More than 143 million people in the United States may be exposed to toxic “forever chemicals” in their drinking water, according to a new analysis of water testing data. The findings come as environmentalists fear that the incoming Trump administration will weaken or repeal tough new standards designed to protect public health. Under new rules set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
By Eloise Gibson, RNZ climate change correspondent
New Zealand’s Climate Change Minister Simon Watts is going to the global climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan next week, where he will be co-leading talks on international carbon trading.
But the government has been unable to commit to using the trading mechanism he is leading high-level discussions about, and critics say he is also vulnerable over New Zealand’s backsliding on fossil fuels.
New Zealand has consistently pushed for two things in international climate diplomacy — one is ending government subsidies for fossil fuels globally, and the other is allowing carbon trading across international borders, so one country can pay for, say, switching off a coal plant in another country.
Nailing down the rules for making sure these carbon savings are real will be an area of focus for leaders at the COP29 summit, starting on 11 November.
But as Watts gets ready to attend the talks, critics say his government is vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy on both fronts.
In a bid to bring back fossil fuel exploration, the government wants to lower financial security requirements on oil and gas companies requiring them to set aside money for the costs of decommissioning and cleaning up spills.
The coalition says the current requirements — brought in after taxpayers had to pay to deal with a defunct oil field — are so onerous they are stopping companies wanting to look for fossil fuels.
Billion dollar clean-ups
At a recent hearing, Parliament’s independent environment watchdog warned going too far at relaxing requirements could leave taxpayers footing bills of billions of dollars if a clean-up is needed.
The commission’s Geoff Simmons spoke on behalf of Commissioner Simon Upton.
“The commissioner was really clear in his submission that he wants to place on record that he doesn’t think it is appropriate for any government, present or future, to offer any subsidies, implicit or explicit, to underwrite the cost of exploration.”
The watchdog said that would tilt the playing field away from renewable energy in favour of fossil fuels.
Energy Minister Shane Jones says the government’s Bill doesn’t lower the liability for fixing damage or decommissioning oil and gas wells, which remain the responsibility of the fossil fuel company in perpetuity.
But climate activist Adam Currie says that only works if the company stays in business.
“The watering down of those key financial safeguards increases the risk of the taxpaper having to yet again pay to decommission a failed oil field.
“Simon Watts is about to go to COP and urge other countries to end fossil fuel subsidies while at home they are handing an open cheque to fossil fuels .. This is a classic case of do as a say, not as I do.”
Getting flack not feared
Watts says he does not fear getting flack for the fossil-friendlier changes when he is in Baku, citing the government’s goal of doubling renewable energy.
“No I’m not worried about flak, New Zealand is transitioning away from fossil fuels . . . gas [from fossil fields] is going to need to be a means by which we need to transition.”
Nor does he see an issue with the fact he is jointly leading negotiations on a trading mechanism his own government seems unable to commit to using.
Watts is leading talks to nail down rules on international carbon trading with Singaporean Environment Minister Grace Fu. Her country has struck a deal to invest in carbon savings in Rwanda.
New Zealand also needs international help to meet its 2030 target, but the coalition government has not let officials pursue any deals. NZ First refuses to say if it would back this.
Watts says his leadership role is independent of domestic politics and ministers around the world are keen to nail down the rules, as is the Azerbaijan presidency.
“Our primary focus is to ensure that we get an outcome form those negotiators, our domestic considerations are not relevant.”
Paris target discussions
He said discussions on meeting New Zealand’s Paris target were still underway.
His next challenge at home is getting Cabinet agreement on how much to promise to cut emissions from 2030-2035, the second commitment period under the Paris Agreement.
Countries are being urged to hustle, with the United Nations saying current pledges have the planet on track for what it calls a “catastrophic” 2.5 to 2.9 degrees of heating.
A new pledge is due for 2030-2035 in February.
A major goal for host Azerbaijan is making progress on a deal for climate finance.
Currently OECD countries committed to pay $100 billion a year in finance to poorer countries to adapt to and prevent the impacts of climate change.
Not all the money has been paid as grants, with a large proportion given as loans.
Countries are looking to agree on a replacement for the finance mechanism when it runs out in 2025.
Watts said New Zealand would be among the nations arguing for the liability to pay to be shared more widely than the traditional list of OECD nations, bringing in other countries that can also afford to contribute.
Oil states such as UAE have already promised specific funding despite not being part of the original climate finance deal.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
You probably know about the last moments of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in 1985.
But what do you know about the environmental campaign ship’s last voyage before it was bombed by French secret agents in New Zealand on 10 July 1985?
Where had it come from, why was it there and what was it doing?
Find out in The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, a six part podcast series produced by an ABC Radio Australia and RNZ partnership.
The series was written and hosted by James Nokise of the ABC with writers and producers Justin Gregory (RNZ) and Sophie Townsend.
The series was assisted by Pacific journalist David Robie, author of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior; and editor Giff Johnson, Eve Burns and Hilary Hosia of the Marshall Islands Journal; along with many Marshall Islanders who spoke to the podcast crew or helped with this project.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
COMMENTARY: By Reverend James Bhagwan
“We will not sign our death certificate. We cannot sign on to text that does not have strong commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.”
These were the words of Samoa’s Minister of Natural Resources and Environment, Toeolesulusulu Cedric Schuster, speaking in his capacity as chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) at the UNFCCC COP28 in Dubai last year.
Outside, Pacific climate activists and allies, led by the Pacific Climate Warriors, were calling for a robust and comprehensive financial package that would see the full, fast, and fair transition away from fossil fuels and into renewable energy in the Global South.
This is our Pacific Way in action: state parties and civil society working together to remind the world as we approach a “finance COP” with the upcoming COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11-22 that we cannot be conveniently pigeonholed.
We are people who represent not only communities but landscapes and seascapes that are both vulnerable, and resilient, and should not be forced by polluting countries and the much subsidised and profit-focused fossil fuel industries that lobby them to choose between mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage.
Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) are the uncomfortable reminder for those who want smooth sailing of their agenda at COP29, that while we are able to hold the tension of our vulnerability and resilience in the Pacific, this may make for choppy seas.
I recently had the privilege of joining the SPREP facilitated pre-COP29 gathering for PSIDS and the Climate Change Ministerial meeting in Nadi, Fiji, to provide spiritual guidance and pastoral support.
This gathering took place in a spiritually significant moment, the final week of the Season of Creation, ending, profoundly, on the Feast Day of St Francis of Assisi, patron saint of the environment. The theme for this year’s Season of Creation was, “to hope and act with Creation (the environment).
Encouraged to act in hope
I looked across the room at climate ministers, lead negotiators from the region and the regional organisations that support them and encouraged them to begin the preparatory meeting and to also enter COP29 with hope, to act in hope, because to hope is an act of faith, of vision, of determination and trust that our current situation will not remain the status quo.
Pacific church leaders have rejected this status quo by saying that finance for adaptation and loss and damage, without a significant commitment to a fossil fuel phase-out that is full, fast and fair, is the biblical equivalent to 30 pieces of silver — the bribe Judas was given to betray Jesus.
In endorsing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and leading the World Council of Churches to do the same, Pacific faith communities are joining their governments and civil societies to ensure the entire blue Pacific voice reverberates clearly into the spaces where the focus on finance is dominant.
As people with a deep connection to land and sea, whose identity does not separate itself from biodiversity, the understanding of the “groaning of Creation” (Romans 8:19-25) resonates with Pacific islanders.
We were reminded of the words of St. Saint Augustine that says: “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
As we witness the cries and sufferings of Earth and all creatures, let righteous anger move us toward the courage to be hopeful and active for justice.
Hope is not merely optimism. It is not a utopian illusion. It is not waiting for a magical miracle.
Hope is trust that our action makes sense, even if the results of this action are not immediately seen. This is the type of hope that our Pasifika households carry to COP29.
Reverend James Bhagwan is general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches. He holds a Bachelor of Divinity from the Pacific Theological College in Fiji and a Masters in Theology from the Methodist Theological University in Korea. He also serves as co-chair of the Fossil Fuel NonProliferation Treaty Campaign Global Steering Committee. This article was first published by RNZ Pacific.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson of Te Ao Māori News
Over 30 years the French government tested 193 nuclear weapons in Māohi Nui and today Indigenous peoples still suffer the impacts through intergenerational cancers.
In 1975, France stopped atmospheric tests and moved to underground testing.
Hinamoeura Morgant-Cross was eight years old when the French nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa stopped in 1996.
“After poisoning us for 30 years, after using us as guinea pigs for 30 years, France condemned us to pay for all the cost of those cancers,” Morgant-Cross said.
She is a mother of two boys and married to another Māohi in Mataiea, Tahiti, and says her biggest worry is what will be left for the next generation.
As a politician in the French Polynesian Assembly she sponsored a unanimously supported resolution in September 2023 supporting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
It called on France to join the treaty, as one of the original five global nuclear powers and one of the nuclear nine possessors of nuclear weapons today.
As a survivor of nuclear testing, Morgant-Cross has worked with hibakusha, which is the term used to describe the survivors of the US atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.
Together, as living examples of the consequences, they are trying to push governments to demilitarise and end the possession of nuclear arsenals.
Connections from Māohi Nui to Aotearoa
Morgant-Cross spoke to Te Ao Māori News from Whāingaroa where she, along with other manuhiri of Hui Oranga, planted kowhangatara (spinifex) in the sand dunes for coastal restoration to build resilience against storms or tsunamis at a time of increased climate crises.
In the 1970s and 1980s, many of the anti-nuclear protests were in response to the tests in Māohi Nui, French Polynesia.
The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement began in Fiji in 1975 after the first Nuclear Free Pacific Conference, which was organised by Against French Testing in Moruroa (ATOM).
The Pacific Peoples’ Anti-Nuclear Action Committee was founded by Hilda Halkyard-Harawira and Grace Robertson, and in 1982 they hosted the first Hui Oranga which brought the movement for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific home to Aotearoa.
In 1985, Greenpeace was protesting against the French nuclear tests in Moruroa on its flagship Rainbow Warrior when the French government sent spies and members of its military to bomb the ship at its berth in Auckland Harbour. The two explosions led to the death of crew member Fernando Pereira.
Condemned to intergenerational cancer
“We still have diseases from generation to generation,” she says.
Non-profit organisation Nuclear Information and Resources Services data shows radiation is more harmful to women with cancer rates and death 50 percent higher than among men.
In her family, Morgant-Cross’ great-grandmother, grandmother, aunt and sister have been diagnosed with thyroid or breast cancer.
A mother and lawyer at the time, Morgant-Cross was diagnosed with leukaemia at 25 years old.
Valentina Cross, her mother has continuing thyroid problems, needs to take pills for the rest of her life and, similarly, Hinamoeura has to take pills to keep the leukaemia dormant for the rest of her life.
Being told the nuclear tests were “clean”, Morgant-Cross didn’t learn about the legacy of the nuclear bombs until she was 30 years old when former French Polynesian President Oscar Temaru filed a complaint against France for alleged crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the the nuclear tests.
She then saw a list of radiation-induced diseases, which included thyroid cancer, breast cancer, and leukaemia and she realised it wasn’t that her family had “bad genes”.
Known impacts ‘buried’ by the French state
Morgant-Cross says her people were victims of French propaganda as they were told there were no effects from the nuclear tests.
A 2000 research paper published in the Cancer Causes & Control journal said the thyroid rates in French Polynesia were two to three times higher than Maōri in New Zealand and Hawaians in Hawaii.
In 2021, more than two decades later, Princeton University’s Science and Global Security programme, the multimedia newsroom Disclose and research collective INTERPT released an investigation — The Moruroa Files — using declassified French defence documents.
“The state has tried hard to bury the toxic heritage of these tests,” Geoffrey Livolsi, Disclose’s editor-in-chief told The Guardian.
The report concluded about 110,000 people were exposed to ionising radiation. That number was almost the entire Polynesian population at the time.
New nuclear issues and justice
Similarly in Japan, the government and scientists are denying the links between high thyroid cancer rates and the Fukushima disaster.
Morgant-Cross said she was also concerned with the dumping of treated nuclear waste especially after pushback from NGOs, Pacific states, and experts.
The Pacific Islands Forum had an independent expert panel of world-class scientists and global experts on nuclear issues who assessed the data related to Japan’s decision to discharge ALPS-treated nuclear wastewater and found it lacked a sound scientific basis and offered viable alternatives which were ignored.
In Māohi Nui, much of the taxes go towards managing high cancer rates and Morgant-Cross said they were not given compensation to cover the medical assistance they deserved.
In 2010, a compensation law was passed and between then and 2020, RNZ Pacific reported France had compensated French Polynesia with US$30 million. And in 2021, it was reported to have paid US$16.6 million within the year but only 46 percent of the compensation claims were accepted.
“During July 2024 France spent billions of dollars to clean up the river Seine in Paris [for the [Olympic Games] and I was so shocked,” Morgant-Cross said.
“You can’t help us on medical care, you can’t help us on cleaning your nuclear rubbish in the South Pacific, but you can put billions of dollars to clean a river that is still disgusting?”
As a politician and anti-nuclear activist, Morgant-Cross hopes for nuclear justice and a world of peace.
She has started a movement named the Māohi Youth Resiliency in hopes to raise awareness of the nuclear legacy by telling her story and also learning how to help Māohi in this century.
Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The BHP Group, as with other mining giants, has much explaining to do in the way it has approached the environment. It has become a master of the greenwashing experiment, an adept promoter of sham environmental responsibility (take, for instance, its practice of merely selling its oil and gas business to Woodside Petroleum in 2021 rather than retiring them); and, it transpired recently, a ruthless negotiator and litigant over contentious claims.
After nine years of negotiations and attritive legal proceedings, BHP has reached a settlement with Brazilian authorities regarding its role in the Fundão tailings dam collapse in Mariana, Minas Gerais. Taking place on November 5, 2015, the results were catastrophic to human life and nature, leaving 19 people dead and spilling toxic sludge over some 700 kilometres of land. The Samarco-owned facility, which held something like 26,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of tailings (50 million cubic metres), was a joint venture between BHP and Vale. In addition to killing 14 company employees and five residents, the released tailings rapidly reached Bento Rodrigues, and part of the communities of Paracatu de Baixo and Gesteira and, for good measure, flooded the centre of the town of Barra Longa.
The catastrophe merely compounded, turning the Rio Doce Basin a filthy brown and affecting dozens of municipalities and hundreds of communities reliant on the Rio Doce for drinking water. The pollution also destroyed wildlife, fishing stocks, farmland and churches, and affected various Indigenous communities, including the Krenak, Tupiniquim, Guaranis and Quilombola.
In response to the collapse, BHP, Vale and Samarco established the Renova Foundation, intended to compensate individuals and small businesses for losses and ostensibly ameliorating environmental impacts. This was hardly a concession on BHP’s part of guilt. “Conveniently,” write the authors caustically in a Nature Conservation study on the disaster in August, “the company creates its foundation to repair its own damages. Through the dense patchwork of multiple lawsuits filed in Brazil, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, BHP has repeatedly denied any central culpability in the collapse.
Compensation payments to victims from the fund, to date, have also been scandalously tardy. The BHP 2024 annual report notes that R$17.5 billion (US$3.5 billion) had been paid to 430,000 people as of June 30 this year, with R$12.2 billion (US$2.5 billion) forked out to 110,000 people under the Novel system, or “court mandated simplified indemnity system”. The company praises this arrangement as one that enabled “informal workers” (cart drivers, sand miners, artisanal miners and street vendors) to receive compensation despite having “difficulty proving the damages they suffered”.
What BHP fails to underscore is that those under the Novel system had to wait for seven years after the dam collapse to receive any cash, with 40% of those only paid in the last two years. Of the 430,000, some 290,000 received a pitiful R$1050 each for a disruption to their water supply for seven to 10 days following the dam collapse. And just to add to the nastiness of it all, the replacement housing for victims has been of questionable quality. Little wonder that Thatiele Monic, president of the Vila Santa Efigênia and Adjacências Quilombola Association, is suspicious of the efforts of the Renova Foundation.
The UK leg of proceedings, commenced in November 2018, is positively Dickensian in legal gyrations. It began as a High Court lawsuit against BHP involving 240,000 plaintiffs, including Brazilian municipalities and Krenak indigenous communities. In November 2020, the court dismissed the lawsuit, with Justice Turner making a memorable remark: “The task facing the managing judge in England would, I predict, be akin to trying to build a house of cards in a wind tunnel.” Various impediments, not least the size and scale of the claims, including “jurisdictional cross-contamination” and an abuse of process, were cited.
In March 2021, the Court of Appeal affirmed the decision, arguing that the plaintiffs were already seeking legal redress in Brazil. In July, the London court of appeal reversed the decision, granting permission to appeal on grounds that the case had a “real prospect of success”. To not do so would risk real injustice. In July 2022, a Court of Appeal ruled that English courts could hear the case, noting that, “The vast majority of claimants who have recovered damages have only received very modest sums in respect of moral damages for interruption to their water supply”. An April 2024 date was set for the commencement of trial proceedings.
In March 2023, the scale of the class action burgeoned further, with the addition of 500,000 claimants. Attempts by BHP to delay the lawsuit till mid-2025 were rejected by a London court in May 2023. On October 21 this year, the trial finally commenced. It would last all but a few days.
The settlement agreement signed on October 25 includes BHP, Vale, Samarco and some half a dozen Brazilian authorities. Of the 42 civil claims against BHP, the October 25 agreement covers the most monumental and contentious. Its value – R$170 billion (US$31.5 billion) – is deceptive. Brazilian authorities can have reason to cheer the result, as it comes close to the R$175 billion sought in civil claims in 2016. BHP’s Chief Executive Officer, Mike Henry, also seemed suspiciously satisfied, claiming that the agreement would deliver a laundry list of benefits including “expanded and additional programs for the environment and for the people, including designated funding for the health system, economic recovery, improved infrastructure and extensive compensation and income support measures, including for farmers, fisher people and Indigenous and Traditional communities.”
A sharp analysis from Tony Boyd of the Australian Financial Review, hardly a forum known for its humanitarians and bleeding hearts, offers a rather different reading of Brazilian efforts and the tactics employed by the mining giants. It was evident to Boyd “that over the past decade, BHP and Vale have outplayed the Brazilian federal government, and statements of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo as well as the federal and state Public Prosecutors’ and Public Defenders’ Offices.”
Much of this has to do, as Boyd remarks, on the time value of money. Some 60% of the final R$100 billion settlement is payable over 20 years. Taking that time frame into account, the nominal amount comes to a net present value of R$48 billion. Using the net present value analysis also means that the R$32 billion commitment to cover the cost of removing tailings from the Rio Doce and R$30,000 compensation awards to individuals and small businesses who opt into the arrangement, is R$25 billion.
The financial burden arising from BHP’s compensatory undertakings has also been lessened by the near decade process of dispute resolution, allowing the reopening of the Samarco iron ore mine to take place in the meantime with healthy annual returns of US$750 million.
Even now, BHP’s mild description of the catastrophe is given a coolly confident assessment. The company’s website notes that since the dam breach, Samarco operates “with a strong focus on safety and sustainability.” Alleviating the use of dams has been possible because of the implementation of a “new filtration system”, while 80% of the tailings arising from the operations “are now dry stacked, with the rest deposited in a confined rocky pit.” Feeble assurance to those hundreds of thousands affected that fateful November in 2015.
The post Ruthless Settlements: BHP, Brazil, and the Samarco Fundão Dam Class Action first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Dangerously poor air quality is likely to continue blighting the north of Thailand and neighboring countries during the dry season, experts said, despite the recent announcement of a “clear sky” plan including a hotline with Myanmar and Laos.
Burning of agricultural land, much of it converted from forest to maize for animal feed, caused severe pollution in northern Thailand in the first half of 2023, along with Laos and Myanmar’s Shan state.
As the dry season approaches again, the environment ministers of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar and Thailand’s foreign minister this week said they’re committed to tackling air pollution. The World Health Organization estimates poor air quality causes millions of deaths globally every year.
“I’m not so optimistic about what is going to happen in the next few years. But we are starting right now, I think we can build [on this clear sky strategy]. Everyone knows this is affecting the health of their children,” said Aekkapol Aekakkararungroj of the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center.
“I think we are going to see better things after five years,” Aekakkararungroj, the center’s air pollution and geospatial imaging expert, told a haze seminar in Bangkok where the three countries’ ministers announced their plan for the hotline.
Southeast Asia is a global hotspot for haze and air pollution, particularly cross-border disasters that have their roots in land conversion for large scale agriculture.
Companies in Indonesia, for example, have drained extensive areas of peatland for pulpwood and palm oil plantations, making that land particularly combustible. Massive fires in Indonesia in 2015 sent haze into Singapore, Malaysia and southern Thailand and according to a joint Harvard and Columbia study hastened about 100,000 deaths across the region.
At Tuesday’s event, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos publicized a clear sky plan that for its first stage involves setting up a hotline, developing fire risk maps and “capacity building.”
Government ministers from the three countries put their hands onto a large glowing sphere at a launch ceremony in Bangkok. A giant screen behind them showed haze pulsating menacingly over a map of the region.
“This launching of the clear sky strategy is good for our countries because in the future we can work very closely. We can set up the hotline, sharing the challenges, difficulties and opportunities,” Khin Maung Yi, Myanmar’s environment minister, told Radio Free Asia.
“In Myanmar we are now reducing fire hot spots,” he said.
Maize for animal feed
Greenpeace Southeast Asia said the governmental efforts lack a crucial ingredient – accountability for “Big Meat” agricultural conglomerates such as Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand.
“We truly hope that the government is brave enough to make real change and protect people’s health before profit,” food and forest campaigner, Rattanasiri Kittikongnapang, told RFA.
“Without a traceability system and enforcing accountability of the meat and agribusiness, the government’s effort … will never be able to stop the haze at the source,” she said.
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During the 2023 haze, thousands went to hospitals with respiratory problems and workers in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which was ranked at that time as among the world’s most polluted cities, were told to stay indoors and work from home.
The two main culprits behind the hazardous pollution, 16 times worse in some areas than healthy levels, were forest fires and the burning of ever-wider fields of corn stubble after the February harvest to clear land for the planting season in May.
More than 40% of transboundary haze in the lower Mekong region results from fires in industrial maize plantations for animal feed, according to research by Greenpeace, more than other types of agriculture and forest fires.
Expansion of maize growing for feed grains was behind about 1.9 million hectares of deforestation in the lower Mekong region from 2015-2023, much of it in Laos, according to Greenpeace’s analysis of satellite imagery.
Aekakkararungroj, of the disaster preparedness center, said satellite detection of fires could in future be combined with environmental data and hospital health records to predict not only the risk of haze but the likely impact on people’s health including the number of deaths.
“Government – what can get them on the edge? Money and the number of dead people,” he said. “That will really wake them up.”
Edited by Mike Firn
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Stephen Wright for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A fossil fuel and an energy company have vastly underplayed the emissions that a proposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at a gas power station in Scotland will spew out. New research has exposed that the Peterhead Power Station CCS project could in fact produce five times more than developers have admitted. This means it will generate up to a staggering 31 million tonnes of carbon emissions across its lifetime.
It will throw a spanner in the works for the UK government’s flagship plan to drive down greenhouse gas emissions. This is because it brings into sharp relief how CCS is a sham climate crisis solution and smokescreen for maintaining the polluting fossil fuel industry. In other words, it exposes that Labour’s love-in with the technology is little more than a ploy to keep the powerful sector on side, while doing little to address the climate crisis.
Scottish energy supplier SSE and the Norwegian oil and gas giant Equinor – of climate-ruinous Rosebank infamy – are leading the Peterhead Power Station carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Scotland. The CCS plant will pipe carbon dioxide emissions through disused gas pipelines. The operators will inject the greenhouse gas into emptied oil and gas reservoirs. These lie in the rock bed beneath the North Sea.
However, as the Canary has consistently pointed out, CCS is an industry con to maintain the fossil fuel economy business-as-usual. Crucially, the technology isn’t proven at scale. On top of this, project developers often massively overpromise and underdeliver.
Now, new research has shown how this is likely to be the case with the proposed Peterhead project too.
With the support of Friends of the Earth Scotland (FoE Scotland), think tank Carbon Tracker has reviewed the Peterhead project. It revealed that the climate pollution from the project’s carbon capture plant could be five times higher than developers SSE and Equinor have disclosed to the Scottish government.
It estimated that the plant could cause 1 million tonnes more carbon dioxide each year than the 250,000 tonnes figure claimed in its official planning documents.
Moreover, it highlighted how the companies’ Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) – a legal requirement in planning applications – deliberately failed to account for the climate pollution from a range of factors. For instance, this included the greenhouse gases produced by extracting and transporting the gas. It will burn this to generate electricity.
Researchers exposed the holes in the Peterhead developer’s calculations, and modelled different scenarios. These accounted for more realistic carbon capture rates.
Even within its most conservative scenario, Carbon Tracker still found that the project would produce 40% more annual emissions than SSE and Equinor have suggested. This took likely plant outages into consideration – which the developers failed to do in their planning application. Factoring in upstream emissions of today’s energy supply mix made this even worse. It would see emissions soar by 140% on the companies’ estimates.
Together, this would represent 18m tonnes in lifetime emissions. By comparison SSE and Equinor projected it would be just 6.3m tonnes.
However, this was essentially the best-case scenario.
Carbon Tracker also assessed the impact of the UK relying more on imported gas throughout the plant’s lifespan. Crucially, it’s a scenario the UK government admits is likely.
Currently, the UK sources the bulk of its gas supply from Norway. Overall, the carbon emissions of Norway pipeline gas works out lower than the UK’s domestic supply. In short, the UK offshore North Sea oil and gas sector vastly underperforms in comparison to Norwegian production on reducing emissions.
For this reason, the fossil fuel industry and former Conservative administrations suggestions that domestic production is less carbon intensive – that is, less polluting – are inaccurate.
However, the UK has been increasingly sourcing Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) from places like the US and Qatar. This does have a far higher carbon footprint – up to five times higher than domestic gas.
Notably, as North Sea gas runs out, the UK Government forecasts it will import more LNG. SSE and Equinor’s environmental assessment fails to consider the predicted changes in the carbon footprint of its fuel throughout the Peterhead project’s lifespan.
Carbon Tracker took this into account. It found that in the worst case scenario, the plant could produce up to 1.2m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually. Specifically, this was if the UK’s energy mix was 100% LNG. This represented 4.8 times more emissions than the developers stated. In short, it would mean 31m tonnes across its lifetime.
Of course, this categorically does not make the case for expanding domestic production. Moreover, it shows the problem with greenlighting more dodgy carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to maintain it.
Friends of the Earth Scotland’s climate campaigner Alex Lee told the Canary that:
Carbon capture is being cynically used by the oil industry to prolong the lifespan of fossil fuels when they should be rapidly and equitably phased out everywhere.
The extreme weather that people are suffering which is driven by climate breakdown shows that we can’t afford the pollution from new oil and gas, whether it comes from the North Sea or the Middle East.
In other words, even with domestic fossil fuel production show that the climate can ill-afford this polluting technology.
Overall, Carbon Tracker uncovered that:
Climate campaigners are therefore demanding that the Scottish government orders the companies to produce an “honest assessment” of the climate emissions from the Peterhead project. The UK government recently forced developers of a similar proposed carbon capture and storage gas power station in Teesside to resubmit planning documents. In particular, it requires it to include analysis of the emissions from producing and transporting the gas that would fuel the plant.
Friends of the Earth Scotland’s climate campaigner Alex Lee said:
SSE and Equinor have deliberately hidden the true climate cost of their proposals to build a new gas burning power station at Peterhead. Scottish Government ministers have been misled through selective carbon accounting and wildly unrealistic forecasts.
In a bid to lock in expensive fossil fuel burning for another 30 years, these greedy energy companies are making claims about carbon capture that do not stand up to the slightest scrutiny. These companies seem willing to say whatever it takes to get this project built, leaving the Scottish public to bear the cost of its inevitable failure.
The Scottish Government must order these companies to go back and produce an honest assessment of the environmental impact of this fossil fuel development. When the Scottish Government sees the true climate harm of this project, the only rational response will be to reject it and focus instead on rapidly building up Scotland’s renewable energy future.
Feature image via Youtube – Brandon Cook Journalist
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
United Utilities is a private water company whose current CEO got a pay packet of over £1.4m in 2023/24. And it has “repeatedly dumped millions of litres of raw sewage illegally into one of England’s most famous lakes, Windermere, over a three-year period”, according to a new BBC report.
In some situations, companies have legal permission to dump waste. However, United Utilities illegally pumped “more than 140 million litres of waste” into Lake Windermere in Cumbria between 2021 and 2023.
Former CEO Steve Mogford, who was in charge for most of that time, received a pay packet of £2.3m in 2022. In fact, as This is Money reported, he “made £30m while at the helm of Britain’s biggest water polluter”.
Regarding the 2021-2023 damage United Utilities did to Windermere, the company “failed to report most of it”, according to the BBC.
Save Windermere campaigner Matt Staniek argued that the company had used “the jewel in the crown of the Lake District National Park… as an open sewer”.
As campaign group We Own It has explained, “Margaret Thatcher privatised water in England and Wales in 1989”. Welsh Water is now a not-for-profit organisation, and Scottish Water and Northern Irish Water remain in public ownership, but England is one massive experimentation lab for the monsters of privatisation.
In Scotland, We Own It says “bills are lower and rivers and seas are cleaner”, and investment is higher (per household).
The private companies in charge of water in England, on the other hand, have run up billions in debt and given even more billions to shareholders (almost entirely from abroad), all while increasing bills. And as the BBC reported, “sewage spills into England’s rivers and seas by water companies more than doubled in 2023” – particularly in poorer areas of the country.
It added that “water quality is generally higher in other parts of the UK”. And it noted that:
Some environmental charities blame water companies for a failure to fix leaky pipes and other damaged infrastructure – and criticise the regulator for not forcing them to act.
As We Own It’s lead campaigner Matthew Topham said in September:
The industry is in ecological and financial crisis. Shareholders have treated the sector like an ATM, extracting billions, not a public service stewarding our natural environment.
Under privatisation, it pays to pollute. Underinvestment in sewage treatment has led to spills, while funds are directed to shareholders’ pockets instead.
He also insisted:
Any bill hikes will serve as a bailout by the public of failed private finance. Keir Starmer has the power to end this rip-off, taking the firm into public ownership for free, as recommended by the Treasury, and halving its debts using Special Administration.
If you agree that change is an urgent necessity, join the March for Clean Water on Sunday 3 November, alongside groups like British Rowing, Extinction Rebellion, the National Trust, and the Women’s Institute.
Featured image via the Canary
By Ed Sykes
This post was originally published on Canary.
In his latest refusal to stand against pollution in London, mayor Sadiq Khan rejected an offer by Zack Polanski AM to join together and urge the national government to reject any future efforts to expand the city’s airports.
As the Canary previously reported, the Labour government just announced a £1.1bn investment in a Stansted Airport expansion over the next five years, ultimately showing how little it cares about the planet and climate crisis.
Of course, the government’s decision flies (almost quite literally) in the face of the climate crisis.
This includes the advice of its very own independent body the Climate Change Committee. Crucially, it had argued that government’s shouldn’t approve any airport expansions as this would jeopardise its climate commitments.
Naturally then, first the Labour Party gave the greenlight to the London City Airport expansion in August. It alone will mean the UK will pump out a further 230,000 tonnes of carbon-equivalent emissions a year, up to 2050.
So, Green Party deputy leader and AM Polanski challenged Sadiq Khan over airport expansions.
Pointing to the mayor’s power over the Airport National Policy Statement (ANPS), Zack Polanski pushed the Mayor to explain his previous support for suspending the ANPS with his present refusal to take any meaningful action to actually do so.
While Stansted Airport lies outside the boundaries GLA remit, Heathrow Airport and London City Airport both fall under the mayor’s purview.
Zack’s questions come after numerous questions over the mayor’s puzzling support for United Airlines, an American company that sponsored both London Pride 2023 as well as round trip business class flights for the Mayor’s trip to New York City.
Following his exchange with the mayor, Polanski said:
Bigger and bigger airports will never be compatible with a net zero target. Ever.
The Mayor has a real chance to step up and stop any further airport expansion across London, yet when given any opportunity to do so, all we get is more dithering, blame games, and petty partisanship.
It’s time to put action to his words: If London’s Mayor is serious about building a city that is safe and healthy for all Londoners, there is simply no excuse for not joining me in urging the national government to reject further plans for airport expansion.
Featured image via the Canary
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
Investigators have been busy at the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, the independent federal agency tasked with determining the root causes of major chemical accidents at industrial facilities. In Georgia, fallout is continuing more than two weeks after a massive chemical fire erupted at the BioLab pool and spa supply facility in Conyers, just outside of Atlanta. The fire created a toxic plume of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Suicide is a major global public health issue, leading to approximately 700,000 deaths each year. While the global suicide rate decreased by 36% from 2000 to 2019, Brazil saw a dramatic 43% rise in suicide cases during the same period.
A study conducted by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), in collaboration with Harvard University, found that Brazil recorded 147,698 suicides between 2011 and 2022. In 2022, the Indigenous population had the highest rates of self-harm notifications (103.72 per 100,000) and suicides (16.58 deaths per 100,000), compared to the overall population, which reported rates of 70.06 and 7.27 per 100,000, respectively.
Territorial conflicts, the expansion of agribusiness, oil and gas exploration, infrastructure projects, both legal and illegal mining and logging activities, along with discrimination, inequality, climate change, violation of Indigenous rights, inadequate state protection, and lack of permanent policies, are significant contributors to the increasing suicide rates among Indigenous People in Brazil.
Daiane Borges Machado, one of the authors of the Fiocruz study, mentioned:
Increasing suicide rates among Indigenous communities are deeply rooted in a complex web of systemic challenges. These populations have long been dramatically exposed to violence, territorial disputes, and the expansion of industries like agribusiness, mining, and logging, all of which severely impact Indigenous lands and ways of life. These activities not only threaten physical spaces but also disrupt the social and cultural connections that are vital for well-being.
Additionally, longstanding issues such as inequality, discrimination, and inadequate state protection highlight the failure to implement effective, permanent policies that safeguard Indigenous rights and health. Addressing these interconnected issues requires a holistic approach, focusing on cultural preservation, sustainable development, and equitable policy implementation.
Brazil’s Indigenous population exceeds 1.7 million, with more than half living in the Legal Amazon, based on the 2022 Census by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
A report from Brazil’s Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi) revealed that suicides among Indigenous people in Brazil rose by 56% in 2023, totalling 180 cases compared to 115 the previous year. This data may be underestimated due to flaws in Brazil’s death verification and registration system.
From 2019 to 2022, Brazil recorded a total of 535 suicides among Indigenous People. The highest number of cases occurred in Amazonas (208), followed by Mato Grosso do Sul (131) and Roraima (57). In 2023, Amazonas again had the highest number of suicides (66), followed by Mato Grosso do Sul (37) and Roraima (19). More than a third of all cases, totalling 59, involved individuals aged 19 and younger.
Jacyra Azevedo Paiva de Araujo, one of the authors of the Fiocruz study, stated:
It is essential to ensure that government agencies are actively engaged, adequately funded, and properly equipped to maintain a strong presence and function effectively in the region. This would help reduce violence, protect Indigenous lands, and lower the risk of suicide. Since suicide risk is closely linked to mental health disorders, providing access to mental health care must be a priority. While Brazil’s public health system offers mental health treatment to the entire population, these services need to be tailored specifically to the needs of Indigenous communities in these areas.
Jesem Orellana, an epidemiologist at Fiocruz, highlighted that suicide rates among Indigenous populations are associated not only with depression but also with socioeconomic factors such as inequality, economic crises, discrimination, and the decline of Indigenous traditions and practices, including hunting, fishing, and agriculture. Orellana explained that:
Suicide is known to be a complex and multicausal phenomenon. However, in indigenous contexts, sociocultural factors associated with the symbolic and cosmological universe or even with the clash between ancestral traditions and antagonistic worldviews, such as Western ones, tend to play an important role in the tragic statistics of indigenous suicide, especially among younger people.
The invasion of Indigenous lands and territorial disputes continue to be major issues that contribute to the ongoing pressures these communities face. Numerous cases of intimidation, threats, sexual assaults, and violent attacks against Indigenous communities have been reported in Brazil.
The states of Roraima, Mato Grosso do Sul and Amazonas have recorded the highest rates of assassinations.
The Cimi report indicates that invasions of Indigenous lands rose by 252% from 2019 to 2022, compared to earlier years. This period also saw an increase in cases of homicide, sexual violence, and death threats against Indigenous People.
The key factors behind the violence against Indigenous communities include the expansion of agribusiness, cattle farming, oil and gas extraction, both legal and illegal mining, fishing, hunting, and logging, as well as infrastructure projects such as road, railway, and dam construction, along with the private appropriation of their territories.
Indigenous People frequently feel pressured to leave their land due to concerns for their safety.
Of the 1,381 Indigenous lands and territorial claims in Brazil, 62% are still facing administrative obstacles to their regularisation, with 850 pending resolutions, and 563 having received no action from the state regarding demarcation.
The Brazilian government’s support for expanding oil and gas projects in the Amazon, along with agribusiness, cattle farming, mining, and infrastructure projects like the Ferrogrão railway – linking the port of Miritituba in Pará to Sinop in Mato Grosso – and the recently approved BR-319 highway, is expected to have devastating impacts on the environment and Indigenous communities.
The reconstruction of Amazon’s BR-319 highway, which connects Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, to Porto Velho, will affect 64 Indigenous territories. This project is key for the expansion of agribusiness, oil and gas exploration, illegal mining, logging, and organised crime, all of which will directly threaten Indigenous communities in the region.
In Brazil, Indigenous communities are confronted with a multitude of challenges, frequently left to face life-threatening conditions without sufficient state protection. This lack of support undermines their ability to defend their rights and has driven some to such desperation that they resort to extreme actions, including tragically taking their own lives.
Climate change and global warming leads to environmental degradation, posing yet another threat to Indigenous communities. Their livelihoods, dependant on agriculture, fishing, and hunting, have been affected by rising temperatures, droughts, and extreme weather events.
The rise in fires and droughts is pushing Indigenous People to leave their lands and seek work in urban centres. However, they often struggle to find employment, leading to economic difficulties and, at times, an inability to sustain themselves.
The lack of job opportunities and a sense of purpose can lead to substance abuse, with drugs and alcohol becoming an escape, often resulting in severe depression and, tragically, sometimes suicide.
Illegal mining is a critical issue affecting Indigenous communities in Brazil. A Fiocruz study discovered alarming mercury concentrations in hair samples and oral swabs from 293 Yanomami individuals in nine villages located in the upper Mucajaí River area of Roraima.
The mercury levels were three times higher than the recommended safety limits, primarily due to fish contamination, which is a staple in the Yanomami diet. Additionally, cognitive impairments were found in 55.2% of the children across these villages.
Mercury is a neurotoxin, and high levels of exposure can lead to damage to the nervous system, gastrointestinal tract, and kidneys. Symptoms of high exposure include cognitive disturbances, memory impairment, mood swings, muscle weakness, and skin conditions such as rashes and dermatitis.
A study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that maternal consumption of mercury-contaminated fish during pregnancy over three generations contributed to children’s poor mental health, with emotional and behavioural issues linked directly to an increased risk of attempted suicide.
The degradation and contamination of Indigenous lands and water sources drive the Indigenous communities to move to the cities in search of work, exposing them to a range of challenges that can have devastating outcomes.
Preserving Indigenous knowledge and practices is vital for safeguarding the physical and mental well-being of Brazil’s Indigenous populations. The contamination of their land and water forces these communities to relocate to urban areas in search of survival, disrupting their traditional lifestyles.
As they adapt, many turn to ultra-processed foods, alcohol, and drugs – substances foreign to their bodies – which can severely affect their health. This shift often results in increased rates of depression, self-harm, and suicide, highlighting the urgent need to protect their heritage and support their communities.
It’s crucial to establish and enforce permanent policies that safeguard Indigenous People and their sacred lands, while ensuring their participation in the decision-making process. The demarcation of Indigenous territories must be a priority, followed by empowering these communities to defend their rights and protect their land.
Machado explained that:
A Brazilian program has demonstrated significant effects in reducing suicide rates among impoverished populations and could potentially be applied as a preventive measure within Indigenous communities as well. By providing financial support, educational resources, and access to healthcare, such programs can help reduce socioeconomic inequalities and promote mental well-being. Strengthening these measures and ensuring access within Indigenous communities, while respecting their cultural and territorial autonomy, could be a crucial step toward mitigating the factors contributing to rising suicide rates.
Indigenous communities must be protected by the loss of their territories to deforestation and environmental degradation caused by agribusiness expansion, including cattle farming, legal and illegal mining, logging, oil and gas exploration, and harmful infrastructure projects.
These activities not only violate Indigenous rights, but also have devastating effects on their physical and mental health. Protecting ecosystems is crucial for Indigenous communities, as their very survival is inextricably tied to the health of the natural world.
The pursuit of profit and the persistence of an extractive colonial mindset must never outweigh the survival of Indigenous communities and the lands they defend. The alarming rise in self-harm and suicide among these communities is a stark indicator of our collective failure to protect them.
We must act urgently to reverse this destructive path before it’s too late.
Featured image via Survival International
This post was originally published on Canary.
The Labour government just announced a £1.1bn investment in a Stansted Airport expansion over the next five years, ultimately showing how little it cares about the planet and climate crisis:
We are pleased to today release details of a £1.1bn investment programme in @STN_Airport over the next five years
Announced as part of the Government’s International Investment Summit, our investment will help us attract even more routes to destinations around the world and… pic.twitter.com/HuYgpScFvr
— London Stansted Airport (@STN_Airport) October 14, 2024
Of course, the government’s decision flies (almost quite literally) in the face of the climate crisis.
This includes the advice of its very own independent body the Climate Change Committee. Crucially, it had argued that government’s shouldn’t approve any airport expansions as this would jeopardise its climate commitments.
Naturally then, first the Labour Party gave the greenlight to the London City Airport expansion in August. It alone will mean the UK will pump out a further 230,000 tonnes of carbon-equivalent emissions a year, up to 2050.
Evidently, it wasn’t content with spewing just these extra hundreds of thousands of planet-wrecking emissions into the atmosphere. Now, it wants to ramp this up with Stansted’s expansion too:
First London City Airport, now Stansted. Heathrow and Gatwick next?
We have climate deniers at the heart of our Government.
The climate change committee has said the industry cannot grow without undermining our emissions goals, and has urged ministers to stop expansion. https://t.co/9bFPwaGqOF
— Nate Higgins (@natehiggins) October 14, 2024
The government was bandying around its shiny new investment, jobs, and the economic contributions it’ll purportedly make for the UK. By contrast, it was a little quiet about the greenhouse gases it would produce:
Tell us about the carbon footprint of this project.
— austenspace (@austensp) October 14, 2024
Previously, the New Economics Foundation had estimated that the Stansted airport expansion plans could add another 281,000 tonnes of emissions a year. All that’s ON TOP of the staggering emissions London’s airports are pumping out already.
Labour didn’t get the memo that in 2019, London’s six airports generated the same amount of air pollution as 3.23m cars then? Obviously, it’s more likely it did, it’s just that it doesn’t care.
Don’t worry though, Labour and Gatwick have a sleek solution to all that pollution. That is, stick a solar farm over the problem:
Laughable greenwashing from govt and Stansted too as they point out the airport will be building a solar farm to provide green electricity for airport buildings. Oh that makes up for all the jet fuel burned, does it?!
— Helena Horton (@horton_official) October 14, 2024
Labour’s proudly showing off *Stansted airport’s expansion* with a *solar farm* to feed the terminal’s increasing electricity use and *EV charging stations*. Beautifully sums up this government’s approach to afterthought sustainability. Pure cli-fi https://t.co/zS5XZvH6Ac
— Charlie Hertzog Young (@utopianrealism) October 14, 2024
That’s some good ol’ greenwashing guff right there. Though, one person on X felt the new government might be missing a trick:
Quick add some CCS to complete the task
— peter williams (@p17ete) October 14, 2024
Naturally, it all happened just as we found out that trees and land absorbed almost zero carbon dioxide last year. Needless to say, the sudden collapse in carbon sinks was not factored into climate crisis modelling:
Your ‘moment of doom’ for Oct. 14, 2024 ~ Legacy.
“The kind of rapid land sink collapse seen in 2023 has not been factored into most climate models. If it continues, it raises the prospect of rapid global heating beyond what those models have predicted.”https://t.co/391gOz1e2x
— Prof. Eliot Jacobson (@EliotJacobson) October 14, 2024
I’ve been telling you they don’t include the earth’s response to warming, which is to emit gas into climate models because it can’t be factored in.
Why? We can’t know what the Earth will do as it warms. It’s the first time any civilization has made the world go extinct. https://t.co/J6BjriAZdB
— Jessica
(@jessicawins) October 14, 2024
Who’s going to break it to the airline companies that they’re favourite carbon offsetting scam just isn’t gonna fly – because the forests aren’t taking it anymore? Not that it ever did anyway, given countless studies and court rulings junking offset credit schemes.
If the new expansion is anything, it’s a sure-fire way to accelerate climate chaos:
Airport expansion means accelerating climate breakdown. The UK government’s announcement of an extension of #Stansted is yet another assault on human and planetary wellbeing.
— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) October 14, 2024
And while air travel will be soaring, the government will expect the public to pick up the slack on cutting emissions:
And yet today, @UKLabour is proudly announcing £1Bn funding for expansion of Stanstead Airport.
The climate impacts of further expansion in aviation will mean even greater emissions cuts in every other sector.@Ed_Miliband@LouHaighCan you make your policies make sense!
— Art
(@artgelling) October 14, 2024
I’m old enough to remember Haigh announcing investment for cycling a day after the last airport expansion announcement. That would be: Labour’s number one plan to make the rest of us tackle the climate crisis, while CEOs fly business class each week, everyone else must get on their bikes.
But it’s what the electorate wanted, right? Certain, eventual death:
It is what voters wanted.
Only the Lib Dems and Greens promised to curtail air travel on thier manifestos and most voters rejected them.
— Lawrence Locke (@LawrenceLocke6) October 14, 2024
Mind ahead, jet-setting Starmer is taking U-turns to new heights. First, the party jettisoned its £28 green investment pledge. Then, it started turbo-boosting the industry destroying the planet.
Of course, the Stansted airport expansion is Labour’s climate crisis plan in a nutshell. It will still fuck the Earth, just now with extra greenwashing. Oh and don’t forget the jobs, the extra jobs always make ruining the only known habitable planet in this solar system totally worth it.
The only ‘change’ Starmer is giving us is more of the climate destruction kind. But as long as his rich pals are happy, eh?
Because, absolutely nothing to see here… just the fact that multiple new Labour MPs have taken funding from a lobbying firm which shills for the International Airlines Group (IAG). Forget getting in bed with big business, the new Labour government has well and truly joined the ‘Mile High Club’ when it comes to the corporate capitalists screwing the planet.
Feature image via Youtube- 10 Downing Street/ Casey Planespotting/ the Canary
By HG
This post was originally published on Canary.
Labour Party ministers have hobnobbed with members of the industry lobby group the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) on at least sixteen separate events or occasions over the past year.
Now, after a year of lobbying prospective next Labour government ministers, its efforts appear to have paid off. In the midst of chancellor Rachel Reeves’ lament over the new Labour government’s £22bn so-called “black hole” in public finances, it has found almost exactly a tidy £22bn to funnel into carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.
However, this is barely the tip of the iceberg of Labour’s intimate connections to the industry – as board members and key staff in the CCSA show.
On Friday 4 October, prime minister Keir Starmer, Reeves, and energy secretary Ed Miliband have announced a staggering £21.7bn investment into the controversial technology.
In particular, they declared this investment for two Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) ‘clusters’. These are various major industrial areas in the UK vying to develop CCS to decarbonise polluting, and hard to abate sites. There are twelve such clusters spanning across the country.
Their announcement is for the East Coast Cluster at Teeside, and HyNet North West in Merseyside.
The CCSA has been the key trade body pushing for more public investment for the twelve clusters. And notably, among its members are many companies set to cash-in from the government’s recent announcement.
For instance, many of the CCSA’s board members are senior executives for corporations either developing or partnering with these projects. Represented on the board and involved in developing the CCS clusters are major fossil fuel companies including:
In addition to this, CCS developers Progressive Energy, and VPI Power also have key personnel on the CCSA board. There are also a number of CCSA board members who are partnering on the projects. These include oil and gas firms Essar, and Phillips 66, energy company SSE thermal, the UK’s biggest carbon polluter bioenergy corporation Drax, and waste company Viridor.
So, if after opining the black hole in public finances, the new government’s funding seems to have come out of the blue, this isn’t in fact the case. This is because over the past year, the CCSA ramped up its charm offensive with a range of key Labour ministers. Evidently, it is now paying off.
Crucially, the Canary has identified that Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) staff have met with, or attended events in which Labour ministers have been present. In total, it found 16 events or meetings since October 2023.
Kicking it all off was Labour’s conference in October that year. All in all, the CCSA co-hosted six events at this, and participated in a further roundtable event.
Between these events, CCSA representatives rubbed shoulders with multiple key shadow ministers, MPs, and parliamentary candidates.
One was a CCSA and Green Alliance roundtable with then shadow energy secretary Alan Whitehead. Both the East Coast, and HyNet clusters had representatives at this.
At another, Whitehead was again the keynote speaker in a roundtable held by FTI Consulting. A CCSA representative was present at this too. FTI has been central to fossil fuel companies’ efforts to delay action on the climate crisis, and promoting the polluting industry.
In addition to these, there were other events that the CCSA hosted at Labour’s 2023 conference that it didn’t advertise MP presence for. This was in at least two of events – but Labour members would have attended the event.
On top of all this, at both its 2023, and 2024 conference, the CCSA paid thousands of pounds for a stand. There, huge numbers of key ministers and other MPs visited throughout the course of the conference.
The Canary counted 16 MPs, including key shadow cabinet ministers, visited its stand at the 2023 conference. Similarly, at least 16 MPs, visited the stand in 2024. This included cabinet ministers Reeves, Miliband, and business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, as well as exchequer secretary James Murray.
Of course, who has been lobbying Labour on behalf of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) and its members is also significant.
Of note is one Joe Butler-Trewin. He began in his role as senior public affairs and communications officer for the trade lobby group in July 2022. Crucially, Butler-Trewin was previously a regional organiser for Keir Starmer during his leadership campaign. He was also an executive officer to Alex Sobel MP prior to this.
Butler-Trewin has attended both the 2023 and 2024 Labour Party conferences to represent the CCSA. After the 2023 conference, he penned a blog, in which he wrote:
Alan Whitehead has been an obvious champion for the sector but as he comes toward the end of his parliamentary career, we will be looking to the shadow Energy and Business team to take up the mantle as Labour’s industrial decarbonisation champions. We had positive engagement with Ed Miliband, Johnny Reynolds and Sarah Young and will be looking to them to drive development of CCUS from within the Labour ranks.
Essentially, its an admission of the CCSA’s aim to target particular likely next government cabinet members.
Then, in 2024, he can be seen pictured in a CCSA post talking with business secretary Jonathan Reynolds.
However, this likely hasn’t been his only connection or engagement with Labour ministers. In fact, since May 2023, Butler-Trewin has acted as public contact and secretary for the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on CCUS. The CCSA co-runs this APPG.
Obviously, this has cross-party members, including MPs from both the Conservative Party, and SNP. Nonetheless, Labour MP Alex Cunningham chaired the group until it wrapped up for the election in May 2024. Labour MP Bill Esterton also sat on the APPG, and in the most recent register, so too did Labour House of Lords peer Helen Liddell.
Liddell herself, a former Labour minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, is CCSA president.
And Butler-Trewin’s timing in taking over the secretariat role for it may also be telling. His predecessor Judith Shapiro moved into a new role at the CCSA in April, so he obviously took up the mantle from her. Notably however, Butler-Trewin was recorded in the role in the 17 May register. This would have been right after Labour overtook the Conservatives as the largest party in local authorities, during local government elections.
Obviously, the CCSA may have viewed the party’s success in local elections as a sign of what was to come in the following year’s General Election. Given this, it marked the opportune time to ramp up its lobbying efforts with the party.
Alongside Butler-Trewin and Liddell, there’s the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) CEO Ruth Herbert.
In November 2023, Herbert met with Starmer, Miliband, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, and Murray. This was at the St Fergus Gas terminal in Aberdeenshire. There, oil and gas company Shell, and Harbour Energy representatives gave them a tour. The CCS project at St Fergus Gas terminal is part of the Acorn cluster – which the government didn’t commit new funding to in this latest announcement.
Nonetheless, Herbert’s role at the CCSA, and in promoting CCS projects is still significant. This is because she was previously a a civil servant during Miliband’s stint under the last Labour government. This was when he was secretary of state for the then Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).
Notably, Miliband’s role lasted between May and September that year. For a significant portion of this (between March and August), Herbert was deputy head of outreach and collaboration for the Office of CCS. At the time, Miliband was pushing for new coal-fired power stations to require full CCS deployment “from day one”. In other words, he was already trying to embed CCS as a lifeline for the fossil fuel industry, instead of phasing it out.
The Canary has compiled a timeline of the events and the ministers and MPs involved with the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) from October 2023 until the announcement on October 4 2024.
This is as following:
October 2023:
1. Labour Party Conference:
November 2023:
1. Tour at St Fergus Gas Terminal in Aberdeenshire. MPs/ministers in attendance: Labour leader Keir Starmer, then energy secretary Ed Miliband, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, Ian Murray MP. Notable private sector participants: Shell, and Harbour Energy.
2. CCSA Annual General Meeting.
MPs/ministers in attendance: Then shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband, and baroness Liddell.
February 2024:
1. Labour Annual Business Conference. CCSA attended and it commented that Reeves: “stressed the significance of CCS in enabling the continued use of fossil fuels while mitigating their environmental impact. Scaling up CCS infrastructure is pivotal for achieving a balanced energy transition.”
April 2024:
1. CCSA were a forum partner at the Innovation Zero event where it hosted a talk on ‘Opportunities in carbon capture, utilisation, and storage’.
MPs/ministers in attendance: Then shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband, former energy secretary Alan Whitehead. Notable private sector participants: VPI, Drax, Phillip 66, BP, Uniper, Progressive Energy, HyNet.
July 2024 (post-election):
1. Tour of HyNet cluster with CCSA director Olivia Powis.
MPs/ministers in attendance: Energy and net zero minister Sarah Jones.
At this in particular, Jones signalled the new Labour government’s incoming funding for the East Coast and HyNet clusters.
September 2024:
1. Trade group Energy UK conference which the CCSA attended.
MPs/ministers in attendance: Energy secretary Ed Miliband (keynote speech)
2. Labour Party Conference:
Of course, this is likely non-comprehensive. It’s very plausible the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) has met privately with key Labour ministers. However, parliamentary rules revolving round ministerial transparency doesn’t apply to the opposition.
As such, these are not recorded and put into the public domain. The Canary therefore had to rely on events the CCSA had publicised across its social media.
At the end of the day, the latest £22bn investment demonstrated that the new Labour government is well and truly at the beck and call of the CCS industry. By extension, that invariably means big oil and gas. For all its commitments to end new North Sea fossil fuels licences, it’s clear that Labour isn’t planning to spell the end for the industry at large.
However, as new BP boss Murray Auchincloss has just shown with the company’s move away from green technology, the old guard energy majors will do nothing that hits the bottom line. And the bottom line in CCS technology is that it has extortionate costs and is so far unproven at scale.
Right now, the nascent, controversial technology is a convenient smokescreen for the industry to feign decarbonisation and continue on its destructive, polluting business as usual. Yet when the pricey reality sets in, it will likely drop these projects – leaving the public to mop up the spiralling costs.
The new Labour government is hitching billions of taxpayer cash to these uneconomic, fossil fuel industry-favourite vanity projects. It’s doing this while keeping the cruel two-child benefit limit, slashing the winter fuel payment, with more cuts to welfare likely on the way.
Given the CCSA’s extensive mingling with ministers over the past year alone, it’s easy to see how we got here.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
Local officials, academic researchers, and volunteer responders have raised concerns about chemical and biological contamination brought by the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene in the southeastern U.S. last week, which potentially threaten the safety not only of drinking water but also the quality of soil — leading experts to call for tighter regulations on stored pollutants.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Fossil fuel company Europa Oil & Gas is seeking permission for a fracking project in North Yorkshire. And thanks to a gaping loophole in the current moratorium on the environmentally destructive process, it just might happen.
Yet, if the fact the fracking may go ahead in itself weren’t bad enough, the proposed project has exposed something else concerning about current regulations. In particular it has underscored how some new fossil fuel projects may also evade a landmark recent ruling on downstream emissions.
Predictably, Europa has pulled out all the stops in its efforts to do just that – and kicked its PR machine into action over the planned frack.
In June, the Supreme Court delivered a devastating blow to the fossil fuel industry. This was the historic case against UK Oil and Gas’s (UKOG) Horse Hill site. It was brought by Extinction Rebellion campaigner and former Surrey resident Sarah Finch, on behalf of the Weald Action Group.
Crucially, the groundbreaking judgement ruled that greenhouse gas emissions produced from consumers combusting the oil and gas:
are entirely within their control
In other words, companies could choose not to extract them in the first place.
Now, fossil fuel firms will have to consider these downstream emissions and their possible impact in their EIAs.
However, it’s important to note that this doesn’t automatically mean a blanket ban on fossil fuel projects. It simply requires firms to include these in their EIA – and for planning authorities to take this into account when deliberating over approval for an application.
Nevertheless, the landmark ruling will bring the climate impacts of combusting fossil fuels into the mix. In theory, this will make it harder for fossil fuel projects to get planning consents, in the context of the UK Climate Change Act and the country’s binding international commitments.
As the Canary previously reported, fossil fuel firm Egdon has now submitted a pre-application on behalf of Europa Oil & Gas to frack for gas near Scarborough. And crucially, a spokesperson from Frack Free Scarborough highlighted to the Canary that the fracking project at Burniston was a case and point of how the fossil fuel industry might try to get around the recent judgement in some projects anyway.
In Burniston’s case, Egdon and Europa had said an EIA would be unnecessary. They’d argued that the exploration drilling:
is not likely to have significant environmental effects by virtue of its characteristics, based on the relatively short duration of the drilling operations
As it happens, this is exactly the get-out clause UK’s EIA regulations afford. Notably, both the absence of “significant environmental effects” and the project occurring over a “short period” can rule out the requirement for an EIA.
Indeed, there have been cases where councils have screened out fossil fuel projects for EIAs. Particularly notable, in 2014, Cheshire West and Chester Council didn’t ask for EIAs when granting consent for the fracking project at Upton – famously the site of the longest-running anti-fracking camp.
Why is this important in the context of the judgement on Horse Hill? Put simply, because the ruling only applies to projects with EIAs. This is the case since the EIA is where companies have to set out and consider the effects of their downstream emissions. In other words, it means some onshore fossil fuel projects can – and potentially will – evade the moratorium.
Ultimately however, North Yorkshire Council disagreed with the fossil fuel companies assessment. It concluded on the basis of the company’s pre-application that the project:
could have significant environmental impacts
In particular, it emphasised these:
in relation to landscape and transport
It means that Egdon and Europa will have to submit an EIA – and include the impacts of its downstream emissions in it.
Initially, Europa applied for a dispensation on this from the government. Essentially, this is where the government could overrule the council’s decision. However, strong local opposition appears to have put paid to this ploy.
Frack Free Scarborough’s spokesperson recounted to the Canary how over 150 local people and councillors at a Burniston local meeting unanimously voted that the company should produce an EIA. Obviously, this wasn’t binding, but this and local campaigners continued vocal protests against the project seems to have given the company pause for thought.
It has now said it will disregard a dispensation if the government grants it. Of course, its agenda is apparent. This is the company’s ‘good will gesture’ – in actuality, a manoeuvre to get the community – and by extension, the council, on-board with the project.
And throughout, Europa has indeed been playing a charm offensive with the local community.
One part of this has been its online feedback consultation form. Unsurprisingly, it’s rammed with leading questions that yield foregone conclusions. One particular question frames its narrow multiple choice answers with the claim that:
imported gas results in emissions over 20 times greater than domestic production
However, this is an entirely bogus figure. For one, it’s unclear where Europa got this from. It appears as if the company has plucked it from thin air. Of course, it’s a common industry line that UK domestic production is cleaner in terms of emissions than imported liquified natural gas (LNG). However, the claim is persistently overblown.
In reality, the UK imports the vast bulk of its LNG from Norway, and the government’s own data has shown this is less polluting than gas produced from the UK’s North Sea. It also entirely misses the point that just because Europa would be producing the gas here, it doesn’t mean it will stay here.
In reality, the gas will most likely go to the highest bidder on the regional gas markets. In fact, it admitted in its engagement with the community that it couldn’t guarantee the gas it produces wouldn’t be for export.
So, this also eviscerates one of its other key arguments for the project. This is the idea that the fracked gas is to meet UK energy demand, and bring down bills – which is patently false. It has splashed this across a series of slick online community information material.
Naturally, there’s plenty more industry hot air where these came from too. Largely, it’s all to pitch itself as the friendly neighbourhood fracking company.
Obviously, the ‘consultation’ is just a tick-box exercise when it comes down to it. It will enable the company to claim it has engaged with the community and taken their opinions on board.
Unfortunately for Europa, this isn’t going to fly. Frack Free Scarborough’s spokesperson articulated how campaigners fighting the project are not falling for its PR:
There’s an inherent contradiction at the heart of fossil fuel exploration and that is that the fossil fuel companies have one responsibility — to make money for their shareholders. They can talk about all sorts of other stuff but when it comes down to it that’s what they’re there for. We, as residents and community members, also have one responsibility – to take care of our families, and our communities, and extended outwards from that, to take care of the planet.
Those two sets of interests do not mix and that means that the fossil fuel industry isn’t welcome anywhere. It has to force itself on the communities it wants to operate within. Obviously, tactics vary depending on the political context. From murder in the Niger Delta to obfuscation, a campaign of lies and disinformation, and downright bribery.
In the middle of that spectrum from carrot to stick is the schmooze zone, and this is where the onshore UK drilling industry prefers to operate. This is where they talk about energy security, as Europa has, gas prices, which Europa has, about the pathway to net zero. All of this kind of stuff, including even more insidious and sneaky stuff.
Predictably then, Europa has done a good job of dressing up their fracking operation. From “small-scale standard oilfield operation” to “conventional hydraulic fracturing”, the company has gone to every effort to downplay the fact it plans to frack in Yorkshire.
Similarly, Frack Free Scarborough’s spokesperson also highlighted how the industry’s terminology has helped it bypass the moratorium and pitch itself as a safer fossil fuel process:
That term ‘proppant squeeze’ is part of the schmooze effort – it sounds very friendly, doesn’t it?
Unsurprisingly, at a community drop-in session, the merchant of doubt kicked this misinformation machine into full gear.
Again, Europa took umbrage at the use of the term ‘fracking’. A member of the local community took notes on the meeting. Frack Free Scarborough shared them with the Canary. According to these, the company’s CEO Will Holland, and COO Alastair Stuart expressed their frustration over this.
In particular, they suggested the project shouldn’t be equated with so-called high volume fracking. In another ostensible schmooze-fest then, they purportedly opined how they wished people would use:
less contentious language around ‘well stimulation’.
Fortunately, independent onshore oil and gas monitoring site Drill or Drop’s Ruth Hayhurst has held the company’s feet to the fire over its claims during the meeting.
In particular, it disclosed how it would use 1,200 cubic metres (m3) of fluid in total, across up to three so-called “proppant squeezes”. A single frack would use up to 500m3. And crucially, as part of its presentation, it compared these to other high-profile former fracking sites in the UK.
However, it was here that Hayhurst caught the company out. Europa’s exhibition panel showed vastly higher amounts than operators at these sites actually used in practice. She pointed out that Preston New Road’s individual fracks used between 2.5m3 to 472m3. In other words, the largest frack used a similar volume to the amount Europa could use in its exploration at Burniston.
Of course, this is another sticking point with the moratorium too. Notably, it was the earthquakes at Preston New Road that ultimately formed the basis for it.
According to Hayhurst, the company argued that Preston New Road earthquakes were due to the existence of geological faults. But, it said that none had been identified at Burniston.
Once more though, there was a significant problem with this. Hayhurst highlighted that Europa hasn’t conducted 3D seismic surveys yet – meaning, it doesn’t properly have the full picture of geological faults at Burniston. Worse still, it won’t do this until next year – that is, after it has submitted its application.
On top of this, Europa’s leaflet again leans into the fact it’s a lower volume, lower pressure form of fracking. It says that:
There will be no earthquakes as a result of this operation. Despite there being no risk we will still monitor seismic activity at the site and the operation will be immediately shut down if any unusual seismic activity is noted as a result.
Of course, again, this is patently false. Europa can’t conclusively rule out the possibility that its operation could trigger seismic activity. Realistically, it can at best say that it’s unlikely. This is what an assessment at Wressle determined before Europa venture partner Egdon carried out its frack in 2021.
So, Europa compared the Burniston proposal to the proppant squeeze operation at Wressle further. On this, Hayhurst noted:
proppant squeeze used 146m3, just over a quarter of the fluid volume that could be used in a single operation at Burniston.
Obviously, the point here is that Wressle was a smaller operation and therefore not necessarily a good comparison. The chances of inducing an earthquake may very well be small. However, Europa’s misinformation deliberately tries to obfuscate that it’s even a possibility.
At the end of the day, no amount of Europa’s sly public relations pitch is going to change the reality. And that is to tackle the climate crisis, there should be no new fossil fuel projects. The EIA downstream emissions is one significant nail in the coffin of this planet-wrecking industry. But evidently, fossil fuel companies will continue to do everything in their enormously well-resourced power to weasel out of it.
The fact a fracking project nearly did shows that these profiteering polluters have every intention of maintaining business-as-usual. And they’ll do so whatever the cost is to communities, and the planet at large. However, climate activists and local people will be damned if they let them get away with it.
Featured image supplied
This post was originally published on Canary.
As predictably as as false climate crisis solutions follow conference lobbying, the Labour Party government has announced its latest chunk of taxpayer cash it’s gearing up to inject into the fossil fuel industry.
But apparently, there’s a £22bn black hole in public finances.
So, Labour has said it needs to freeze your grandparents to death this winter to plug this.
Therefore, it might come as a shock (a SHOCK we tell you) that energy secretary Ed Miliband has seemingly found a spare £22bn down the back of sofa for the government’s gander into greenwashing. Specifically, the Labour cabinet plan to spaff this up the wall of the fossil fuel industry-favourite smokescreen technology that is carbon capture and storage (CCS) – after proponents of it lobbied the party.
As the Guardian (rather dutifully) reported:
Rachel Reeves is paving the way for a multibillion-pound increase in public-sector investment at the budget after the government announced plans to commit almost £22bn over 25 years to fund carbon capture and storage projects.
In what is expected to be one of the biggest green spending promises of the parliament, the chancellor, prime minister and the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, will unveil the details on a visit to the Liverpool city region on Friday declaring a “new era” for clean energy jobs.
CCS itself does what it says on the tin. Companies capture carbon emissions from large-scale industrial installations. They then pump it underground – for instance, in depleted oil and gas wells. However, this is the technology the fossil fuel industry is pinning its hopes on as a lifeline for its polluting business-as-usual.
The Guardian article therefore noted that the technology is “controversial” because:
it has never been used at commercial scale in the UK before, while environmental campaigners have warned big energy firms could use it to extend the life of their fossil fuel assets.
It didn’t give any further details on this, but as the Canary has previously reported, plenty of studies have demonstrated it woefully falling short.
Of course, the Guardian gave good ol’ greenwashing Ed the last word. Furthermore, it bigged up the Labour energy sec while it was at it. Notably, it wrote that:
Britain’s initial attempt to establish a carbon capture industry began in 2009 under a Labour government. But after the Conservative victory in 2010 the £1bn funding plan faltered and was scrapped in 2015. The Conservatives went on to shortlist the two CCS projects for funding in 2021 but did not commit to the investment before they were voted out of power in July.
Miliband said: “I was proud to kickstart the industry in 2009, and I am even prouder today to turn it into reality.
“On Monday, 150 years of coal in this country came to an end. Today, a new era begins. By securing this investment, we pave the way for securing the clean energy revolution that will rebuild Britain’s industrial heartlands.”
Yet, it somehow missed the part where previous governments have wasted almost £500m to prop up this junk technology.
Despite all this, the Labour government is still planning to ploughing billions more into dud CCS. Might this have something to do with its lavish £4m from an offshore tax haven-based hedge fund, with a philanthropic foundation that invests in just such technology?
Or, perhaps the recent Labour Party conference awash with CCS backers twisted its arm.
One was the industry body the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) forking over thousands to secure itself a stand outside this year’s conference hall. It previously sponsored 15 events at Labour’s 2023 conference. But, it’s in bed with big oil and gas, big-time – with members from BP, to Exxon, to Shell, and Equinor.
Others were CCS developers hosting fringe events, and a lobbying firm that represents the sector.
One person on X thought that Miliband might have missed the memo:
Someone needs to tell Ed Miliband that CCS (Carbon Capture Storage) is a myth invented by the fossil fuel lobby to maintain fossil fuel production.
It won’t work. Just Stop Oil
— Rangzen (@revoltinghippie) October 4, 2024
*Whispering* – here’s the truth: he knows, he just doesn’t care. Miliband is more worried for the fossil fuel industry going the way of his Labour leadership stint (see: the ill-fated ‘Edstone’) than he is about people dying from the cold this winter:
Urgent: this represents capture of the UK’s environmental policy by fossil fuel companies. Taxpayer subsidies of 22bn should NOT be going to support these companies esp while Uk citizens struggle to pay fuel bills.
We need a rethink @Ed_Miliband https://t.co/VWaPAWr97i
— MP Watch (@MPWatchNetwork) October 4, 2024
Did he say something about a “new” industry? That would be the flailing CCS the government has thrown millions at, but has nothing to show for it after over a decade. Moreover, the announcement was just that the new government would waste more money on it. There’s a term for this type of taxpayer-fueled spending spree:
This isn’t an industry, it’s a subsidy https://t.co/vhu3TzfOkG
— James (@jamesjwyork) October 4, 2024
£22 billion subsidy to the fossil fuel industry https://t.co/1gKUaKxEPM
— Todd Bonzalez (@not_tbonzalez) October 4, 2024
At the end of the day, it’s just the business-bought neoliberal Labour Party doing what it does best. Eye-watering payouts for its capitalist backers at the publics’ expense. Obviously, this latest sham will be bad news for the planet too.
It will greenlight and greenwash climate-wrecking companies continuing their destructive extractivism. Corporate capture leading to carbon capture? That about sums it up.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
A fossil fuel company, Europa, has plans afoot for a fracking project in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.
Despite the 2019 moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, Scarborough’s local authority – or the government – could very well give the project the go-ahead. This is because the ban as it currently stands doesn’t cover it. However, local campaigners already resisting the project have accused the firm of attempting to push “fracking by loophole”.
As a result, the brewing battle has thrown the gaping hole at the heart of the existing fracking moratorium into the spotlight. What’s more, it has inadvertently underscored the current gaps in the new Labour government’s pledge to ban fracking.
UK-based fossil fuel firm Europa Oil & Gas is gearing up to frack for gas near Scarborough, at a cliffside site within the North Yorkshire and Cleveland Heritage Coast.
It will involve a form of fracking known as a ‘proppant squeeze’. Essentially, it’s a process that injects a proppant – a solid material, usually sand – and water slurry into the wellbore. Technically, this isn’t the same procedure that Cuadrilla used at notorious fracking site Preston New Road. This is because it uses less water, and due to the proppant, less pressure to carry out the operation. Ultimately though, the end goal is no different – that is, to fracture the gas-bearing rock.
Operator Europa holds a 40% stake in this onshore oil and gas licence at Burniston. The remainder is owned by Egdon Resources parent company Heyco Energy Group (40%), and Petrichor Energy UK (20%).
In July, Egdon, on behalf of Europa, put its feelers out with North Yorkshire Council over its proposals. It submitted a screening request from the local authority. Essentially, this asked it to set out whether its full application would require an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).
Already, Europa has indicated that it will submit a full application for gas exploration at the Scarborough site by the end of the year. Notably however, this wouldn’t be to extract gas for commercial sale. Instead, it would be to test the rates of gas it could bring into commercial production, which would require a further licence.
At this point then, across 37 weeks, it is proposing to prepare the site, drill a borehole, frack for gas, and finally decommission and restore the site. Ultimately though, if it finds gas that it can frack – and it certainly expects to – a production application will invariably follow.
In other words, Europa is sizing up the lucrative prospects of this so-called “low volume hydraulic fracturing” at Burniston. Yet, this industry ascribed framing is misleading – and for multiple reasons. Crucially, it’s not quite the small affair the company is making it out to be.
In fact, if the project at Burniston goes ahead, it could very well be the biggest onshore gas field operating in the UK.
As it stands, Angus Energy’s Saltfleetby conventional gas field in Lincolnshire is the UK’s largest producing field. It has made up nearly three-quarters of the onshore gas production in the UK for the first half of 2024. Similarly in 2023, it made up over 70% for the whole year.
So far, the gas field has averaged at producing just shy of seven million standard cubic feet of gas per day(mmscf/d). By comparison, the second largest onshore producer has averaged less than 1mmscf/d in the first six months of 2024. Europa’s modelling has indicated the site could produce approximately 6mmscf/d. Obviously, this means that Burniston could be hot on Saltfleetby’s heels.
In fact, in an investor presentation, Europa CEO Will Holland suggested that it’s possible it could far exceed this, reaching as high as 20mmscf/d. Largely though, the company expects it to be closer to the lower 6mmscf/d.
Despite this, by offshore standards, it’ll make up a tiny proportion of the UK’s domestic gas production. In 2023, 34 offshore fields produced over 6mmscf/d on average. The largest producing gas field was majority owned Spirit Energy’s Cygnus in the southern North Sea. British gas owner Centrica holds the largest stake in the fossil fuel company. This produced 210mmscf/d on average in 2023 – 35 times more than Europa’s modelled estimates for Burniston.
Nonetheless, Burniston would still place within the top 50% of gas fields currently producing in the UK. And certainly, it would sit among the highest onshore gas producers, if not the top.
Holland also told Burniston residents in an information meeting that the company thinks it could recover around 50 billion cubic feet (bcf) from the gas reservoir. This is over double the remaining recoverable reserves of gas in the UK’s current largest onshore site at Saltfleetby.
Most significantly however, Europa has been curiously quiet about one key detail. That is, how the project at Burniston could prove to be among its biggest cash cows.
As it stands, the company makes most of its profits from its stake at Wressle oil and gas field in Lincolnshire. Of its total £6.7m revenue in 2023, £5.3m of this was from the site alone.
Yet, Angus Energy’s operations at Saltfleetby has netted it £12.1m in just the first six months of 2024. Even with just a 40% stake at Burniston, Europa – and its partners – could turn a tidy multi-million profit on it. Therefore, there’s a decent possibility it could become the company’s main money-spinner.
Of course, there’s currently a moratorium on fracking in the UK. With the exception of a brief period under Liz Truss’s short-lived stint as prime minister, this has been in place since 2019.
Given this, the fracking project at Burniston surely shouldn’t be on the table? However, Europa and co wouldn’t be submitting an application for it if that were the case. For one, the fact is, the moratorium isn’t an outright and permanent ban anyway.
Aside from that, there’s also another gaping hole in it too. Crucially, it’s this lapse in regulation within the moratorium that the fossil fuel companies are targeting in particular at Burniston.
So, local climate campaigners have called it “fracking by loophole” and for good reason – because that’s exactly what it is.
Unsurprisingly, Europa has fervently refuted that it constitutes this. It has laboured over this point in its public-facing literature for the project. In particular, it states that:
low volume hydraulic fracturing operations, which have been used for many decades in the UK, were not included in the 2019 moratorium. They were deliberately excluded because these operations are well established and proven to be safe, both from a health and safety and an environmental perspective. As such the legal basis under which the ban on high volume hydraulic fracturing was prosecuted does not apply. This is therefore not a “loophole” in the law relating to the 2019 moratorium.
Despite its protestations however, it’s definitively a form of fracking. For one, the clue is in the name: hydraulic fracturing – which is quite literally, fracking. In other words, the process the fossil fuel companies plan to use at Burniston involves fracturing rock to obtain gas.
However, what Europa has said about the moratorium is correct – at least insofar as the fact it doesn’t apply to this specific form of fracking. Largely, the reason for this is the UK’s legal definition for fracking. Crucially, the Infrastructure Act 2015 only includes projects that involve the injection:
(i)more than 1,000 cubic metres of fluid at each stage, or expected stage, of the hydraulic fracturing, or
(ii)more than 10,000 cubic metres of fluid in total.
When the then Tory government implemented this, leading geologist professor Stuart Hazeldine at the University of Edinburgh lambasted it for only defining fracking by the amount of high pressure fluid injected. Tellingly, at the time he used the same word to describe this that anti-fracking campaigners have levied against the Burniston project. Then too, he branded it a word evidently instilling dread in the minds of Europa’s top brass: a “very large loophole”.
In fact, Hazeldine showed exactly why the definition was hugely controversial. In an analysis of more than 17,000 gas wells fracked in the US, he identified that 43% of these would elude the UK’s definition. For 4,500 fracked oil wells, 89% would not qualify as fracking under UK rules.
In short then, it is fracking by any other name. It’s just that the former government’s legal definition of fracking, and ergo its moratorium, doesn’t cover it.
The Canary talked to a spokeperson for Frack Free Scarborough, who have been fighting the project since Europa announced it. They told us that this had been a deliberate “sleight of hand”, emphasising that:
When we were campaigning, and Horse Hill were campaigning, and Preston New Road were campaigning, and everybody nationally was campaigning to get a fracking ban, people were campaigning for an end to all forms of fracking. That was the fight — to say, ‘We don’t want any of this. We don’t want acidification near Scunthorpe. We don’t want proppant squeeze in Wressle. We certainly don’t want high volume, high pressure fracking at Preston New Road or at KM8.’
But when you wake up on the morning of the renewed moratorium and the ink has dried, you realise they’ve just appeased people by saying fracking is not allowed, and all of this other stuff we’ve been campaigning about is still perfectly OK. It’s not.
Needless to say, this has certainly benefited fossil fuel companies like Egdon and Europa. Now, Burniston will be another case and point.
In fact, it actually isn’t the first time a fracking project like this has slipped through the moratorium’s widely-holed net. Another site part-owned by Europa, and operated by Egdon conducted the same process in 2021. Union Jack Oil also holds a stake in this licence.
At Wressle oil and gas field in North Lincolnshire, Egdon carried out a proppant squeeze operation for oil. The site the second largest producing onshore oilfield in the UK after Wytch Farm, in Dorset.
What’s more, only this September, North Lincolnshire Council greenlit Egdon to conduct two other smaller scale fracks at Wressle for oil.
Frack Free Scarborough’s spokesperson also raised with the Canary that obviously, the “political context has changed” with Labour now in government. And notably, in its manifesto, it promised to “ban fracking for good.”
Of course, this follows its opposition motion in 2022 to do just that as well. Vitally however, this was essentially to shift the moratorium into a permanent ban.
Ostensibly then, it referred to fracking as set out by the active legal definition in the Infrastructure Act. Obviously, it’s this which currently allows projects like Burniston to bypass the moratorium. In all likelihood then, the manifesto’s commitment will seek to do the same. And if this is the case, all fracking won’t be banned “for good” after all.
Despite this, Scarborough and Whitby MP Alison Hume has already come out against the project, so the Frack Free Scarborough spokesperson explained that:
As a campaign, one of the things that we will do is encourage Alison Hume and others in the Labour Party to put pressure on Keir Starmer to listen more strongly to us than he might be tempted to listen to the fossil fuel companies.
Already though, Starmer and his government are a little too close for comfort with the fossil fuel industry. The party cosied up to corporate lobbyists shilling for the oil and gas sector at its recent 2024 conference. In fact, Global Witness identified that oil and gas linked companies and organisations sponsored a fifth of its climate events.
What happens at Burniston will ultimately be a litmus test for the new government’s commitment to ending this environmentally destructive, and climate-wrecking fossil fuel practice. It could do so “for good” and for the good of all communities these companies are planning to impose themselves on. At this rate however, the new Labour government just might listen to those that shout the loudest with their wallet – and the lobbyists representing them that have had its ear all along.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
Environmental activists have disrupted the Reuters Sustainability Awards ceremony in central London – stacked with big polluters. They aptly branded the event “The Greenwashing Awards” as the likes of corporate climate crisis criminals such as carbon mega-emitter Drax sidled up as finalists.
On Tuesday 1 October, corporate media outlet Reuters hosted its annual Sustainability Awards event in London.
Its website describes the affair as:
the world’s leading Awards that celebrate leadership in sustainable business.
However, over 100 companies with chequered environmental and human rights records were among the finalists. These included:
Other nominees include Amazon, Mars, and the tobacco giant Philip Morris International.
Virgin Atlantic was also among the nominations for an award for its ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuel’ project. However, this is a slick industry greenwashing con – in part because SAF technology isn’t remotely scalable to current aviation levels.
Moreover, Virgin Atlantic’s SAF is a case and point of where SAFs are already causing environmental destruction. In particular, an investigation by openDemocracy found that the company has sourced vast amounts of supposed used cooking oil from Asia – where it has identified evidence of suppliers passing off deforestation-linked virgin palm oil as this.
In reality then, the awards have little to do with genuine sustainability and tackling the climate crisis. Instead, it’s a prime opportunity for environment-wrecking companies to greenwash their reputations.
Tellingly, the Reuters Sustainability Awards website goes on to say:
The Awards ceremony is not only a great night to recognise the hard work and the amazing achievement of being a finalist and finding out the result of the awards, but it also offers the chance to enhance business networks which lead to valuable collaborations and connections.
In other words, it provides the perfect chance for big polluters to rub shoulders, under a smokescreen of celebrating sustainability.
Notably, companies paid Reuters £500-1000 to enter into the awards, and then a further minimum of £8000 to attend the event itself.
What’s more, these climate-wrecking companies may as well have been marking their own homework – and practically were. This is because news site Reuters is a paid shill in the pocket of fossil fuel firms.
Specifically, investigative outlet Desmog hightlighted in 2023 that Reuters’s in-house ad agency tops the table of corporate media outlets in its marketing for big oil and gas. In particular, it noted that out of multiple corporate media outlets:
only one company, Reuters, offers fossil-fuel advertisers every possible avenue to reach its audience, including custom events.
Essentially, it offers the full sweep of sponsored commercial partnership content to fossil fuel clients. It’s therefore perhaps little wonder its so-called sustainability awards was stuffed with these companies too.
Given all this, activists crashed the event to call out the staggering hypocrisy of Reuters laundering the bogus sustainability credentials of these notorious companies.
Protesters from Axe Drax and Climate Resistance unfurled an enormous banner above the entrance to the central London venue. In big bold green print, this read:
Welcome To The Greenwashing Awards
They handed out ‘Certificates of Greenwashing’ to participants, which listed some of the abuses on the back:
Unsurprisingly, the action drew a heavy police presence:
However, activists at the award ceremony were undeterred, staging a sit-in demonstration in the foyer to the awards:
Axe Drax’s Polly Hallam said of the Reuters Sustainability Awards:
What we are seeing here is an example of the very same multinationals who are guilty of perpetuating the climate crisis pretending to have green credentials to distract us from their environmental and human rights abuses. They pay money to get a badge for press releases and websites in order to launder their reputation. These awards distract us from the real work needed to rapidly decarbonise and get on track to solving the catastrophe that continues to unfold.
Echoing this, Climate Resistance activist Sam Simons said that:
Big polluters are using their political influence to stonewall climate action and protect their own short-term profits. Drax, the UK’s single largest carbon emitter, donated £12,000 to Labour and sponsored their party conference, in order buy influence and protect their dirty business. We face a climate crisis – only last month, huge swathes of Europe were underwater. Yet these companies are more focused on laundering their reputations rather than stopping the actual harmful practices that are contributing to the problem.
Feature and in-text images via Axe Drax
This post was originally published on Canary.
The Labour Party government’s new sewage scandal solution reeks of more private sector profiteering. Rather than pulling the plug on the failed project of water sector privatisation, it’s readying to pour more profits into the pockets of the water company fat cats. How exactly? The Labour right’s favourite Private Finance Initiative (PFI) con – meaning of course, the public will pay for it through their bills. All this was revealed during this year’s Labour conference.
As iNews reported:
Tens of billions of pounds of private finance is guaranteed to be spent over the next five years to build new sewage overflows, reservoirs and major pipe upgrades, the Environment Secretary has said.
Steve Reed said the “biggest ever investment” in the water industry, amounting to around £88bn in private cash, will allow the Government to “fix the foundations” of the water sector and bring an end to the sewage crisis.
It noted that environment minister Reed would be officially announcing the new plan at the Labour Party conference on Monday. In short then, the government will be throwing more money at the sewage-mongers responsible for polluting the UK’s waterways in the first place. Obviously, these are the same companies who’ve siphoned off eye-watering dividends for their shareholders, while criminally underinvesting in the country’s ailing infrastructure. Of course, this has only worsened the state of the UK’s sewage crisis – whereby broken pipelines are leaking more sewage into the country’s polluted rivers.
Crucially, iNews highlighted where Labour would be raising the sewage polluter slush fund from. Predictably, this will be through customer bills. And unsurprisingly, it will come from increasing these for the public. According to the outlet, this will see a rise of around £19 a year between 2025 and 2030.
Of course, there’s a term for this type of con, because Labour have tried and tested it to the benefit of the private sector before. Far from the sewage scandal renationalisation the sector sorely needs, Labour is plunging headfirst into the murky, profit-plagued ploy of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs).
Clean water campaign group SOS Whitstable summed up the Labour conference ruse in one on point rework of iNews’s headline:
“Labour to build new reservoirs and sewage systems using billions in private finance”
Really this headline should read: “Innocent bill payers lumbered with cost of cleaning up sewage shitshow through further unjustified bill increases”https://t.co/JSgWCPmXTq
— SOS Whitstable (@SOSWhitstable) September 23, 2024
Labour peer Prem Sikka articulated the scam of scandal-hit firms turning more tidy profits:
Labour to build new reservoirs, sewage systems using £bns of PFI.
Funded by customers & taxpayers, water companies to collect profits.
Each £1 of PFI money will lead to £5-£6 repayment
Gift for banks & water companies
No justification for privatisationhttps://t.co/OlYrYf1KtX
— Prem Sikka (@premnsikka) September 22, 2024
Notably, Sikka underscored the new plans in light of the staggering profiteering in previous PFI projects. Specifically, it’s a rinse and repeat of New Labour’s neoliberal con-artistry. In particular, this was Labour’s NHS PFI model under Tony Blair and his health secretary Alan Milburn.
And just like PFIs under Blair, Starmer’s corporate-captured Labour government has the perfect pretext for this. For Blair’s NHS privatisation, as the Independent has explained before:
The argument went that Labour had inherited public services in such a diabolical state of neglect that there was no alternative to the private financing of whole swathes of infrastructure.
Now, Labour is once again going all in on the inheriting the sewage mess from the Tories. According to i News, Reed will say at the party’s conference that:
The Conservatives stood back and watched as raw sewage polluted our rivers and customers’ money was funnelled into multimillion pound bonuses and dividend payments while our sewage system crumbled.
Of course, in this instance, the Tories have already long privatised the sector. So, Labour’s answer? More privatisation, of course. So, what will this invariably mean? Funnily enough, funnelling multimillion pound bonuses and dividend payments to the private water sector bosses and shareholders.
As the Canary’s James Wright has recently highlighted with New Labour’s previous PFI schemes, these:
saw the taxpayer charged over £300bn for infrastructure with a value of £54.7bn.
Therefore, as Sikka pointed out, the water sector may now reap a similar return on plundering public money for the next wave of privatisation.
Plenty of others on X were holding up Blairite Labour’s PFIs coming home to roost for the public, as a cautionary tale:
Reminder that the NHS is still paying £millions every year on interest for PFI loans they didn’t want, out of their budget which is supposedly for staff and treatment of patients. Blair forced the loans on NHS, now Starmer wants to do it to waterhttps://t.co/6Vzq0W9XCl https://t.co/gDGUFZLmSc
— Seakay
(@Sea1kay) September 22, 2024
If true, this is astonishing, not least because of how well Tony Blair’s use of PFI has worked out for the NHS: https://t.co/YD1I9NnLsg https://t.co/FyvMkE9LKj
— Polly James (@Mid_WifeCrisis) September 22, 2024
We’re still paying for the PFIs from the 90s.
Has no one learned anything? https://t.co/2gQ9dfWHVc
— Josh Hamilton – Writing A Book About GameStop (@Give_Me_TheJist) September 23, 2024
Despite all this, one person on X noted that iNews had reported how:
New plans being introduced will mean water firms that fail to spend the money raised from customers on infrastructure upgrades will be refunded to bill payers.
However, many weren’t buying this latest Labour conference pledge:
Sounds like bullshit to me, and also something that will be at the discretion of government, which as we see is entirely captured by private water
— Joseph K Bennett (@JosephKBennett) September 23, 2024
Do you really think they are going to send your money back? Ah, ah there are still people who believe there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
They will find some form of clever accounting to keep every last penny.
— Max Antax (@AntaxMax) September 23, 2024
This was not least because Labour has an extensive network of connections to the polluting industry.
One poster had the perfect example of just what will happen with Labour’s new water infrastructure con. Specifically, they highlighted the Tories Thames Tideway project:
I’ve just reading about Bazalgette Tunnel Limited a consortium of investors who will be investing in the new sewage system for Thames Water
The deceitful headline of 2.9% return on their investment masks the truth that they’ll be also able to set water prices to customers https://t.co/IkonPfwPoN
—
Not The Torygraph
The Canary’s James Wright has also detailed the gargantuan scam this turned out to be. He previously wrote how:
The Conservative government financed a new sewer under London, the Thames Tideway, with this new style- PFI. During the year 2022-23, Bazalgette Tunnel Limited – the financer, builder and operator of the Thames Tideway – made £144.6m profit. This shows the prospect of increased user bills makes its financial instruments profitable.
Essentially, this is the exact type of project Labour is now proposing to roll-out en masse.
Therefore, it’s evident that this government has one thing in mind. That is, how to line the pockets of the private water sector and help it get out of the profit-driven debt and sewage crisis of its own making.
As ever, the public will be drowning in sky-high water bills and literal shit as a result. Meanwhile, Labour and its private water sector pals will be neck-deep in another PFI scam. Water companies swimming in more staggering profits means more political donations and a wide-open revolving door after all.
Feature image via Youtube – BBC News/the Mirror/ the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
Over 70 non-profit and campaign organisations have called on Labour Party prime minister Keir Starmer to step up the government’s climate ambitions. Crucially, they’re demanding he set the UK back on track after the previous Conservative government derailed the country meeting its domestic and international commitments on the climate crisis.
On 20 September, 71 environmental non-profits, faith and international development organisations, as well as local groups, penned a letter to Starmer. Together, they called on the prime minister to ramp up the UK’s action on the climate crisis ahead of upcoming climate negotiations at the UN General Assembly.
Heads of state will gather at the UN headquarters in New York and discuss climate commitments ahead of COP29 in November. At this, governments will use the opportunity to signal their climate leadership. Crucially, they may highlight their new domestic climate plans for meeting 1.5°c. This would be ahead of the deadline to submit these in february 2025.
Of course, as the Canary has previously highlighted, the UK is currently not on course to meet its domestic or international targets to keep below 1.5°c of warming. This was the consensus of the government’s independent advisory body, the Climate Change Committee. Specifically, we wrote that:
Now, just six years away from its 2030 deadline, the CCC is once more saying that the country is not on track to hit this target. While it commended a handful of policies under the former Conservative government, overall it concluded that these were “not enough”. The report lambasted the Tories for rolling back a number of its main green policies
Moreover, a large focus of discussions at COP29 in Azerbaijan will centre round international climate finance (ICF). There, countries will agree on a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) for climate finance. This is the target for climate finance that high-income nations will provide to low-income nations to deal with the impacts of the climate crisis.
On this too, the Tories decimated the UK’s contributions to countries on the frontlines. In part, the Tory government did so by changing the goalposts on what constituted ICF. Essentially, it relabelled existing spending to make it seem like the UK was giving more money than it actually was.
Given all this, the letter states that:
as the fifth largest historical emitter and sixth largest economy, the UK has both the responsibility and the capability to take far greater action on climate change – at home and overseas
Crucially, it calls for the UK Labour government to lead by example domestically and contribute to fair financing of climate action globally, making clear:
these are the benchmarks against which your government will be judged.
Adding to this, it calls out the injustice that it is currently:
communities and countries that are the least responsible for causing the climate emergency that are paying with their lives, livelihoods, homes, lands, ecosystems, and futures
In particular, it underscores how the climate crisis costs African nations up to 5% of their GDP. For Small Island Developing States (SIDS) it’s even worse than this, at 35% of annual GDP.
As a result, the letter calls on the Labour prime minister to restore and renew a range of the UK’s climate goals and commitments. In particular, it demanded the following:
Executive director of Climate Action Network UK (CAN-UK) Catherine Pettengell, responsible for coordinating the letter, said:
Today we are calling for more ambitious and fair international climate action, and urging Prime Minister Starmer to play an important role in that. Countries and communities that have done the least to cause the climate emergency must not pay with their lives, livelihoods, and futures. We have to secure agreement at COP29 on a justice-based finance goal, and with the talks locked in acrimony, a new approach from the new UK government – starting next week at UNGA – could make an enormous difference.
The letter is also a part of a global day of action. Specifically, around the world, people are calling for governments in the Global North to #PayUp their fair share of climate finance. The actions are in solidarity with those unfairly bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.
Pettengell also referred Global North governments’ – including the UK – to meet the previous $100bn climate finance goal. Collectively, they failed to fork out the $100bn in climate finance by 2020 that they had pledged to poorer nations at COP15 in 2009.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), countries may have finally delivered this in 2022. However, governments provided over two-thirds of the public finance through loans. What’s more, the costs of adaptation to the climate crisis and mitigation from its impacts has spiralled. A 2022 study estimated poorer nations would need $2tn in funding by 2030.
She therefore said that:
We need trillions and not billions globally, and the UK must pay our fair share. But there are fair ways to generate the finance by making polluters and the wealthiest in our society pay, that do not unfairly cost UK households. As Prime Minister Starmer prepares to travel to New York for the UN General Assembly, progress on climate finance ahead of COP29 must be a top priority for him and all World Leaders.
Echoing this, senior campaigner at Global Witness Flossie Boyd said:
As people from Brazil, to Germany, to Vietnam struggle with extreme weather, it’s clear we need urgent action to redress climate damage. It’s disappointing to see the new government without a bold plan on our climate finance promises when frontline communities are already paying.
As a fossil fuel power, the UK has the responsibility to take far greater action and we know that taxpayers can’t foot this bill alone – and we also know big oil’s profits could cover the damages that people are currently footing. The UK must lead in getting huge polluters like BP and Shell to pay their fair share.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
Environmental groups said Friday that a newly reported leak at the first CO2 injection site in the United States highlights the threat — and false promise — of carbon capture and storage efforts, which climate advocates have long criticized as a ploy by the fossil fuel industry to preserve its extractive business model. E&E News reported Friday that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The area from Cochise County, Arizona, to Hidalgo County, New Mexico, is largely remote and highly biodiverse. This part of the Southwest is home to national monuments like the Chiricahua Mountains, national forests and endangered species. It is also home to ranching communities, small towns built around the natural beauty of the area and tribal communities, including the Tohono O’odham…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The thing about fossil fuel companies is that they are just so damn predictable. It’s only a week on from the Labour government’s decision to drop a legal defence in a key legal challenge against Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields. Already however, the fossil fuel firms behind the projects are dusting off their deep pockets to fight the cases in the government’s stead.
That week of corporate climate criminal comeuppance was nice while it lasted.
In June 2022, the UK’s oil and gas regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority, gave the greenlight to Shell to develop the Jackdaw gas fields in the North Sea. the Following this, in September 2023, it granted the license for Equinor and Ithaca Energy to develop the notorious Rosebank oil and gas field.
Environmental groups took their fight against these climate-wrecking projects to the courts. Firstly, Greenpeace, filed a legal challenge against the government’s approval of the Jackdaw gas field in 2022.
Then, in December 2023, Greenpeace and campaign group Uplift launched another judicial review against the government over Rosebank. Crucially, this sought to overturn the government’s decision to give the go-ahead to the gargantuan polluting project.
The Tory government chose to defend its decision in the cases. However, on 29 August, climate campaigners celebrated a momentous development in the case. Specifically, the new Labour government gave up the former administrations battle – dropping its defence in the case.
Unsurprisingly however, this isn’t the end of it.
The Canary pointed out that Labour ditching the former Tory government’s defence wasn’t a death knell for the two projects. All it really meant was that the companies would need to redo their environmental assessments. Then, the new energy secretary Ed Miliband would decide whether to approve these.
We highlighted some of the issues with this, not least that Labour has repeatedly openly assured the two fossil fuel supermajors that it’d honour their licences the Tory government had awarded them.
But perhaps the biggest issue was what the fossil fuel companies would do. We explained that the climate destructive corporations could in fact still defend the case.
Like oily clockwork, the fossil fuel majors are greasing their gears to do just that. As the Guardian reported:
Shell and Equinor have said that they will defend their plans to develop new North Sea projects despite Labour’s decision to withdraw government support for the plans, which were approved by the Conservatives over the last two years.
All climate activists together now: FFS FFFs (For fucks sake fossil fuel firms!)
Or if you prefer: WTS (What the Shell?!)
Painful acronyms aside, climate justice campaigners are rightly bracing to fight back:
BREAKING: Equinor is reportedly defending the legal challenges against Rosebank.
Now our court case is a straight up fight between us and the oil & gas industry.
Bring it on
pic.twitter.com/YU78rOUDJJ
— #StopRosebank (@StopCambo) September 5, 2024
Let’s win this !#StopRosebank https://t.co/xq1JNpltVF
— Extinction Rebellion Horsham (@HorshamXR) September 5, 2024
Exasperatingly, the Guardian’s news report made the decision to sign off its article with a comment from an Equinor spokesperson.
The Canary has highlighted the issue before with this journalistic practice of giving the powerful the last word. In this instance, the reader leaves with the impression that Rosebank:
is a vital project for the UK in terms of investment, job creation and energy security
Of course, this is palpable bullshit and Equinor knows it. The Canary has also spelled out why in simple terms before:
UK offshore oil and gas does not automatically supply UK demand. Instead, like all oil and gas, it goes on the international market. On top of this, a recent Uplift analysis highlighted that during the last six licensing rounds since the Tories took power in 2010, new blocks have produced just 16 days worth of gas.
So, in other words, dragging up more domestic fossil fuels simply doesn’t mean more so-called ‘energy security’.
In fact, here’s Miliband schooling fossil fuel-funded Reform MP Richard Tice just this week on this basic fact:
Watch Ed Miliband school Richard Tice on clean energy Vs fossil fuels.
“The only way to get off the roller coaster of international gas markets & take back control… is to become a clean energy superpower.” pic.twitter.com/F8dFe65RRa
— Haggis_UK
(@Haggis_UK) September 3, 2024
A poster on X emphasised the sham of ‘energy security’ when the world already HAS enough fossil fuels anyway:
Absolutely shameless conduct by fossil fuel companies.
Claims of energy security are false. @IEA has done the work: world has pathway to net zero by 2050 that necessitates *NO NEW FOSSIL FUELS!*https://t.co/3PCHEESP8u https://t.co/01MnzXMg5U
— T
M (@UrbanLorax) September 5, 2024
But just what is a multibillion fossil fuel company to do when it has poured its bumper profits into burgeoning them further? At least, Shell wants you to get out your tiny violin for it. Its spokesperson argued that:
Jackdaw is a vital project for UK energy security that is already well under way. Stopping the work is a highly complex process, with significant technical and safety issues now that infrastructure is in place and drilling has started in the North Sea.
Translation: spare a thought for us parasitic profiteers, we’ve thrown too much money at it to stop now. Quite frankly, the climate justice community couldn’t give crap about its wasted thousands that amounts to chump change for the staggeringly rich corporation.
Here’s an idea, some of Shell CEO Wael Sawan’s eye-watering £8m in dividends for 2023 could go towards plugging up its planet-polluting project in the North Sea. Needless to say of course, it’ll easily find some pocket change down the back of the sofa for this legal challenge.
Feature image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
Plastic waste is pummeling the South Pacific, polluting coral reefs and lagoons, washing up in tons on sandy shores and accumulating in a giant mass in the ocean. Ocean currents put Pacific Island nations at the front lines of the global plastic pollution crisis, even though the islands’ 2.3 million inhabitants contribute less than 1.3 percent of the world’s plastic waste. In just five years…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Undertones star-turned-water campaigner Feargal Sharkey is still scratching his head over Labour doing – checks notes – exactly what it said it would do on sewage pollution.
Now the sewage-mongers in blue ties are out, Sharkey has turned his ire to slimy Starmer’s sewage stooges in red ties instead.
Of course, it’s the same Labour Party he was cosying up to ahead of the election and encouraging the public to vote for.
Fresh from its parliamentary summer holibobs, the new Labour government has announced its new bill to tackle the sewage spoiling UK waterways.
On 5 September, it introduced its flagship Water (Special Measures) Bill in a policy statement. This will:
- block bonuses for executives who pollute our waterways
- bring criminal charges against persistent law breakers
- enable automatic and severe fines for wrongdoing
- ensure monitoring of every sewage outlet
It’s doubtful any of Starmer’s ministers took a little holiday dip at a shit-infested UK beach this summer. If they had, they’d know how woefully inadequate the new measures will be in halting the tide of water company crimes.
Prolific anti-sewage campaigner Feargal Sharkey had something to say on it:
“Feargal Sharkey blasts Labour’s plans to clean Britain’s rivers as inadequate.”
What we need is decisive, bold, transitional action from govt this is not it.https://t.co/Jz2H62IMDf
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) September 5, 2024
In particular, he blasted the new government’s plans for doing nothing more than what existing laws already do:
“Water company bosses could face prison time in new Labour crackdown on sewage infested rivers, lakes and seas.”
That idea is already part of the Companies Act and has been for almost 20 years. Wanna know how many company bosses have ever been prosecuted never mind gone to jail…
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) September 5, 2024
Alongside this, he highlighted the party’s double standards:
“The new legislation being introduced to parliament on Thursday will also give the regulators powers to ban bonuses for water company CEOs.”
Am I getting confused or is govt? Treasury says it will absolutely not under any circumstances reintroduce the ban in bankers bonuses but…
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) September 5, 2024
And as some have pointed out, these bankers have also been complicit in the failed neoliberal sham of water privatisation:
Bankers made a lot of money and bonuses by helping water companies rack up debt they knew would end up around the neck of the public. Banks should be on the hook for that as much as the water companies
— DeanMorrison
#FBPE #RejoinEU (@BarumDean) September 5, 2024
While Sharkey made some important points, his outrage was also astonishingly hypocritical. Because, as some reminded him – this was the Labour government that he himself voted for and backed at the recent election:
Unfortunately like millions you were gaslit by starmer https://t.co/d4rXL1P0Zq
— Phil Waller (@Davejones0305) September 5, 2024
Just shy of 6 months
https://t.co/jWTszZzCDY pic.twitter.com/BMD29O6tUW
— Bsazzled
Of course, the Canary has already pointed this out too. At the launch of Sharkey’s new clean water coalition, we listed a damning rapsheet of his repeated suck-ups to Labour.
It’s as if Sharkey had no idea what was coming. Here’s the thing though, this isn’t the case of another Labour U-turn blindsiding the public. Although I would argue those were just as predictable. The Labour Party literally had these exact plans in its manifesto, which stated:
Labour will put failing water companies under special measures to clean up our water. We will give regulators new powers to block the payment of bonuses to executives who pollute our waterways and bring criminal charges against persistent law breakers. We will impose automatic and severe fines for wrongdoing and ensure independent monitoring of every outlet
In fact, Sharkey was also gushing over these very plans during the election campaign mere months ago. And he’s been doing it since 2022. Fortunately, the internet has kept the receipts.
In December 2022, here he is lauding Labour’s plans to fine water company bosses:
A tale of two political parties.
One, Gov, are set to weaken water targets and delay their implementation.
The other, Labour, want to make water company directors personally liable, introduce automatic fines and reduce sewage discharges by 90% by 2030.
You decide. https://t.co/9Q6pWQ6Deg
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) December 9, 2022
Fast forward to the election run-up, and Sharkey had this to say about just such measures as Labour has plopped into its new bill:
“LABOUR leader Keir Starmer has told of his love of the Lake District as he promises a Labour government will bring in tough new regulations to sanction water company bosses for illegal dumping of sewage in Lakes such as Windermer.”
Now we’re talking. https://t.co/GS1Gwpzj0A
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) May 27, 2024
So from “now we’re talking” to “this is not it” in less time than it takes to water companies to pump drinking water full of parasites, Sharkey is well and truly taking the piss.
How much can change in just a matter of months. Not the dire state of water company pollution in UK seas and rivers. Nor the Labour Party’s half-assed plans for dealing with them. So that’s just Sharkey’s ill-fated love affair with Labour then?
If Labour’s vapid “change” slogan had Sharkey hook, line, and floater, he only has himself to blame.
Because at the end of the day, Labour’s slippery slate of sewage shills-turned-MP candidates, and criminal private water company ties were clear for all to see. A damn sight clearer than the UK’s shit-plagued seas at least.
Feature image via Youtube – Good Morning Britain
This post was originally published on Canary.
Thames Water know a thing or two about shit. Whether it is pouring it into our disgustingly over-polluted waterways, or shitting all over the public with its creaking infrastructure and crap services. It also knows a lot about taking the piss – and right now, it’s sure as hell doing that as it seeks to pile on a stinking, stonking 60% hike in bills to its customers.
So, what is a debt-ridden, yet multi-million dividend paying company to do when it needs to mop up the mess from its many years of enormous underinvestment and profiteering? Lobby its good ol’ mates in government of course!
In fact, as the Guardian reported on Friday 30 August, that’s exactly what Thames Water has been doing – and to the freshly-elected new Labour government to boot. Specifically, it revealed that:
Advisers and board members of the beleaguered water company are understood to have met Whitehall officials in recent weeks to say that allowing it to be temporarily renationalised would have a “chilling effect” on the entire UK’s appeal to international investors, sources familiar with the discussions told the Guardian.
Of course, Thames Water’s murky argument is not anything new nor surprising. The water industry’s main lobby body Water UK has long pumped out these same scare-mongering pile of shit anti-nationalisation lines.
Now, the corporate media is also lapping up Water UK’s insistence for bill hikes. For instance, ITV News was doing the Thames Water’s dirty PR work just this week, with an article on Wednesday 28 pronouncing how:
Water bosses warn plans to cap bills will reduce industry’s ability to tackle sewage leaks
However, what’s especially galling is Thames Water’s attempt to circumvent regulator Ofwat. The Guardian pointed out here again that:
The call for government to intervene and potentially overrule Ofwat risks bringing into question the watchdog’s independence. The body was created in 1989, when Britain’s water and sewage services were privatised by Margaret Thatcher’s government, in order to set limits on the amounts regional monopolies could charge consumers.
Yet, it’s also no surprise the company is appealing to the new Labour government to intervene either. That’s because the Labour Party is a festering pool of corporate capitalist stooges. Crucially, it’s filled to the brim with a veritable shitshow of water industry lobbyists and ties.
Pre-election, the Canary identified no fewer than a dozen firms that have lobbied for the UK water sector in the last five years with significant connections to the Labour Party.
One just so happens to be former new Labour environment minister Ian Pearson. He currently sits on the board of none other than the mess, the sinking company itself – Thames Water.
Naturally, the links with Thames Water didn’t stop there. Multiple candidate MPs had worked for Lexington Communications. The company had former Thames Water owner and “vampire kangaroo” investment bank Macquarie as a client. We noted that:
While owners of Thames Water, the bank leeched billions in loans and dividends from its subsidiary. When Macquarie sold the company in 2017, Thames Water was over £10bn in debt – and the investment bank itself had saddled it with a significant portion of this.
All three candidates are now MPs.
As well as this, we revealed that:
Teneo, which has listed Severn Trent, United Utilities, and Thames Water among its clients as recently as at least 31 May this year. The company’s senior managing director Patrick Loughran worked closely with New Labour during its time in government. In particular, he operated as a special advisor to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Peter Mandelson.
These were just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the Labour right’s multitude of connections with the industry. Given these, it’s no surprise now that Thames Water is mounting its lobbying charm offensive on the government fresh out of the election.
And by all accounts, it very well might work. So far, Labour has levied a light touch approach to profiteering private water firms.
Government regulator the Environment Agency is “considering” reforms to its flawed star rating system. This has allowed water companies to dump sewage and still rack up a full sweep of stars to their names. However, as the Canary detailed, it’s likely that:
stripping stars will be just a sewage-spilling slap on the wrist with little to no impact.
Of course, besides shooting down Thames Water’s bill hike plans, it’s not as if Ofwat itself has been doing much to clamp down on the parasitic company either. Despite making a song and dance on 6 August about lumping Thames Water with a “record” fine, the Canary’s Steve Topple pointed out that:
it’s unlikely to bother the toxic water company, as the £104m fine is just 66% of its annual profits last year – never mind what it paid to shareholders.
Most significantly though, Starmer has ruled out nationalisation – and did so just days after taking office. Ostensibly, it appears Thames Water’s lobby efforts could be taking effect.
However, it’s goading that Thames Water is attempting to weasel out of this stonking mess of its own making even further. More to the point, it now wants to palm its costs off to the public. It’s the stinking epitome of socialising the risks, privatising the profits. Worst of all, Labour will probably let the putrid private water company get away with it. It’ll maintain the flailing legacy of water privatisation until the profits come home – for the next Labour MP-turned-Thames Water lobbyist.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
Almost 100 air pollution and climate campaigners have taken the new Labour Party government to task over its decision to greenlight London City Airport’s expansion plans.
As the Canary previously reported, on 19 August, transport secretary Louise Haigh greenlit London City Airport’s climate-wrecking plans. She did so in a joint decision with deputy prime minister Angela Rayner in her role as secretary for housing, communities, and local government. Specifically, they approved:
Of course, the decision flies in the face of the climate crisis – including the advice of independent body the Climate Change Committee. Crucially, it had argued that government’s shouldn’t approve any airport expansions as this would jeopardise its climate commitments.
So, on Wednesday 28 August, protesters gathered outside the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government.
Chanting ‘they fly, we die’, protesters called on Rayner to revoke the decision and commit to an end to airport expansions.
Carrying banners and placards, they highlighted the devastating impacts the expansion will have on local communities:
In particular, they expressed how it is considerably worrying for Londoners affected by emissions, air pollution and noise given that London’s Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, and Heathrow airports are all also pushing to increase passenger capacity.
What’s more, they underscored how the government’s approval went against the will of local authorities.
In July 2023, Newham Council – where the airport’s based – unanimously rejected London City Airport’s bid for expansion. However, the airport appealed this, leaving the decision to the Secretaries of State for Transport and Levelling Up. Now, the Labour-run Newham Council is considering legal action against the government following this decision.
Newham is the third most deprived local authority in London. Notably, 37% of residents, and 50% of children live in poverty. By contrast, City Airport serves wealthier travellers. The average household income of leisure passengers at London City airport is 34% higher than the average UK flyer. One placard aptly summed up this disparity and in light of the new Labour government’s decision – declaring:
Labour puts corporate wealth over children’s health
Already, London is the most exposed city in the world to air pollution from aviation. Alarmingly, Londoners in Newham are exposed to air pollution levels 35% higher than those determined safe by the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. Unsurprisingly, this has meant 7.5% of all deaths in the borough are attributable to particulate air pollution.
Fossil Free London were among the climate protesters calling out the government on this. Spokesperson for the group Joanna Warrington said:
This was a major test of Labour’s credibility on the climate crisis. They have failed. By approving City Airport’s expansion, Rayner is choosing frequent flyers, private-jet users and executive profits, over protecting the majority from emissions, dirty air and the constant drone of needless flights.
We’re quite simply running out of time to avert the worst effects of climate breakdown. The last thing our leaders should be doing is approving high-carbon, pointless projects. We need serious climate leadership from Labour.
Feature and in-text images via Fossil Free London
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the first ever federal action against a system that misleads consumers about the recycled content in plastic products. A ProPublica investigation in June showed how the plastics industry uses a controversial accounting method called mass balance to advertise plastic products as 20% or 30% recycled even if they physically contain less than 1%
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Undertones star-turned-water campaigner Feargal Sharkey has launched an anti-sewage coalition. In October, he will lead the ‘March for Clean Water’ to mark the first 100 days of the new Labour government’s failure to mop up the water companies’ pollution mess.
But there’s a reason a Labour-run UK has rivers and oceans roiling in shit. Sharkey himself is part of the problem.
On Wednesday 21 August, anti-sewage campaigner Feargal Sharkey announced the new coalition:
#floodthestreets Turn your outrage into action.
Join me, March for Clean Water, Sat 26th of October 2024, Parliament Square London. https://t.co/36CPQOIBAu
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) August 21, 2024
As River Action detailed on its website, this will involve a ‘March for Clean Water’ on the 26 October:
which is timed to mark the end of the first 100 days of the new government, and days before the Chancellor’s first budget (October 30), when environmental campaigners will be watching closely for financial commitments to protect the environment, will involve scores of participating groups and well-known personalities, including river campaigner Feargal Sharkey.
They invite the public to join in one simple demand of Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer: to take immediate and decisive action to end the poisoning of our rivers, lakes and seas by the lethal cocktail of raw sewage, agricultural waste and other chemical pollutants, that over recent years have been allowed to leave most of our waterways so filthy that they present major risks to human health and untold damage to nature.
This must include:
- a plan to address the continuous illegal dumping of raw sewage by the water companies;
- a full set of solutions to end all other major sources of water pollution;
- the reform of our failed regulatory system, including Ofwat and the Environment Agency, so the law can be effectively enforced against polluters
Multiple environmental groups plan to join the protest:
Industrial animal farming is polluting our rivers. Enough already. @SoilAssociation will be joining @MarchforWater with @RiverActionUK on October 26th. – join us!
https://t.co/1EFmpd8W1k https://t.co/NP5aovfZog
— Rob Percival (@Rob_Percival_) August 21, 2024
Water we want? Clean #rivers!
Every British river is suffering as a result of a range of pollutants.
Join us on 26th Oct at the March for Clean Water in London to show your support for cleaning up our waters and ending freshwater #pollution.
— The Rivers Trust (@theriverstrust) August 21, 2024
STOP THE POISONING OF BRITAIN’S WATERWAYS
26 Oct 2024.
London
Water is life. Yet here in Britain, it’s on life support.
Join us on the #26Oct as we march on the streets of London to reclaim our right to clean water for everyone across the UK… 1/2
pic.twitter.com/PTbaLP6gNs
— RiverActionUK (@RiverActionUK) August 21, 2024
We’re stoked to be a key partner in this march on London. We demand an end to the poisoning of Britain’s waterways.#OCEANACTIVISTS, GAS MASKS AT THE READY!
#floodthestreets pic.twitter.com/2AoAIakt2l
— Surfers Against Sewage (@sascampaigns) August 21, 2024
If only someone could have predicted a Labour Party government plagued with water company lobbyists links would fall at the first hurdle. Of course, the Canary, like plenty of others, did precisely that. Sharkey on the other hand?
by ‘campaigner’ you mean ‘labour party activist and shill’.
— รℓσαɳε ℓყรɓεƭɦ
(@SloaneFragment) August 21, 2024
Feargal was entirely confident in Labour’s plan to fix things before the election. Did you ask him why he’s not giving companies time to spend the £80bn they got?
— Anonymous Left (@anonymous_left) August 21, 2024
Naturally, the internet has the receipts. Here he is cosying up to Starmer:
It is a huge honour to be President of @serauk Labour’s Environment Campaign and the time really is now.
The moment SERA members have been waiting for has finally arrived.
See you at the ballot box. pic.twitter.com/4kbYwQ9x7h
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) May 25, 2024
In fact, as Sharkey himself acknowledges in that post, he’s quite literally the president of Labour’s main environment campaign group. This is the Socialist Environment and Resources Association (SERA).
That might go some way to explaining his nauseatingly gushing pattern of praise for Labour’s sewage scandal plans. Exhibit number one:
A tale of two political parties.
One, Gov, are set to weaken water targets and delay their implementation.
The other, Labour, want to make water company directors personally liable, introduce automatic fines and reduce sewage discharges by 90% by 2030.
You decide. https://t.co/9Q6pWQ6Deg
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) December 9, 2022
Back in 2022, Sharkey was schmoozing with then shadow environment minister Tim McMahon MP at the Labour Party conference:
A huge thank you once again to @JimfromOldham and all at @UKLabour for the last few days. An absolute honour to be able to speak at conference and great to see that Labour are responding so well to the attack our environment is under.
Much to do but we will get it done.
https://t.co/i7bLFAkI60
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) September 28, 2022
This is the same McMahon who in one breath, introduced a (doomed-to-fail) piece of legislation to tackle water company pollution, then toed the party whip and abstained on a Lib Dem amendment to criminalise companies in another.
The clean water campaigner has only continued to heap stinking piles of unearned praise on the party for its pre-election promises. We think if you have to spell out that “it’s not a party political broadcast”, it might well be just that:
“Labour unveils plan to end sewage dumping as Keir Starmer accuses Government of turning rivers into ‘sewer’”.
This is not a party political broadcast but @UKLabour has a much better plan right now that that act of desperation gov have pumping out.https://t.co/IAy0zs7hZe
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) April 2, 2023
“Now we’re talking” – are we though? See Labour abstention above:
“LABOUR leader Keir Starmer has told of his love of the Lake District as he promises a Labour government will bring in tough new regulations to sanction water company bosses for illegal dumping of sewage in Lakes such as Windermer.”
Now we’re talking. https://t.co/GS1Gwpzj0A
— Feargal Sharkey (@Feargal_Sharkey) May 27, 2024
Unsurprisingly, Labour hasn’t lived up to any of its pledges yet. And the fact is, Labour’s plans weren’t much cop to begin with. Multiple environmental groups and political opponents have exposed the glaring holes in Labour’s sewage pollution pledges. Most notably, under Starmer, Labour has walked back plans to nationalise the industry.
And Sharkey can hardly claim people haven’t been warning him this all along:
“Could” is in that sentence , in other words , they want you to vote for them, promise it and then say they will look into it once in power and it can’t be done , no change again
— Michael Onions (@onions2903) October 11, 2023
Labour are Pro-business therefore special measures and not nationalisation #BrokenBritain
— asum izak (@yrubswed) June 22, 2024
They’ve already reneged on a pledge to nationalise which is the ONLY solution. Increasing fines won’t work. Who’s daft enough to believe a word @Keir_Starmer says. You up for a gong Feargal? You ignore everyone that points this out. Is a bit of imperialist tat worth it?
— Jayne Doherty (@jayneb64) June 22, 2024
“That is why I am backing Labour’s plans to put the water companies under special measures.”
Why do I feel that part of these ‘special measures’ will involve Starmer finding a nice job in a toothless quango for Feargal Sharkey – and very little will change? pic.twitter.com/79bnGKTtsE
— Roger Gall (@Shambles151) June 22, 2024
Sharkey may have fallen hook, line, and stinker for the opportunistic Labour turds floating in the party’s election pledges, but plenty of us didn’t. We’ll leave the falling into a festering pool of privatisation’s broken promises to another slimy politician – yes, we mean Lib Dem leader Ed Davey plunging bottom-first into a sewage-spoiled Lake Windermere. Maybe now Labour is in charge, Sharkey will fancy joining him – if he does, it’ll be a cold, harsh dip in reality.
Feature image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
