The post The Carbon Profiteers: meet the investors running – and destroying – our world appeared first on Corporate Watch.

‘The Carbon Cash Machine’ examines the cash earnings to shareholders over seven years, profiles the beneficiaries, and considers the implications for divestment campaigns.

We found:

• Annual cash earnings made by shareholders in the UK’s two largest oil companies (BP and Shell) are around triple the amount they were when the Paris Agreement was signed in December 2015. Their total earnings since the Agreement amount to £131bn.
• £131bn could fund solar panel installation for approximately 13 million houses. Less than a fifth of the figure could cover the costs of the 40 new hospitals the government has pledged. One tenth could meet the shortfall in UK social care provision.
• The eight largest shareholders in both BP and Shell have made a total of £28.7bn since the Paris Agreement. Those shareholders are: abrdn PLC; BlackRock Inc.; Norges Bank Investment Management; Legal & General Investment Management Ltd.; SAFE Investment Co. Ltd.; State Street Global Advisors Inc; UBS Asset Management AG; and Vanguard Group Inc.
• The top three shareholders of both increased the proportion of their collective holding of BP from 11.48% in 2016 to 17.71% in 2022. The same major shareholders increased the proportion of their collective holding of Shell from 13.08% in 2016 to 15.89% in 2022.

Introduction: “spewing out cash”

In the second half of 2022, as energy prices continued to soar and the cost-of- living crisis deepened, the business media began reporting new highs in oil company dividend payments with remarkable hyperbole. In August, Bloomberg headlined with “Big Oil is Paying Out Years of Dividends in One Day.” In November, Barron’s noted “Oil Companies Lift Their Dividends as Cash Rolls In”. A few months later, Reuters reported “Bumper profits fuel surge in dividends, buybacks at oil firms”. The bonanza continued as a number of oil firms reported record profits for the last quarter of 2022. And in February 2023, Forbes led with the headline “We’ve Struck Oil: 3 Energy Plays Yielding Up To 11% in Dividends.”

All of the hyperbole is justified. Oil company dividends are rising very rapidly indeed. This is largely because – to quote one trader – the energy industry has become “a broken ATM spewing out cash.”

According to even the conventional logic of the markets, it isn’t supposed to be like this. That logic claims that oil company dividends should be influenced by several factors, including the shifting energy balance towards renewables, increasing regulatory pressure to reduce emissions, and the rise of divestment campaigns. As the climate crisis accelerates, shifts towards a low-carbon economy should have led to a decline in demand for fossil fuels, and investors were supposed to become increasingly concerned about the long-term sustainability of oil companies. Yet oil companies are making record cash payouts to their shareholders.

This report reaches behind the corporate veil to identify the major beneficiaries of the UK’s largest fossil fuel companies, BP and Shell. It analyses their cash earnings from those shares since the Paris Agreement on climate change, and juxtaposes their corporate spin on environmental targets with facts and figures on their fossil fuel investments.

Our aim is to provide a rich analysis of the large institutional shareholders who have retained their investments in oil and gas – in a period that most observers of the Paris Agreement might reasonably have expected to be a time of divestment in fossil fuels.

A second report will go on to ask profound questions for the fossil fuel divestment movement and how it might develop more effective forms of campaigning to ultimately stop the flow of capital into the industry.

Read the full report here.

The post Carbon Cash Machine: charting the payouts to BP and Shell shareholders appeared first on Corporate Watch.

With a permanent deployment of approximately 150 police on the hill reported for the past half year, the atmosphere is intimidating, to say the least. Since August 2022 up until the time of writing, the assembly to defend the hill has reported constant harassment of those trying to use the park, including of kids coming to play basketball or simply hang out. It has counted over forty arrests in that time, as well as other acts of violence and tear gas used against local residents who refuse to back down in the face of state intimidation. Yet the assembly has sustained resistance in myriad forms – from demos, to intergenerational festivities with traditional dancing and choirs.

Strefi Hill is more than just an inner city park. It’s a precious gathering space at the heart of a spirited neighbourhood that successive governments have sought – but failed – to subdue and assimilate. It’s a haven for anarchists, refugees and other outsiders to organise or socialise, but also a valuable community space with an open theatre, basketball courts and a playground.

And it’s a refuge for wildlife too. Wild tortoises live on the hill, and the animal has become its symbol: ancient, free, and vulnerable – but ultimately tough in its weather-beaten shell.

Since our interview, we’ve dug into the companies carving up this precious space for personal gain, hoping to inspire solidarity. We traced the financial interests back to faceless private equity firms in Northern Europe and the US – and found some wealthy Greek dynasties along the way.

Mural for Strefi Hill. Image: Open Assembly for the Defence of Strefi Hill

The investors: PRODEA

Parent companies: Invel & Castlelake

€1m (£850k) in financing for the Strefi project is provided by Prodea, with €800,000 (£687k) supplied by Athens city council.

Prodea is a property developer listed on the Athens stock exchange. Its owner describes it as “the largest Real Estate Investment Company (“REIC”) in Greece in terms of assets”, and it has at least fifty subsidiaries – mostly based in Greece and Cyprus.

The majority of Prodea’s investments are in commercial property in the form of offices. Over a third of its portfolio is rented out to the National Bank of Greece, while 10% is leased to the Greek supermarket chain Sklavenitis. It is currently in discussions about participation in the controversial Elliniko megaproject on the site of Athens’ former airport, among the world’s biggest urban redevelopment schemes.

According to company accounts, the firm appears to be doing well financially. It made just over €98m (£84m) in profit in 2022, although this was a significant drop from the previous year’s profits of around €128m (£110m).

Prodea’s chairman and president is Christophoros “Chris” Papachristophorou, who is also managing partner of the parent company, Invel. Educated at the London School of Economics, Papachristophorou cut his teeth in the world of property as global head of RREEF Opportunistic Investments, a real estate investment manager then owned by Deutsche Bank. Several other former RREEF and Deutsche Bank real estate personnel populate the Invel and Prodea management teams. This includes Papachristophorou’s wife Marianna, a London Business School graduate who owns a £5m home in Chelsea.

In an indication of the company’s potential proximity to government, another Deutsche Bank alumni and recent Invel Partner, Alexis Pipilis, happens to be Facebook friends with Sofia Mitsotakis – daughter of the current Greek Prime Minister.

Chris Papachristophorou

Invel

Prodea is owned by Invel, a Jersey-headquartered, multinational property investor and asset manager. The company specialises in “real estate and distressed debt opportunities across Europe”. It invites investment firms to contribute money alongside its own in the purchase of properties that are not considered to be profitable enough, and redevelops them.

However, Invel’s most high-profile investment isn’t a luxury hotel or a chain of supermarkets – it’s the property division of the National Bank of Greece (NBG).

Back in the early 2010s, the institutional response to the Greek debt crisis was to provide loans on the condition of massive structural changes, such as the privatisation of public assets and the implementation of austerity measures. Consequently, the real estate subsidiary of the bailed-out National Bank of Greece, then known as Pangaea, was sold off to a consortium led by Invel—a company that had been in existence for less than a year.

And Invel got a bargain. It purchased a majority share for just €653m (£566m) – however €450m was paid for by a loan provided by the bank itself (at just 2.75% interest), meaning Invel only actually paid €203m (£174m) at the time. The deal initially gave Invel access to nearly €1bn in 252 properties; as the country emerged from the worst days of the crisis, the value has since multiplied to nearly €3bn (£2.6bn) euros in 380 properties. It acquired the remaining stake in the Pangaea in 2019, renaming the business Prodea.

The Steinmetz Connection

Crisis profiteering isn’t the only unsavoury aspect of Invel’s story. It would probably like to distance itself from its most inconvenient bedfellow, disgraced diamond merchant and Israel’s former richest citizen, Beny Steinmetz.

Beny Steinmetz launched Invel back in 2013 with $400m (£343m) start-up capital provided via his firm, BSG Real Estate, part of the convoluted Beny Steinmetz Group (BSG) business empire which spans minerals, fossil fuels, property and private equity. He hired Papachristophorou as Invel’s “man on the ground” in Greece and Cyprus, and was partner at the firm until his legal woes mounted five years later. Papachristophorou remains CEO of another company in that empire, BSG Resources.

In 2020, Steinmetz was convicted of “the creation of an organized criminal group” by a Romanian court, in a case concerning the bribery of public officials for access to real estate. He was sentenced to five years’ prison in absentia.

Beny Steinmetz

A year later, Steinmetz was convicted of bribery again – this time in a case involving tens of millions of dollars worth of payments to the wife of Guinea’s then dictator, Lansana Conté, in return for mining rights. The site concerned is one of the world’s largest known deposits of iron ore in Guinea’s Simandou mountain range, home to critically endangered Western chimpanzees. In 2008, Rio Tinto – which had been given exclusive rights to the mine (and still enjoys concessions in the project) – had its license revoked. Permits were instead granted to BSG Resources, a company with no history of iron ore mining.

Steinmetz and his associates spent years trying to shut down the story through aggressive PR and legal tactics, as well as (not having quite caught on the first time) further bribery attempts.

Then in May 2022, a World Bank arbitration panel ruled that the mining rights had indeed been obtained through bribery. Yet in spite of having been sentenced to a total of ten years in prison by courts in two jurisdictions, Steinmetz appears to be walking free while he appeals his second conviction.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described Steinmetz as “the last guy you would want as an enemy”, and it no doubt helps to have family with access to power; his nephew was a partner in Jared Kushner’s property business, Kushner Companies. Steinmetz enjoys such a privileged relationship with Greece that despite the mounting evidence of corruption, a court in Athens rejected a Romanian extradition request in April 2022. He said he was “grateful to Greek justice” for this intervention.

A second figure who has been embroiled in the scandal is Shimon Menahem, another of Steinmetz’s nephews (in this case, by marriage), who invested heavily in Invel. In 2014, a Greek financial regulator noted that Papachristophorou and Menahem jointly controlled numerous companies, including exercising indirect joint control of at least one of Invel’s entities.

This map provides only a snapshot of Steinmetz’ nebulous corporate network, and many of his firms – as well as Invel’s extraordinary list of companies – are based in the tax havens Jersey, Guernsey and Luxembourg. Capitalism thrives on ambiguous corporate structures, and Steinmetz’ ability to evade the criminal justice system so far is testament to that.

Castlelake steps in

Following Steinmetz’s fall from grace, global investment firm Castlelake L.P. came to the rescue, acquiring significant shares in several Invel firms. Castlelake is now therefore the ultimate owner of Prodea, while Invel’s role in the relationship is that of a shell company – basically, a vehicle to run Prodea.

Castlelake is a multinational private equity firm specialising in planes and property. Although based in the US, the firm manages $20bn (£17bn) in assets through various funds – most of which are invested in Europe, according to financial databases.

It is headed by the founders, Rory O’Neill and Evan Carruthers. Both of them previously worked at the agribusiness conglomerate – and world’s largest private company – Cargill.

Evan Carruthers, Castlelake Co-CEO

Rory O’Neill, Castlelake Co-CEO

Engineers: Aktor

Parent company: Ellaktor

The engineering work on the hill is being carried out by Aktor. According to members of the assembly, this is being done via TOMI AVETE, an Aktor subsidiary specialising in urban developments.

Aktor is owned by Ellaktor, a major Greek construction and engineering conglomerate which operates in over thirty countries, notably in Eastern Europe and the Gulf. It works in construction, quarrying and property development, as well as building and running wind farms and wastewater treatment plants. The Group as a whole has benefited significantly from prominent public-private development projects for decades. It was, until a few years ago, led by two warring families, the Kallitsantsis clan, and the powerful Bobolas dynasty – which also owned controlling stakes in leading Greek media outlets. It is now headed by banker and private equity trader, Efthymios Bouloutas, who was convicted of corruption charges in 2018 associated with (mis)management of the now-defunct Laiki Bank. He evaded prison, walking away with a small fine.

Ellaktor has been called Greece’s second-largest producer of wind energy, running a dozen or so such farms, and now branching out into offshore wind power. Wind energy has been particularly controversial in Greece over the past couple of years, with deregulation resulting in farms being plonked on mountain tops in ecologically-sensitive habitats, and communities mobilising against the developments. Aktor also had a 5% stake in the gold mine at Skouries, Northern Greece, until this was bought by Eldorado Gold in 2020. Locals and supporters have mounted a decades-long, historic campaign of resistance to the ecologically-disastrous plan, and the mine is still not yet in production.

Efthymios Bouloutas, Ellaktor CEO

Returning to the present day, Aktor is one of several companies implicated in February’s catastrophic train collision near Tempe, Greece’s deadliest rail disaster. In 2014, Aktor was awarded the contract to upgrade the signalling system on approximately 500km of the Athens-Thessaloniki line, in a joint venture with French rail giant Alstom. But a recent report by Reporters United and Investigate Europe found that the two companies repeatedly failed to carry out their duties, and instead spent years bickering and demanding a larger contract. This was eventually approved in 2021 for an extra €13m (£11m). However, despite having been given more money, the companies were apparently still unable to get along. This led to Aktor subcontracting everything to Alstom, which had begun the work by the time of the crash.

Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis has attributed the disaster, which killed at least 57 people, to “tragic human error”; industry experts have said that an adequate signalling system would have prevented the accident from happening.

Neither trains nor joint ventures seem to be the company’s forte. Aktor was part of another joint venture that was awarded a multi-billion euro contract to extend the Doha metro. The consortium become embroiled in a dispute with a subcontractor, which took it to court resulting in a $98.5m (£79m) fine. Aktor had to pay a substantial share of the damages.

Despite its record, Ellaktor has bid to lead the consortium that would run the new Thessaloniki metro, once completed. It has been involved in the construction of the network, although the work has been hampered by delays for years, and the company again ran into dispute with a contractor.

Protracted construction projects have resulted in a significant backlog and debt for Aktor, and it made losses of €155.5m (£133m) in 2020. Despite it being the Group’s largest company, it is now being sold off to major competitor Intrakat for €100m, in a deal expected to be completed before the end of the year.

Today, Dutch private equity firm Reggeborgh is Ellaktor’s largest shareholder, with a total stake of approximately 45%. Until recently, it also had a large shareholding in another major Greek construction firm, GEK Terna. Reggeborgh has been described as the investment vehicle of the Dutch Wessels family, which is behind the conglomerate VolkerWessels.

The next largest shareholder (with roughly 30%) is Motor Oil, a Greek petrochemicals firm chaired by billionaire shipping tycoon Vardis Vardinogiannis.

Police on Strefi Hill. Image: Open Assembly for the Defence of Strefi Hill

The managers: UNISON

Parent company: ISS

According to the Open Assembly for the Defence of Strefi Hill, the installation of the CCTV cameras, tree-cutting, fencing, concreting and cleaning has been contracted to a Greek firm called Unison.

Unison describes itself as Greece’s “market leader in the facility management industry”. Set up in the late seventies as ISS Group Hellas, it was rebranded in 2021.

Unison carries out much of the same work as its parent company, the global outsourcing giant ISS. It also has a human resources subsidiary specialising in temping work, and says that it is the first company in Greece to have received a temping license.

ISS

Danish outsourcer ISS has its roots in the security business in the early 20th century, before it branched out into cleaning, catering, site and equipment maintenance. It is now a facilities management multinational, smaller than the behemoths Sodexho and Compass Group, but larger than the British outsourcing firm Mitie. It is led by CEO Jacob Aarup-Andersen, an investment banker.

Unison represents particularly marginal revenues for ISS, at less than 1% – and isn’t even included in ISS’s list of significant subsidiaries. ISS’s most important market is the UK, where the majority (15%) of its global income is generated. It is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark.

ISS is a publicly-traded company. Kirkbi A/S, a private holding of the Danish Kirk Kristiansen family (owner of the world’s most profitable toy company, Lego), has a 17% shareholding in the business.

British-based private equity firm Longview Partners has a smaller (7%) shareholding. Ownership of Longview can be traced back to Ernesto Bertarelli, Swiss billionaire and until recently, Switzerland’s richest person. Bertarelli recently bought a £92m home in Belgravia, London using wealth which ultimately derives from his family’s former pharmaceutical business.

Conclusion

Tugging on the threads of Strefi Hill unravels a patchwork of companies and individuals united in self-interest and corporate greed, from faceless US investors and a corrupt Israeli diamond merchant, to an LSE-educated banker and a Swiss billionaire. The cases of Aktor and Steinmetz show how proximity to power means they can keep getting the contracts, no matter how corrupt or incompetent they may be.

These corporate interests can be traced far beyond Athens, with wealth being funnelled back to countries such as the UK, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark and the US. The attack on the hill is part of a global struggle against the suppression of dissent, alternative lifestyles and free public spaces. But with collective resistance and solidarity, victory against the devastating forces of gentrification is within reach.

Click to enlarge

Appendix: Addresses

See the links for more locations

• Prodea

  Athens: Chrisospiliotissis 9, 105 60.

• InvelAthens: (same as Prodea) Chrisospiliotissis 9, 105 60.London: 1st Floor, 26 Grosvenor Gardens, London, SW1W 0GT.(See the link for more)

• Castlelake

  London: 15 Sackville Street, W1S 3DJ.

• Unison

  Athens: Andrea Siggrou 194, Kallithea 176 71.

• ISS

  UK: 1 Brooklands Drive Brooklands, Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 0SL

• Ellaktor

  Athens: Ermou 25, Kifisia 145 64.

• Aktor: As Ellaktor

The post The corporate plunder of Strefi Hill appeared first on Corporate Watch.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below:

Transcript:

00:01 Tom

Hello, and welcome to episode two of the Corporate Watch podcast. My name’s Tom and this is our Eco-defence miniseries, which we recorded at the Earth First! gathering in the UK. This interview is with Katy and Merry from Biofuel Watch and the Stop Burning Trees Coalition. As with all these interviews, we recorded this outside in the midst of an ecological direct action gathering, you might be able to hear the wind or the noise of people chatting. We hope that this background noise isn’t too distracting, and allows you to hear the atmosphere of the gathering. We hope you’ve enjoyed listening to all the interviews in this mini-series. And that you check out our work at www.corporatewatch.org.

And now back to the gathering…

[Recording cuts to the interview at the Earth First! gathering]

Hey, so I’m here with Katy and Merry from Biofuel Watch and the Stop Burning Trees Coalition. Thanks a lot for talking to us. We’re here at the Earth First gathering on the Sunday. Could you tell us a bit about the organisations that you’re a part of and about the Coalition?

01:01 Katy

So Biofuel Watch works to campaign against the use of bio-energy. Focusing a lot at the moment on woody biomass. So [are] forests being used to create electricity, but also liquid biofuels from crops like corn and soy. And we campaign to highlight the issues for biodiversity and the climate, and [their] impacts on human health.

01:27 Merry

And the Stop Burning Trees Coalition is a fairly new coalition. That [began] around the time of Drax’s, one of the biggest biomass companies in the world, AGM with groups from across the north [of England] and the UK coming together for that. And since then, trying to organise a more grassroots campaign against biomass, but in particular, Drax because a lot of us are located in Yorkshire in the north, where Drax is a huge problem. And it’s right on our doorstep. So [we are] working quite closely with lots of different groups from trade unions and trade union councils to health campaigners, and environmental groups campaigning against biomass.

02:03 Tom

And you were talking a little bit in the workshop you did here about the Axe Drax campaign. Could you talk about that briefly?

02:08 Merry

Yeah, so Axe Drax as a group came about just before the first lockdown from people in Yorkshire again, wanting to take action against Drax. It’s done various different actions and protests and that sort of thing. And then it’s sort of moving more towards direct action, trying to cause more disruption and respond in a way that seems appropriate to the destruction that Drax is causing. So there’s been a few different actions that have happened with Axe Drax. There’s this train line, that’s a private railway that goes straight into Drax, which brings all the wood pellets from all the trees cut down abroad to be burnt.

‘Halt the felling’ Protesters stop a train carrying biofuel – via Axe Drax

There has been a couple of protesters who have disrupted that train line, just trying to bring attention to what Drax is doing, and the amount of harm it’s causing around the world. More recently, there was an action taken by Axe Drax on the day of Drax’s AGM – targeting the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), where they did some creative redecorating of the outside of BEIS bringing attention to the billions in subsidies that BEIS gives Drax that will come out of our energy bills. Drax currently is receiving £2.6 million a day in subsidies from BEIS, which is a horrible misuse of public money. And it’s meant to be going to actual renewables, but instead, it’s going [towards] destroying our forests and polluting our communities. So Axe Drax is a member of the coalition working again on a grassroots level to campaign against biomass, but with a particular focus on Drax because they’re so prevalent in the north.

London, UK. 27 April 2022. A protestor from Axe Drax sprays paint to the outside of the entrance to BEIS (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial strategy)

03:32 Tom

And for people who aren’t so familiar with biomass – and some of the issues you’ve talked about here – could you explain a bit more about what the campaign is about?

03:40 Katy

Yeah, so focusing specifically on Drax as that’s our main focus and [it’s] the biggest biomass burner in the UK. So, Drax is currently in receipt of £2.6 million [a day] in subsidies, which comes from BEIS from a surcharge on energy bills – as Merry’s explained – and they get that money because biomass or wood burning, which is how Drax now generates electricity after transitioning from coal is currently classed as renewable. And it’s also classed as carbon neutral under carbon accounting rules. In reality, Drax is the single biggest carbon emitter in the UK. And burning wood actually releases more CO2 for the amount of energy produced than coal does. So that’s also the first lie that is told – that burning wood is carbon neutral. We’re also told that it’s sustainable, and Drax will claim that the wood it uses to make pellets comes from waste wood [and] sawmill residues. But the reality is that the demand for wood from the biomass industry – particularly Drax – is driving forest destruction around the world. The wood that is burnt in Drax comes from overseas. 60% comes from the southern US, [and] the remainder comes from Canada and the Baltic states: Estonia and Latvia.

And in Estonia, there is evidence of Drax sourcing wood illegally, from old-growth forests that are protected. But the majority of the wood that Drax burns is classed as sustainable under the UK sustainability criteria. But that’s because the bar is set so low that it basically means if it’s legal. And because forests aren’t classed as old growth unless they’re over 150 years old, they can use wood from 100-year-old forests and that’s classed as sustainable.

Truck loaded with logs on logging road – via Wikimedia Commons/University of British Columbia library

Investigators on the ground have filmed logging trucks [coming out] of forests that have been clearcut and filmed the logs getting taken to the pellet mills to be turned into wood pellets. So this idea that the wood is a byproduct of other forestry industries isn’t true. And one of the things that they would class as waste wood – they would class a tree that isn’t uniform. And so if the tree isn’t completely straight and can’t be used for, say house building… [but] obviously if you’re that tree, or you’re the animal that lives in that tree, [then] that’s not waste wood, it’s your home. And particularly in the southern US, there are environmental justice issues with the pellet mills being cited predominantly in – over 50% of them – in areas that are classed as ‘environmental justice communities’. So poor communities of colour and the health impacts from the pellet mills are horrendous – people suffer[from] cancer, heart disease, and asthma. They can’t put their washing out else it gets dust on it, dust all over their cars. This is impacting communities that are already suffering economic hardship. And there are now issues over here with Drax being in court [CW note, this case was ongoing as of August 2022], they’ve been taken to court by the Health and Safety Executive [in the UK] because the same health issues that are being created by the pellet mills are actually now taking their toll on the workers at Drax in terms of exposure to wood dust. And the pellets once they’ve been processed come over to the UK by ship, obviously there is pollution involved with shipping wood pellets for such long distances. And the pellets come through ports in the north of England, so Liverpool, Hull, Immingham and sometimes to Tyneside. And those have been focal points for action in the north [of England] taken by the Stop Burning Trees Coalition that we’ve set up.

Climate justice campaigners taking part in a demonstration at Leeds Magistrates Court today in support of health and safety charges against Drax Power Station – via Axe Drax

07.35 Tom

And we heard a little bit about how Drax is planning to make money from BECCS [Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage], would you like to explain what that is?

07.43 Katy

Yeah, so it gets worse. Because a lot of people aren’t aware of all the issues with biomass… It’s not sustainable and it’s not renewable and it’s not a climate solution. And so already kind of communicating this can be bursting people’s bubbles. But the next thing that Drax [is] trying to claim is – not just that burning wood is carbon neutral – but that by applying BECCS, which is Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage, they can make wood burning carbon negative. So a lot of people will be familiar with CCS – Carbon Capture and Storage – which the fossil fuel industry has been promising for years is going to make it viable to keep burning fossil fuels and not contributing to climate change because they’re going to capture the carbon and store it underground. So far, that’s only happened on a very limited scale. And [it’s been] incredibly expensive, and not viable as a climate solution, certainly not within the timescales that we’re talking about in terms of needing to reduce emissions. Drax now is claiming that they’re going to use this technology but with bioenergy [CW note – in fact Drax has submitted a proposal to try and do it] proposed to, and they’ll thereby store the carbon from the trees that they burn. And then in theory – by regrowing those trees – create a kind of cycle where they are sucking carbon out of the atmosphere.

One, it’s a completely unproven technology. And at the moment, it’s at very initial stages of technology development. So again, just not at all within the timeframes that we need to be addressing climate change. And then, very worryingly, governments are accepting that this is a technology that works, and plugging it into climate projections and policies. And instead of addressing the need to reduce emissions now. They are saying that we’re going to get net zero by [2050], by being heavily reliant on BECCS technology that doesn’t work, and Drax knows is unlikely to work because the subsidy regime that they are asking for to implement this has the subsidies for capturing carbon, separate to the subsidies for continuing to burn wood – which they are keen to get. And the other thing that’s really important to highlight, is that the whole concept of it being renewable and sustainable is based on a false promise that if you replant trees, they will reabsorb carbon at the same rate as old trees. And that’s not true, increasingly, there’s evidence that old-growth forests, mature forests, are our biggest allies in climate change mitigation, because they’re the biggest absorbers of CO2 and saplings don’t absorb CO2 at the same rate. And so the timescales that we’re talking about for it to be renewable and sustainable – again – they’re not in line with the urgency of needing to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels.

10.44 Merry

Yeah, so the research shows that it takes about 44 to 104 years to reabsorb the carbon emitted from burning these trees, which is obviously, way, way longer than we have in all the other different estimations of how urgently we need to cut carbon. And it also doesn’t take into account all the biodiversity, the fact that these forests act as vital flood defences for these communities, again, often ‘environmental justice communities’. And also all the biodiversity and the rare and protected species that exist in these forests. So it’s on far too long a timescale for it to have any real impact on us hitting the tipping points, and harming the planet even more, not to mention all the other impacts that come alongside it.

11.22 Tom

So it’s an unproven technology. And you’ve said lots of reasons why it’s it’s not an adequate way or even a real way of addressing climate change. So what’s in it for the government subsidising these projects? And what’s in it for Drax? Why is it being done?

11.37 Merry

Drax Power Station from West Hill, High Hunsley, by Nick Theasby for Geograph Britain and Ireland

I mean you look at [what’s going on] and you think, obviously, this shouldn’t exist when you think about it. But there’s a lot of money in it. So, in 2009, when the EU declared that biomass was a form of renewable energy, there were subsidies given out to coal power plants to transform [them] into biomass energy plants. So Drax – having been a huge coal power plant – saw this opportunity to keep going, and to keep making money. It took the subsidies and started transitioning. Since then they’ve been receiving billions in subsidies. By 2027, they’ll have received about £10 billion in renewable energy subsidies to keep burning our forests. There’s a very close relationship between Drax and the government. In the last year or so there were about 70 meetings between DRAX and BEIS [CW note – it was actually 32 meetings with Kwasi Kwarteng after he joined BEIS in 2019, and a total of 69 meetings with ministers since 2020. These figures are from Biofuel Watch’s own research]. Whereas it took the same amount of time for MPs who are resisting biomass to have one meeting with BEIS. So there’s a very clear, close relationship. And you have people who used to sit on Drax’s board, [and] also on the climate change commission designing the government’s net-zero strategy, which funnily enough features BECCS very heavily. And also, I think, because it was something they could already do, they could transition these existing power plants into biomass plants, they can then count that as part of their renewable energy and say: ‘Look, we’re meeting our targets! We’re producing this much renewable energy because Drax is burning trees’, and therefore it counts as renewable energy, and there’s very close relationships between lots of government officials and MPs and Drax. The local Selby MP, Nigel Adams – which is where Drax is located just near Selby – has received tens of thousands in donations from Drax [CW note – also fellow Biomass firm Eggsborough], and then has also gone on to lead biomass working groups in Parliament and push biomass very heavily. So there’s all these lobbying relationships, and there’s money to be made that’s coming out of our energy bills that should be going to genuine renewables.

13.19 Katy

I think as well, it’s really expedient for the government that they can just look at BECCS and say, ‘Oh, great, we don’t really need to change anything. We don’t need to ask people to change their lifestyles’. ‘We don’t need to decentralise the electricity grid’, you know, ‘we can keep the base loads there using Drax and not invest into the sorts of battery technologies that we need to transition to more sustainable, genuine renewable technologies such as wind and solar’, which are now… the costs of those have massively come down. And whereas Drax is taking money from people’s energy bills through this levy, wind and solar are now paying back. My view is the government doesn’t want our energy systems here to become too decentralised, because it’s a way of controlling people and having power over people if you have that very centralised grid. But also it means we don’t have to really address the actual situation we’re in, which is that we need to start limiting economic growth. We need to look at our economic model, which is constant extraction of resources to make profit for companies. And by relying on these pie in the sky technologies, we can just keep going with business as usual. And ultimately, it’s a way of them trying to appear to be addressing the climate crisis, but within capitalism. Ultimately it can’t work, because we need to start addressing consumption and resource use in terms of economic resources and extraction and looking at different sorts of economies that are sustainable. But governments don’t want to make those changes because they want to keep making money, and their mates being able to make money.

15.17 Merry

Fundamentally, it’s another form of so-called green capitalism that doesn’t require addressing – as Katy was saying – the root causes of any of these issues, and we can continue [to] export – as England has done for a very, very long time – the harm to other countries, to communities that are already marginalised and harmed by different polluting industries. We can cut down forests abroad, pollute those communities, and then the UK can continue acting as it always has done by harming other communities, continuing these economic systems, these systems of profit, and these very close relationships between all these people in power so that nothing ever really has to change. And I think it fundamentally comes down to that. It’s just green capitalism and greenwashing so that they can continue making money and harming everyone else.

16.14 Tom

And can you tell us a bit more about campaigning around this issue, about the Stop Burning Trees Coalition and maybe some highlights or inspiring things that have happened during your campaign?

16.47 Katy

The AGM was a particular highlight because we had Axe Drax’s amazing action outside BEIS coinciding with a very, very noisy demo outside Drax’s AGM in London. And then there were a range of actions across the north along the train line routes, like Hull, and Liverpool [which] are both ports where pellets come in, and then Leeds and York close to Drax. We had very colourful, visually exciting actions. And we’ve also been challenging Drax’s greenwash successfully.

19.24 Merry

I think one of the really amazing things about the coalition is building these connections between people who are campaigning on different issues, whether it’s [highlighting] the health impacts [of Drax’s business] or working with trade unions and that sort of thing. One of the things that Drax does incredibly well and pours a lot of money into is greenwashing on a local level. So they have very close relationships with schools and universities in the north. And just recently, they were sponsoring this thing called the York Nature Fair, where there were lots of really lovely organisations coming together to educate people more about nature and biodiversity. Drax was the main sponsor of that and had their branding on everything, Propagating this image that they are this lovely, friendly company. So the coalition obviously noticed this and weren’t too thrilled about it, and contacted a lot of the different organisations involved. And they ended up dropping Drax from all their branding and the sponsorship and reassessing their own relationship with Drax because a lot of these organisations – without doing like a lot of their own research into biomass – it can be very easy to say, yeah, that seems fine. It’s classified as renewable. So I think that was a really wonderful thing that happened, just like very quickly and from all these different groups coming together and just educating more people about biomass.

And at the moment, the coalition is working quite heavily on looking at things like a just transition for workers, because Drax is a huge employer in the north. And you can’t deny that people rely on these jobs. And it’s a very big employer. So we’re building up more connections in the local area is something we’ve been putting energy into. Drax workers are currently [as of September 2022] doing wildcat strikes every two weeks, and people from the coalition go down to support those there’s sort of been this veil lifted on the working conditions within Drax because whenever you speak to someone who used to work for Drax they have nothing good to say about them, like really just genuinely awful stuff. But then when people are still working there, it’s hard to speak out. But then you’re hearing people are working in 50-degree conditions every single day and being paid very poorly and all these things. So what we’re trying to do with our work with the trade unions in the coalition is looking at how we could actually transition away from Drax in the north, and how those people could be supported and have genuinely green jobs and not actually be harmed by the shutting down of Drax. Because there’s such a diversity of groups within the coalition, it allows us to have this real diversity of tactics. You’ve got Axe Drax doing more direct action, more disruptive things, and then people working very closely with trade unions and local campaigning groups in the Selby area, and doing these sort of more theatrical, very colourful protests and stuff like that, or just like outreach and talking to more and more people about it, because even in the north, not many people really know what Drax is doing. So yeah, it allows us to have a really wide range of tactics and [a broad] campaigning strategy, which I think is really beautiful and really wonderful.

19.32 Tom

I was wondering if you could tell me a little about the relationship between Drax and a Canadian company called Pinnacle Pellets.

20.41 Merry

Yes, so Pinnacle Pellets is a Canadian logging company. They’ve previously been accused of – or known – for logging on unceded indigenous land in Canada home to over 600 indigenous communities with lots of biodiversity and protected species. Last year, Drax purchased Pinnacle Pellets, because they’re expanding into the pellet production business – not happy with just burning everything. They’re also trying to, you know, cut down the trees and turn them into pellets, they’re now the world’s second-biggest pellet producer. So this is all happening in Canada, which is where they’ve been increasingly sourcing wood from. And another part of that is the Head of Forestry in that province [Diana Nicholls], who was deciding which companies could log where has now recently [joined] Drax’s board. And there’s a very clear connection between them. Part of this as well is because Drax has expanded so much in this part of Canada in the logging business, the unions and the workers who have been working in the forestry business have actually published open letters to Drax, basically saying that their huge expansion in that area is putting them out of work and taking jobs away from all the people that been working there for a very long time. And it’s just another example of how Drax is trying to expand and trying to grow its business into cutting down and burning more and more trees around the world and harming communities as it goes.

20.50 Tom

And you were saying that the campaign back in the UK has been going after the financiers of Drax. Could you say a bit more about that?

22.07 Katy

We’ve been focusing recently on Barclays in particular, which is one of Drax’s biggest financiers. They’ve come under fire from fossil fuel campaigners because of their investments in fossil fuels. And they’re trying to greenwash their way out of that by saying that they are investing in renewable energy as well. But one of the big things that they are investing in is Drax. So we’re really trying to expose that burning fossil fuels and burning trees amount to the same thing. And Barclays is complicit in both. We recently had a very noisy and lively day at the Barclays AGM in Manchester with people inside disrupting the AGM and causing it to be delayed for quite a long amount of time. And then lots of campaigners outside campaigning on fossil fuels, and biomass burning a really lively, noisy demo. Also, there was some subvertising campaigns with spoof adverts exposing Barclays’ bad practices. We had an E-Action as well calling on Barclays to drop Drax, just to let people know that big biomass is not a climate solution, and the banks need to drop that as well as dropping fossil fuel investments.

22.16 Tom

And are there any moments in the campaign, or any aspects of the campaign that you think comrades can take inspiration from, or learn from?

23.07 Merry

I think so. The Coalition is very new. It only came out of the AGM in April [2022], and it sort of just sprung up from people who had been organising against Drax coming together to realise that we can unite all these groups and that by working together, we’re much stronger. And there’s a lot of expertise, and skills and energy from all these different groups around the north of the UK, coming together to campaign against Drax, I think we’re still in our very early stages. So we’re still learning as we go as well. But seeing the power of having different health campaigners and trade unions, environmentalists, and people working on a just transition coming together to campaign makes us so much stronger. If we can unite and see all the different connections between these issues, and how all these different aspects of capitalism and colonial capitalism come together, and feed into one another. Understanding how that all functions together, makes us much stronger, and makes resisting it much better.

Protest at Drax, via Axe Drax

23.12 Tom

And finally, how can people get involved in the campaign and support you?

23.52 Katy

If people want to find out more about Biofuel Watch, we’ve got loads and loads of really useful information on our website, which is biofuelwatch.org.uk. And also you can sign up to our newsletter and get updates for online actions. You don’t get too many emails. [The mailing list is designed to inform] how you can take action on biomass and how you can learn more. Also, we’ll support you if you want to organise a local screening of a film called ‘Burned: Are trees the new coal?’ Which we absolutely recommend you watch and analyse to learn more about biomass and then try and show it to other people.

24.26 Merry

If you want to get involved in the Coalition, you can sign up for updates on our website as well stopburningtrees.org. Or you can find us on social media: SBT Coalition. We hold regular welcome meetings, and we’re holding different actions over the coming months, which hopefully you’ll see. And if you’d like to get involved, you can contact us. All of our actions, events, and that sort of thing will be on the website and on social media. So you can find us that way. Come to our welcome meetings and if your group would like to sign up, or you would like to join, [you’re] very welcome. And we can give you as much information as you’d like and support you in taking any sort of action you want against biomass.

24.37 Tom

Oh, thanks very much. And we’ll put all those links and everything in the notes for the show. And thanks so much for your time. And I hope you enjoy the rest of Earth First!

24.48 Merry

So you can also join Axe Drax, you can find us on our website, which is axedrax.uk or on social media: axe_drax. And if you want to do direct action, that sort of thing, we’d love to have you there.

Music by Oz Lockley

The featured image is of Drax Power Station, taken by Richard Brownbridge, CC BY-SA 2.0

The post Eco-defence podcast episode two – an interview with Biofuel Watch appeared first on Corporate Watch.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the play button below:

TRANSCRIPT:

00:01 Tom – Corporate Watch

Hello and welcome to the Corporate Watch podcast. My name’s Tom, and I’d like to welcome you to this first episode in our eco-defence miniseries of interviews that we gathered at the UK’s Earth First! Gathering. Featuring interviews with comrades involved in campaigning against the ecological destruction that’s caused by corporate greed.

But before we start, here’s a word about us:

Corporate Watch is a research group that helps people stand up against corporations and capitalism. We investigate exploitative bosses, landlords and property developers, companies profiting from prisons, profiting from deportation flights, from animal exploitation and more, as well as the mega-corporations devastating our planet – and the wider systems of power and profit they work within.

At the heart of everything we do is our idea of “information for action”. We know that people can fight and win, even against powerful enemies like corporations and governments. Good information helps to understand the forces we’re up against, spot their weaknesses, and so campaign effectively.

This is our first venture into the world of podcasts – so we apologise if things aren’t as polished as they could be. Because of this, it’s also taken us a good while to get these interviews ready for broadcast, so we’ve provided updates to the original interviews where that’s proved necessary. This interview – for example – includes an update on the situation as of March 2023.

All of these interviews were recorded outside, in the midst of an ecological direct action gathering – and you might hear the noises of people preparing the dinner, or shouting for the next workshop, and so on. We hope that all this adds a sense of atmosphere to the interviews.

Okay, so without further ado, here’s our first interview of the series.

[cut to the interview from the Earth First! gathering]

01.39 Tom – Corporate Watch

Okay, so I’m here with Daniel and Anne from Coal Action Network. And [the] first question I was gonna ask is about the Coal Action Network campaign, about how long it’s been going on for and what the aims of the campaign are?

An opencast coal mine in South Lanarkshire

01.50 Anne – Coal Action Network

So Coal Action Network started around 2008. It came out of an Earth First! gathering because at the time, there [were] around 45 new open cast coal mine applications proposed, and a similar number of operating open cast in the UK. So it was a big issue. The amount of carbon that’s released by the burning of the coal from the mines is significant, but also the environmental devastation on a local environmental level, when everything over the coal is destroyed. So all of the habitats, [and] the biodiversity is taken away. The very bedrock is taken away right down to the coal itself. And this has a huge impact on local communities and the local communities were… very isolated in their own fights. And they felt like it was only them – only their village – that was affected. And so, the Coal Action Network was formed, originally under a different name. It was formed in order to unite the groups together so that they could share their learning. And so that people could take direct action as well as working through the planning system.

02.46 Tom – Corporate Watch

Can you tell me a little bit about some of the successes of the direct action and the campaigns against coal over the years?

02.52 Anne – Coal Action Network

So over the years, we have fought a lot of campaigns, we didn’t end up fighting all 45, they weren’t necessarily necessary, but we stopped 22 open cast applications or extensions… 2020, was the kind of the end of that era – where we stopped: a new application at Druridge Bay, a new application at Dewley Hill and stopped an extension at Bradley in the Pont Valley. So that was a kind of accumulation of the work. But lots of people – community activists, environmental activists – over the years fought against these applications, through all sorts of different methods. Very much a holistic approach to fighting the campaigns. And in 2018, things kind of came together in the campaign to protect Pont Valley, where we had a big protest camp. That lasted, I think, for 54 days. We had the camp and then after that, there were further actions against the mine, sadly, the mine did happen. It did succeed. It had been rejected… by the local council in 2011. And then it had been approved at a second appeal. So it was like a really long drawn–out process, and the local community were really downtrodden because they felt like the mine was going to go ahead. And then we all came together for this really empowering, but sadly, ultimately unsuccessful campaign to stop the mine.

Demonstration at Bradley mine in the Pont Valley (photo via Glen Black)

But, in a way, it wasn’t unsuccessful, because the coal mining companies like to expand, because there isn’t [just] coal in a small pocket. They kind of keep eating up a whole valley and moving down the area. And because of the campaign to protect Pont Valley, and how successful that campaign was at making the headlines and keeping the issue in the news when they asked for an extension application, and to get even closer to people’s houses, they were rejected. So that was a big turning point for us.

But there were a lot of other camps prior to that. In Scotland, there were Coal Action Scotland camps, there was a camp in Huntington Lane [in Shropshire], they were across the coalfields of the UK. And yeah, lots of different types of tactics kind of brought about that change, to see we’re very near to the end of open cast coal mining in the UK. There’s a couple of mines operating, and there’s one extension application, but it’s a very different picture to the one that we started with when we started Coal Action Network.

04:50 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And is there anything from that history of campaigning that really sticks out as like a really inspiring moment or a really inspiring action?

04:59 – Anne – Coal Action Network

via Coal Action network

There was an action in the Pont Valley that really inspired me, we went to the company that was building the access road to enable the coal mine. The access road had to be completed before the third of June, otherwise, the coal mine wouldn’t be able to start. So it was very clear for us that if we stopped the access road being built then we would stop the coal mine and we were successful in that. Sadly, the authorities didn’t care. But the action – what was inspiring for me about it – was that three non-binary people blocked the road. And the support involved quite a lot of local queer women who had never been part of anything like that. And just seeing those movements come together, and people fighting for the area where they lived and an area where they had just met and people coming together in a fantastic action where ultimately, the road building company built a new road out of its own compound [laughs]. You can’t predict everything that might happen. But we won that, we stopped them from building their access road in the time available. And then the authorities pushed through the mine despite that happening, but there were lots of successes along the way – even though we weren’t successful in stopping the valley… from being destroyed.

06:02 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And, what’s the situation now? You were saying that opencast is less of an issue for you now, can you explain that? And talk about what is going through the planning process in terms of new projects?

06.13 – Anne – Coal Action Network

So open cast has become much less of an issue because of the obvious environmental impact locally, whereas [for] deep mining the environmental impacts are less clear. But the global environmental impacts are much greater because there’s a much greater amount of coal that’s extracted. When the organisation started, we were fighting coal mines… which provided power for power stations, so for the electricity grid. Though, there was a point when the UK was using 40% of its electricity coming from coal and now it’s down to less than 3%. And so there’s been big changes in that, and the government has said it will phase out coal by 2024. However, when they say phase out coal what they mean is close the power stations, they don’t mean stop the mining. And coal is not only used in power stations it’s also used in steelworks – is the second biggest – or has now become the biggest consumer of coal and so, things have changed in that direction.

Scottish Coal site – aerial view

07:07 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And did you want to talk about the current projects that are going through the planning process and that are live at the moment?

07:13 – Daniel – Coal Action Network

So we do have a working open cast coal mine in South Wales called Ffos-y-Fran, that is due for closure on the sixth of September [2022] this year [but the mine has applied for an extension], so, at that point, there shouldn’t be any active opencast coal mining in the UK. We are looking at an extension for Glan Lash, also in South Wales, that is opencast – [they] currently don’t have a licence to operate but they are looking to extend a coal mine. There’s also a deep coal mine in South Wales called Aberpergwm, that is going to mine 42 million tonnes of coal, so it’s a large extension.

Coal Action Network has launched a judicial review against the decision for that extension to go ahead. And we’re likely to have the hearing for judicial review around January or February 2023. There’s also Whitehaven which is being widely publicised in West Cumbria, that is a deep coal mine that is awaiting a determination by the Secretary of State in October [2022]. And finally, there’s a coal mine that’s at a very early stage in the planning process on the Scottish/English border, in Dumfries and Galloway. I think what’s really critical about this is all of these coal mines are claiming to primarily mine coal to make steel. So the government cut off for 2024 for coal for power in the UK, [and] these applications will be completely unaffected by that target. Globally, the steel industry uses a billion tonnes of coal every year to produce 1.7 billion tonnes of steel, that process emits 11% of global greenhouse gases. If we don’t solve this we can’t get a handle on climate change. It’s a really key issue, and not enough people know about it. In the UK, these four coal mines cumulatively – that are going through the planning process at the moment – account for 140 million tonnes of coal, that will produce around 430 million tonnes of CO2.

We need to get active on steel, and we need to stop the steel industry from consuming the level of coal it currently does. In the UK. There are two main steelworks in the UK that consume huge quantities of coal. The largest of those is in Port Talbot. And it’s called Port Talbot steelworks, it’s owned by Tata Steel. The other one is British Steel in Scunthorpe. These account for the second and third highest sources of [CO2] single–site emissions in the UK.

09:46 – Tom – Corporate Watch

So could you tell me about the companies that are involved in these four projects?

09:52 – Daniel – Coal Action Network

So in Whitehaven, the company behind the coal mine is called West Cumbria Mining Limited, they are majority owned by a Singaporean investment company serving people in Australia and elsewhere. Aberpergwm is run by Energybuild Ltd. They bought the coal mine in 2004. And we suspect that they might sell the coal mine at some point in the future to another coal–operating company. And there’s Lochinvar which is owned by New Age Exploration Limited – rather dystopically named – and they run gold mines in New Zealand and Australia. And they, until recently. also owned a stake in a tungsten mine in Cornwall but sold that. And finally, Glan Lash is owned by Bryn Bach Coal Limited.

10:40 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And out of those four projects, which one do you think is likely to be a campaigning focus in the near future?

10:47 – Daniel – Coal Action Network

A demonstration in support of legal challenges to Whitehaven coal mine

So in the order that these coal mines are in the planning system, Lochinvar is the earliest and then Glan Lash which is currently awaiting a determination by Welsh Ministers. Whitehaven is awaiting a determination by the Secretary of State in October [2022] [update – this has now been approved, but is subject to a legal challenge]. So that’s coming up quite soon.

And Aberpergwm is a massive extension. We’re looking at a judicial review in January or February [2023] with an outcome from that several months later. We’re hoping to win. We’ve got a crack legal team and it’s looking optimistic. If we don’t win, there are no other options than direct action. And we really hope that people will come out and join us in taking direct action against that coal mine from happening.

Whitehaven – we’re expecting a decision on that very shortly. But there are other options that might be explored before direct action becomes the last option available to us.

11:49 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And how will people who want to support that direct action know, where should they look for information?

11:55 – Daniel – Coal Action Network

Coal Action Network, we share our information [through] our mailing list, which you can sign up for on our website. We put out information via Twitter and Facebook. I’m afraid we’re all a bit old to be putting information out on Instagram. But we would appreciate it – if you see that information – to share it amongst yourselves on Instagram. So keep your ears peeled and follow us on our socials and our mailing list, so you can find out news as it happens.

12:20 – Tom – Corporate Watch

Okay, and I wanted to ask – what do you think that the campaign… the struggle that you’ve had so far highlights about the links between the coal industry and corporate power and greed in general?

12:35 Anne – Coal Action Network

So there are lots of examples of how the coal industry links into corporate greed and how the state protects that. For example, when opencast coal mines start, they produce a lot of waste, what’s called overburden – everything that’s over the rock, and it costs millions of pounds to put that back. Coal companies don’t make any money whilst they’re putting that back. They’re supposed to put money to one side to pay for that later. However, often what these companies do is set up shell companies – subsidiaries. For example, Celtic Energy in South Wales escaped over £100 million pounds worth of restoration costs on four different sites, so Selar, Margam, East Pit, and Nant Helen.They created companies that were based in the Virgin Islands and gave them names that weren’t related to coal, weren’t related to the business… things like Ash Energy and Oak… and things like that. So subsidiaries that are basically meaningless.

UK coal did it as well. They also went for the plant theme and called it Juniper Number Three.

So they create these companies that then own the land, the land that is opencast – and the actual company behind the whole thing keeps operating the site, but the liability goes with the land. So planning permission goes with the land and who has to put it back goes with the land. If that company is then in the Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands abroad, then there’s no recourse for that to ensure that restoration happens.

Consequently, local communities who were promised to get their footpaths back, to have the water that fills in the void dealt with safely, to have woodland planted or whatever – kind of things that we know are bullshit remediation -those don’t happen. And so communities who’ve dealt with all of the dust, all of the noise, all of the loss of amenities, lose everything once the company has gone. In the case of Celtic [Energy], it went to involve the Serious Fraud Office and it involved a court. And the people high up in the companies had their premises raided, [and] they were arrested. And when it went to court, the judge said it was dishonest, it was wrong, but there [was] nothing they could do. It was legal. And that just shows that the state is set up – as we all know – to criminalise people who try and create a better world and a more sustainable world. It isn’t set up to penalise the people who have a lot of money, and who walk away having extracted from places, which have had the negative impacts of coal, and then none of the benefits – and so it’s just another example that we’re well aware of, of the way in which the state benefits and companies benefit, and local people don’t.

photo via Glen Black, from a protest in the Pont Valley

15.02 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And the last question I had was, out of all those years of struggle against the coal industry, what do you think the lessons are, that comrades that are involved in struggles against corporate power, can learn or take from the struggles that you’ve been involved in?

15.15 – Daniel, Coal Action Network

So in my experience, the things that we can see through the work that we’ve taken on coal, that are equally relevant in other contexts are that communities that resist coal mines or resist extractivist projects are much more successful when the community works together. If there’s like land being bought and things like that, the communities need to work in partnership with their neighbours. And that community groups that start up around the point where a planning application is expected, they are most strong and most likely to win if they fight on other issues in their local area.

So if they create positive events in their area, or they tackle other problems, that they have – other environmental problems that they have – they’re more likely to stay together as a cohesive group and then be able to re-invigorate themselves on the issue of coal, or whatever extractivism it is, at a later stage.

I would also say that it’s really important to break down the narratives of ‘activists’ and ‘local people’, I think, sometimes I fall into it myself! But that, that we’re all part of the same struggle, and that the struggles that can seem fairly single issue [do] inspire people and enable people to meet connections that they wouldn’t have otherwise met. And also that within direct action movements, it’s very easy to [think] that direct action is the most successful thing, but often the fairly dull dealing with the planning system can actually result in a secure victory. And that direct action is often necessary at the last point when we really don’t have anything else. And so it’s better if we can stop getting to that point because it’s [the] endgame. Whereas if we can stop it at planning, or you can stop it through other methods, then that’s better, it’s a bit more laborious, it’s a different sort of way of working, but it can give really useful results.

A tussle with security at Bradley (photo via Glen Black)

16.54 Daniel – Coal Action Network

I think I would just go into more detail on Margam, which was operated by Celtic Energy. And although Celtic Energy pulled a similar trick at all four of its coal mining sites, Celtic Energy particularly screwed over people living around Margam in Park Slip in South Wales. They lobbied the council planning board to give them an extension to the coal mine. And they said ‘we’ll use the money that we earn from this extension to pay for the restoration’. And the council who were looking at a huge liability if Celtic were to walk away, which they could because they’d sold the land already, they were held over a barrel. And so they said ‘yes, fine, you can have this extension. We just need to restore this massive void that you’ve dug out, to put the soil back’. Celtic Energy said ‘yeah, yeah, yeah. Great, we’ll do it’. At the end of that extension, the council came to Celtic Energy, [and] they said ‘right, great! It’s time for you to down tools, [and] restore the land. Keep your promise!’ Celtic were like, ‘yeah, we’ve not sold as much coal as we though we would. We need another extension’. At this point, the council said ‘no!’, ‘you’ve had enough, we’re not gonna do it any more’.

Unfortunately, only £5 million had been put to one side for restoration. £5 million might sound like a lot, [but] it’s a pittance to their amount that was required to just drain the water that was accumulating in the site… Because of that the council took Celtic Energy to court to pay for the restoration they’d promised to do. And over the course of that court process, the water had been filling into this coal mine, and just draining that water would cost over £10 million. So the council had no option than to just dig a bit of a ditch at the top of the coal mine that would drain the water away, so it will stop it from overflowing and flooding to the residences below. So these people now live with this massive void of water massive millions of cubic metres of water near to their homes, and they feel that threat.

And Celtic Energy said to the council, ‘you know, if you don’t accept this proposal, well, we’re gonna turn off our pumps [that] keep maintaining the water levels where they are, you’ve got a few months. So not only did the council accept this proposal, they paid Celtic Energy to do that – to dig this ditch. They paid them that last £5 million because Celtic Energy had their gear there, it would cost more to pay another company to come in. And that’s just such a galling example of company abuse of power, and abusing the legal system that our state creates. And ultimately, it’s the local communities that always pay the price. And there are so many communities still living beside unrestored or poorly restored sites around England, Wales and Scotland. We’ll be releasing a report [update – it’s now been released] shortly on the state of restoration of coal mining sites around South Wales. So keep your eyes peeled for that. We’ll be sending a mailing out to our mailing list and it’ll be on our website.

19:52 – Tom – Corporate Watch

Anne and Daniel, thanks so much and [I] like really encourage people to check out the website and go on the mailing list and be ready to take action when it’s needed. And, we’re gonna go and get some dinner pretty soon. But thank you so much for speaking to me.

Okay, so that interview was recorded in late August 2022. And some things have changed since then. So I asked Daniel for an update.

20.16 – Daniel – Coal Action Network

It’s March 2023. and much has changed. The Whitehaven coal mine has been approved by the Secretary of State in December 2022. Since then, local environmental group SLACC [South Lakes Action on Climate Change] and Friends of the Earth have both launched legal challenges against that approval. And we’re looking at other ways that we can challenge the Whitehaven coal mine from progressing.

Ffos-y-Fran did submit an extension application just five days ahead of the planning permission running out on the sixth of September 2022. But that extension application is still being considered by the local planning authority. In the meantime, though, all reports indicate that the coal mining company has not stopped coal mining at Ffos-y-Fran despite the fact that the planning permission has run out. We’ve done everything that we can to highlight this, and to report it to the local planning authority, but they’ve just sat on their hands. As far as we’re aware, they’ve not done any independent investigation of what would be a serious breach of planning permission at the site, they are due to formally consider and make a decision on the extension application in April. That’s almost six months of coal mining at the site without planning permission for six months, that’s terrible!

A demonstration outside the first day of the Aberpergwm judicial review hearing

At Glan Lash, that application for an extension is still alive. It is due to be considered by the local council of Carmarthenshire in three months from now. And we’ll be there to resist that.

In Scotland. slightly brighter news, the Scottish Government have announced a de facto ban on all forms of coal mining within Scotland, very similar to what they’ve done against fracking. We think that this means that the Lochinvar Coal Mine application is dead in the water.

And finally, at Aberpergwm, the deep coal mine in South Wales, that judicial review hearing is happening in a few days from now [cw note – it started on March 16th. A judgement is expected within three months]. So we’re very busy preparing for that, we’re optimistic that we’ll win. And that will save nearly 40 million tonnes of coal from being potentially extracted from that coal mine, and restore a bit of Welsh sovereignty around what happens in their future – ensuring that they can put into action, the strong anti-coal policies that they have.

Music by Oz Lockley

The post Eco-defence podcast episode one – an interview with Coal Action Network appeared first on Corporate Watch.

High Speed Two (HS2) is a 343-mile, high-speed cross-country railway line. HS2 would pick up from HS1, which connects the Channel Tunnel to London, snaking to Leeds & Manchester via Birmingham. Plans for the project have been in the pipeline since 2009, and the final stages are not expected to be completed until 2040.

The initial budget for the work was £33 billion, but the expected cost has since spiralled to over £100 billion. The project is being overseen by High Speed Two Ltd, a state-owned company.

At the 2022 Earth First! gathering, Corporate Watch spoke to Liz and Nancy, two activists who’ve been challenging HS2 for several years; from living in camps on route, to taking direct action in tunnels and structures. We spoke to them about how this eco-defence movement stood up to corporate power and the impact of increasingly draconian government legislation on environmental protest.

“HS2 encompasses so many injustices”

Liz explained that the proposed route “goes through 108 Ancient woodlands, which are going to be decimated by the project. And it’s going to create – instead of a green corridor – a cement corridor all the way up the country… It’s splitting the country in half with this huge slab of concrete”.

“HS2 encompasses so many injustices,’ Nancy said ‘wherever you sit on the political spectrum or whatever issues you really care about”. 

Whether it’s ecological issues, or the social issues of people being displaced from their homes, and then being treated completely unfairly by the compulsory purchase scheme. And whether it’s the economic factors of building HS2 or, the way that governments are mandating these kinds of things and calling it ‘the political will of the people’.

Nancy and Liz said that in the early stages, local communities along the proposed route set up “really strong groups” to oppose HS2. But the government approved plans in 2017:

I think a lot of those people felt very disenfranchised. And about three and a half years ago the direct action campaign started with one woman called Sarah Green. She was at Greenham Common, and lives in Hillingdon, which is one of the first areas where they started building. It’s just outside of London in the Colne Valley, which is a really beautiful area. She had a business showing people around the canals – HS2 completely decimated that business, made it completely unviable, because people had come to see a beautiful area. And now all they were seeing was HS2.

So she started the direct action campaign by climbing under a digger and staying under there for, I think, a couple of days and then people started setting up roadside camps.

“Obstructing the destruction”

Shortly after this, activists “started setting up woodland camps” along the proposed route as opposition against HS2 grew in solidarity with local communities. In the summer of 2020, when the pandemic hit, resistance expanded further. Liz explained that lockdown:

Created a moment where a lot of people were suddenly either furloughed or not going to uni. There were no employment prospects – it created a space for people to go and try something new. That’s when I went to the camps. At that point, there were about seven camps along the line, all set up at different points that were strategically important to HS2, mainly because it was on the land that [the company] wanted, or that they needed to build the train line. 

That’s not a new tactic, protest camps have been going for quite a while. They have to send people in to remove people from the site, which isn’t so easy when there are activists 60 foot up in the trees, or underground in tunnels. So that was a big tactic – to occupy land – but the camps also created a space we could do outreach to involve the local community and sort of reinvigorate those groups creating a base from which people can do direct action, obstructing the destruction.

Digging for victory

Liz feels that by 2021 the “campaign felt really strong” with camps along the London to Birmingham route. The year started with the eviction of a tunnel system under Euston Square Gardens. Liz explained that the gardens “right outside the HS2 head office were one of the only green spaces in that area, sitting on one of the most polluted roads in London”. It was also one of the few places homeless people in the area found to sleep. The gardens were due for destruction initially to make way for a “temporary taxi rank” but activists found out that, “a luxury hotel” to serve wealthy HS2 customers was eventually due for construction on the site. They continued:

It was an important space. So they [activists] decided to dig the first HS2 tunnel. The activists lasted in there for 31 days. It was an amazing event and it certainly inspired me. I saw that you can take big, powerful action against government and HS2 and be very disruptive. It was the start of a set of tunnel protests. There were quite a few major evictions in a row after this. I think each eviction costs around three or four million pounds. So it was quite successful, I think, as a protest.

Liz told Corporate Watch that activists saw HS2 workers deforesting large sections of the proposed route “as fast as they could”. Time and time again, they saw trees cut down in front of their eyes and Liz explained that this led to further questions about areas cleared that didn’t seem connected to route maps. Since HS2 is allegedly “meant to be a public infrastructure project, they’re not allowed to be seen to be profiting from the wood that they’re chopping down”.  But protesters still have questions about where “tonnes and tonnes of wood” from these trees went.

Desolation and displacement 

The recent injunctions are simply the latest in an ongoing wave of legislation pushed through by the government to build HS2. Although anti-Hs2 campaigners celebrated when the government scrapped the East Midlands-Leeds stretch of the route, this was only a partial victory. In 2017, it passed a Phase One Hybrid Bill to push ahead with the London to West Midlands section of the route. Phase Two a (West Midlands to Crewe) passed in January 2021 and Phase 2b (Crewe to Manchester) is currently going through parliament. Hybrid bills blend public legislation (which affects everyone) with private (impacting specific individuals or groups). Although used rarely, they create sneaky ways for governments to legally embed corporate destruction because they authorise compulsory purchasing, destruction of conservation areas or changing rights of way as part of major infrastructure projects.

Activists like Liz and Nancy, have seen first-hand the implication of these hybrid bills enabling corporations to benefit from a tax-payer-funded project, and the devastating impact of this legislation for home and land owners along the route. As Liz explained:

The hybrid bill is legislation that gives effectively gives HS2 their own set of laws regarding the construction of this huge mega project. It gives them the sort of ‘legal right’ to get the funding from the taxpayer and to circumvent certain practices (like ecological practices) that other companies or private citizens would have to abide by to get something done. 

A normal construction company would have to go by the rulebook, but the hybrid bill effectively gives them an excuse saying ‘they need to make this train line’ so anything that they want to do to make that happen, they can do.

Nancy continued:

And the other thing that the bill gives the right to do is compulsory purchase land. So this affects anyone unfortunate enough to live on the HS2 route or very close to it. And that’s another important thing to explain about HS2 – it’s such a massive construction project. Some people might think ‘oh, it’s just a train line – that doesn’t sound that bad’. But it’s huge. It’s got to be a certain width – I think about the width of Parliament Square at it’s narrowest.

Then along with all that they’ve got to build all the access roads, they’ve got to build compounds to store all their machinery, they’ve got to reroute other bits of road. And they’ve also got to build several factories, bentonite factories are one of the main ones. It’s not just little country train line, it’s massive. It also needs to be fairly flat. So in places where the land is high, they’ve got to make massive cuttings into hillsides. In places where the ground is lower, they’ve got to build viaducts for the trains to go along. You really, really feel how vast it is when driving around the Chilterns or Oxford areas. Because every road you go down, there are signs, traffic lights, compounds – its desolate.

A lot of people are now displaced. Some people have just had to move out of their houses. Some people have had little bits of their land taken off them… I’ve heard of someone who has a farm and HS2 now owns both of the access roads to it.

And then there are also houses in what’s known as ‘blight’. So if HS2 makes your house completely worthless, they have to buy it but then often end up renting that barn back out [to the previous owner] until it’s time to demolish it. Some people are just sort of left right on the fringes where they’re not in blight, but it’s certainly enough to ruin where they live, with no chance of any financial payment to compensate.

Tax-payer funded destruction

In terms of challenging corporate power, Liz told us that HS2 presented some unique challenges because it’s “a limited company which technically should mean it’s a private company. Mark Thurston [HS2 CEO] earns over half a million pounds a year… so it sounds like a private company but it’s fully funded by the government”. In fact, Thurston is also the UK’s highest-paid public sector employee.

Liz continued:

Essentially, the people that work in the top ranks of it are all civil servants but they don’t have the same accountability processes that an actual civil servant would.

Some of the companies that build HS2 are involved in many other big projects in the UK today. And four huge companies were merged to do some of the building contracts. Those are Eiffage, Kier, Bam Nuttall and Ferrovial. 

Liz said that activists have started to look towards other business ventures these companies engage in. “Kier,’ for example, ‘don’t only build terrible cheap housing, they build vivisection labs. And they are also involved heavily in the construction of the mega prisons planned in the next few years”. As Liz also pointed out, the scope for corporate profit from HS2 is vast and extends far beyond construction.

There’s one [company] called Fusion Fencing, which does all the enabling works for HS2. So whenever a site gets taken, or a compound is built, they’ll come and do all the fencing. The fencing contract is massive. I mean, along 107 miles of train line, that’s a huge, huge contract for fencing for the next 30 years, or something like that. 

And then there are the companies profiting from security. 

Another big contract is for Control Risks Group – the people that essentially supply security services for HS2. You’d wonder why a mega project that has been written into our history as part of the democratic will of parliament needs a security system? That’s something I’ve questioned, but they are running to the tune of about £140 million so far, which is quite an expensive security detail for a train line. Control Risks Group is essentially staffed by a lot of ex-military people.

As early as 2017, Control Risks Group secured contracts worth at least £64 million. The tender contract stated the work required involved “proactive area patrolling, close personal protection and management of locked on protesters”. It also stated the contractor was “expected to be insight led with gathering of insight forming a significant part of the contract”.

Nancy continued:

When you’re on the protest camps, you get to know the different security groups because they have slightly different uniforms. I don’t know exactly who employs specific people, but the lowest level security are ‘fondly’ known as the carrots, because they wear just orange. Then there’s the Black Onyx, they’re very ex-military, and they’re there to add more muscle and are more intimidating. And then you have the IRT who are sent in supposedly for the ‘hairy moments’. They show up where there are protesters, or even when [contractors] do something that they anticipate they will get protesters at – they’re there to forcibly remove people. And they wear all black.

 “A special place to be”

Despite exhaustion from continuous evictions and surviving onsite through all seasons, Liz and Nancy shared insights about the power of activist communities. “For me’ Liz said, ‘the camps acted like a huge flashpoint for so many things that weren’t necessarily just about HS2”.

I encountered conversations around patriarchy and conversations around trans rights, pronouns and land rights – things I’d not really discussed before in my ‘previous life’. It was a real melting point, a melting pot of ideas and ideologies and people in a special place. I met a group of nature defenders with such solidarity for what they were doing and for the campaign.

HS2 was a good follow on from the fracking campaigns. It was the next big culturally important set of camps and activist protests against big government infrastructure and big government plans.

Injunction, Injunction, Injunction

Following news of the injunctions, Corporate Watch caught up with Liz to see how HS2 activists felt:

It’s devastating. It’s completely devastating. They’ve got everything they wanted now, stated in proper case law. They already had legal standing through the hybrid bills and now the judge has given them complete impunity to basically create their own mini-state.

It’s worrying because this affects every campaign from now on. If parliament has decided something should ahead it’ll get the green light like the Rwanda policy or, new coal fields or, North Sea oil or, anything that doesn’t relate to net zero promises or the Paris Climate Agreement. There’s no scope for protesting against them because there’ll be deemed as in the public interest. 

The new injunction potentially threatens using Articles 10 and 11 in the European Convention on Human Rights (EHCR) (which protect the rights of assembly and free speech) as legal defences for protest. Essentially, injunctions like this strengthen Article 1 (A1P1) in the EHCR which protects rights to enjoy “property peacefully” because it prioritises HS2’s ownership of land on the proposed route. This is particularly offensive given how the property rights of the former owners have been destroyed by compulsory purchase orders.

As Liz noted, under this legislation “even slow walking has been completely made illegal. So something that was a tried and tested tactic is impossible to undertake” anywhere near the HS2 route. Liz added:

It seems that the judges dealing with this are not really not in our favour because they assume that parliament is acting in the best interest of all the people in the country. So it’s an uphill struggle to get legal systems to listen.

But Corporate Watch suggested that in some ways, the injunction is also proof that years of protest had a powerful impact – almost a backhanded compliment – to the campaign’s success. Liz laughed saying:

Well, that’s true! We know the reason that this injunction was granted was to stop an imminent threat of nuisance and disruption to the HS2 project. They were worried. The ‘endless guerrilla tactics’ is something that’s cited many times in the ruling. They thought we shouldn’t have the right to endlessly apply guerrilla tactics to HS2 and also that Articles 10 and 11 shouldn’t be limitless. But because of the way we behave, moving from site to site, because of how effective we’ve been disrupting and delaying, yeah, that’s why this has happened really: because it’s been working.

“Never gonna stop”

Looking to the future, now the site-wide injunction is in place, Liz said:

We have to find ways that we can feel good about the way that we move through the world. We’re never gonna stop doing the things that we think are important. I’m never gonna stop doing the things that I feel make a difference.

We just have to find new sneakier ways to go around and circumvent all these draconian rules that are being imposed on us.

 

Images courtesy of Screw You HS2 and Stop HS2

The post Tax-payer funded destruction: Activist reflections on HS2 appeared first on Corporate Watch.

We are in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. All areas of our lives have been permeated by technological interference. Agriculture, an inherently slow practice governed by nature’s cycles, has been particularly susceptible to technofixes – the use of technological solutions to address real or perceived problems. The most sought after technologies are those that promise to speed up those biological cycles and eliminate genetic variation for productivity and profit.

Here we look at technofixes specifically in the context of the UK dairy industry. The decline of this industry over the past 50 years has added to the pressure on farmers to incorporate dystopian technologies – that is, products which impose extreme levels of surveillance and control on living beings.

In this report, we set out the technological changes taking place in the industry and the corporate interests driving them, including:

• the intensification of livestock-rearing;
• the growth in the genetic uniformity of livestock, and moves towards gene edited plants and animals;
• total systems of tagging and tracking;
• the full automation of the milking process; and
• the use of technofixes to reduce the carbon footprint of the industry.

Despite some efforts to portray these technologies as beneficial to the animals, many in fact have severe implications for their welfare and freedom – as well as for our relationship with our food.

Dairy’s decline

The UK dairy industry is in trouble. People in the UK drink half the milk they did 50 years ago, and the image of the milkman delivering glass bottles to people’s houses is now largely a throwback to the past. Individuals are consuming smaller quantities of the white stuff, and growing numbers are abandoning it altogether.

Why? Changing tastes, the growth in alternatives, and rising disposable income are all to varying degrees likely to have influenced this shift.

However, the rise in veganism on environmental, animal rights or human health grounds has certainly been a factor in recent years. Besides concerns over significant land and water use, the meat and dairy industries continue to draw heavy criticism for their role in climate change – mainly through deforestation for animal feed crops and methane emissions from burping cows. Some scientists argue that avoiding meat and dairy is the “single biggest way” to reduce our impact on the planet.

Animal rights concerns range from the repeated impregnation of cows to produce milk, and the toll this takes on their bodies; the distress caused by the forced separation of mothers from their calves; the treatment of male calves, many of whom are shot at birth for economic reasons; and cows generally being treated as machines rather than sentient beings with their own desires. Finally, health concerns include the relationship between high levels of milk consumption and diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Meanwhile, the huge growth in alternatives has inevitably made ditching dairy more thinkable; a third of the UK population is now drinking plant-based milks – either alongside or instead of cow’s milk.

Another major blow has been Brexit, which has significantly worsened the outlook of the industry. Milk and cream sales to the EU were down a whopping 96% in the year 2020-21 – over twice that of the 40% overall decline in food and drink exports. Sales to the EU represented nearly 80% of the UK’s total pre-Brexit dairy export, and things are so bad that the government is planning a lump sum payment scheme of up to £100,000 for farmers wanting to exit the business.

In the context of this slow-burning crisis in reputation, demand and sales, many farmers have been turning to technological solutions.

The Rise of the Megadairies

Photo by Sebastien on Unsplash

Despite the declining market, there are still some 8,000 dairy producers in the UK. While the actual dairy cow population across the country has dropped by at least 28% since 1996, there has been a corresponding population concentration and an intensification in farming practices. The number of UK dairy farms with large herds has grown, while the number with small ones has shrunk. This is a pattern that is echoed across different livestock and cereals sectors. There has also been a “stealth rise” in the number of so-called megadairies – farms whose dairy herds number over 700 cows.

Yield has grown too: despite the fall in the overall number of cattle, farms have become more extractive, with quantities of milk produced per UK cow increasing 100% since 1975. This has been achieved through numerous technologies, the main being selective breeding and automation. Yet in an unending quest for productivity, these technologies are themselves undergoing major change.

Technofixes

From selective breeding to gene-edited animals?

Selective breeding has been one of the biggest factors behind this increase in milk production over the past few decades. Like all livestock today, the modern dairy cow is a very distant beast from her wild ancestors. Generations of human control over reproduction, particularly since the Agricultural Revolution in the 18th century, has ensured that cattle are produced with the most desirable traits for milk production – such as docile personalities and a high yield.

Selective breeding for particular traits using a very limited gene pool has resulted in extreme inbreeding. Virtually all the world’s Holsteins, a top dairy breed, descend from just two bulls bred in the 1960s. Due to the degree of inbreeding, although there are 9 million Holsteins in the US, their “effective population” stands at just 43. In the wild, animals with an effective population of less than 50 are classed as being at immediate risk of extinction. But this won’t happen to Holsteins, since the industry’s total control over their reproduction forces them to continually give birth.

In the UK, the rate of inbreeding has risen significantly since 1990. A 2004 study in the Journal of Dairy Science identified that between 96-98% of UK Holsteins were inbred to some degree, compared with around 50% in 1990. Yet there are clear limits to what this technofix can achieve: extreme selective breeding based on “productive” characteristics can in fact lead to lower productivity due to disorders and health problems.

Photo by Amber Kipp on Unsplash

If there wasn’t already enough interference in cows’ reproduction, a new and more disturbing development is on the horizon: gene editing (“GE”). This is a form of genetic modification which enables breeders to achieve traits not possible by simple artificial selection, for example, cattle that are faster growing, hornless, or disease resistant.

The use of Genetically Modified (“GM”) plants is tightly controlled in the UK and GM crops are not grown here commercially, though there have been trials. But that is largely a legacy of EU membership, and Brexit has shifted the goal posts. A European Court of Justice ruling had kept gene editing at bay on the continent by refusing to recognise a distinction between GE and genetic modification. Yet in the wake of Brexit, the government wasted absolutely no time in overturning existing protections, and in January 2021 it ran a “consultation” on whether gene editing should be treated more leniently.

Despite 88% of individual respondents supporting the continued regulation of gene editing as GM, the government announced regulatory changes on the practice just a few months later. It said it would “cut red tape and make research and development easier”. A “Precision Breeding” Bill is now going through parliament to provide a minimal regulatory framework for the research and commercial production of GE plants and animals. For the time being, this will allow scientists to carry out research on gene-edited crops in England with less red tape and expense. The government has also made it clear that in the longer term, there would be a “review of England’s approach to GMO regulation more broadly”.

According to Gideon Henderson, the chief scientific officer at DEFRA, engineered livestock will be next. Genetics companies such as Genus have been developing GE livestock for years, and powerful lobbyists such as the National Farmers’ Union are predictably pushing for its use. It doesn’t help that George Eustice – former UKIPer, best friend of the dairy industry, and current Agriculture and Environment Minister – is a strong advocate of the technology. The spin is already being spewed, with the government claiming that “gene editing has a vital role to play in helping address animal welfare concerns and reducing the carbon footprint of livestock production”.

Environmental groups emphasise the distinctive set of risks that gene editing carries to both the individual organism and the environment. For one, claims that it is a precise art have been strongly disputed. It can bring about unexpected mutations, and new or increased levels of toxins or allergens in plants. When US biotech start up Recombinetics used gene editing to produce hornless dairy calves, they also accidentally introduced genes from another species (bacteria which had been used to carry out the process), that conferred resistance to three antibiotics. It is feasible that these genes could transfer to disease-causing bacteria, rendering them resistant to antibiotics and potentially posing a risk to humans. The error was only picked up in checks by the US Food and Drug Administration, oversight which Recombinetics had vociferously resisted. And by that point the genetic trait is thought to have been passed down to the animals’ offspring, at least some of whom were subsequently culled. The project, initially heralded as a breakthrough for animal welfare with “no unwanted effects”, turned into a disaster.

Livestock genetics companies have catalogues featuring grotesquely oversized, specially-bred animals, such as the ones in these Semex magazines

Gene-edited hornless cattle are a clear example of how technofixes can be a means to profit from a “problem” that is itself manufactured by industry. In industrial agriculture, calves routinely have their horns removed with searing hot irons in a process known as “disbudding”. It’s an extremely painful and distressing procedure for the calf that can result in the animal losing consciousness. The rationale is to prevent cattle from injuring each other – and people – either during transportation or through their otherwise cramped and stressful conditions. GE hornless cattle are promoted as a solution to the hassle and pain of disbudding. But that “need” is entirely the product of a certain farming culture, and in many parts of the world farmers do not remove the animals’ horns at all.

Gene editing takes selective breeding to another level by allowing scientists to increasingly pick and choose specific genetic traits desired for mass reproduction. But as we’ve seen, artificial selection has resulted in dangerous levels of inbreeding. To paraphrase Friends of the Earth, whereas ecological resilience lies in species’ diversity, GMO science relies on predictability. Gene editing will only take us further down the disastrous path of uniformity with the added risks involved in manipulating DNA itself.

‘Robot-ready cows’

Over the course of the 20th century, hand milking was replaced by a combination of automated and manual processes. The total robotisation of the milking process has been growing since the 1990s, with 10% of UK dairy farms using fully-automated systems in 2019. In other Northern European countries, home to the leading suppliers of robotised milkers, the figure is double that.

It works like this: cows wear RFID chips, which allow them to be identified. Incentivised by the lure of food, they pass through checkpoints and either enter a single machine, or a stand in a large rotary unit. Robotic arms locate, sterilise, hose down and attach themselves to the cow’s udders. Sensors monitor the cow’s output, how much milk each teat gives, and whether there are any changes to the milk. After milking, the gate opens and the cow leaves.

Robotisation is claimed to increase yield and significantly decrease labour requirements. It is also presented as beneficial to animal welfare, since many systems rely on the cow entering the milking system ‘voluntarily’ to access food.

A rotary milking parlour. Image: dolgachov

Yet automation of the process is clearly not enough: the animals too must “evolve” along with the machines. Enter the “robot-ready cows”. These are cows specially bred by livestock genetics companies like Semex for traits best suited to being milked by a robot. Such traits include the “correct” udder shape and length to ensure a good fit with the machines, higher milking speeds, and pliable personalities. Animals who do not adapt well to this new conveyor belt regime are likely to be culled.

Why stop at extreme selective breeding and genetic modification? In the eyes of some agritech companies, hormonal cycles are fair game too. While injecting hormones to stimulate milk production is banned in the UK and EU on animal health grounds, some companies are using light to manipulate the animals’ natural cycles. The lighting reportedly influences their circadian rhythms to stimulate hormones and increase milk yield, as “the cows’ reproductive cycle must be tricked into resuming it earlier than is natural”. Kew LED and Dairy Light are two such companies in the UK marketing LED lighting in cattle sheds which can deliver “summer-light conditions all year-round”.

Sensors and shocks

Automated milking relies heavily on the use of sensors, truly the biggest fad today in animal agritech. Sensors are in the cowsheds, on the milking robots, in the fields, attached to the animals, and even in their guts. There’s now a plethora of startups competing to sell various forms of livestock surveillance gadgets, often promoted under the guise of animal welfare. From “facial recognition for cows” to bluetooth ear tags, these sensors monitor the animals’ movements, hormonal cycles, health and behaviour. Again, most of these factors are essential to achieving one key objective: a higher pregnancy rate. A sick cow is an unproductive cow.

Some startups have gone yet a step further: shock collars to control the movements of “free range” cattle. These are inevitably not marketed as such; instead they’re presented as a way of allowing livestock to graze in the fields and save on fencing costs. As the animal approaches the invisible boundaries determined by the farmer, the collar emits a sound. And if the cow doesn’t turn around, they receive an electric shock.

“Draw your virtual fence anywhere on your property, and your cattle are trained to remain within the virtual barrier”, says one supplier. The idea is that the area can easily be moved to cover fresh terrain by simply redrawing the map boundaries. Yet we can only guess at how much confusion this will cause the cows, as they tentatively navigate the edges of an entire perimeter in search of untouched pasture. This is to say nothing of the impact on their ability to run around as they would naturally. The lack of the usual visual clues could be disorientating for the animals, and as the RSPCA point out, some cows learn how to avoid the shocks far more quickly than others. A number never quite get to grips with how the system works, to their detriment and suffering.

Another danger of these technologies is that they’re invisible to people as well. The public will be unaware that free-range cattle in the fields may in fact be bombarded with sounds or electric shocks, and may object less to this practice than seeing farm hands with electric cattle prods.

A few taps on a farmers’ phone and automated feedlots can release more pellets, cows can be corralled, and udders can be hosed down from the comfort of the farmers’ living room. In many cases these things can happen entirely automatically, and the modern farmer need have very little real contact with the animals at all.

Will these gadgets have any beneficial impact on animal welfare as claimed? Automation will reduce contact with farmers, which can be stressful for the animals. But equally, being corralled and controlled by unseen machine systems such as virtual fence shock collars, is likely to be confusing and potentially even more distressing.

While some of the sensors also pick up on health problems, most issues detected will require human intervention. Given the severe impact of alienation on our relationship with nature (and each other), we have to wonder whether farmers who have less contact with their animals will have the same degree of care. Meanwhile, sensors will not be the magic bullet in disease detection. They can be unreliable and malfunction, while the growth in dependency on machines can potentially degrade the knowledge of farmers long-term.

Photo by MRC Témiscamingue on Unsplash

Low-emission cows?

Double-speak is rife on Dystopian Farm: from shock collars sold as necklaces of freedom and sensors merely monitoring the animals’ health, to ‘low-emission’ cows. Indeed, the environmental impact of the dairy industry is one more issue that technofixes claim to be able to reckon with.

Of all livestock, cattle produce the highest rate of greenhouse gas emissions by far (62% of the total emissions from livestock farming). Methane is over than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. While some people are opting to cut dairy and beef altogether, many scientists are developing technofixes to prop-up the industry. Zelp (Zero Emissions Livestock Project), a startup launched at the Royal College of Art, has developed cattle masks which convert methane to CO2. Cargill, agribusiness giant and animal feed provider linked to massive Amazon deforestation, will be the exclusive distributor of this “green” technology in Europe. Other solutions being explored in the UK include breeding cows or gene editing their food crops so that they burp less; while technologies currently being developed abroad include using gene editing to remove the predisposition towards certain gut bacteria, and even developing vaccines against their natural gut microbes.

Yet as Friends of the Earth point out, gut flora is essential to animals’ immune systems, and interference may have serious health implications. Rather than invest in education to influence food production systems and more ethical dietary choices, many researchers are choosing to put their money into the continued manipulation and exploitation of animals’ bodies. For some, the devasting impact of animal agriculture is merely another business opportunity. They know full well that despite the growth in veganism, meat and dairy consumers are still in the distinct majority, and it’s more profitable to sustain these industries – even through extreme technologies – than it is to invest in education and alternatives.

Conclusion

By monitoring and controlling their movement, their environment, their production and reproduction, their physical traits and even their personalities, corporations have attained truly totalitarian control over livestock.

Many of these technologies are no doubt effective in achieving their narrow, short-term objectives of increasing yield and profit. There is after all no shortage of eager entrepreuneurs – nor for that matter, venture capitalists willing to throw money at them.

But whether we actually want this dystopian picture is an altogether different question. Dominating nature begets problems, both for animal and human health. Milk production, circadian rhythms and genetic variation all exist for very important reasons, none of which relate to corporate profit. The full dangers of interference with these natural processes are still unknown to us, but the documented impact of extreme selective breeding on animal health and the tale of the gene-edited cattle should spell alarm.

Ditching meat and dairy, consuming local produce, working with nature’s cycles, supporting small-scale farming; many solutions to meet our food demand such as permaculture are slower, low tech, and won’t produce big bucks for start ups and their investors. But they’re often healthier, lower impact, and far more ethical. And crucially, they’re also within people’s reach, offering possibilities for autonomy from multinationals and their machines.

What can we do?

If you’re disturbed by many of the developments discussed in the article, there are things you can do. Go vegan, subscribe to a locally-grown veg box scheme, and participate in seed swaps to preserve genetic diversity. Get active in campaigns against animal abuse and GM. And participate in this year’s Earth First! summer gathering to learn more about active campaigns for environmental justice and animal rights, skill up, and get involved.

Corn in Mexico, where small-scale farmers are keeping the genetic diversity of the crop alive. Photo by ALAN DE LA CRUZ on Unsplash

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The final chapter in our 5-part series shining a light on major struggles against destructive mega-projects happening around the world, each involving companies with links to the UK. In focusing on campaigns involving these companies, we of course exclude many other important battles going on. For a more comprehensive list, see the Environmental Justice Atlas. If you would like would like Corporate Watch to carry out research in support of other eco-defence campaigns, feel free to get in touch.

Part one: Mountain Valley Pipeline, US
Part two: Coastal GasLink pipeline, Canada
Part three: Phulbari coal mine, Bangladesh
Part four: Adani coal mine, Australia

#5 The campaign against the Trans Mountain Pipeline

What is it?

In 2012, US company Kinder Morgan announced plans to construct a new oil pipeline to replace its existing Trans Mountain pipeline in Western Canada, and triple the capacity in the process. It would run parallel to the current line, pumping tar sands oil from Edmonton to Vancouver for export. Following massive opposition, the company suspended spending on the project in 2018. The Canadian government then stepped in, buying the pipeline for $4.5 billion and resuming the project.

What’s wrong with the project?

The pipeline would cross the territories of over a dozen Indigenous communities, threatening the health of the rivers which people and wildlife depend on. At the port, it would lead to a nearly 700% increase in oil tanker activity in the habitat of endangered orcas. The existing, much lower capacity line has seen dozens of oil spills over the years, according to Trans Mountain itself, a risk that will increase if the new line is built. The other major threat is to the climate. According to some studies, Canadian tar sands oil is associated with 70% more greenhouse gas emissions on average than conventional oil.

A tiny house in the making. Image from the Tiny House Warriors

How have people been resisting?

Resistance has included mass demonstrations, direct action and camps. Many legal challenges have been mounted, largely by Indigenous groups. Since the project was first announced, hundreds of people have been arrested, Indigenous land defenders have been harassed and subjected to trumped-up charges, and Trans Mountain has obtained injunctions to prevent protest at its sites. One example of the creativity of the resistance is the Tiny House Warrior movement, which has been building tiny mobile houses along the route of the pipeline in unceded Secwépemc territory. The structures also serve to provide accommodation to Indigenous families.

Pipeline construction is underway, but like all the contentious developments in this series, the project is delayed and the price tag has gone up considerably. The costs of the publicly-financed project have mushroomed from an estimated $7.4 billion to at least $12.6 billion. Campaigners are now targeting insurance companies, knowing that the project cannot go ahead without them. At least 16 insurance firms have stated that they would not underwrite the project, though Canadian insurance regulators recently accepted a request by Trans Mountain to conceal information about who it works with. Wet’suwet’en Solidarity UK have held protests outside Lloyds of London for providing insurance services to the Trans Mountain pipeline. The pipeline suffered another blow in September when campaigners succeeded in getting Swiss insurance firm Chubb to declare that it wouldn’t work on the project.

Main company

Trans Mountain Corporation, owned by the Canada Development Investment Corporation (CDEV), a state-owned company.

Other companies involved

Various oil companies, including BP and Total, have made 15 and 20 year commitments to ship the oil. Insurance has been provided by American International Group (AIG), Liberty Mutual, and other Lloyds of London insurers.

Companies with UK offices

BP, Total, AIG, Lloyds of London, Liberty Special Markets (which is part of Liberty Mutual). Click on the links for further company details and addresses.

For more information & ways to support

Tiny House Warriors, Tiny House Warrior legal defence fund, Stand Earth’s timeline of the pipeline, and Coast Protectors. To take action in the UK, see Wet’suwet’en Solidarity UK.

Image: Tiny House Warriors

Image: Tiny House Warriors

Protest at Lloyds of London. Image: Wet’suwet’en Solidarity UK

Image: Tiny House Warriors

The post Eco-defence & international solidarity: #5 the Trans Mountain Pipeline appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Part one: Mountain Valley Pipeline, US
Part two: Coastal GasLink pipeline, Canada
Part three: Phulbari coal mine, Bangladesh

What is it?

Indian conglomerate Adani have been trying to build a highly-controversial coal mine in Carmichael, Queensland (northeastern Australia) since first seeking approval for the project in 2010. Construction on the mine finally began in 2020. The project also includes the development of a 200km railroad to Adani’s export terminal on the coast.

What’s wrong with the project?

If completed, it will cause major damage to the land of the Aboriginal Wangan and Jagalingou, and Juru, Jaanga and Birri peoples. It would also consume precious water in the dry region, lead to significant coal shipping through the Great Barrier Reef, and add 4.6 billion tonnes of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Through the construction of a railroad to Adani’s export terminal, the project may pave way for at least eight more mines in the Galilee Basin area, which until now has been one of the world’s largest untouched coal reserves.

Image from Frontline Action on Coal

How have people been resisting?

The plans have met stiff resistance in a country which last year saw record-breaking temperatures, drought, and deadly bushfires that resulted in the destruction of nearly 30 million acres of land. Over 100 local groups nationwide have organised thousands of creative anti-Adani actions. Countless blockades and lock-ons have targeted Adani’s coal terminal, other train lines to the terminal, Adani’s railway line, access to the mine, equipment at the mine, contractors and more. Hundreds protested at British consulates in March to call on UK insurance firms Lloyds of London and Ark to abandon the project. May saw the ‘Tour de Carmichael’ bike ride, where participants visited Wangan and Jagalingou country to learn about their culture and see the destruction being done by the mineworks there.

The campaign has achieved many victories: 100 major companies have pledged not to work with Adani after sustained pressure. Adani’s stance has been aggressive in both tone and action, bankrupting one Wangan and Jagalingou elder following his unsuccessful legal challenge to the project. The Queensland government then simply extinguished the Wangan and Jagalingou’s native title over 1,385 hectares of their land and gave Adani exclusive possession of that area. Adani has also taken out a massive lawsuit against another opponent who the company is blaming for contractors’ withdrawal from the project.

Nevertheless, resistance to Adani’s mine continues and the project is reportedly now eight years behind schedule.

Image from Frontline Action on Coal

The main company

Indian conglomerate, Adani. Its Australian branch has recently been rebranded ‘Bravus’.

Other companies involved

Insurance has been supplied via the Lloyds of London insurance market, with pressure mounting against London-based Ark, one of the last Lloyds insurers not to have released a statement denying involvement. A number of other insurance firms, including some British ones, refuse to deny involvement.

Adani’s biggest investors are BlackRock, HSBC, State Bank of India, JP Morgan, and MUFG (Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group). Campaigners have recently turned their attention to the Bank of New York Mellon (BNYM) for its suspected financial support for Adani. See here for a list of investors who have pulled their money from Adani.

London-headquartered firm Ernst & Young are providing auditing services to Adani’s Australian operations. The mine’s building contractors appear to be mostly Australian, but other companies involved include Siemens Mobility, a Siemens subsidiary which is providing signalling equipment for the railway line. French outsourcing giant Sodexo has been providing hospitality and cleaning services for the railway construction camps. Meanwhile multinational engineering consultant BG&E has also been working on the line. Australian telecomms firm Telstra are believed to be providing communications services for the project. See here for a full list of companies who are suspected of being involved in the mine.

Meanwhile, the Science Museum in London has recently accepted sponsorship from Adani for its ‘green energy’ gallery.

Companies with UK offices

Lloyds of London; Science Museum; Insurance firm, Ark; BlackRock; HSBC; State Bank of India; JP Morgan; MUFG; BNYM; Ernst & Young; Siemens Mobility; Sodexo; Telstra; BG&E (click on the links for details of UK addresses).

For more information

Stop Adani, Frontline Action on Coal, Wangan and Jagalingou Family Council, Galilee Blockade and for more on the companies working with Adani, see Market Forces. See the Adani Files for more information on Adani’s legacy. In the UK, see the Coal Action Network.

Image from Wangan & Jagalingou Family Council

Action against London-based Ark insurance. Image from Stop Adani

Railway blockade. Image from Frontline Action on Coal

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