Megafires, drought and heat killing conifer seedlings in US west – study

Maanvi Singh
Fri, 10 March 2023 

Photograph: Susan Montoya Bryan/AP

The ancient, towering ponderosa pines and Douglas firs that dot the west are dying off at an alarming rate – and increasingly intense megafires, drought and heat are making it harder for their seedlings to grow, a new study has found.

In an expansive study, a team of more than 50 fire ecologists analysed data from more than 10,000 locations after 334 wildfires to assess how the severity of a fire and the weather conditions afterwards affected conifers across the US west.

Related: Atmospheric river comes for California as experts warn it ‘could get really ugly’

They found that over the past four decades, increasingly destructive megafires and hotter, drier conditions have already made it harder for seedlings to establish themselves post-fire, according to the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

For the next few decades, the intensity of wildfires will most affect the likelihood of a forest regenerating afterward, the study found, though eventually, warm, dry climate conditions will make large sections of conifer habitats unsuitable for seedlings. If global average increases 4F (2.2C) compared to the first half of the 20th century, only 74% of the area the researchers studied will have climate conditions suitable for conifer seedlings by 2050.

Extensive projections across the range of eight major conifer species in the west suggest that while forests in the northern Rocky Mountains and Pacific north-west are expected to hold steady in the coming decades, forests in the south-west and California are most vulnerable to decline.

But the analysis also offers some good news. At least in the short term, researchers say, forest treatments to clear out the dead and dying vegetation that fuels megafires could reduce the severity of wildfires across the west – and preserve its forests.

“So the results are at least a little bit hopeful,” said Kim Davis, who led the study as a researcher at the University of Montana, and now works as an ecologist for the US Forest Service at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory. “Climate change is making it really hard for trees to recover. But there are some ways in which we can have a little bit of agency and promote forest recovery.”

Lukens Lake with shoreline conifer trees and grasses in Yosemite national park, California. Photograph: Anthony Brown/Alamy

Conifer species in the west have evolved with fire, even depending on fire to seed and regenerate. Some species, such as the lodgepole pine, are cued up to open up their cones and release seeds with the heat of a fire. Before European colonisation, many wildfires were left to burn naturally, and many were set intentionally by Indigenous practitioners who used controlled burns to manage overgrown vegetation.

But decades of aggressive fire suppression in many parts of the west disrupted the cycles of fire that these trees need. Without regular fire, built-up brush can crowd out seedlings and fuel more severe conflagrations that damage even established trees.

And then came climate chaos. In recent years, prolonged droughts and record-breaking heatwaves have not only ushered in an era of more intense and destructive wildfires, but have also created a hostile environment for seedlings. “It’s a double whammy,” said Davis.

Unlike older trees, seedlings have small root systems that cannot reach for water below the top layer of soil. And they lack the thick bark that insulates trees from heat waves.

As the west warms, the regions that can comfortably support seedlings are rapidly shifting and shrinking. The study’s findings are in line with other recent research mapping the devastating effects of climate crisis on western conifers. In another report published this month, researchers at Stanford University found that global heating has already left a fifth of all conifers in California’s Sierra Nevada stranded in climates that cannot support their species. While resilient, ageing pines and firs across lower elevations of the range are hanging on to life, new generations of young trees are failing to establish themselves.

Climate change is making it really hard for trees to recover. But there are some ways in which we can have a little bit of agency and promote forest recovery

Kim Davis

Both studies show that conifers, which can live for decades or centuries, simply cannot keep up with the velocity of climate crisis. But if western states work quickly to reduce the severity of wildfires, they can help forests survive – at least in the short term, said Marcos Robles, lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy in Arizona.

Clearing landscapes – mechanically and with fire – and restoring fire-wrecked forests, can help conifers regenerate in the coming decades.

Controlled fires, for example, thin out the fire-fueling brush so that flames can’t burn as fiercely, allowing more trees to survive. Those trees, in turn, help shade and cool the forest post-fire, reducing temperatures by up to 5F (2.8C), and allowing seedlings a chance to grow and survive. In some high-elevation forests, planting trees after wildfires could also help forests recover, the study suggests.

“This study really spells out the point that we stand to lose our forest,” said Don Hankins a pyrogeographer and Plains Miwok fire expert at California State University, Chico. “But there is a path forward.”

Hankins, who was not involved in the study, said that recent examples show that thoughtful fire management can transform a forest’s fate. When the Bootleg fire hurtled toward the 30,000 acre Sycan Marsh Preserve in Oregon, it weakened and slowed as it hit areas that had been thinned and treated with controlled burns.

In the aftermath, “we were looking at an island of green, surrounded by a dead forest”, Hankins said.

State and national authorities are increasingly prioritising wildfire management, and the federal government has allocated $3bn toward a 10-year plan to treat 20m hectares. The analyses and maps generated by the study could help officials decide which regions to tackle first, said Robles.

“But even with this federal investment, the pace of wildfire treatments is probably not going to be sufficient,” said Robles, a co-author of the PNAS study. In California and other western states, landscape management efforts stalled and lagged due to bureaucratic hurdles, staffing and funding shortages. Authorities could consider letting some low-severity wildfires that occur away from communities burn naturally.

“Right now, we have a short term opportunity to change the trajectory of our forests,” Robles said.

Texas youth organizers take aim at the biggest oil field in the world

Aliya Uteuova
Fri, 10 March 2023 

Photograph: Nick Oxford/Reuters

A first-of-its-kind municipal climate charter in Texas could throw a wrench in US fossil fuel extraction. Residents of a major Texas city just west of the Permian Basin, the largest oil field in the US, will have the chance to vote on the package this spring.

If the proposal passes, the city of El Paso would adopt a comprehensive climate policy that would include prohibiting the use of city water for extraction projects outside city limits, such as in the Permian Basin, which makes up roughly 40% of all US oil production.

“El Paso is on the verge of potentially passing one of the most progressive pieces of climate legislation in the country,” said Deirdre Shelly, campaigns director for the national Sunrise Movement.

Related: Oil wells guzzle precious California water. Next door, residents can’t use the tap

Proponents say the climate charter would prepare El Paso to withstand extreme weather events and accelerate the city’s transition to renewables, requiring 80% of its energy to come from carbon free sources by 2030. It also encourages rooftop solar development, proposes establishing a climate department and could move the ownership of El Paso Electric into the city’s hands. The utility company was purchased in 2020 by a JP Morgan-tied fund.

“We’re battling the fossil fuel giants in our community,” said Ana Fuentes, a 25-year-old resident of El Paso and a campaign manager for the local Sunrise chapter. “This charter would allow people to have the platform and a space where our concerns will be prioritized over the bottom line of fossil fuel oligarchs.”

Last July, Sunrise El Paso and Austin-based Ground Game Texas submitted nearly 40,000 petition signatures to get the climate charter on the ballot for the November 2022 election, but due to a prolonged verification process, the vote on the plan will take place in the 6 May election. Roughly half of the petition signers were people under the age of 35.

“Something [we] talk a lot about a lot is climate anxiety, and I think we all feel it and it shows in those numbers,” Fuentes said.

The climate charter has the potential to disrupt drilling in the Permian Basin. The proposed policy would ban the use of city water for fossil fuel activities outside of El Paso limits. The annual amount of freshwater used for fracking the Texas side of the Permian Basin was estimated at 72bn gallons in 2019. That is a 2,400% rise from 2010, according to the US Geological Survey.

“We would be able to preserve the water within our desert community for household use, instead of having that water be sent to fracking and fossil fuel projects outside the city,” said Fuentes.

Fracking depletes large amounts of water that is scarce in desert communities like El Paso. On top of that, this process of extracting natural gas has been shown to cause groundwater contamination.

Water used for fracking is “laced with chemicals [and then] percolates through to people’s agricultural fields and sometimes wells where people drink them”, said Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. The fossil fuel activities in the Permian Basin, which have been termed a “carbon bomb” by environmentalists, release planet-heating methane and volatile organic compounds associated with poor air quality that can degrade human health.

Related: Red states leading the US in solar and wind production, new report shows

The El Paso chamber of commerce, a membership group representing the interest of businesses, wrote in an emailed statement that it opposes the climate charter, stating that the proposition “has the right end game in mind – an improved climate, but doing so will cost us the very livelihoods it seeks to enrich”. The chamber claims that the climate charter would pose a “clear detrimental effect to local businesses and regional economy”, according to the findings from the economic impact report that the chamber paid for.

Sharon Wilson, an organizer with the nonprofit Earthworks who previously worked in the oil and gas industry, said this type of fear mongering from industry stakeholders is par for the course when environmentalists propose bold climate action.

“The oil and gas industry actually uses some of the same tactics that the tobacco industry used to deceive the public about the harm of tobacco,” said Wilson. Indeed, there is a documented history of companies like Exxon and Chevron borrowing from the tobacco industry’s playbook.

“At some point the tobacco industry was not allowed to advertise anymore and that needs to happen with the oil and gas industry.” Wilson said. “Smoking is a choice, breathing air is not.”

Students protest pension reform in France as union cuts power to Stade de France in ‘symbolic move’

Euronews
Fri, 10 March 2023 

Young people across France took to the streets on Thursday to protest the government’s attempt t to raise the retirement age to 64.

Several hundred students protested in Paris as part of nationwide strikes and demonstrations - with some blocking access to universities and high schools.

The protest briefly turned violent as a group of young people broke away, vandalizing bus stops and setting a car on fire.

The energy branch of France's prominent union, CGT, cut power to the Stade de France and several construction sites of the infrastructure for the 2024 Paris Olympics on Thursday.

Cédric Liechti, the Secretary General of CGT Energy, said the move was a “symbolic action”.

“For two and a half months now, more than 90% of workers and more than 70% of French people have rejected this reform which will bring the entire French people to their knees. The government refuses to hear, refuses to apply democracy and the majority of the people.”

A man plays the trumpet in front of a barricade during a demonstration in Lyon, central France. - AP Photo

President Emmanuel Macron wants to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 and make other changes he says are needed to keep the public pension system financially stable as the population ages.

But opponents argue that wealthy taxpayers or companies should pitch in more to finance the system instead.

“I don’t want to work all my life and be exhausted at the end,” said Djana Farhaig, a 15-year-old who protested in Paris. “It is important for us to show that the youth is engaged for its future.”

Demonstrations also took place in Rouen, where some 400 people marched. And in Toulouse, where 400 to 500 people gathered.

Blockades were also organised in several high schools and universities.

In Strasbourg, three university buildings were reportedly blocked. In Lille, for the second consecutive day, the Moulins campus of the university was blocked by 50 to 100 students with banners and drums, according to the faculty.

REST IN POWER
French architect and left-wing activist Roland Castro dies aged 82

Jonny Walfisz
Fri, 10 March 2023 



The French architect made his name through his design plans predicated on raising the standard of living for working class neighbourhoods and his involvement in the May 1968 Paris student protests.

Born Limoges in 1940, Castro's Jewish heritage meant he spent the first years of his life in hiding during the Vichy regime. Alongside his parents and sister, Casto took refuge in the Limousin hinterland, in Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, where he was hidden by the Maquis, the communist resistance force.

His experience with the Maquis would define his worldview, believing he had “a debt of existence to France.”

“Architecture, the suburbs, the causes have never been lacking: everything has been a pretext for settling this debt,” he once said.

His ambition took him to the Paris Beaux-Arts architecture school in 1958 and joined the Union of Communist Students. Ever committed to his intellectual integrity, he was expelled from the union in 1965 for criticising Stalinism. In response, he embraced Maoism, as was popular in French communist circles at the time.

He became a leading figure in the anti-capitalism protests that erupted throughout France during May 1968 bringing the country to a standstill. Castro was involved in the student paper ‘Melp!’ which publicised the motivations behind the riots to the general public.

Castro became an architect and in 1983, and co-founded ‘Banlieues 89’ with his urbanist friend Michel Cantal-Dupart. Banlieues 89 was a vehicle for his political and architectural ideals with the mantra “to make a revolution in the suburbs.”

In 1983, President François Mitterrand (C) and architect Roland Castro (R) visit the new stock exchange building in Saint-Denis. - PIERRE GUILLAUD/AFP or licensors

The project was responsible for the renovation of Cité de la Caravelle in Villeneuve-la-Garenne and the housing estates in the Hauts-de-Seine. Castro also designed the Cité de la bande dessinée in Angoulême and the Bourse du Travail in Saint-Denis.

Roland Castro's buildings were often grafted onto existing constructions. He added asymmetrical lines, combining wood and concrete, and favoured white, adorned with plant facades.

More than 200 projects were submitted to Banlieues 89, but the operation faced financial reluctance from the French government, and the collective dissolved in 1991.



In 2017, Castro came out in support of President Emmanuel Macron.

The President responded to the architect's death on Twitter, writing: "Legend of architecture and urbanism, visionary left-wing activist, Roland Castro has left us. On our urban landscape, it bequeaths an indelible imprint. To the citizens, an inspiration. Goodbye and thank you, Roland."

Castro was a colourful figure of French intellectualism, donning a trademark pinstripe suit and socialising with Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan (who psychoanalysed him for seven years), as well as meeting Che Guevera and Fidel Castro - no family relation.

‘Trust is gone’: First Nation battles oil company and Alberta over toxic water


Leyland Cecco in Toronto

THE GUARDIAN
Fri, 10 March 2023

Photograph: The Canadian Press/Alamy

Throughout the summer and into the fall, members of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation ventured out on to the land as they do every year, hunting and fishing the streams and boreal forest of their community in western Canada.

Over those same months last year, however, toxic water had been leaking from an oil sands operations upriver.

It wasn’t until recently, when Chief Allan Adam got a call from a neighbouring First Nation, that he realized the danger his community could be in: mine waste had been seeping from four tailings ponds for months.

When he called them, company officials and the province’s energy regulator both confirmed the leak – but neither had warned the community when they learned of the issue nine months ago.

Adam is now prepared to battle both Imperial Oil and Alberta’s energy regulator, alleging they “covered up unprecedented failures” of the company’s containment ponds, in what is now believed to be one of the largest tailings leaks in Alberta history.

“They’re both up against the wall right now. They were caught red-handed. The trust is gone. There’s no way you can come back from that. And we’ll always have what happened in the back of our mind, whenever we’re out on the land,” he said. “You can’t ever forget about something like this.”

The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation chief, Allan Adam. 

Photograph: Trevor Hagan/Reuters

Calgary-based Imperial Oil notified Alberta’s energy regulator in May that it had discovered discoloured water near the Kearl oil sands project.

The regulator soon concluded the water had come from tailings ponds where the company stored the toxic sludge-like byproducts of bitumen mining. Environmental samples showed high levels of several toxic contaminants, including arsenic, iron, sulphate and hydrocarbon – all of which exceeded provincial guidelines.

Local communities were notified in May of the initial discovery of discoloured water, but not made aware of the regulator’s subsequent findings that containment ponds had failed.

Last month, there was another leak, in which 5.3m litres of tailings water escaped from an overflowing catchment pond. This time, the community was informed two days later.

On Monday, Imperial said the second spill posed no threat to water or wildlife and that it had made “significant progress” in the cleanup efforts.

But the company admits it doesn’t yet know how much toxic tailings water has seeped into the land and water over the last nine months.

Adam says he met with company officials three times during the period, but alleges they never mentioned the leaking tailings pond.

On Monday, Imperial apologized for not communicating with affected communities, admitting it had “fallen short of expectations”.

Despite assurances from the company, residents remain wary. In the municipality of Wood Buffalo, city staff have stopped drawing from Lake Athabasca.

And in Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, community members have been advised by leadership not to eat any game or fish harvested in the last nine months.

“I just got back from an elders meeting and I told everyone to get rid of whatever you harvested. Throw it out. Don’t even feed it to your dogs,” said Adam, adding the community was waiting on test results of its water supply to determine if it is contaminated.

Imperial Oil has since been hit with both an environmental protection order and a non-compliance order in relation to the leak and the province’s regulator has demanded the company file plans to show how it intends to contain, monitor and remediate the areas affected by the leak.

Canada’s environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, said last week he was “deeply concerned” over revelations toxic water had been leaking into the nearby land and water for months.

Adam met with the the province’s regulator this week, and received an apology from senior staff for their failure to notify his community.

“I told them don’t bother apologizing. We’re well past that. Fix this problem, and show me how you won’t let it happen again.”

He says the inability for residents to harvest from the lands is a violation of the nation’s treaty rights and by not notifying the community of the spill, the company breached its benefit agreement contract with the First Nation.

“I told the company and I told the regulator that a simple phone call would have cost you less than five bucks. A simple phone call,” he said. “Look at what it’s going to cost you now.”

Explainer: Where are the critical raw materials the EU needs for its green transition?


Marie Lecoq
Fri, 10 March 2023 

Raw materials are present in the ground all over the world but some are more common in certain areas than others.

All of the clean energy technologies that we need to decarbonise the energy system require large amounts of minerals and metals.

These minerals and metals are used in many technologies, from smartphones to wind turbines and electric car batteries.

And as countries around the world are setting out to reduce carbon emissions, the demand for clean technologies is increasing, and with it so is the demand for raw materials.

K.C. Michaels is a legal advisor and critical minerals expert at the Internation Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organisation analysing data on the energy sector worldwide.

“Essentially all of the clean energy technologies that we need to decarbonise the energy system require large amounts of minerals and metals,” he explains.

Electric vehicle (EV) batteries for instance need large amounts of lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite. While rare earth elements are mainly used in permanent magnets for EV motors and wind turbines.

An excavator piles up salt at the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia, one of the biggest reserves of lithium in the world, October 10, 2009 - MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP

The European Union has established a list of 30 critical raw materials, mostly minerals, that are considered strategic to the EU’s economy and that have high supply risk.
But where do we get them from?

“The first challenge is the availability of those critical raw materials,” explains Dario Liguti, the director of sustainable energy at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.

“The production of some of those materials is highly concentrated in certain countries today,” he adds.

More than three-quarters of the global production of critical raw materials used for energy comes from just three countries.

China leads with 66% of the global supply share, followed by South Africa with 9% and the Democratic Republic of Congo with 5%.

And in some cases, a single country can be responsible for over half of the global output.

“For example, cobalt supply from the Democratic Republic of Congo is about 60 or 70% of the world production,” Liguti explains.

China also plays a huge role in refining, a necessary step before the materials can be used.

So for example, even though cobalt is primarily mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, almost all of it goes to China for processing.

This concentration of resources can lead to major issues in supply, particularly for places like Europe, which produces very little in-house.

“If we imagine a world where there are ten suppliers of lithium and one of those suppliers has a strike or some sort of issue and a shutdown, there are a lot of opportunities to switch to other suppliers. But if we imagine a world where there are only two suppliers and there's a disruption from one, then there's a really big impact,” Michaels says.

An aerial view of wind turbines off the coast of Great Yarmouth, eastern England, on February 15, 2023 - DANIEL LEAL/AFP

“Their demand is already right now explosive and it will only become so as the transition towards a less carbonised energy system becomes even more important,” Liguti says.

The International Energy Agency projects that if the world stays on track to meet its global climate goals and reach net zero by 2050, the overall demand for minerals is going to quadruple by 2030.

“This is a huge increase in just the next seven or eight years,” Michaels says.

“When we start to look at specific minerals, then the demand increase can be much higher. Specifically for lithium, it's as many as 40 times, depending on the scenario,” he adds.

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So can the current supply keep up with growing demands?

“There is a real risk that we won't be able to ramp up production fast enough to meet these goals,” Michaels says.

The quantities necessary for the green transition are staggering.

“Even if we could have 100% re-use of all the minerals and metals that are out there today, we're still not even close,” he adds.

According to Liguti, increasing production won’t be enough. “The quantities necessary for the green transition are staggering,” he says.

“The answer to that demand is not only through increased primary production, but it is as well through the increase of the recycling and the reuse of those raw materials, on establishing the circular economy, the traceability of those minerals, so we exactly know at which stage of the value chain those raw materials are,” he explains.

A child and a woman break rocks extracted from a cobalt mine in Lubumbashi on May 23, 2016 - JUNIOR KANNAH/AFP

Securing the supply is not the only issue at stake. Mining can have a destructive impact not only on the environment but also on local communities.

"While we develop lithium mines and cobalt mines and manganese mines, even if the scale of operations is smaller, we don't want to do the same errors that we did when we started exploiting oil and gas, ” Liguti says. So we have to consider what happens to mines at the end of their lifecycle, he adds.

This means looking at "what to do with the mine, how to involve the local communities, how to account for negative externalities on the environment and mitigate those aspects”, he explains.

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So how can we ensure a sustainable and ethical supply chain of raw materials?

One of the solutions, experts say, is supply chain diligence.

“Companies will be required to look into their suppliers and really try to understand where the materials are coming from, what the risks are and what they can do as purchasers to reduce those risks,” Michaels explains.

This principle will be used in the new EU battery regulations, to ensure that batteries on the European market are sustainable and circular throughout their whole lifecycle, from the sourcing of materials to their collection, recycling and repurposing.

Once the purchasing companies, the car manufacturers become engaged, then they can bring a lot of change.

“It can lead to real efforts to improve the situation because once the downstream companies, the purchasing companies and the car manufacturers become engaged, then they can bring about a lot of change. They can speak to their suppliers, they can push for new standards and push for improvement,” Michaels adds.

Innovation can also play a big role in reducing the demand on raw materials.

New technologies can help improve how we use and mine these materials but also find alternative sources, develop substitutes and improve recycling.

“A raw material might not be critical a few decades from now as they were not critical a few years ago,” Liguti says.

“But they are critical now and we need to take care of that. So in 20 years, we don't have to look back and say: "Oh, we did the same errors that we did 100 years ago when we started exploiting oil and gas",” he adds.

To address this, the EU will adopt a Critical Raw Materials act on the 14th of March, 2023. The initiative aims to make sure Europe has a diverse and reliable supply of materials, and ensure social and environmental standards are respected.

BBC will not broadcast Attenborough episode over fear of ‘rightwing backlash’

Helena Horton Environment reporter
Fri, 10 March 2023 



The BBC has decided not to broadcast an episode of Sir David Attenborough’s flagship new series on British wildlife because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians and the rightwing press, the Guardian has been told.

The decision has angered the programme-makers and some insiders at the BBC, who fear the corporation has bowed to pressure from lobbying groups with “dinosaurian ways”.

The BBC strongly denied this was the case and insisted the episode in question was never intended for broadcast.

Attenborough’s highly anticipated new series, Wild Isles, looks at the beauty of nature in the British Isles.

Narrated by David Attenborough, it is expected to be a hit, with five episodes scheduled to go out in primetime slots on BBC One.

A sixth episode has also been filmed, which is understood to be a stark look at the losses of nature in the UK and what has caused the declines. It is also understood to include some examples of rewilding, a concept that has been controversial in some rightwing circles.

Related: The truth about Britain’s wildlife crisis is stark: the timid BBC must let David Attenborough tell it loud and clear | Geoffrey Lean

The documentary series was part-funded by nature charities the WWF and RSPB, but the final episode will not be broadcast along with the others and will instead be available only on the BBC’s iPlayer service. All six episodes were narrated by Attenborough, and made by the production company Silverback Films, responsible for previous series including Our Planet, in collaboration with the BBC Natural History Unit.

Senior sources at the BBC told the Guardian that the decision not to show the sixth episode was made to fend off potential critique from the political right. This week the Telegraph newspaper attacked the BBC for creating the series and for taking funding from “two charities previously criticised for their political lobbying” – the WWF and RSPB.

One source at the broadcaster, who asked not to be named, said “lobbying groups that are desperately hanging on to their dinosaurian ways” such as the farming and game industry would “kick off” if the show had too political a message.

They added: “Frankly, this idea that you sort of put it in a separate programme to almost parcel it to one side is disingenuous. Why don’t they integrate those stories into all of them at the time?”

In a statement provided after the story was first published, the BBC said: “This is totally inaccurate, there is no ‘sixth episode’. Wild Isles is – and always was – a five part series and does not shy away from environmental content. We have acquired a separate film for iPlayer from the RSPB and WWF and Silverback Films about people working to preserve and restore the biodiversity of the British Isles.”

Alastair Fothergill, the director of Silverback Films and the executive producer of Wild Isles, added: “The BBC commissioned a five-part Wild Isles series from us at Silverback Films back in 2017. The RSPB and WWF joined us as co-production partners in 2018.

It was not until the end of 2021 that the two charities commissioned Silverback Films to make a film for them that celebrates the extraordinary work of people fighting to restore nature in Britain and Ireland. The BBC acquired this film for iPlayer at the start of this year.”

Laura Howard, who produced the programme and used to work at the BBC’s Natural History Unit, said she did not believe its messages to be political.

She told the Guardian: “I think the facts speak for themselves. You know, we’ve worked really closely with the RSPB in particular who are able to factcheck all of our scripts and provide us with detailed scientific data and information about the loss of wildlife in this country. And it is undeniable, we are incredibly nature-depleted. And I don’t think that that is political, I think it’s just facts.”

The producer said the film would touch on how farming practices had harmed wildlife, but would also profile farmers who had done the right thing.

“Those farmers are there to make the point that every farm in the country ought to be able to do a little bit at least of what they do, and that it is possible to farm alongside nature, to make a profit, to produce healthy food and to still run a business,” Howard said.

She added that she hoped a young audience would be able to find the film, as they are used to streaming on iPlayer rather than watching a broadcast.

Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP for Brighton Pavilion, said: “For the BBC to censor of one of the nation’s most informed and trusted voices on the nature and climate emergencies is nothing short of an unforgivable dereliction of its duty to public service broadcasting. This government has taken a wrecking ball to our environment – putting over 1,700 pieces of environmental legislation at risk, setting an air pollution target which is a decade too late, and neglecting the scandal of our sewage-filled waterways – which cannot go unexamined and unchallenged by the public.

“BBC bosses must not be cowed by antagonistic, culture war-stoking government ministers, putting populist and petty political games above delivering serious action to protect and restore our natural world. This episode simply must be televised.”

Chris Packham, who presents Springwatch on the BBC, also criticised the decision. He told the Guardian: “At this time, in our fight to save the world’s biodiversity, it is irresponsible not to put that at the forefront of wildlife broadcasting.”

Stephen Moss, a natural historian and TV producer who has worked for the BBC on nature programmes, said focusing on a conservation angle could win political support for the cause. He said: “Often, if you lead on environmental issues, people genuinely turn off. But if you drip feed it within the programmes and then hit people with a message at the end when you convince them how brilliant wildlife is, it tends to work.

“With Blue Planet, you got Theresa May standing up and Philip Hammond, the chancellor at the time, saying: ‘this is the BBC as its very best’, doing what Conservatives never do, basically praising the BBC and saying: this is fantastic. So maybe that will happen with this. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Tory politicians jump on the bandwagon and go on and on about how brilliant it is.”

The charities involved in the programme are already using it to launch a campaign – unaffiliated with the BBC – called Save Our Wild Isles. They have gained the support of the National Trust, the Guardian understands.

EU commits to pushing for global fossil fuel phaseout ahead of Cop28 summit


Stuti Mishra
Fri, 10 March 2023

The European Union (EU) has agreed to support a worldwide push for phasing out fossil fuels in a bid to tackle the growing threat of climate crisis ahead of the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai later this year.

Ministers from the 27 EU member states approved a text on their diplomatic priorities ahead of the conference, where almost 200 countries will be present to strengthen their efforts towards limiting global warming.

“The shift towards a climate-neutral economy will require the global phase-out of unabated fossil fuels,” the EU text said, citing the scientific consensus that this is necessary to avoid a more severe climate crisis, Reuters news agency reported.

“The EU will systematically promote and call for a global move towards energy systems free of unabated fossil fuels well ahead of 2050,” it said, adding that global fossil fuel consumption should peak in the near term.

The shift towards a climate-neutral economy, the EU text said, would require a worldwide phase-out of unabated fossil fuels.

This decision comes after countries failed to agree on a push to phase out fossil fuels at last year’s climate summit in Egypt.

More than 80 countries, including the EU, supported an Indian proposal to do this at last year’s summit, provided the earlier agreed-upon pace of coal phase-down is not slowed. But Saudi Arabia and other oil and gas-rich nations opposed it.

Many other nations also backed the proposal, including 39 countries of the Alliance of Small Island States, seriously threatened by the rise in temperatures and sea levels.

There’s hope that this year’s Cop28 summit, starting on 30 November in UAE, could clinch a global deal on phasing out all Co2-emitting fossil fuels - not only coal, as agreed at previous UN climate talks, but also oil and gas.

Europe is currently transforming its energy system to meet climate targets and end decades of reliance on Russian fossil fuels. The EU text said countries should combine the two aims and use renewable energy or energy savings - rather than fossil fuels - to replace Russian energy.

“There is no need for a one-to-one replacement of former Russian natural gas import volumes,” it said.

EU countries approved their climate text two weeks later than planned, owing to a spat among countries over whether it should promote nuclear energy.

The final version scrubbed some wording that countries had disagreed on but said that alongside renewable energy, EU diplomacy will promote sustainable “low-carbon technologies” - a phrase that often refers to nuclear energy.

As climate crisis continues to be a pressing issue, it is hoped that the commitment made by the EU to promote a global fossil fuel phaseout will set the ball rolling for the global deal this year to include in the text.

While coal is considered the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, it is also the cheapest and most abundantly available energy source for developing countries like India which still has a long way ahead to provide cheaper electricity to their population. While India has made strides in renewable growth and aims to increase its share by half by 2030, it often comes under fire for its coal usage.

The move to get all fossil fuels mentioned in the global climate deal was considered a diplomatic offensive by India at the UN climate summit in Egypt and aimed to put the spotlight on oil and gas-producing nations, mostly developed countries like the US and the EU, instead of singling out coal.

The EU’s move towards a global phase-out of fossil fuels is seen as significant as the bloc’s carbon emissions makeup approximately 18 per cent of global historic greenhouse gas emissions.

The European Commission plans to increase the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction target to 55 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030, which will require significant changes in the way people heat their homes, travel, and produce food.

BP boss earns 170 times his average worker as his pay doubles to £10m

August Graham, PA Business Reporter
Fri, 10 March 2023 



The boss of BP earned more than 170 times more than his average employee last year as his pay doubled to around £10 million after the company benefited from the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

New figures from the oil giant showed that Bernard Looney’s total pay packet increased from around £4.5 million in 2021.

The company’s profit doubled between 2021 and 2022, but the increase was largely thanks to a long-term incentive that was paid to Mr Looney.

This means that Mr Looney’s remuneration was around 172 times higher than the average employee at the oil and gas giant.

Compared to the 25th percentile – that is to say an employee whose pay was less then three in four of their colleagues’ – Mr Looney’s pay was 421 times higher.

Those in the 25th percentile also saw their pay increase, going from £21,450 in 2021 to £23,810 a year later.

The average salary for workers across all employers in the UK is around £33,000.

BP fared well last year thanks in no small part to the day that Vladimir Putin decided to send tanks across the border in an attempt to annex the entirety of Ukraine.

As cruise missiles started falling on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities the price of oil and gas ticked upwards last year, peaking in August and June respectively.

The cost of gas in particular spiked for European customers. Oil is largely transported by ship around the world so it was easier for other countries to supply oil to Europe.

But there are many fewer gas ships in the world, so as supply from Russian pipelines dried up the price of gas peaked at somewhere around 15 times its historical average.

BP and its rivals around the world helped avoid a massive energy crunch in Europe by supplying oil and gas to the continent.

But it came at a price as the energy they sold was much more valuable to their customers.

By January this year the average household energy bill was nearly £4,300 per year – four times where it had been before the crisis.

The Government has racked up a massive bill to help households so they did not have to shoulder the full amount themselves.

But BP had its best ever year as a result. Profit doubled to around 28 billion dollars (£23.4 billion).

Jonathan Noronha-Gant, senior fossil fuels campaigner at Global Witness, said: “People everywhere struggling to feed their families or warm their homes in the harsh winter months, have every right to be angry that the CEO of a huge energy firm is netting millions of pounds in pay. This enormous pay package is a kick in the teeth to all hard-working people being faced with a cost-of-living crisis.

“Nothing could be a starker example of the gross inequality that sits at the very heart of our broken energy system.

“For a rich few to be seeing their already extraordinary wealth bolstered, precisely because bills have been so unaffordable for the majority, is a twisted irony. At the very least the governments should be implementing a proper windfall tax on both profits and CEO pay.”

Greek tragedies like Medea are an ethical nightmare. That’s why we need them

Charlotte Higgins
Sat, 11 March 2023 


Last week, I found myself – at the end of a gloomy day – shot through with a burst of fierce, electric energy. It came from watching Sophie Okonedo’s 90 minutes of flat-out fury as she played Medea, opposite Ben Daniels’s Jason, in Dominic Cooke’s production of the Euripides play.

Afterwards, I registered the fact that the woman sitting by me had actually put her hands over her face when Medea decided to murder her own children. I, on the other hand, had not. Why did I mentally urge her on towards the unspeakable deeds, inwardly channelling all the pent-up anti-patriarchal rage at my disposal? Wasn’t there something deeply disturbing about that? Or was the play precisely doing its job in Aristotelian terms: providing a catharsis?

Medea’s murder of her children is the nuclear button when it comes to punishing her faithless husband, who has cast her aside like an old rag: their sons are the symbol and reality of inherited male power. Since Jason has just openly voiced his fantasy that men might give birth to sons without the need for women at all, there’s a magnificent, if gruesome, logic to her crime.

My theatre date quizzed me. She had found Medea a surprisingly sympathetic character … well, for most of the play, and had the script been updated? It had, but not that much: the essentials of Medea’s character were intact, including her immortal words, “It is easier to stand in battle three times in the front line … than to bear one child.”

The audience at the premiere, in Athens in 431BC, mostly male, would have received the story very differently. Athenian women, particularly high-born women, were expected to be silent and remain out of sight and mind of men; in public, they would be veiled. The same year that the play premiered, the Athenian statesman Pericles gave a famous speech in which he said that women’s greatest glory was not to be spoken about. It crossed my mind that my friend had once been a correspondent in Afghanistan.

What on earth do we do with these strange, knotty, difficult texts from the past? Roald Dahl has nothing on Greek tragedy, and yet we seem always to be coming back for more. Okonedo’s Medea was the second brilliant performance I’d seen in a year, after Adura Onashile’s, for the National Theatre of Scotland, last summer. And then there is Phaedra at the National Theatre, starring a magnificent Janet McTeer. The play, by Simon Stone, who also directs, is “after” Euripides’s Hippolytus, Seneca’s Phaedra and Racine’s Phèdre. Those plays tell of how Phaedra, queen of Athens, falls in lust with her stepson, Hippolytus. After he rejects her, she accuses him, falsely, of rape.

I was intensely curious to see how Stone would deal with this storyline. Phaedra’s tale is enormously potent and has parallels in other cultures; for example, the biblical story of Potiphar’s wife. But it’s powerful in a destructive way. It reinforces the patriarchal lie that women, far from being overwhelmingly the victims of sexual violence and abuse, routinely accuse men of rape falsely.

If you disagree that a myth like that can still have a foothold in the modern world, I would politely refer you to the alleged statement by Stephen House, a former Metropolitan police deputy commissioner, that the bulk of rape accusations are, in fact, “regretful sex”. (He denies having used the phrase or believing the statement.) For such reasons, I decided not to include the story of Phaedra in my book Greek Myths: A New Retelling.

As it turned out, Stone also refused the fence. His Phaedra (renamed Helen) does many terrible things, including causing, directly or indirectly, at least two deaths. But in his version of the story, she does not falsely accuse anyone of rape. “What I have her do in my version is no less heinous,” Stone told me. “But it’s not an act that reduces her to a set of cliches that certain parts of society currently use to try to hinder the essential progress towards gender equality.” Is inventing a rape claim worse than causing people’s death? What are we supposed to do with these stories that take you into a world way beyond the boundaries of the taboo?

A couple of weeks ago, I saw another, quite different approach to Greek tragedy, in the Gulbenkian Arts Centre in Canterbury. Several years ago, the playwright David Greig and the director Ramin Grey worked on a hit production, performed in London, Dublin, Manchester, Belfast and Edinburgh, of Aeschylus’s play Suppliants. The story tells of how the 50 daughters of Danaus, forced into marriage with the 50 sons of Aegyptus, flee their homeland in Africa and claim asylum in Argos.

What I saw in Canterbury was the second part of the story, the middle play of what originally would have been a trilogy of tragedies. The twist is that only that first, Suppliants, actually survives. Of the second, Egyptians, only a single word remains, and, of the third, little beyond a few lines hymning Aphrodite. So the play I saw was a complete (bar one word) reconstruction. Greig’s idea, a crazy and quixotic one, was to imagine himself into Aeschylus’s shoes and to build the play without modernising, recuperating, softening or reclaiming it. Impossible, of course, but a fascinating quest.

Related: Yes, Roald Dahl was a bigot. But that’s no excuse to re-write his books | Francine Prose

The result was mesmerising to watch – a thing that both was and wasn’t Greek. It put me in mind of Ossian, whose poems, purporting to be ancient Gaelic epics, were actually faked by the 18th-century Scottish poet James Macpherson – by which I mean it struck me that in years to come, the play will, like Macpherson’s poems, be more revealing of the moment in which it was created than of the culture it aims to reconstruct.

Greig had, I thought, done a good job of being Aeschylean. That is, he had written a play whose likely outcome was the mass rape of 50 women; in which his major female character slits her own throat; and in which the other female character exists solely to uphold the patriarchal values of marriage and family represented by the goddess Hera, whose priestess she is. It’s true that in the next play, which Greig is also planning to write, 49 of the 50 brides murder their rapists/bridegrooms – but Aeschylus was no feminist, and nor, even, was Euripides.

I left with a nagging sense of what a strange – and yet intriguing – thing it was to put a play like this into the world when what the world actually needs is space for the untold stories of women and girls.

And yet we do need difficult, violent intractable texts such as Euripides’s Phaedra with its false rape claim, because the play tracks us back to the origins of a pernicious narrative, but also because Euripides’s play Hippolytus is otherwise ravishingly beautiful (read Anne Carson’s translation in her volume Grief Lessons).

We do need Medea and her horrific child-killing. We need the literature of the past in its spikiness and indigestibility, with its people whom we love and hate, who remind us of ourselves and yet are alien to us. It is one of the few ways we have left of understanding ourselves and other humans in all our destructiveness, and all our deadliness, and all our magnificence.

Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer