Revealed: cabinet ministers warned of legal action over UK’s failure to tackle climate crisis


Toby Helm Political Editor
Sat, 4 March 2023

Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images

Cabinet ministers have been warned by senior civil servants that they face court action because of their catastrophic failure to develop policies for tackling climate change, according to secret documents obtained by the Observer.

The leaked briefings from senior mandarins – marked “official sensitive” and dated 20 February this year – make clear the government as a whole is way behind in spelling out how it will reach its net zero targets and comply with legal duties to save the planet.

Related: The UK’s battle cries on net zero have led to nothing – and now time is running out


The restricted, highly sensitive documents are another severe embarrassment for Rishi Sunak, who originally planned to stay away from last November’s Cop27 climate summit in Egypt, but was shamed into attending after his predecessor but one, Boris Johnson, announced he was going.

Sunak then declared that acting to cut carbon emissions was a moral duty “because if we do not act today, we will risk leaving an ever more desperate inheritance for our children”.

Now, with just weeks to go before a crucial court deadline for the UK government to submit its latest climate plans, the damning leaked documents make clear the government is falling far short of its legal policy obligations to match its rhetoric with action.

The documents say that as a result of evident lack of policy there is an increasing “legal risk” facing the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, Grant Shapps – who is held responsible under law for failing to act.

At one point, officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) state that their own department’s failure to develop policies for cutting carbon emissions “increases the legal risk on the DESNZ (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero) SoS (Shapps) if the reduced savings cannot be made across the economy, which DESNZ have indicated will not be possible.”

The papers, circulated by Defra officials to other senior Whitehall figures, will place particular pressure on environment secretary Thérèse Coffey, who was booed recently at a conference by farmers, who are already highly critical of the government’s agenda for agriculture post-Brexit.

The documents show Coffey’s department is by far the worst offender in failing to develop green policy, lagging a staggering 24% behind its official target, while the transport department has a gap “that is considerably over 5%”.

The documents show Coffey’s officials pleading with her to adopt an improved climate plan for the agricultural sector within weeks, not only to meet a legal deadline but also in response to stinging rebukes from the government advisers on the climate change committee (CCC).

They say: “The CCC has been calling for Defra to publish a decarbonisation plan since 2018 … The CCC has also criticised the ‘glacial progress’ in reducing emissions from agriculture.”

In our last report we said that it is abundantly clear Defra is off track to deliver key climate policies
Lord Deben, CCC chairman

The papers add: “It is likely that if we do not commit to a plan in response to the CCC’s recommendations, we will be singled out for further scrutiny by the CCC and other stakeholders.”

Green groups say Coffey is nervous of triggering a bigger anti-Tory rural revolt if she announces policies that will force farmers to adopt more green ways of farming, such as enforcing limits on the size of livestock herds, large-scale tree planting and reducing use of fossil-fuel-based fertilisers on farms.

Coffey’s difficulties highlight a central problem with the green agenda for a Tory government, which draws much of its support from rural voters and communities, including farmers.

The high court ruled last year that by the end of March 2023 ministers must publish their workings on how individual departments plan to get on track to deliver net zero climate targets and be compliant with the Climate Change Act 2008.

As the legal deadline approaches, every Whitehall department is currently in the final stages of reviewing policies and counting up carbon savings before an expected new “Net Zero Growth Plan” set to be unveiled by the prime minister within the next month.

The announcement by the Biden administration of its Inflation Reduction Act – with incentives for US manufacturers of clean technologies – has added to a sense of urgency in the UK that it could miss out on a green “industrial revolution”.

Lord Deben, chairman of the CCC, told the Observer on Saturday night: “The CCC does not comment on leaked documents, but in our last report we said that it is abundantly clear that Defra is off track to deliver key climate policies. It is our statutory duty to highlight these failings to parliament, to help them in their scrutiny over government plans.

“Defra is unique across key Whitehall departments in not having a net zero strategy, which must cover critical aspects of farming, land use, nature and our critical food system. That is a huge gap as we head into a critical period for the achievement of the UK’s statutory climate goals.”

The Observer understands that No 10, the Treasury and DESNZ are angry that Defra is dragging down the whole government’s climate progress.

A Defra spokesperson said: “We cannot comment on potential leaks.”

Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary of state for net zero, tore into the Conservatives’ record on climate policy: “Years of failure in a number of departments; the ludicrous ban on onshore wind remains in place; billions channelled to fossil fuel companies in tax breaks, instead of investing in homegrown renewables; slashed investment in energy efficiency; and a refusal to follow the example of President Biden to invest in the green industries of the future here in Britain. It’s 13 years of failure which explain why this government isn’t a leader on net zero but is a lawbreaker.”

Clouds of disinformation and climate change

Adam Manning
Sat, 4 March 2023 


Cloud is the term used for remote storage of images, files and other stuff in this digital age.

Highlighting the needy, with Anthony Bernard.

Every smartphone is connected to its cloud, just as midges follow scotsmen in summer. Maybe it is an acronym, CLOUD - Calamitous Load Of Unexpected Doom? Enormous amounts of energy are required to keep all this information instantly available, with lots of cooling because energy generates heat. We are all fooled into believing smartphones and computers have no carbon footprint, but in reality they seriously add to global warming.

Software in new computers and smartphones monitor everything we explore on line. Users have their interests categorised and are then fed further information to support their original thinking and reinforce their perceptions, however ill advised. News will be skewed towards preferred items, advertisers will be alerted to further opportunities to sell them gambling, pizzas, funeral services or anything.

Ireland has 20% of its electricity taken up feeding clouds of "data hubs", helped by Irish tax laws encouraging international operators to be based there while serving customers in other countries. Lots or water is needed to cool electronics. Water shortages in the London area last summer were exacerbated by cooling data hubs in Slough with water from the Thames. Don't worry, this column is typed on a 1999 iBook, made before all this clever stuff, with its own memory, not using clouds, just coffee for the operator!

"Influencer" is the term for a regular user whose contributions are widely read; recently a major promoter of macho violence has been in the news after being arrested. Years ago, in the playground, such self promotors might be surrounded by ardent admirers who became a gang, available to follow the leader. Vlad Putin's schooldays could be revealing, maybe some of his school chums are now oligarchs!

Nowadays, with social media, a crowd can be gathered to follow a particular policy, theme or whim; "dislikes" cause people to be excluded from the group. Nowhere is there a better nor sadder example than the furore around poor Nicola Bulley's disappearance. In the three weeks while she was missing, before her body was found, maybe a hundred other people would have gone missing according to average statistics. Most would have been found unharmed, but some would have had an unhappy outcome mixed up with drugs, alcohol, gambling or mental health. Maybe a thousand police officers were doing their best, mainly getting it right. None of these were in the news; the only story was Nicola Bulley.

Reports tell that every day someone commits suicide as a result of gambling, which is a catastrophe for their family and friends but passes unnoticed by the rest of us.l

Massive and easy data storage facilitate social media frenzies on particular issues, to the exclusion of balanced news. This adds to global warming and places a significant burden on electricity and cooling water. We all assume that the internet does not cost anything, but we all pay through our mobile phone and wifi charges and suffer the effects of climate change.

Social media does open up communications, but software is skewing how messages are handled, gathering like minded thinkers together. This makes it a haven for activists to shout louder than the fair minded majority.

We should avoid being confused or caught up in these trends. Global warming remains an issue; cattle exhale methane; data hub clouds are worse

WAR ON LGBTQ

Conservative Pundit Calls for Trans People to Be 'Eradicated'

The Pink Triangle

This symbol dates back to Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s. Homosexuality was outlawed and gays and lesbians were sent to the concentration camps. Gay men were forced to wear the pink triangle just as the Jews were forced to wear the yellow star to identify which group they belonged to.

Symbols of PRIDE

Children's Aid Society of Toronto

https://www.torontocas.ca › outandproudsymbols

Laura Bassett
Sat, 4 March 2023

Photo: Getty (Getty Images)

It’s long been clear that the subtext of Republican attacks on trans healthcare, drag story hours, books that even mention LGBTQ+ people, and “pronouns”—which really reached a fever pitch in state legislatures this week—is that trans people do not have a right to exist. But few have come out and said it in as chilling of terms as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Saturday morning.

“If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” the rightwing commentator told a cheering crowd amid what HuffPost reporter Chris Mathias described on Twitter as a “straight-up eliminationist anti-trans tirade.”

Knowles has said before that this overtly genocidal rhetoric is not, in fact, calling for the murder of millions of people, because he doesn’t believe trans people actually exist in the first place. “There can’t be a genocide,” he said on his show last week, because “it’s not a legitimate category of being. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.”

Of course, Knowles is not some lone, unhinged extremist at CPAC or in the Republican Party writ large, which is collectively whipped up into an anti-trans frenzy lately that seems to preclude discussing any other issue. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) joked at CPAC this week that Biden spent “four or five days asking the Chinese spy balloon what pronouns it uses before we shot it down.” Former Donald Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka railed at the conference this week about “mutilating boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity.” Former Vice President (and likely 2024 presidential candidate) Mike Pence made the nonsensical claim without any evidence this week that school nurses in Iowa require parental permission to give out aspirin, but just dole out “gender transition plans” to kids willy-nilly without telling anyone.

It’s pretty clear to me, after Republicans underperformed in the midterm elections due in large part to the fall of Roe v. Wade and their extremely unpopular views on abortion, that they needed to invent another culture war issue to whip up their base in lieu of abortion. And telling parents in red states that doctors are “mutilating” their kids, that Democrats and teachers are “grooming” them to be trans and just secretly doling out hormones at recess, is a pretty easy way to drive paranoid Fox News viewers out to the polls.

Unfortunately, like the war on abortion, this one also comes at the expense of people’s lives. The rhetoric is fascist and genocidal, and it’s being accompanied by actual laws that will kill people and/or destroy their lives. We can ignore the extremist talking heads at CPAC, but I would argue that we shouldn’t.

Jezebel

CPAC Speaker’s Trans Comments About ‘Eradication’ Sound Downright Genocidal

The conservative movement’s annual confab was creepily obsessed with trans kids and showcased the GOP’s alarming and intensifying anti-trans rhetoric.

By Christopher Mathias
Mar 5, 2023

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Thousands of conservatives, including prominent Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls, flocked to a suburban Washington, D.C., convention center this week to discuss children’s genitals.

They were there for the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the preeminent annual gathering of America’s conservative movement, where speaker after speaker held forth on the urgent need for the Republican Party — an institution ostensibly dedicated to limited government — to criminalize the act of doctors and parents providing minors with gender-affirming care.

Sebastian Gorka, an alleged member of a Nazi-collaborating political order in Hungary who served as an advisor to former President Donald Trump, kicked off proceedings Friday morning from the main stage inside the Gaylord Convention Center. Democrats, he warned the crowd, are “mutilating boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity.”

A short time later, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — a featured speaker at a white supremacist conference last year, where her fellow speakers praised Adolf Hitler and cheered on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — took to the stage to make a big announcement.


Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at Gaylord National Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 3, 2023.
SARAH SILBIGER VIA REUTERS

“So last Congress, I did something radical and extreme because remember Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘she’s so extreme,’” she joked. “I introduced a bill called the Protect Children’s Innocence Act. And let me tell you my great news this morning, ladies and gentlemen: It couldn’t pass last Congress because Nancy Pelosi was the speaker of the House. She doesn’t believe in gender at all, but we have a new speaker in our Republican majority… and I’m going to be re-introducing my bill… that will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender!”

The crowd roared. Greene’s cruel piece of legislation — based on a multitude of lies — would prohibit transgender Americans under 18 years old from receiving crucial health services that have long been endorsed by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association.

Such endorsements were of little concern at CPAC, where politicians and right-wing influencers fine-tuned the anti-trans messaging that will likely be a staple of next year’s presidential campaign news cycle — the Republican Party clearly having decided that trans kids are worthy enough of a wedge issue to win back the White House.

But it also became clear at CPAC that the Republican campaign against trans kids isn’t just a mere ploy to energize its base — it could also be the beginning of an insurgent fascist campaign to erase trans people from public life altogether.

Michael Knowles, the host of ”The Michael Knowles Show” on The Daily Wire, gave a speech at CPAC that, at moments, sounded genocidal. “The problem with transgenderism is not that it’s inappropriate for children under the age of 9,” he said. “The problem with transgenderism is that it isn’t true.”

There are an estimated 1.6 million trans people in the United States. Knowles essentially told the CPAC crowd that these people should not have a right to exist.

“If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society... transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” he said.

Eradicated. The crowd roared again.

Another speaker, Tom Fitton, president of the right-wing website Judicial Watch, called gender-affirming care for minors “a demonic assault on the innocence of our children.”

And there was also a panel on the main stage called “A Time for Courage” featuring panelists Riley Gaines, a former collegiate athlete who made a name for herself complaining about competing against a transgender swimmer, and Chloe Cole, a woman who identified as a transgender male as a minor but later “detransitioned.”

Cole’s story has featured prominently in right-wing media to demonstrate the apparent dangers of allowing children to receive gender-affirming care. But stories like hers are very rare. Only about 1 to 3% of people who start a gender transition later express regret for doing so and then “backtrack or travel elsewhere across the landscape of gender identity,” as Slate once explained.

But for CPAC attendees, stories like Cole’s prove that gender-affirming care for minors is always evil.

Donald Ruthig, a 73-year-old retiree from Onancock, Virginia, told HuffPost he recently left the Episcopal Church over its decision to support transgender youth. He drove three hours to CPAC to “meet people that think the way I think” who are “dedicated to restoring the Judeo-Christian morality that we’re losing.”

Part of this restoration, he explained, is to “stop torturing our children with gender transitions, to stop this whole LBGTQ alphabet nonsense, and start treating people like God’s people created in God’s image. We are all alike. We don’t need to partition everybody by their little fetishes.”

Donald Ruthing, 74, attends the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland on March 3, 2023.

CHRISTOPHER MATHIAS FOR HUFFPOST

Tim Roberts, 57, traveled to CPAC from East Lansing, Michigan, with his two daughters, who he recently removed from public school “because of all the woke stuff that’s going on in there.”

He echoed a sentiment expressed a lot at CPAC — that the mere acknowledgment of transgender people in the classroom is tantamount to indoctrination.

“I graduated [high school] in 1985, and it just wasn’t a thing, and now [my daughters] said a better part of their classes have a lot of trans kids or kids that think they’re trans,” he said. “Like the first thing [school administrators] do when they come to school is say, ‘Hey, write down your pronouns, and that’s what we will go by.’ They’re encouraging this.”

James Clark, 37, a political public relations consultant from Kansas City, Missouri, expressed enthusiastic support for Greene’s bill. Gender-affirming care for minors, he said, was “child abuse.”

“It also leads into the human trafficking, sex trafficking, pedophilia, and different things like that,” he started before HuffPost asked him what gender-affirming care had to do with pedophilia.

“It has a lot to do with it,” he replied. “If you have an adult grooming a child to become trans...” HuffPost interjected again, asking what evidence is there that they’re being groomed.

“Well, you know, I’m just speculating,” Clark conceded before insisting that there is probably a lot of science that can “back up” the conservative argument against providing transgender youth with gender-affirming care — he just didn’t know it offhand.

He simply added, “I’m not a psychologist.”

CPAC offers a platform for an avalanche of anti-trans attacks


Alex Woodward
Sat, 4 March 2023

In speech after speech and panel after panel, the guests on the stage at one of the biggest platforms for right-wing activists and Republican officials lobbed casual attacks against transgender Americans, made jokes at their expense, or threatened to strip them of their healthcare and remove them from public life.

The guests at 2023’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, revived familiar right-wing tropes aimed at “safe spaces” and “wokeness” and “socialist” Democratic lawmakers, but prominent GOP elected officials and right-wing media personalities repeatedly returned to their alarmist visions of children in danger from LGBT+ people and gender-affirming care.

Their claims run parallel to a wave of legislation targeting LGBT+ Americans, particularly young trans people, and proposed federal legislation that would restrict that care nationally under threat of felony prosecutions.

Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told the conference that she plans to introduce a bill she is calling the Protect Children’s Innocence Act that would make it a felony to perform “anything to do with gender-affirming care” for minors.

One panel on 3 March featured Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, among interest groups advancing legislation across the US to end gender-affirming care for trans youth and, ultimately, end affirming care for all trans people. He intentionally misgendered two prominent transgender women activists as men in his remarks on the panel.

That panel also heard from Chloe Cole, a “detransitioner” who has become a central figure in a right-wing campaign to restrict gender-affirming care, despite the vast majority of trans people maintaining their gender identity.

Riley Gaines, an American swimmer who repeatedly called trans swimmer Lia Thomas a “biological male”, also appeared on the panel to speak out against trans athletes; Ms Thomas has been routinely attacked by her former competitors, sports stars, politicians, activists, and even some of her teammates’ parents.

Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire sparked widespread alarm on 4 March with remarks derided as eliminationist and genocidal.

“If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” he said.

Mr Knowles had previously claimed that he doesn’t believe his rhetoric is genocidal because he doesn’t believe trans people exist, Jezebel noted.

“There can’t be a genocide,” he said on his programme last week, adding that “it’s not a legitimate category of being. They’re labouring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion”.

A panel on 2 March rejected transgender Americans from team sports as well as honest classroom teachings on race, racism and LGBT+ people, with former college football turned Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville listing a string of right-wing targets in a series of baseless statements against trans athletes and US education.

“All this woke, transgender athletes, CRT, 1619, they don’t teach reading, writing or arithmetic,” the senator said, referencing “critical race theory” and The 1619 Project, an award-winning New York Times project that reframes the nation’s founding through the lens of slavery.

His remarks on a panel titled “Sacking the Woke Playbook” panel dismissed transgender girls and women as “biological boys”; sports, he said, must be “protected” because “sports have built this country”.

The senator also falsely claimed that “half the kids when they graduate they can’t read their diploma” as he condemned “the progressives, the crazies” who he baselessly claimed are “trying to change family, change things that are our moral values”.

At least 150 bills in 2023 would specifically restrict the rights of trans people, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Several proposed laws would specifically target trans healthcare for adults.

On the opening day of CPAC, Tennessee became the eighth state in the nation to ban gender-affirming care for youth, the fourth to do so this year. A similar measure was signed into law in Mississippi one day earlier.

Gender-affirming care can span several kinds of treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and social transitioning support. Care standards from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and other leading medical groups do not recommend that affirming surgeries be performed on minors.

Such care is considered safe, effective and medically necessary by most medical organisatons. The American Medical Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians, among others, have established clear clinical guidelines for treating young trans people.

Dozens of bills introduced in state legislatures across the US to restrict such care are supported and in many cases drafted by influential right-wing legal groups, conservative Christian organisations and fringe medical groups that have aligned with right-wing public officials to advance their agenda.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation’s largest professional association of pediatricians, recommends a “gender-affirming” and “nonjudgmental approach that helps children feel safe in a society that too often marginalizes or stigmatizes those seen as different.”

“The gender-affirming model strengthens family resiliency and takes the emphasis off heightened concerns over gender while allowing children the freedom to focus on academics, relationship-building and other typical developmental tasks,” according to the organisation.

But remarks from elected officials and waves of legislation aimed at trans Americans, alongside what appears to be the makings of a newspaper crusade focused on trans rights, have insisted that something is dangerously wrong with the ways in which children and their families navigate a nuanced and personal process, similar to a concurrent battle for abortion rights against an avalanche of restrictions.

CPAC’s personalities, meanwhile, unjustly linked trans people to “grooming” and “pedophilia” or used “pronouns” as a punchline.

“There is no middle ground on transgenderism,” right-wing activist Candace Owens said in her remarks on 2 March. “If you don’t have the courage to say what needs to be said, we truly don’t need you.”

Speakers at the conference accused their political opponents of “targeting” children with “gender ideology” while within the same breath advancing legislation and proposals that would severely restrict care for young people.

“I don’t know about you,” congresswoman Greene said on 3 March, “but when it comes to kids, I think the Republican Party has a duty. We have a responsibility, and that is to be the party that protects children.”

Nearly one in five transgender and nonbinary youth attempted suicide in 2022, according to a nationwide survey from The Trevor Project. Fewer one in three trans and nonbinary youth reported living in a home that was gender-affirming.

Legislation and inflammatory political debates surrounding it have radically impacted the mental health of a majority of young trans and nonbinary people, according to polling from The Trevor Project and Morning Consult.

A vast majority of trans and nonbinary youth, 86 per cent, reported that debates and laws targeting LGBT+ people have negatively impacted their mental health, weighed down by “anger, sadness, stress, and fear,” with fear “most intensely felt” among trans and nonbinary young people, according to The Trevor Project.

With her Libs of TikTok accounts and attacks against LGBT+ people, teachers and doctors, Chaya Raichik has emerged as an influential right-wing media figure making appearances on Tucker Carlson’s programming and Newsmax, with millions of social media followers and a high-earning blog.

She made her debut at CPAC stage alongside several prominent right-wing media personalities on 2 March.

Libs of TikTok has been linked to harassment and threats against drag performers, LGBT+ people and their advocates, particularly teachers, and doctors and hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to young trans people. Hours after five people were killed and several others were wounded inside a mass shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBT+ nightclub, Libs of TikTok drew negative attention to a drag performance in the state.

At CPAC, she was hailed as a “hero” and “courageous”.

She called a recent VICE article previewing her CPAC appearance as an “insane hit piece”.

Ms Raichik also claimed that the term “stochastic terrorist” was invented because of her, though she also admitted she doesn’t know what it means; the term has been used to describe the leveraging of hateful rhetoric through large social media platforms to promote violence.

“Nothing I love more than to mock and clown the liberal media,” she said.

If you are based in the US and seek LGBT+ affirming mental health support, resources are available from Trans Lifeline (877-565-8860) and the LGBT Hotline (888-843-4564), as well as The Trevor Project (866-488-7386 or text START to 678-678).

UK rivers are too polluted to enjoy, says Ray Mears

Danny Halpin
Sat, 4 March 2023 


Ray Mears has said he would not canoe in some of the UK’s rivers because they are so polluted.

The television woodsman made his career teaching bushcraft and survival techniques, but in an interview with the i newspaper he lamented the state of British waterways.

He told the paper: “I have seen rivers full of effluent, bubbling like they are full of detergent.

“It’s heartbreaking. I’m a canoeist and there are some rivers I wouldn’t put a canoe in to paddle on, which is how bad it is in some places.

“One of the joys for me is to make a canoe trip in wild places and at the end of the day’s hard paddling is to literally jump in and swim and to feel nature envelop me, and I think that’s magical. We should have those opportunities.”

Only 14% of rivers and lakes in England meet good ecological status and none meet good status for persistent, bioaccumulative or toxic chemicals.

Monitoring of PFAS, an industrial chemical that builds up in the body and has been linked to cancer, liver damage and decreased fertility as well as an increased risk of asthma and thyroid disease, has found widespread contamination in UK rivers.

The Times reported on Saturday that water companies plan to pump rivers if more drought conditions threaten drinking water shortages, raising concerns about the transportation of chemicals and the threat to wildlife.

Environment Secretary Therese Coffey has been accused of backing away from fining water companies up to £250 million for polluting (Kirsty O’Connor/PA)

Data obtained by the Labour Party last year showed that monitored discharges of sewage into waterways had increased by more than 26 times between 2016 and 2021 – from 100,533 hours to 2,667,452.

Water companies are only permitted to release sewage during periods of heavy rain so that the system does not back up and pump sewage into people’s homes.

But Surfers Against Sewage said they found 143 “dry spills” between October 2021 and September 2022 by using Met Office data to identify sewage discharges when there had been no rain in the preceding two days.

They also said that more than half the people they asked in a recent survey had reported being sick after wild swimming or water sports.



In his interview with the i, Mr Mears said rivers are part of the “poetry” and “psyche” of the UK and that we have a hardwired, spiritual need to be by water.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it has increased transparency of sewage discharges by making water companies monitor and publish more data on overflows.

It said the number of monitored overflows has increased 15-fold, from 800 in 2016 to more than 12,000 in 2020 and plans to have all 15,000 overflows covered by the end of this year.

In January, Conservative MPs introduced a new target for water companies to reduce the level of phosphorus, a chemical present in human waste, from treated wastewater by 80%.

The Liberal Democrats and others said the Government had effectively voted to allow sewage to continue for another 15 years.

In response to the vote, Extinction Rebellion began putting up satirical blue plaques, in the style used by English Heritage, by waterways across the country, naming and shaming MPs who had voted in favour of the Government’s new target.

Misplaced fears of an ‘evil’ ChatGPT obscure the real harm being done

John Naughton
Sat, 4 March 2023 


On 14 February, Kevin Roose, the New York Times tech columnist, had a two-hour conversation with Bing, Microsoft’s ChatGPT-enhanced search engine. He emerged from the experience an apparently changed man, because the chatbot had told him, among other things, that it would like to be human, that it harboured destructive desires and was in love with him.

The transcript of the conversation, together with Roose’s appearance on the paper’s The Daily podcast, immediately ratcheted up the moral panic already raging about the implications of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 (which apparently underpins Bing) and other “generative AI” tools that are now loose in the world. These are variously seen as chronically untrustworthy artefacts, as examples of technology that is out of control or as precursors of so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) – ie human-level intelligence – and therefore posing an existential threat to humanity.

Accompanying this hysteria is a new gold rush, as venture capitalists and other investors strive to get in on the action. It seems that all that money is burning holes in very deep pockets. Mercifully, this has its comical sides. It suggests, for example, that chatbots and LLMs have replaced crypto and web 3.0 as the next big thing, which in turn confirms that the tech industry collectively has the attention span of a newt.

The most likely outcome is that chatbots will eventually be viewed as a significant augmentation of human capabilities

The strangest thing of all, though, is that the pandemonium has been sparked by what one of its leading researchers called “stochastic parrots” – by which she means that LLM-powered chatbots are machines that continuously predict which word is statistically most likely to follow the previous one. And this is not black magic, but a computational process that is well understood and has been clearly described by Prof Murray Shanahan and elegantly dissected by the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram.

How can we make sense of all this craziness? A good place to start is to wean people off their incurable desire to interpret machines in anthropocentric ways. Ever since Joe Weizenbaum’s Eliza, humans interacting with chatbots seem to want to humanise the computer. This was absurd with Eliza – which was simply running a script written by its creator – so it’s perhaps understandable that humans now interacting with ChatGPT – which can apparently respond intelligently to human input – should fall into the same trap. But it’s still daft.

Related: Everything you wanted to know about AI – but were afraid to ask

The persistent rebadging of LLMs as “AI” doesn’t help, either. These machines are certainly artificial, but to regard them as “intelligent” seems to me to require a pretty impoverished conception of intelligence. Some observers, though, such as the philosopher Benjamin Bratton and the computer scientist Blaise Agüera y Arcas are less dismissive. “It is possible,” they concede, “that these kinds of AI are ‘intelligent’ – and even ‘conscious’ in some way – depending on how those terms are defined” but “neither of these terms can be very useful if they are defined in strongly anthropocentric ways”. They argue that we should distinguish sentience from intelligence and consciousness and that “the real lesson for philosophy of AI is that reality has outpaced the available language to parse what is already at hand. A more precise vocabulary is essential.”

It is. For the time being, though, we’re stuck with the hysteria. A year is an awfully long time in this industry. Only two years ago, remember, the next big things were going to be crypto/web 3.0 and quantum computing. The former has collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, while the latter is, like nuclear fusion, still just over the horizon.

With chatbots and LLMs, the most likely outcome is that they will eventually be viewed as a significant augmentation of human capabilities (spreadsheets on steroids, as one cynical colleague put it). If that does happen, then the main beneficiaries (as in all previous gold rushes) will be the providers of the picks and shovels, which in this case are the cloud-computing resources needed by LLM technology and owned by huge corporations.

Given that, isn’t it interesting that the one thing nobody talks about at the moment is the environmental impact of the vast amount of computing needed to train and operate LLMs? A world that is dependent on them might be good for business but it would certainly be bad for the planet. Maybe that’s what Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the outfit that created ChatGPT, had in mind when he observed that “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies”.

Is hydrogen really a clean enough fuel to tackle the climate crisis?

Nina Lakhani
Tue, 7 March 2023 

Hydrogen is the smallest, lightest and most abundant molecule in the universe. On Earth, it does not occur by itself naturally, but can be separated from water (H2O) or hydrocarbon compounds (fossil fuels) like gas, coal and petroleum to be used as an energy source. It’s already used for rocket fuel, but it is now being pushed as a clean and safe alternative to oil and gas for heating and earthly modes of transport. Political support is mounting with almost $26bn of US taxpayer money available for hydrogen projects thanks to three recent laws – the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Chips Act. Hydrogen is politically hot, but is it the climate solution that its cheerleaders are claiming?

Why all the hype about hydrogen?

The short answer is that the fossil fuel industry sees hydrogen as a way to keep on drilling and building new infrastructure, and has successfully deployed its PR and lobbying machines over the past few years to get policymakers thinking that hydrogen is a catch-all climate solution. Research by climate scientists (without fossil fuel links) has debunked industry claims that hydrogen should be a major player in our decarbonised future, though hydrogen extracted from water (using renewable energy sources) could – and should – play an important role in replacing the dirtiest hydrogen currently extracted from fossil fuels. It may also have a role in fuelling some transportation like long-haul flights and vintage cars, but the evidence is far from clear. However, with billions of climate action dollars up for grabs in the US alone, expect to see more lobbying, more industry-funded evidence and more hype.

What’s the difference between blue, grey, brown, pink and green hydrogen?

A green hydrogen production facility project in Africa at Namaqua Engineering in Vredendal with the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. 

Photograph: Esa Alexander/Reuters

Extracting hydrogen is energy intensive, so the source and how it’s done both matter. Currently, about 96% of the world’s hydrogen comes from coal (brown) and gas (grey), with the rest created from nuclear (pink) and renewable sources like hydro, wind and solar. Production of both grey and brown hydrogen release carbon dioxide (CO2) and unburnt fugitive methane into the atmosphere. This super-polluting hydrogen is what’s currently used as the chemical base for synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, plastics and steel among other industries.

Blue hydrogen is what the fossil fuel industry is most invested in, as it still comes from gas but ostensibly the CO2 would be captured and stored underground. The industry claims to have the technology to capture 80-90% of CO2, but in reality, it’s closer to 12% when every stage of the energy-intensive process is evaluated, according to a peer-reviewed study by scientists at Cornell University published in 2021. For sure better than nothing, but methane emissions, which warm the planet faster than CO2, would actually be higher than for grey hydrogen because of the additional gas needed to power the carbon capture, and likely upstream leakage. Notably, the term clean hydrogen was coined by the fossil fuel industry a few months after the seminal Cornell study found that blue hydrogen has a substantially larger greenhouse gas footprint than burning gas, coal or diesel oil for heating.

Green hydrogen is extracted from water by electrolysis – using electricity generated by renewable energy sources (wind, solar, hydro). Climate experts (without links to fossil fuels) say green hydrogen can only be green if new renewable sources are constructed to power hydrogen production – rather than drawing on the current grid and questionable carbon accounting schemes. The industry disagrees: “Strict additionality rules requiring electrolytic hydrogen to be powered by new renewable energy is not practical, especially in the early years, and will severely limit the development of hydrogen projects,” said BP America.

“There may be some small role in truly green hydrogen in a decarbonised future, but this is largely a marketing creation by the oil and gas industry that has been hugely overhyped,” said Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, a co-author of the paper on blue hydrogen.Interactive

What’s at stake?

In addition to $26bn in direct financing for so-called hydrogen hubs and demo projects, another $100bn or so in uncapped tax credits could be paid out over the next few decades, so lots and lots of taxpayers’ money. Fossil fuel companies are also using hydrogen to justify building more pipelines, claiming that this infrastructure can be used for “clean hydrogen” in the future. But hydrogen is a highly flammable and corrosive element, and it would be costly to repurpose oil and gas infrastructure to make it safe for hydrogen. And while hydrogen is not a greenhouse gas, it is not harmless. It aggravates some greenhouse gases, for instance causing methane to stay in the atmosphere for longer.

The first offshore wind farm in the US began operations in late 2016 off Block Island in Rhode Island. Photograph: Michael Dwyer/AP

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in actual zero-emission solutions, but could be a disaster if the federal government pours scarce resources into infrastructure and technologies that could make the climate crisis worse and cause further public health harms,” said Sara Gersen, clean energy attorney at Earthjustice. “Sowing confusion about hydrogen is a delay tactic, and delay is the new denialism.”
Is there any role for hydrogen in a decarbonised future?

Yes, but a limited one – given that it takes more energy to produce, store and transport hydrogen than it provides when converted into useful energy, so using anything but new renewable sources (true green hydrogen) will require burning more fossil fuels.

According to the hydrogen merit ladder devised by Michael Liebreich, host of the Cleaning Up podcast, swapping clean hydrogen for the fossil fuel-based grey and brown stuff currently used for synthetic fertilisers, petrochemicals and steel is a no-brainer. The carbon footprint of global hydrogen production today is equivalent to Germany’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, so the sooner we swap to green hydrogen (created from new renewables) the better. This could also be useful for some transportation, such as long-haul flights and heavy machinery, and maybe to store surplus wind and solar energy – though none are slam dunks for hydrogen as there are alternative technologies vying for these markets, said Liebreich.

But for most forms of transport (cars, bikes, buses and trains) and heating there are already safer, cleaner and cheaper technologies such as battery-run electric vehicles and heat pumps, so there’s little or no merit in investing time or money with hydrogen. Howarth said: “Renewable electricity is a scarce resource. Direct electrification and batteries offer so much more, and much more quickly. It’s a huge distraction and waste of resources to even be talking about heating homes and passenger vehicles with hydrogen.”

Thousands of shacks gutted in Bangladesh Rohingya refugee camp fire

Blaze, now under control, leaves thousands of people homeless

Md. Kamruzzaman |05.03.2023 


DHAKA, Bangladesh

Thousands of temporary shelters were burnt in a fire that broke out at a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh on Sunday, officials said.

The fire hit Camp 11 in Cox’s Bazar, a border district which hosts more than a million Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled military crackdown in Myanmar in 2017.

There were no casualties, and a police official said the cause of the blaze was not clear, but it is likely because of gas cylinders used for cooking. The fire spread quickly as most of the homes are made of bamboo and tarpaulin.

The Armed Police Battalion, the force in charge of maintaining law and order in the refugee camps, said in a statement that nearly 2,000 tents were gutted and 12,000 Rohingya left homeless.

“The Rohingya would be shifted to different camp-based learning centers and other shelters under the supervision of Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner’s office, and donor agencies including the UNHCR and World Food Program will provide them food and other support,” said the statement.

The UNHCR in Bangladesh said Rohingya volunteers trained on firefighting, and local fire services brought the fire under control, adding that multiple shelters and facilities were destroyed.

Similar fires occurred at the camps in January 2022 and March 2021. While the blaze last year only damaged homes, the one in 2021 killed 15 community members and destroyed over 10,000 settlements.

Vase is first evidence of a real gladiator fight in Roman Britain

Leo Sands, Mar 08 2023

COLCHESTER MUSEUMS AND COLCHESTER CITY COUNCIL
The Colchester vase is believed to date to the late 2nd century.

Elaborately armed, two gladiators named Memnon and Valentinus faced each other in brutal combat almost 2000 years ago.

Historians have known since a clay vessel was discovered in 1853 that Memnon, an enslaved past champion who experts say was probably Black, won this match.

Valentinus, also enslaved, can be seen raising an index finger toward the sky, a gladiatorial gesture of submission equivalent to the waving of a white flag.

But unknown until now was where the match took place: Colchester, England.

Archaeologists say it is the only depiction of a real gladiator match that took place in Roman Britain.

While there are other artifacts suggesting that gladiators were in Britain, on the outer reaches of the empire in its heyday, none depicted specific matches taking place.

An analysis conducted by archaeologists collaborating across British universities reveals that the two gladiators almost certainly met for combat near where the pot was found - a city in what's now the eastern county of Essex.

"When you now look at this vase, you know that you're seeing real people on it. They fought here, in Colchester," which was known to the Romans as Camulodunum, Glynn Davis, a senior curator at Colchester Museums, said in a telephone interview Monday. The vase is believed to date to the late 2nd century.

"It was a revelation," he said.

COLCHESTER MUSEUMS AND COLCHESTER CITY COUNCIL
Archaeologists say it is the only depiction of a real gladiator match that took place in Roman Britain.

Because of the sophistication of the frieze, archaeologists previously assumed that the pot had been imported from elsewhere in the Roman Empire.

Archaeologists studying the lettering scratched onto the pot's surface and its clay material concluded that the description was carved while the clay was still soft before it was fired in a Colchester kiln.

That means, according to Davis, that Memnon and Valentinus met for battle nearby.

"The clay is like a fingerprint for where it's been made," said Davis, who worked alongside a team of experts to examine its composition. "It matched identically with the local clay."

A separate analysis of the Latin lettering inscribed across the pot's surface found that Memnon and Valentinus's story was spelled out before the pot entered the kiln and not scratched onto the surface later.

"We were looking at an inscription that couldn't have been scratched on after firing," he said. "The T's and the X's you can only achieve in soft clay. If you tried to do that in fired clay - it would chip."

The researchers concluded that the vase was commissioned, designed and fired locally, upending previous assumptions that it had been imported from elsewhere in Europe or that it may have been manufactured as a generic with details added afterward. "This can't have been a generic souvenir," Davis said.



Memnon had a heavy advantage in the fight, according to the vase's depiction. He carried a sword and a large shield and had a helmet that completely encased his head except for eyeholes, considerably better than his rival's weaponry and armour. The inscription says this was his ninth victory as a gladiator.

It is also highly likely that he was Black, said King's College London archaeologist John Pearce, who was involved in the research.

Memnon, probably a stage name, is an apparent reference to the King of the Ethiopians in Homer's Troy, Pearce said.

The mythological figure recurs throughout Roman literature and is frequently accompanied by a reference to his ethnicity or that of his companions.

"It seems to us plausible that the choice of name for this particular gladiator was influenced not only by his martial abilities but also by his skin colour," Pearce said via email.

"He could be a star performer brought a long distance or could himself have been born in Britain to parents from places far to the south who had come to the province as forced or willing migrants."

"Inscriptions and increasingly analysis of human skeletal remains show us the presence of individuals of Middle Eastern and African geographical origin in Roman period Britain, especially in the province's cities," Pearce added.

The vase shows Valentinus, Memnon's rival who appears to have been left-handed, armed with just a trident that has dropped to the ground. He wears only a padded sleeve and shoulder guard for protection.

Not shown on the pot, according to Pearce, is the match's referee - who would have been gesturing to Memnon to pause combat until the fight's sponsor decided whether to order the defeated combatant to be shown mercy or slain.

The crowd may have influenced that decision, cheering on behalf of the defeated gladiator if he had fought well - or encouraging Memnon to kill him. One thing we still don't know: Valentinus's fate.

With pails and mugs, Philippine residents clean up oil spill

MARCH 07, 2023

A volunteer dressed in personal protective equipment gathers the oil spill 

collected from the sunken fuel tanker MT Princess Empress, on the shore 

of Pola, in Oriental Mindoro province, Philippines, March 7, 2023.

Reuters

POLA, Philippines — Residents of a central Philippine province affected by an oil spill from a sunken tanker endured the powerful stench of petroleum as they cleaned it up using buckets and mugs while authorities raced to contain environmental damage.

Wearing personal protective equipment and masks, residents of the town of Pola in Oriental Mindoro, with the help of Philippine coast guard crew, collected debris soaked in oil and wiped thick sludge from rocks along the shore.

"Here in our area the oil is really thick and the smell is strong," said 34-year-old resident Maribel Famadico while cleaning along the shore with other volunteers.

Buckets used to clean up the oil spill from the sunken fuel tanker MT Princess Empress are placed on the shore of Pola, Oriental Mindoro province, Philippines, March 7, 2023.
PHOTO: Reuters

"There is so much oil that we become nauseous when we are not wearing protection. Many are feeling unwell because of the stench," she added.

Philippine authorities said on Monday (March 6) they believed they have found the tanker that sank off Oriental Mindoro last week and that they planned to deploy a remotely-operated autonomous vehicle to pinpoint its exact location.

The tanker, the MT Princess Empress, is thought to be lying at about 1,200 feet (366 metres) below sea level, off Oriental Mindoro province, though the information still needed to be verified, according to the environment ministry.

The vessel was carrying about 800,000 litres of industrial fuel oil when it suffered engine trouble on Feb 28 in rough seas.

Famadico said ridding the shore and rocks of oil will likely take days.

"[The oil] comes back with the tide. Yesterday we cleaned this area but there is more again today," she said.

Marine scientists at the University of the Philippines said about 36,000 hectares (88,958 acres) of coral reef, mangroves and sea-grass were potentially in danger of being affected by the oil slick.

Central Asia’s poorest farmers know the value of their land
Farmland and pastures across Central Asia are far less productive after decades of monocropping.

Mar 8, 2023

Depleted land needs more water, which is already insufficient across much of Central Asia. (David Trilling)

The soils of Central Asia yield far less meat, dairy and produce today than they did a few decades ago. While that is an undisputed driver of poverty, new research examining the relationship between poverty and soil management challenges the idea that the rural poor are shabby stewards of the land, and could foster novel approaches to soil restoration.

In a paper published this month, Alisher Mirzabaev of the University of Bonn and two Russian colleagues use household survey data from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to examine the "vicious cycles between poverty and environmental degradation."

Mirzabaev has previously calculated that reduced crop yields, lower livestock productivity, and increasing needs for costly inputs such as fertilizer and labor – all signs of land degradation – cost the Central Asian economies $6 billion a year; the land is 4.8 times less productive than it was in the early 1980s. Degraded land often needs more water, as well, to wash salts out of the topsoil.

But does poverty worsen soil degradation?

The poorest farming households, Mirzabaev and his coauthors found, are more likely to use their land sustainably, for example by reducing tillage (to cut down on fuel costs), diversifying and rotating crops. It stands to reason that farmers who are cash-poor have less money to spend on fuel and fertilizer and other environmentally unfriendly inputs: “Our results show that the poor households have adopted more SLM [sustainable land management] practices than their richer counterparts.”

SLM can be labor-intensive. But for the poorest farmers, who frequently live in rural areas with high unemployment, labor is often one thing they have in surplus.

This lack of alternative local work opportunities “reduces the opportunity cost of family labor, especially for women due to labor market inequalities, leading to increased allocation of family labor to farm production. From the view of land management, lack of non-farm employment opportunities may, thus, allow for the adoption of more labor-intensive SLM.”

In other words, the poorest farmers are putting more hours into tending the land by hand, doing less of the mechanized work that can deplete soils most rapidly.

The authors acknowledge their work could suffer a "survivorship bias," meaning that the farmers surveyed do not include those who have quit trying to farm depleted fields: "We are looking into the areas where land degradation has not trespassed the irreversibility points and thresholds beyond which no agricultural production is possible."