewables, amounting to $523 billion in 2011, up almost 30% on 2010.

As a result emissions of greenhouse gases reached their highest-ever level in 2011. Current energy plans of governments across the world will lock in a long-term average global temperature increase of 3.6 °C, not the 2.0°C governments claim they are committed to.

Renewables are the fastest growing form of energy, but that is starting from a very low level. Coal, which is responsible for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions from fuel, is going through a massive global expansion. Production is up 6% on 2010.

The rejection of nuclear by some governments in the wake of the Fukushima disaster did not lead to an expansion of renewables but to an expansion in coal burning. For example, Germany announced it would get out of nuclear within a decade, but this year it increased the amount of electricity generated from coal by 12% over 2011.

China is investing hugely in renewables, but coal-fired output grew as much there in the last decade as nuclear, wind and hydro combined.

In the US rapid expansion of “fracking”, plus new offshore finds have fuelled a dash for gas. But coal production is on the increase, licensed by the Obama administration and so the US is now exporting cheap coal all over the world.

The IEA says  that “the world is still failing to put the global energy system onto a more sustainable path” and despite an increase in low-carbon sources of energy “fossil fuels remain dominant in the global energy mix”.

The big question is why? Why are we pouring tax subsidies into fossil fuels, instead of renewables or energy efficiency? Why is a country like South Africa, an ideal test bed for solar power, pouring government funding into coal? In its post-crash-printing-money phase, the Obama administration funded excellent solar projects, which have brought major advances. Why is that not the US’s new export, instead of dirty old coal?

The “whys” are endless and exhausting but the answer is quite straightforward – it’s the bottom line that counts. Corporations use their power over governments to keep their priorities sweet. Six of the richest 100 mining billionaires are Chinese, five are Indian. The richest of them all is Brazilian Eike Batista whose personal net worth is $32 billion.

And at number 42 is Patrice Motsepe, South Africa’s first black billionaire, who bought up failing mineral businesses and made them profitable by cutting costs and increasing exploitation. You can be sure he is not pressing his friends in the ANC government to shift funding into renewables.

There’s a lot of money to be made from destroying the planet’s climate and eco-system. Only a transfer of political power to popular democracies acting in the interests of the majority and not the oligarchs and corporations, can halt the process.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Fossil fuel warriors in charge of ConDems energy policy

As the first cold blast of winter heads down from the Arctic, more than five million UK households cannot afford to heat their homes to the standard required for good health and comfort.

And now that the unscrupulous cartel of big energy corporations has slapped a 9% increase on fuel bills – the average bill is now over £1,300 – the number of people in fuel poverty will soar.

David Cameron talked big at his Party’s conference, claiming the government would force the energy giants to offer customers the lowest price tariff but now rushes to change his tune. The best the Coalition can offer is a letter from the supplier telling the customer what their lowest – but still  unaffordable – tariff is.  

UK governments of all stripes have consistently refused to regulate for high energy efficiency leaving the market to decide. The result is most houses being built in the UK even today, wouldn’t get off the drawing board in Scandinavia.

The much proclaimed Green New Deal replaces the former grant programme with loans at high interest rates offset by small amounts of cash back for measurable energy savings. The paltry sum set aside is £200m - £125 will go for loans and £25m on publicity. It will be used up in about three months.

The truth is Cameron’s “greenest ever government” has been taken over by the dirtiest fossil fuel warriors.

Owen Paterson, the new Minister for Energy, is a climate change sceptic who described the potential for gas fracking as "one unexpected and potentially huge windfall". His policy advisor is a former lobbyist for the Australian fossil fuel industry.

Ian Taylor, boss of energy trader Vitol, gave the Tories more than £500,000. Viton is a major shareholder in companies involved in hydraulic fracturing (fracking and coal bed methane extraction, another dirty business.

Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP is a government energy adviser. He is chairman of Cuadrilla, the UK’s main “frackers”, and is on the board of North Sea deep water oil explorer Riverstone.

Cameron’s new advisor on energy policy is Ben Moxham, who worked for Browne at BP and Riverstone.

Vitol is a major shareholder in Dart Energy, which will soon begin coal bed methane extraction at Airth, on the River Forth. This filthy technology will start with 22 CBM wells but as many as 600 could be on the cards. It is just “the beginning of a nightmarish industrial transformation for the UK as a whole”, says Elsie Walker of campaign group Frack Off.

Do you get the picture? Energy policy in the UK is being written by the fossil fuel industry, in its own profit-driven interests and has nothing to do with keeping consumer prices low or tackling climate change.

The government argues that getting at new sources of fossil fuel is essential to keep prices down. But the exact opposite is the case.

Systems such as “fracking” or coal bed methane capture or tar sand extraction, are only now economic (profitable) because of the rising price of gas as easy to access supplies run out. When gas was plentiful and cheap, they were not viable.

A recent report from IMF on the future of oil notes that keeping oil production going at current levels will bring about a doubling of the cost in the next decade. The report speaks of “economic peak oil”, a point beyond which importer economies cannot sustain production and there is runaway inflation.

The IMF calls it a "shock" that will have "large and persistent" macro-economic effects and it calls on governments to invest heavily in alternative energy sources.

But these arguments will fall on deaf ears because government energy policy is about the corporations and the profits.

This winter, more than 20,000 people in the UK will die from cold and many more become ill or get into debt. It is time to put all energy resources into a new commons and end the corporations’ right to profit from such misery.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Paying for energy profits in disease and death

This descent of the energy production industry into 19th century activities such as “fracking”, which was last tried in Scotland 150 years ago, and marginal drift mining show that capitalism cannot safely tackle the growing energy crisis.

The tragic deaths of four miners in South Wales last week highlighted one side of the increasingly desperate search for energy sources. Camp Frack, set up by local residents and climate activists on a site near Southport in Lancashire, to protest against plans by mining company Cuadrilla Resources to drill for shale gas, draws attention to an equally dangerous activity.

The camp is opposing plans for “fracking” – hydraulic fracturing – where water with chemicals is pumped into rocks to shatter them, releasing the carbon gas which is piped to tankers and transported to power stations. Cuadrilla, backed by Australian mining money and with BP's former chair Lord Browne in support, is one of a number given licence by the Coalition government to pilot fracking. The company is looking at sites across 437 square miles of Lancashire.

Its first operation was suspended in the summer, when geologists suggested they had caused two earthquakes that shook the seaside town of Blackpool. In the USA people living near fracking operations say it causes seismic shifts and serious illnesses. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently conducting a large-scale study on the impacts, and the Camp Frack protesters are demanding the British government halt all activity until it reports.

As well as the health and geological risks, burning shale gas gives off more CO2 than coal. But the risks to the people, the environment and the wildlife of the Ribble Valley have been simply ignored. The US anti-fracking film Gasland, was nominated for an Oscar last year and you can find out more about it here.

The sum total of possible shale gas deposits in Britain would meet the need for gas for a grand total of 18 months. It is only in the total absence of anything resembling a coherent strategy for energy that such a risky activity could be given the go-ahead for such short-term returns.

Meanwhile, the National Union of Mineworkers has warned that tiny collieries like the one at Gleision where four miners died as a result of an inrush of water, may be operating “under the radar” of mine inspectors. The soaring world price of coal has led to an expansion of small, privately-owned drift and open cast mining in the UK over recent years – operations that sometimes open and shut in response to commodity price fluctuations.

Gleision, which produced smokeless coal for boilers, is one of the smallest and remotest of these kinds of laissez-faire operations. Chris Kitchen, general secretary of the NUM, said: "We have grave concerns about safety standards in these kinds of mines. We fear that safety is often set at minimum standards so that costs can be kept down. They are not generally unionised or easily visited by inspectors."

Britain's five remaining deep-mine collieries, such as Kellingley in Yorkshire, have teams of safety personnel, high standards, and a unionised workforce alert to problems. "You are not going to have that kind of thing in a small drift mine that employs nine people."

As the Energy Bill currently going through Parliament shows, the reality is that government efforts to promote energy saving and efficiency, or local power generation strategies and clean sources, are minimal. The scale of what they plan – lots of advice and fine words but little funding or subsidy – shows they are not serious.

As long as we live in this undemocratic profit-driven energy society, the government will make sure the energy corporations keep the market sewn up. Only by challenging the ownership and control of energy production will we ever be able to put the focus on safety, clean energy and conservation.

Penny Cole

Environment editor