Protection from extreme weather is a democratic question

The main impact of climate change on the UK will be more frequent and extensive floods. That is the conclusion of every single report and study for the last decade, including the government's own major risk assessment published by the Environment Agency (EA) in 2012

So why is the key agency responsible for flood planning being cut? And how come the ConDems are lying about the amount being spent on flood prevention?

The EA is to lose 1700 jobs to cuts this year, on top of 1150 lost since 2009 – 23% of its workforce – and more than 300 flood defence schemes have been halted to save money.

Research by Friends of the Earth shows ministers are including estimated spending by local authorities and businesses in their totals. And the amount they are claiming has been spent by businesses is just an over-optimistic guess.

Prime Minister David Cameron admitted (to boos and hisses from Conservative climate change sceptics – and abuse from The Sun) that global warming is the underlying cause of the current floods.

But the EA has calculated that because of climate change, the government needs to spend an extra £20m per year every year up to 2035 on flood defences to have any chance of mitigating the impact on people, land, water supplies and wildlife.

Coastal erosion has speeded up and could make some areas uninhabitable, or at the very least, uninsurable. But some people in the worst affected areas have not even had time to recover from the last major floods in 2012. Insurers estimate paying out £400m so far. Even the lesser floods of 2012 cost the country £600m.

However, a new insurance scheme agreed between government and the insurance industry to help people in the areas most at risk to get some cover, takes no account of the impact of climate change. It is going to be capped at 500,000 properties even though the EA has estimated that between 1.7 and 3.6 million people will be affected by floods by 2050.

Given that there are currently 360 flood warnings in place across the UK, the lower end of that figure must have been reached already, if all impacts are taken into account.

The same jet stream fluctuation that has trapped the UK in a persistent low pressure area, is causing extreme cold and snow in the United states, where temperatures as low as -50 have been recorded. Winter in Ontario is always cold but even Canadians struggle to cope with -30C. It was -17C (-33C with wind chill) in the town of Hell, Michigan, prompting online jokes that Hell had frozen over.

Hell will certainly freeze over before governments take action to halt these frightening climate transformations. The truth is that even when leaders like David Cameron and Barack Obama accept the existence of climate change, capitalist states will do nothing to halt the rise in greenhouse gas emissions (up again by 2.1% in 2013). And it seems that in this time of austerity, they will do little or nothing to help people cope with the disastrous results.

Most greenhouse gas emissions, are due to - in order of impact - land use change (clearing forest and wilderness for agriculture or building on formerly agricultural land); burning coal, oil, gas, cement making and gas flaring.

And just 90 entities are responsible for 63% of all emissions:

- 50 investor-owned companies such as Chevron, Peabody, Shell, and BHP Billiton

- 31 state-owned companies such as Saudi Aramco and Statoil

- 9 state-run industries in China, Poland and the former Soviet Union.

The positive message for 2014, therefore, must be that the area for action is actually well defined and relatively narrow.  To halt climate change we need to take political, social and economic action to slow these  specific activities and then stop some of them entirely.

But to achieve that we need to find ways to replace our hollowed out democracies, operating only in the interests of those 90 entities, with a popular decision-making process that defends the interests of the 99% and their life on planet earth.

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