WHAT ON
EARTH FRIENDS OF THE EARTH SCOTLAND’S MEMBERS’ MAGAZINE
Issue 79 I Winter 2019/2020
WHAT ON
H T R A E T L A N D’S RT H S C O F T H E E A GA Z IN E O S D N F R IE S’ MA MEMBER 020
19/2 Winter 20 Issue 79 I
Friends of the Earth Scotland is:
Climate protests in Edinburgh. Photos: Maverick Photo Agency, Richard Dixon
> Scotland’s leading environmental campaigning organisation > An independent Scottish charity with a network of thousands of supporters and active local groups across Scotland > Part of the largest grassroots environmental network in the world, uniting over 2 million supporters, 75 national member groups and 5,000 local activist groups
Our vision is of a world where everyone can enjoy a healthy environment and a fair share of the earth’s resources.
C O N T E N TS People Power wins climate action
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Building People Power
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What on Earth is published by and copyright to: Friends of the Earth Scotland 5 Rose Street, Edinburgh EH2 2PR
UN Climate Conference comes to Glasgow
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T: 0131 243 2700 E: info@foe.scot W: www.foe.scot
Opposing false climate solutions
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Climate change and migration
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Friends of the Earth Scotland is an independent Scottish charity SC003442
Editor: Connal Hughes Cover photo by Brittonie Fletcher. Climate Strike, Edinburgh Sep 2019. Used with kind permission of UK Student Climate Network. Design: Emma Quinn The views expressed in What on Earth are not necessarily those of Friends of the Earth Scotland. FoES accepts no liability for errors, omissions or incorrect data in advertisements. If you would prefer to receive a digital version of What on Earth please contact us: info@foe.scot Printed on 100% FSC Silk
Get social with us: /foescotland /foescot
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Director’s view Dr Richard Dixon, Director @Richard_Dixon It has been an incredible year on climate change. There was the seminal 1.5ºC report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the UN’s official grouping of the world’s climate scientists. The report painted a stark picture about how awful the world would be at 2ºC warmer than pre-industrial times and how little time there is left to head off that future. 7.5 million people round the world took part in the Global Climate Strikes, with over 40,000 in Scotland. I was on the 25,000 strong march in Edinburgh, which built on an earlier march and a rally. It felt great to be part of something so strong, so global and so energetic. The strikes added to the pressure which produced a last minute boost for Scotland’s climate targets during the Scottish Parliament debate on the new climate bill. It was a rollercoaster week as the Tories looked like they would push the Scottish Government further than a 70% target for emissions reductions by 2030, then didn’t, then finally did, backing Labour’s proposal for a 75% target. This wasn’t as good as the Greens’ proposal or the 86% we were calling for but it was considerably further than the Government wanted to go. To paraphrase one of the climate strikers, it makes Scotland the fastest snail in the climate race. And then the Scottish Government announced its final(ish) decision not to allow fracking in Scotland. This was swiftly followed by the UK Government with their own moratorium on fracking. Whilst caution is still needed, this is a huge victory for the thousands of community campaigners who successfully fought off this dangerous new fossil fuel over the last 7 years. There was also the announcement that the annual UN climate talks will come to Scotland, with 30,000 official delegates, 200 world leaders and perhaps 300,000 demonstrators converging on Glasgow in November 2020. Inside this issue you can read about what those talks could involve and how we can ramp up action in the coming year.
It felt great to be part of something so strong, so global and so energetic.
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Annual Prize Draw Star prize: Two-night stay for two in Bamff Luxury Yurts, Perthshire Win a stay for two people in a luxury yurt, with your own deck, barbecue and picnic table, as well as a shared firepit. Located close to the Scottish Woodland Skills Centre, the Cateran Trail and organised beaver watching activities, this is a perfect getaway for nature lovers. Our Annual Prize Draw is a great way to raise money to support our vital work. You can purchase tickets yourself, or sell them to friends, family or workmates. Other prizes include: A Patagonia Duffle Bag. Worth £100, this burly 25L daypack has just the right amount of space to haul your daily essentials. Made with durable 100% recycled polyester. Tickets for the Highland Wildlife Park. An epic day out awaits you in the Cairngorms National Park area, where you’ll see polar bears, snow leopards and Scottish Wildcats, and lots more! Set of 5 yoga classes at Meadowlark. Do you know your downward facing dog from your reverse triangle? Come and practice your poses at Meadowlark, based in Edinburgh. A bottle of Wildcat Gin. Distilled especially for mixing, cat’s claw botanical adds a whisper of spiced citrus to a classic dry juniper taste. A £30 Henderson’s voucher. For use in the Edinburgh-based shop, deli, and restaurants, offering a range of vegan and vegetarian culinary delights.
You’ll find a booklet of tickets enclosed in your copy of What on Earth. To enter, send tickets and payment to: FREEPOST RRLR-KAGH-LYBS, Friends of the Earth Scotland, 5 Rose Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2PR For more tickets, please contact Kerrigan info@foe.scot Tel: 0131 243 2700. Or buy tickets online at https://donate.foe.scot/raffle2019 Entries must be received before 14 January 2020 ahead of the draw date.
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March at Marrakech Climate Conference, 2016. Richard Dixon
What do we mean when we talk about climate justice?
We must help developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change while also improving standards of living by providing finance and sharing green energy solutions
Around the world, the effects of climate change are felt most acutely by people who are least responsible for causing the problem. Communities in the Global South – as well as low-income communities in the industrialised North – are bearing the burden of rich countries’ and elites overconsumption of our planet’s resources.
But doing our fair share also means recognising and paying our carbon debt to the Global South.
Poorer nations also have least access to the finance, resources and technology required to adapt to the consequences of climate change whilst reducing their own emissions.
Climate justice also demands that the response to the climate crisis within richer nations is transformative, and tackles inequality in our societies. An important part of this in fossil fuel rich countries like Scotland is a Just Transition, which ensures workers and communities are not left behind as we move from fossil fuel to clean industries.
Climate justice means addressing the climate crisis in an equitable way that protects and realises human rights – doing our fair share. Scotland and other countries which have become wealthy – by exploiting fossil fuels – must live up to their historical, moral and legal responsibilities by rapidly reducing emissions over the next crucial decade.
We must help developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change while also improving access to energy and standards of living by providing finance and sharing green energy solutions.
er w o P e l p o e r P e t a e r g s n n i o i w t c a e t a m i l c
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By Caroline Rance, Climate Campaigner
In September, the Scottish Parliament passed a new Climate Change law. It sets legally binding targets for Scotland to cut climate pollution 75% by 2030, and reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. Here’s a roundup of what’s in the new Climate Change Act, how people power helped make it stronger, and a look ahead at what needs to happen next. This law was first proposed in 2016, when the SNP pledged to deliver “a new Climate Change Bill to implement the Paris Agreement”. However, their initial proposals were abysmal – to cut Scotland’s climate emissions by only 90% by 2050, and put off any work to reduce emissions for another decade at least. Together with other organisations in the Stop Climate Chaos Scotland (SCCS) coalition, we launched a campaign to improve the Climate Change Bill and get the Scottish Government to cut climate pollution further and faster.
People Power Over the past three years, thousands of you responded to the government’s public consultation, wrote to the First Minister or contacted your own MSPs, demanding they step up action on the climate crisis. Hundreds more got out to meet their local MSPs, while local groups across Scotland ran all sorts of events including ‘Cake not Climate Change’ evenings, Climate Cafes, film screenings, street stalls, discussion events, protests and more. The last 12 months have been particularly significant. In October 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report stated that we need to see transformational action in the next decade or face catastrophic consequences. Since then the public mood on climate change has been transformed. New grassroots climate groups have shot up, with the youth climate strikers and Extinction Rebellion helping to push climate action right up the political agenda.
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Campaigners gathered outside Parliament ahead of the final vote. Photo: Maverick Photo Agency
Just 5 days before the final vote on the Climate Change Bill, Scottish Youth Climate Strikers organised Scotland’s biggest ever climate protest. Over 25,000 people were on the streets in Edinburgh alone, marching past the Scottish Parliament and demanding urgent action on the climate emergency. It was undoubtedly this tremendous show of public support that, at the final hour, pushed both the SNP and the Conservatives to vote for stronger targets proposed by Labour and seconded by Lib Dems.
New targets The Act sets a legally binding target for Scotland to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. We called for this goal to be reached sooner but as the next decade is the most critical, we were more concerned by the 2030 target. We knew that focusing on a long-term target would allow the Government to delay action even further, and push more difficult decisions onto future generations. So, while some were happy to celebrate the Government’s net-zero announcement back in May, we knew there was still serious work to be done.
This tremendous show of public support pushed both the SNP and the Conservatives to vote for stronger targets. With your support, we kept up the pressure on politicians to do more in the crucial next 12 years, as the IPCC had warned. After initially proposing to cut emissions 66% by 2030 (compared with 1990 levels), the Government then moved to propose 70% and finally, just a few hours before the final vote, were forced by public pressure to move to supporting 75%. This isn’t as strong as we were calling for, and while Parliament voted against an 80% target tabled by the Greens, it is significant progress. It means Government immediately have to get to work cutting emissions across transport, home heating and intensive agriculture.
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What else is in the new law?
Just Transition
As well as the targets, there are other important measures we succeeded in getting into the new law.
The Act sets out new Just Transition principles, and requires the government to consider employment and set out support for the workforce, communities and employers in their climate plans. This is a really important step in ensuring that as we take steps to cut our emissions we do so in a way that protects workers and communities currently dependent on high carbon industries. However, it’s really disappointing that the Scottish Government blocked moves to put the Just Transition Commission on a statutory basis in the new law.
The Act requires the Government to get expert advice on the true impact of emissions from aviation, and to count them fully. As emissions from airplanes are released higher in the atmosphere they contribute more to global heating than the same amount of emissions released at ground level, but this has never previously been taken into account. The new Act will also improve how we account for, and begin to reduce, the climate impact from goods and services which we import from overseas (our consumption emissions). While emissions from activities in Scotland have been falling, emissions from imports have been increasing, so it's vitally important we begin to tackle this problem.
The law also establishes a new Climate Citizen’s Assembly, which was a key demand of Extinction Rebellion. This Assembly will allow a demographically representative group of people to debate the big changes needed to deliver progress on climate in the coming years.
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Ahead of the vote, campaigners read sections of the IPCC report emphasising the demand for urgency from climate science. Photo: Esme Allen
What happens next? Passing this new Climate Change Act is a milestone, but the work certainly doesn’t stop here. The Scottish Government now has to publish a ‘Climate Change Plan’ – setting out exactly what they’re going to do to cut emissions in the next decade to reach that new 2030 target. They must start cutting emissions from transport – Scotland's biggest polluting sector, which has seen emissions rising in recent years. We need to see affordable, connected public transport powered by renewables, and better walking and cycling routes, to move people away from their polluting cars. We need to see a detailed plan for supporting households to switch from fossil fuel oil and gas heating to affordable renewable alternatives. We must speed up efficiency
improvements and ensure that cold, damp or draughty homes are a thing of the past. While all new homes should be built to the highest energy savings standards, with renewable energy built in. Industrial and intensive forms of agriculture produce a lot of greenhouse gases too, and farmers must be supported to move to climate friendly farming methods. And of course, we need a managed phase-out of North Sea oil and gas. The pressure that we’ve collectively been able to bring in these past three years shows how much appetite and energy for action there is from people in Scotland. These are no small tasks but we know what needs to be done, the public demand for change will continue to grow, and our politicians will have to really act on the Climate Emergency.
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Building people power to tackle the climate crisis By Kate Whitaker, Activism Organiser Fossil fuel corporations, alongside many of their pals, love to tell us that the way we can contribute to solving the climate crisis is to focus on our individual actions: take shorter showers, buy a reusable cup and switch o the lights. This strategy, which positions individual consumption choices as the only arena of change, will not deliver emissions reductions at the scale we need, and, but serves to isolate and shame people, preventing them from taking collective action against those who are driving the emergency. But the more you learn about the climate crisis, the bigger and scarier it gets and the more obvious that consumer choices alone are not going to solve the problem. Climate change is just the latest and most severe consequence of a capitalist, colonial system that has exploited people and nature for centuries. We know that without taking on that system as a whole, and overcoming its toxic legacy across the world, the climate crisis will only intensify.
Campaigning and activism that targets the root causes of the crisis, is a way to respond which both feels proportionate and provides people with a support network Over the past year we have seen the visibility, scale and actors of the climate movement in Scotland and across much of the world change dramatically. Since the publication of the IPCC Report we have seen an outburst of climate activism, including the rise of the school strikes, Extinction Rebellion, worker-led calls for transition, direct action against the fossil fuel industry and more. Since then, the space which climate justice activism has taken up in the media, public conversation and physically in public spaces has completely transformed.
When confronted with the existential threat of the climate crisis, and told that the way for tackling this is turning o the lights, people are largely faced with the choice of not believing it could actually be that bad or complete helplessness. However, campaigning and activism that targets the root causes of the problem, is a way to respond which both feels proportionate and provides people with a support network for dealing with the fear of the crisis we are living through.
Climate strike protest took place around the world. In Vienna, they criticised greenwashing of the crisis. Photo: Global 2000
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Climate Strike in Edinburgh Photo: Richard Dixon
Fossil fuel sponsorship has also been a major target, with activists pushing to get these corporations out of sports, arts and science institutions. The Global Climate Strike from 20th–27th September 2019 was the biggest climate mobilisation in history. Children and young people led 6,135 actions, with over 7.6 million people in 185 countries across the world. This was massively significant, not just because of its size, but because of the range of people and organisations the strikers have motivated to take action, including thousands of trade unions, and their insistence on the need for wide-scale, systemic change. Children and young people shouldn’t have to be organising global days of action, or taking endless days off school to fight for a habitable planet. But resistance is strongest when it is led by those who have the most to lose. Children fighting for their future has a moral authority that is hard to ignore. However, it is telling that the calls for systemic change that have been coming from
In Paris, President Macron came under attack for his record on climate Photo: Les Amis de la Terre / FoE France.
communities in the Global South, facing the harshest realities of the climate crisis right now, are still being ignored by the media and much of the climate movement in the Global North. Extinction Rebellion’s media-catching and dramatic mass civil disobedience has undoubtedly changed the narrative around the climate crisis in Scotland and the rest of the UK and brought many thousands of people into the climate movement. Other groups have been targeting the pillars that uphold the power of fossil fuel corporations in our society. Campaigners have succeeded in getting over 11,000 organisations worldwide to divest $11 trillion from fossil fuel companies. In Scotland, over half of Scottish Universities have divested and there are active campaigns pushing faith institutions, local councils and MSPs to take their pension funds out of the corporations fueling the climate crisis.
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find a way to get involved and show your support for these groups or campaigns where you are
Protests even took place in Moscow. Photo: RSEU/FoE Russia
Fossil fuel sponsorship has also been a major target, with activists pushing to get these corporations out of sports, arts and science institutions. The Edinburgh Science Festival and the Royal Shakespeare Company are two of the latest organisations to drop fossil fuel sponsorship. Other activists have taken to disrupting the events that enable the industry to function, such as blocking and delaying AGMs, dinners, drinks receptions and seminars. University students are organising to kick big polluters off campus by disrupting careers fairs. Increasingly, collectives of workers are also calling on their employers to take action on the climate crisis. In the recent Global Climate Strike, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft workers, among many others, walked out to demand climate leadership from their workplaces. Workers at Immediate Media, who produce major BBC magazines like Top Gear, have been striking every week to demand the publisher refuses fossil fuel advertising.
Social movements function like an ecology, with many groups, organisations and individuals acting in their own way, based on their own politics and theory of change, yet they all inevitably influence the rest. The climate movement is both full of action and also of debate, criticism and disagreement about the best way to create change. The snowballing of action that we have seen over the past year has created a lot of attention, momentum and power. We need to work on sustaining and focusing this on the real causes of the crisis, and pushing for just and fair solutions. With the UN climate negotiations coming to Glasgow in 2020 there will be even more opportunities to get active. If you can, I would urge to find a way to get involved and show your support for these groups or campaigns where you are.
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Why I strike from school Caitlin outside the Scottish Parliament.
My name is Caitlin Conway, I am 14 years old and I am a member of Scottish Youth Climate Strikes and I strike from school for the climate. The main reason I strike from school is because I believe climate change is one of the biggest issues that humanity will ever face. We have waited for too long for governments to act and in recent years it has become clear that they are not acting with the urgency required and taking the necessary steps. I was inspired massively when I heard about Greta Thunberg and the school strikes. Climate change had always been an issue I felt needed to be solved but I had never really looked into it and realised what a massive crisis it was. After learning more and more about it, I felt that if I didn't demand action from the governments then I had hardly any chance at having a future. I also want the future generations to grow up in the world I grew up in. They should have the same chance as I and many others did.
As a movement across Scotland we have a few main aims: > The Government commit to achieve net zero climate emissions by 2030, > The national curriculum be reformed to address the climate crisis as an educational priority, > The Government communicate the severity of the climate crisis and the necessity to act now to the general public, > and for the Government implement a Scottish Green New Deal. We believe these targets need to be reached in order for a just transition for all and in order to combat climate change. Find out more at www.climatestrike.scot
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COP comes to Glasgow
Protests outside COP in Katowice Poland. Photo: Richard Dixon
By Dr. Richard Dixon, Director COP 26 is coming to Glasgow next year. This is both an exciting and a faintly terrifying prospect. COP26 is the 26th of the snappily-titled annual Conferences of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. They are the international negotiations about how we tackle climate change and are attended by representatives of almost every nation on earth. COP26 will see around 30,000 delegates spending two weeks in and around the SEC in Glasgow, and perhaps several hundred thousand people will march, rally, protest and take part in alternative events in the city. Around 200 prime ministers and presidents will also attend for part of the talks. Civil society organisations are official participants in the UN climate change talks, so around 40 Friends of the Earth international delegates from groups right around the world
will be inside the official talks. I have been to nine of these COPs, including the worst failures in 2000 and 2009 and the most successful in 2001 and 2015. Being on the inside is exciting, inspiring, infuriating and often baffling. In 2015 the Paris Agreement was negotiated, committing countries (in a totally-voluntary, not-really-committing-at-all sort of way) to keep the global temperature rise well below 2°C and ‘make efforts’ towards keeping it below 1.5°C. Despite many weaknesses the Paris Agreement has been a surprisingly effective spur to both governments and business. In Glasgow there will be plenty of scrutiny on how the world’s nations are doing on the goals in that Paris Agreement. Some of it will be pretty embarrassing since we are currently over 1ºC and heading for a catastrophic 3–4°C of temperature rises.
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It is a privilege to have a COP come to your country. Come and take part in COP26, it will be amazing. Protest inside the Paris COP. Photo: Wale Obayanju ERA/FoE Nigeria
There will also be the crucial and regular arguments about who should act first, how much money was promised but then never delivered to help countries adapt to climate change and even that long-running favourite, whether the big oil producing countries should be paid to stop destroying the planet. At or near the SEC there will undoubtedly be an official area where the public can come and learn about climate change and climate solutions, from seeing electric cars to hearing talks about the latest climate science. There will also be an unofficial space where protestors, demonstrators and interested people can gather, paint the banners, strategise, meet people from around the world and hear from speakers covering topics ranging from how climate change is affecting Africa right now to why just making all vehicles electric isn’t enough.
And of course there will be a huge civil society action on one of the weekends, demanding that world leaders act. Thousands of activists from Friends of the Earth groups across Europe and beyond will be there. The amazing school strikers will be making their presence felt and Extinction Rebellion will no doubt be out in force. At Friends of the Earth we will also be working with other environment, development and protest groups to make sure that the voice of civil society and their demand for climate justice now is heard loud and clear inside and outside the SEC, including pressing the Scottish and UK Governments for more action to reduce emissions. It is a privilege to have a COP come to your country. Come and take part in COP26, it will be amazing.
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We must not back false climate solutions By Caroline Rance, Climate Campaigner
Red Moss at Balerno reserve. Photo: Scottish Government / Flickr
To effectively tackle the roots of the climate crisis while achieving social justice and restoring nature, we need to fight for the right – not just any – climate solutions. Otherwise we risk allowing our politicians to put plans in place that will do more harm to people and wildlife, while failing to adequately cut climate pollution in the long term. Such false solutions include negative emissions technologies like Carbon Capture and Storage, biofuels, offsetting schemes and others that prolong our use of fossil fuels.
Caught in the net Scotland’s new Climate Change Act sets a target date for Scotland to reach net-zero emissions by 2045. Net-zero simply means that any greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere must be balanced by absorbing an equivalent amount back out of the atmosphere.
However, net-zero emissions is not the same as zero emissions, and leaves the door open to the false promise that we can continue to produce carbon emissions for as long as we like, so long as we offset them with tree planting, peatland restoration or technologies like Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
Negative emissions technologies Negative emissions refers to the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Because action to reduce emissions has been delayed for so long, the amount of carbon that can be released without going above 1.5°C or 2°C of warming (our carbon budget) is getting drastically smaller. So much that it's now unlikely to be possible to keep within 2°C warming without also removing carbon from the atmosphere.
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The capacity of these natural carbon stores is limited – they cannot soak up infinite amounts of carbon dioxide.
In order to increase the amount of carbon which can be stored, natural climate solutions including tree planting, peatland restoration are all important. However, the capacity of these natural carbon stores is limited – they cannot soak up infinite amounts of carbon. These things should be done at the same time as radically cutting climate pollution across society, not instead. As well as these natural ways of achieving negative emissions, there is increasing political clamour for negative emissions technologies that are intended to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) The idea behind CCS is that it will be possible to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it underground, forever. However since 2007, the EU has spent €587 million in subsidies on developing Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plants. To date, none of this investment has led to a full scale CCS plant. As well as being hugely expensive, it would use huge amounts of energy to run the technology, not to mention the risks for local communities, wildlife and the climate if all that carbon leaked out of the storage facilities.
Climate Justice allies protest about threats to food, land and water at COP24 in Katowice. Photo: Richard Dixon/FoEI
It's much talked about by wealthy western governments and big energy corporations, as it allows them to continue operating as normal in the hope that this silver bullet technology will come and save them, instead of making the shift away from fossil fuels today.
Bioenergy with carbon, capture and storage (BECCS) BECCS runs on biofuels, requiring vast amounts of land to be planted with single tree crops that will then be harvested and burned for energy. Carbon is captured in the biomass by way of the photosynthesis during growth. Plants are then burnt for energy and a part of the carbon is captured again after combustion in the power plant and sequestered in underground geological formations. The net result of this cycle is supposed to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. It is fraught with problems – from the vast area of land needed for planting to the ecological problems with creating vast monoculture plantations. There are also serious concerns about land grabbing and pitting major corporations against communities over use of the land.
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Carbon offsetting An increasingly attractive option for governments, big companies and individuals alike, offsetting allows polluters to continue business as usual, then pay someone else to reduce emissions for them – usually in a different country. Sounds too good to be true? It is. Offsetting schemes have been beset with scandals, and it is incredibly difficult to prove that they even work. But by paying for projects to happen in other countries, often in developing nations, offsetting schemes are often accused of neocolonialism. By allowing industrialised countries and big polluters to exhaust the little remaining atmospheric space available, denying developing countries the right to use this to develop and bring their populations out of poverty.
Hydrogen power The Scottish Government is considering backing hydrogen to meet our energy needs. This is not the right path for a number of reasons. Going for hydrogen in a big way would require massive investment in new infrastructure, require carbon capture and storage to become economically viable and always carries with it the risk that hydrogen is more likely to explode than natural gas. Plus the government’s advisors say hydrogen could not be in wide-scale use until some time in the 2030s. There are some cases where it might be very sensible to use hydrogen as a fuel, as long as you make it by using renewable electricity to split water. For example, islands with lots of wind turbines might use spare electricity to make hydrogen to power the island’s ferry.
Photo: Maverick Photo Agency
If you have surplus renewable electricity during the summer it might make sense to make hydrogen which can be turned back into electricity in the winter, when energy demand is higher. But the ‘cheap’ way to make hydrogen is from gas, which explains the fossil fuel industry's enthusiasm about the technology. Almost all of these proposed technologies are used as an excuse to delay urgent action today, in the hope that the next generation will figure out how to make this technology work and clean up our mess. But it is the cumulative emissions in the atmosphere that lead to warming, and it is possible that dangerous tipping points will be reached and exceeded before negative emissions technologies such as CCS or BECCS could even start working at scale. Clearly it is better for the climate if we reduce our emissions to actual zero, or as close as possible, as soon as possible. Thankfully, we know the real solutions already. We need to end fossil fuels, reduce energy use and invest in renewable alternatives.
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Going to court for the climate By Connal Hughes, Communications Officer The fight to slow the climate emergency is taking place on many fronts. People are talking to politicians to change policy whilst others want to get their hands dirty and take practical steps like planting trees or growing food. But an increasing number of people are taking action through the legal system. The surge in climate court cases reflects the increasing concern about the climate crisis but also the fact that in many countries taking action on climate is now a legal obligation for Governments. The Paris Climate Agreement has been ratified by over 180 nations, leading to another layer of legal duty for Governments. ‘Climate Case Ireland’ was one such attempt to force the Irish Government to increase their action to bring down emissions. Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) is a group of activists who have used environmental and planning law to try and ensure the Irish environment and citizens are protected.
Highlighting the impact of Shell's operations. Photo: Milieudefensie / FoE Netherlands
Their case argued that the Irish Government’s National Mitigation Plan in 2017 was so weak that it violated Ireland’s Climate Act passed in 2015. They also asserted that, by failing to bring down emissions rapidly enough, the Mitigation Plan failed to uphold the Irish Constitution and human rights obligations. FIE also said that international commitments under the Paris deal meant the Government must do more. In a recent ruling, the Irish Court found in favour of the Government saying that the Mitigation Plan was just one part of the jigsaw of tackling climate change and would be built upon. Therefore the Plan itself could not infringe on the rights mentioned or that it was contrary to the Climate Act. The Court did not want to intervene in what it considered to be a policy-making issue, which normally falls under the responsibility of the Government.
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Friends of the Earth groups and our allies are challenging these fossil fuel companies in the courts, on the streets and in parliaments around the world. The judge did recognise the urgency of climate change, and acknowledged that FIE has “standing,” i.e. the right to bring this case on behalf of the general public. At the time of writing, FIE are considering appealing the decision. This case and action by other groups in the last few years has heaped pressure on the Irish Government to go further on climate. Meanhwile, in Norway, Young Friends of the Earth (Natur og Ungdom) and Greenpeace are taking the Norwegian Government to Court to challenge their approval of oil drilling licences in the Arctic Barents Sea. Due to the urgent need to reduce fossil fuel emissions from oil drilled in Norwegian waters, the organisations argue that the Government's decision violated the principles associated with their constitutional right to a healthy environment. Amazingly, the Norwegian Government argued that it “can not be held accountable for global emissions from Norwegian produced oil and gas abroad.” The case has been dubbed “People vs. Arctic oil” with 522,000 people from all over the world adding their names to the evidence submitted in Court. Every one of the 9000 Young FoE Norway members are part of the lawsuit stating the Government is violating their rights and endangering their future.
YFOE Norway ahead of their first court hearing in 2017 Photo: Natur og Ungdom
The continuation of the Norwegian case is internationally significant because it challenges the very fundamentals of the fossil fuel economy based on established environmental rights. Their case will be heard in the Appeal Court in November 2019. In another challenge to mega-polluters, Milieudefensie / Friends of the Earth Netherlands (FoE NL) is taking Shell to court to stop its climate-wrecking activities. This historic case could set a powerful legal precedent: if they win, one of the world’s biggest polluters will have to radically change its plans. Across the world Shell continues to leave a trail of oil spills, gas flaring, water contamination, and human rights violations. In response, the case has also become global with 30,000 people from 70 countries having joined as honorary co-plaintiffs.
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FoE Netherlands is taking this case against the Dutch-headquartered Shell, highlighting the company’s early knowledge of climate change and its central role in causing it. Despite acknowledging that the fossil fuel industry has a responsibility to act on climate change, and claiming to “strongly support” the Paris Agreement, Shell continues to lobby against climate policy and to invest billions in further oil and gas extraction. This is clearly incompatible with global climate goals.
The court summons, delivered in April 2019 argues that Shell's current climate ambitions do not guarantee any emissions reductions, and would in fact contribute to a huge overshoot of 1.5°C of temperature rises. The plaintiffs argue that Shell is violating its duty of care and threatening human rights by knowingly undermining the world’s chances to stay below 1.5°C.
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FoE NL argues that Shell is violating the European Convention on Human Rights, namely, the right to life and the right to family life. In the historic Urgenda climate case against the Dutch state, the Dutch Appeals Court created a precedent by ruling that a failure of the Dutch state to take sufficient climate action leads to human rights violations. The court ordered the Dutch Government to cut its climate emissions by at least 25% by 2020. The Urgenda was cited as an inspiration by the Climate Case in Ireland. Shell must respond to FoE NL’s complaint by November 2019. Friends of the Earth groups and our allies are challenging these fossil fuel companies in the courts, on the streets and in parliaments around the world. We need binding laws to force big business to keep fossil fuels in the ground and reduce emissions. We’ll use all the tools at our disposal to keep fighting for climate justice.
Whales in the threatened Arctic Barents Sea. Photo: Thor Due
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Why climate change and migration are unavoidably linked By Ruth Wilkinson, Global Justice Now
Across the world, two issues have everyone’s attention – immigration and climate change. It’s easy to think those two things are unconnected, but like so many issues of global inequality, they’re intimately linked. Climate change is a growing cause of migration, with thousands forced to move every month by shrinking coastlines, catastrophic storms, and flooding or wildfires destroying their homes. Of the 50 countries in the world with the highest net emigration, almost half are in areas profoundly affected by intensifying tropical storms and cyclones, and more than three quarters have experienced severe flooding since 2009. Particularly for island nations like those in the Pacific and Caribbean, the effects of rising sea levels are immediate, and people’s homes are literally being consumed. But identifying climate migration as direct displacement by flooding or catastrophic climate events only gives part of the picture. Although millions each year are forced to move by disaster or land loss, many more migrate to escape poverty, oppression, war or disease. What does that have to do with climate change?
Plenty, it turns out. Poverty is directly tied to environmental damage. The cost of repair and relocation following climate disasters can run to tens of billions, and for smaller states where there’s nowhere to relocate to, recovery can cost several times more than their entire national income. Those costs can’t be mitigated or ignored, so impoverished countries often have to borrow billions at extortionate rates to pay for damages – money which then can’t be used for education, welfare or infrastructure. From droughts in Albania to flooding in Bangladesh, already-poor countries around the world are losing hundreds of billions of dollars to climate disasters.
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Climate change is not only contributing to global poverty, it’s also making extreme poverty far less survivable. As global temperatures rise and clean water becomes more and more inaccessible, the spread of disease is also worsened, exacerbated by flooding and famine. And with the creep of desertification and rising sea levels constantly shrinking the amount of usable land, natural resources become scarcer, forcing more and more reliance on exploitative foreign industry. But climate change is not only contributing to global poverty, it’s also making extreme poverty far less survivable. For millennia, people have relied on subsistence farming to survive economic deprivation. But as salination and erosion kill crops in the Pacific and Caribbean and desertification and drought undermine farming in Africa and the Middle East, it becomes impossible for the world’s poorest to feed their families. Rural living, precarious at the best of times, has become untenable for many.
Protests highlighting threat of displacement from climate change at Marrakech COP. Photo: Lise Masson /FOEI
Those who flee to the cities are often faced with unemployment, lack of housing, and shortage of resources. And predatory corporations are quick to profit from scarcity, with speculation and aggressive price hikes raising the price of daily necessities even further out of reach.
This combination of poverty, overcrowding and competition over scarce resources creates a powder keg, ramping up pre-existing tensions. In Syria, prolonged drought was a major contributing factor to the explosion of civil war; in Ethiopia, urban expansion caused by rural famine contributed to the Oromo genocide; in Palestine, limited water supplies are leveraged by Israeli authorities to exert control in the West Bank. The increasing threat posed by climate change throws into stark relief the disparity between those with power and those without it. In the Global North, it’s easy to see climate catastrophe as a future threat. But for millions of people worldwide, the crisis arrived years ago, and they must leave home to survive it. The nations most affected by climate change, from the Horn of Africa to the Pacific Islands, aren’t the ones who caused this crisis, but they are paying the price. Meanwhile, the multinational corporations who are the main contributors to climate change are not only able to escape its effects with impunity, but to gain power and profit from the misery of those affected. We have to understand climate change as a problem not just of land and resources but of conflict, power and exploitation. We cannot claim to care about the victims of environmental destruction if we aren’t willing to make space for them to live safely. Equally, we can’t claim to care about the plight of migrants until we’re willing to address the systems of environmental and financial exploitation which take away people’s freedom to remain in their homes. We in the Global North can’t afford to sit and hope that someone else will fix it while we turn our backs on those escaping the effects of our excess. It can seem overwhelming, but we still have time to prevent this global crisis from getting worse if we enact radical change today.
Learn more at www.globaljustice.org.uk/migration
Your legacy, Scotland’s future We take so much from the planet during our lives, it seemed like the right thing to do to give something back for future generations
Thanks to the support of thousands of people like you, for the last 40 years we’ve helped protect and defend Scotland’s environment. We need to keep campaigning on issues such as air pollution, climate change, and plastics and continue to be Scotland’s leading voice for the planet. After providing for your loved ones in your will, please consider leaving us a share of what is left and help turn the vision of a healthy, fair, fossil-free Scotland into a reality. Leaving a gift in your will is easy, simply visit www.foe.scot/legacy or contact Kerrigan on 0131 243 2717 kbell@foe.scot for more information.
