The ‘Pebble Mine’ would be the largest open-pit mine in all of north America: up to 2 miles wide and 500 metres deep; generating up to 9 billion tonnes of waste.  This waste would be stored in ‘tailing ponds’ (essentially earthen dams), measuring up to 3 miles wide, and 200 metres high. Perhaps of biggest concern is the fact that the mine would be located on top of salmon spawning grounds (where salmon return to, to lay their eggs).

The fishery provides jobs for some 10,000 people, with an annual economic value estimated at $450 million – Anglo American’s plans will put one of the world’s largest remaining habitats of wild sockeye salmon at great risk. 

The UK is the world’s largest importer of tinned Alaska salmon, importing 10,000 metric tons of salmon a year, worth on average over £30 million.  Some 40% of the global supply of sockeye salmon comes from Bristol Bay so we in the UK are ideally positioned to support this campaign.

For more information about the Bristol Bay campaign please click here.

Early Day Motion (EDM) 1606 is a ‘parliamentary petition’ setting out a series of concerns about the proposed mine. It calls on the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills to meet with Anglo American to express concern about the impact the mine will have on salmon stock and the local Alaskan environment.

The EDM comes as a result of ongoing discussions with local communities in Alaska and as a direct response of a meeting between Alaska Natives and Martin Horwood MP (Chair of the All Party Group for Tribal Peoples).

Please contact your MP to ask them to sign EDM 1606 by clicking on the “Take Action” link below:

Related posts:

1. Should the UK demand a voice on Transgenic Salmon?

The deal, if signed, could allow Tar Sands oil imports into Europe and give dramatic new powers to Europe’s multinational oil companies. It could trample over Indigenous rights in Canada and undermine a range of social and environmental legislation on both sides of the Atlantic.

The proposed Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), if completed as planned, threatens to undermine stricter Tar Sands regulation in Canada and stronger climate policies in Europe. Canada is already threatening to pull out of the trade talks if the EU doesn’t water down a key piece of European climate legislation – the Fuel Quality Directive.

Just as controversial is CETA’s ‘investment chapter’ that would grant Canadian and European companies the right to sue governments when environmental policies interfere with their profits. You can find out more about CETA here.

Rather than give more power to European oil giants, the UK Tar Sands Network is working with Canadian civil society and Indigenous organisations to demand that the CETA negotiations should be halted immediately, until the following concerns have been addressed:

1. Ensure public scrutiny and consultation

2. Keep Tar Sands oil out of Europe

3. No new rights for corporations

4. Social and environmental laws come first

5. Get European companies out of the Tar Sands

6. Respect Indigenous rights

To take action on this issue, write to your MEP by clicking on the Take Action link below:

Related posts:

1. Tell BP to Stay Out of the Tar Sands
2. Tar Sands
3. Not On Our Watch

At 200MW it will be one of the biggest in the world. It will blight the area for miles around with monstrous visual impact and increased HGV traffic, and its emissions threaten health.

It will accelerate world-wide deforestation by burning millions of tonnes of timber per year from all over the world (and earn its shareholders £ millions in subsidies from tax payers money in the process).

Scotland is committed to renewable energy and is making a terrible mistake in considering this carbon and energy inefficient monstrosity.

Objections have to be lodged by the 11th March 2011.

Please click below to send a letter of objection directly to the Scottish Government Energy Consents Unit.  Please feel free to adapt it to your own words, to express your particular viewpoint.

Related posts:

1. Halt Large Scale Biomass In Scotland
2. Biofuel Power Station (Southall)
3. Planning Application Rejected for Biofuel Power-station at Southall, London

Take action today. Tell BP’s brand new boss to get the company’s head out of the Tar Sands and move beyond dirty oil.

What are the Tar Sands?

The Tar Sands are deposits of bitumen, spread out under 140,000 square kilometres of pristine forest in northern Alberta – an area the size of England and Wales combined. They are the second largest oil reserve in the world.

We all know that burning fossil fuels exacerbates climate change, but oil derived from the Tar Sands is even more ecologically destructive than conventional oil.

Because it’s a low-grade type of oil, extracting it and turning it into usable petrol generates up to five times more carbon dioxide than conventional drilling. The amount of carbon locked up in the Tar Sands could be enough to tip us over the edge into climate catastrophe.

The local devastation is equally eye-opening. The strip-mining process requires the complete removal of the top-soil, annihilating the ecosystem and leaving something resembling a moonscape. It creates giant toxic ‘tailings ponds’ of waste which cover 130 square km. Deeper deposits of Tar Sands are melted out of the ground by injecting pressurized steam at high temperatures. This incredibly resource-intensive method uses twice the water and energy as strip-mining – including enough natural gas to heat 3.2 million Canadian homes every day.

Equally appalling is the way indigenous people have been treated by the Canadian government and oil companies. They have not been given the right to say “no”. Now, First Nation communities, such as Fort Chipewyan, are suffering rare forms of cancer which they believe are due to the pollution of their water by the Tar Sands.

How is BP involved?

In 2007, BP took the decision to move into Tar Sands in a big way. In partnership with Husky Energy, a Canadian company, it announced the “Sunrise Project”, an extraction project that could produce 200,000 barrels per day by 2012.

When the financial crisis hit and the price of oil crashed in 2008, BP put the project on hold – stating that they would re-evaluate that decision towards the end of 2010.

The Sunrise Project is, however, not the only Tar Sands venture BP have been exploring. Earlier this year, March 2010, BP sealed a deal with Devon Energy, which involved the US-based organisation running a Tar Sands extraction project on BP’s behalf.

A week later, it emerged that BP had won a $1.2bn bid for Value Creation, a failing Canadian company that has massive Tar Sands reserves.

The final investment decision has not been made on any of these projects. There is still time for BP to reconsider its position.

Tony Hayward, BP’s outgoing CEO, was instrumental in leading BP from its infamous “Beyond Petroleum” position to one that’s been described as “Back to Black”, which also resulted in the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Bob Dudley, BP’s incoming CEO, now has the opportunity to take a strong leadership position on Tar Sands, to stop the investment and stop the destruction.

How to take action

Use the Take Action button below to write to Bob Dudley to ask him to ensure BP does not enter the Tar Sands.

Related posts:

1. Keep Europe Out of the Tar Sands
2. Tar Sands
3. Not On Our Watch

In the past, empires collected various riches, boosting their economies and development. From Africa, South America and Asia, continents which are arguably ‘cursed’ with natural resource abundance, Europe has taken minerals, precious metals, fuels, timber, land and the endless fruit of diverse ecosystems. We have even mined these continents for their human resource, which fuelled the slave trade for more than two centuries.

This description does not scrape the surface of the list of riches – which should be shared – that the West has taken as its own. And by describing ‘riches’ I do not mean that humans should seek to ‘own’ and exploit the natural world, but we do gain from it and it does provide for us. Yet these provisions have been greatly skewed to favour some groups.

A highly readable description of the absurdity of the ‘First World Bank’ and ‘Third World Debt’ comes from Jay Griffiths, in ‘Pip Pip’:

‘The interest rates paid out far exceed the original loans, so the countries of the South pay for the North’s increasing wealth and power. Dirt-poor sub-Saharan Africa scrapes together a billion dollars a month in loan repayments, farming fertile fields to sell food to the overfed West all day, then, at dusk, scratching for the odd dry husk on the midden heap to eat themselves…’

She continues:

‘However, the ‘real foreign debt’ is quite the reverse, say the colonised, for between 1503 and 1660, Europe stole thousands of kilos of gold and millions of kilos of silver, which could ironically be described as ‘loans’ from the First Peoples of America. ‘Such fabulous capital exports were nothing short of the beginning of a Marshalltezuma Plan to guarantee the reconstruction of a barbarian Europe…’ says the ingenious Native American chief Guaicaipuro Cuautemoc in an open letter to all European governments, published in Resurgence magazine, asking them to repay the debt. Stating that they will ‘refrain from charging our European brothers the despicable and bloodthirsty floating rates of twenty or even thirty per cent that they charge to Third World countries’ they will demand only the devolution of all precious metals advanced plus a modest fixed interest rate which has accumulated over 300 years. ‘We inform our discoverers that they only owe us, as a first payment against the debt, a mass of 185,000 kilos of gold and sixteen million kilos of silver both raised to the power of 300.’ An amount ‘whose weight fully exceeds that of the planet Earth.’

While this letter is almost laughable in the current context, it speaks loudly because it is logical. We easily attribute colonial injustices to their historical context, to the past, to generations gone before. We feel little responsibility for them and forget them easily. Yet the ‘West’ – Europe and the US – charge debilitating amounts of interest on coldly calculated loans to developing nations.

For our ideal of a world full of cars, technology and an ever-expanding economy, we have chased and taken these riches. We have done this in the name of progress, but whose progress are we seeing? We know that this model is unsustainable, we have seen the destruction of cultures at the hands of this progress, we have seen ‘ecocide’ at the hands of our fuel-guzzling industry. We are now seeing (shock horror) our own lifestyles and lives threatened, as the Earth’s life-giving systems, run dry.

Yet the pilfering continues. We continue to extract wealth at our will. In the form of oil, for instance. Royal Dutch Shell extracts oil from Nigeria as Ogoniland experiences gas flaring, oil pollution, acid rain, but sees none of the profit. Oil pipes full of the valuable resource run literally through communities but then beyond them, only touching local people in the sticky pollution of their land and water.

Forests are burned and species exterminated throughout Asia, South America, and Africa, destroying the ecological wealth of local people, and replaced with ranches or monocrop plantations, used to feed our Western appetite for every kind of burger and shampoo.

Our hopelessly bottomless stomach for energy means that it occurs in new and creative ways. Each more extreme and arguably more damaging than the last. Take deep sea drilling, the tar sands (which has been coined the ‘most environmentally destructive project on earth’), and the latest ‘boom’ in biofuel production.

This ‘boom’, touted by Guardian Sustainable Business as the ‘unlikeliest opportunity’ revisits the African continent. The insensitivity is quite striking, as Chris Milton writes:

‘For starters, I thought we were no longer in favour of booms, because they led to busts and were therefore inherently unsustainable… companies and countries will sink money into projects in Africa because it has unparrelled financial returns on offer.  I’m lost .. how is it sustainable to creating a boom by chasing the best financial return?  I thought we’d learned that lesson. (Chris Milton, ‘The Guardian’s Sustainability Naivity’).

One of many other issues this false ‘boom’ creates is the phenomenon of people being forced off their land as foreign investors vie for the new gold – land – to plant crops to produce ‘renewable’ biofuel. What follows is water and food shortage, displacement of people, biodiversity loss and a deluded Europe believing it’s calling upon a sustainable resource. As food crops are foregone for fuel, again we see the progress of a few at the expense of many.

While Africa’s riches continue to be funnelled to the West, the countries of this continent pay billions each year in interest to rich countries. While Western countries make expensive demands of developing nations in climate negotiations, and charge cruelly high interest rates for financial debts, we forget that our policies contributed to the destabilisation of environments, cultures and whole nations. And that we are still the beneficiaries of such activity.

We are the real debtors, to the nations of the South, to the planet, yet no demands are made of us. Our energy-guzzling, consumption-driven society is fuelled by borrowed riches and is barely surviving on borrowed time as peak resource begins to bite. These ‘riches’ are making a ruin of us all.

Related posts:

1. European development of biofuels causing ‘neo-colonial landgrab’ and risks ‘high value natural ecosystems’, says report
2. Beyond Cancun – international climate policy outside the UN negotiations

Last month, Malcolm Gladwell published a piece in The New Yorker arguing that social media was preventing real social change taking place by encouraging what he termed ‘clicktivism‘ – a form of engagement and action based on weak social ties, rather than real-life activism based on strong ties.

Of course, Gladwell’s piece was mostly a straw-man argument concocted to earn him some column inches and boost his profile between book launches. And of course it generated a number of impassioned rebuttals from the social movement and NGO communities.

However, while Gladwell was wrong on most counts, the past week has started to reveal the faultlines within social media and activism.

Drawing on the fall-out from the student demonstrations in central London last week (for those wanting a back-story, see the LRB’s fantasic essay on why the government’s cuts are driven by ideology rather than economic necessity) we can argubly see clear limitations to the power of social networking and social change.

First of all, there was zero mobile phone signal for many students during the march which meant people were unable to live-tweet, live-blog or upload images and video in real-time. I’m not sure if there was an explanation for the outage, but it had the same effect regardless: people were unable to live-report and co-ordinate actions online from the heart of the demonstration.

And I didn’t see the Home Office intervening and encouraging mobile networks to fix any problems to cope with increased demand as with the ‘Iranian Twitter revolution’.

Secondly, the pitfalls of being a digital native became all to clear to students involved in potentially criminal activity whose actions were uplaoded to social networking sites and shared with the world – especially the media who had a field day harvesting and publishing photography and video of students engaged in direct action.The BBC reports in lurid – and somewhat pointless – detail about this while the Telegraph set up a distasteful ’shop-a-student’ section [No link, sorry. Refuse to]. As this was the first action for a lot of students, many failed to ‘mask up’ or conceal their identity.

Thirdly, once the media witch-hunt began and the police started rounding up suspects support and solidarity networks sprang to life via blogs and Twitter offering advice for people involved in the demo as well as  campaigning to raise funds for those facing charges.

However it would seem that the police are pretty good at spotting these websites – largely hosted on corporate blogging platforms or hosting providers – and pressuring the provider to pull the entire site. The most high profile example to date has been Fitwatch, a blog dedicated to reporting on the police Forward Intelligence Teams who take photos of people suspected of being linked to all manner of lawful protests and adding their profiles to a huge database.

Fitwatch (re)posted advice (widely available on the web) providing guidance on how to deal with the fall-out of the demo which resulted in the entire site being removed by its host, Just Host – purely on the say so of an acting detective inspector, Will Hodgeson, from the Met Police’s CO11 section.

As of tonight Fitwatch is still offline, despite the Guardian taking up their case.

So, while Gladwell argued that the “revolution won’t be tweeted“, he sadly might be closer to the truth then he intended – and definitely more than social change campaigners hope he is.

Related posts:

1. Social Media, Democracy and Activism
2. Clicktivism? Slacktivism? What’s going on with online activism?
3. Climate change – how can we be certain?

The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, and the Cancun talks are supposed to pick up where negotiators failed in Copenhagen, agreeing a set of policies and commitments from 2012 to 2020.

Many critics on both sides of the process believe it is too late to sign the world up to a meaningful agreement. Previous experience suggests the pessimists are right. Take the Kyoto Protocol, for example. The agreement took five years to negotiate, a further nine years to come into force and aimed to reduce emissions in a few countries by 5.2% over seven years. In contrast, negotiators now have one year to agree a far more ambitious global deal.

Talks start today (29 November), and expectations have been going downwards for some time. David Cameron said there would be no binding deal at Cancun, while UN Assistant Secretary-General Robert Orr said that negotiators should “make progress where we can on the issues we can”. “Progress” in this case might include agreements on forest protection, forest protection and technology sharing.

The deadlock will probably be between the China and the US, who together emit approximately half of the world’s greenhouse gases. China continues to insist the more developed countries should lead on reducing emissions, while the US wants developing nations to make cuts. In any case, solid commitments from the US look unlikely after Obama’s defeat in Congress this month.

So what other routes could climate policy take? Regional and sub-national agreements are one way in which the international community could move forward. ‘Governator’ Arnold Schwarzenegger has just finished hosting his third Governors’ Climate Summit, which aims to build agreements between sub-national governments. Over 100 regional leaders from the Americas, Asia, Europe and Africa met in California this month, and agreed to form the ‘R20’ – a commitment to forming 20 ‘Regions for Climate Action’.

One agreement to come out of the conference was a regional deal to cut deforestation between California and two states from Mexico and Brazil. This will use the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) model to create carbon credits. While this scheme is controversial (see previous post) it is interesting to see progressive regional governments agreeing to policies that national leaders could never make.

There are also a number of other opportunities available for international climate policy. For example, negotiators are now discussing using an older, completely separate environmental agreement to regulate greenhouse gases. The remarkably successful Montreal Protocol was set up in 1987 with the aim of controling and reducing ozone-damaging CFCs. In fact, the Montreal Protocol has had an unintended side benefit (beyond addressing the ozone problem) of reducing greenhouse gases 10 times more than the Kyoto Protocol, according to a 2007 study. And it could go a lot further.

For example, the use of ozone depleting HCFCs and CFCs has been replaced with HFCs in many cases. Unfortunately, HFCs also have a climate impact. One of the most common, HFC-23, is estimated to be 14,800 times more potent in causing climate change than carbon dioxide.

Parties to the Montreal Protocol are showing growing interest in phasing out HFCs under the treaty. Whilst actual action was blocked by China, India and Brazil in a recent meeting in Bangkok, the HFC issue will certainly be on the agenda next year. And the Montreal Protocol has a history of getting things done, in contrast to the grandstanding and horse-trading of the climate change negotiations. So watch this space.

So back to Cancun – maybe the painfully slow progress over the last two decades is telling us that the process isn’t working, and we need to look at alternative policies, fast.

One environmental NGO is asking the US not to attend the talks, so other countries can get on with the negotiations without being brought down by American domestic politics. Perhaps this is necessary to get an agreement at Cancun, but any agreement without the US is likely to fall far short of the inflexible demands of climate science. At what point do we admit that current political systems cannot fairly address climate change?

New ideas, such as using the Montreal Protocol, or subnational agreements, could break the deadlock. If failure at Cancun forces countries to explore such completely different approaches, then perhaps we should call that a success. It is the only success that looks likely.

Photograph by sarahjan_van.

Related posts:

1. Meat Free Monday
2. REDD – does money grow on trees?
3. Climate change – how can we be certain?

In this post I’d like to address the interesting idea this person (our own Arthur Girling) has described – the degree to which spreading of information on Twitter and Facebook constitutes ‘political participation’.

My assertion is that the conversations, deliberations and engagement that take place on social networks enhance the democratic essentials of freedom of information and public deliberation. Deliberation and engagement constitute the kind of ‘political participation’ which may drive positive social change, but are also desirable social outcomes in themselves.

The question is really “what do we mean by political participation”?

If we adopt a broad understanding of ‘political participation’ then clearly Twitter, Facebook and other social media, enhance participation levels.  If we adopt a narrow definition are we not blinding ourselves to new forms of expression which are a preferred medium of communication for large sections of society? Given that a substantial proportion of social media users typically fit within younger demographics, a narrow definition also borders on discrimination.

There is a media-induced moral panic every so often that there is a drastic decline in political participation and that people, particularly young people, are disengaged from politics. Lack of political enthusiasm is evidenced with figures on voter turnout, party membership and council meeting attendance.

Yes, membership of political parties may have fallen dramatically in the last few decades, but I would argue that there is not a lack of engagement, simply different, non-traditional channels for engaging that are invisible in these figures. Most importantly – perhaps people no longer relate to political parties but instead – as complex beings in a complex political landscape – identify with issues rather than a party line.

At the same time, perhaps the disengagement we are so worried about is a disconnect with the political process, with representatives and with the ability to influence outcomes.

Perhaps we are moving into a new era of politics that has begun with the election of a coalition government but that will evolve to enable us to tackle some fundamental issues with the current system.  For example, what happens when what you vote for isn’t what you get?  How can voters express a preference when there is no real choice between parties?  What happens if I agree with the some of the policy decisions of a particular party but not others?  How do I communicate that message using the current over simplistic system that only allows me to support one or the other?

Let’s go back to try to understand the angle our commentator was trying to take.  Perhaps what he was really trying to suggest is that there is a difference between having an opinion (very important), registering your opinion (also important), and the creation of real political change (most important?).

That is, does political engagement and participation in the form of the exchange of information, ideas and debate translate and fit into our current political apparatus and can it influence decision makers?

The answer is arguably “no”.  Even if we put aside concerns that Twitter, Facebook and friends just add extra babble to the atmosphere – and appreciate online debate not as a distraction but as a medium to deliberate on issues, share our thoughts and have our say – we still have a gap between the debate and the real decision-making.

But perhaps that is more the fault of an antiquated system that is run by politicians who are no longer in touch rather than an indication of public political apathy.  Politicians need to try to understand and actively listen to the views of the public irrespective of the channels the public choose to use to communicate.

Perhaps we could even go so far as to ask whether the conversations, deliberations and engagement that take place on social networks are being excluded because such conversations can’t be controlled, and often represent views that are so completely at odds with the current system.

There is a great deal of discussion around this topic at the moment – a recent charge by Malcolm Gladwell claimed explained ‘Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted’.

So how do we translate the conversations that happen on Twitter and Facebook and other social media platforms back into real and tangible change?

Watch the blog for more to come on this topic.

Related posts:

1. Social Media, Democracy and Activism
2. Activism, Clicktivism and the limits of social media in achieving social change
3. You’re not listening

This year oil companies have been the main target of environmental campaigns, following the Deepwater Horizon spill in the US. But last year’s climate villain might be making a comeback. A key election promise has been dropped, which could allow high-emissions coal plants to be built.

In 2009, campaigners won a victory against coal power plants when the government promised no new coal plants would be built in the UK without carbon capture and storage (CCS). Last week, Energy Secretary Chris Huhne announced £1bn to fund four new CCS plants.

When in opposition the Tories called for an ‘Emissions Performance Standard’ (EPS), setting maximum level of CO2 power plants can emit, effectively ruling out unabated coal. The EPS was originally intended to be part of the Energy Act 2010 – but in August, the government decided to cut this commitment. They are currently carrying out a consultation on the EPS that will report back in the spring.

In the absence of the EPS, there is a possibility that new coal-fired power stations could be pushed through without any CCS technology. What is more likely is that power stations will be fitted with CCS, but will only have a token amount of their emissions captured.

A planned coal-fired power station at Hunterston, Scotland, is one of the proposed test sites. It will only have CCS technology to capture less than 18% of emissions. The carbon capture process will also reduce the total plant’s efficiency by about 5%, according to developers Ayrshire Power.

This means that Hunterston is only fractionally more carbon-efficient than a normal coal power station, and will be working for 40 years. This contrasts with the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee, which estimates that power generation will have to be largely carbon-free by 2030 to meet emissions reduction targets.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) website notes that demonstration plants like Hunterston are “expected to” retrofit CCS to their full capacity by 2025, although if the process doesn’t work or is too expensive, it is unlikely that these multi-billion pound plants will shut down. It is more likely that they will continue to pour CO2 into the atmosphere.

Indeed, CCS is still unproven on a large, permanent scale – the emissions could escape, negating all carbon savings and possibly causing other environmental disasters. Incidentally, due to a strange loophole in planning regulations, it is impossible to make planning objections to Hunterston on environmental grounds – local residents can only give aesthetic reasons for their objections.

For campaigners, the battle against coal is far from over. ‘Clean coal’ might turn out to be the same old dirty coal, this time with a thin coating of greenwash.

Related posts:

1. Leaders Who Lack Conviction
2. REDD – does money grow on trees?
3. Planning Application Rejected for Biofuel Power-station at Southall, London

And, to developing nations, investment in Biomass makes complete sense because Biomass plantations are covered by REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).  For a Call4 perspective on REDD please see the Call 4 blog, “REDD:  Does Money Grow on Trees?”

Unfortunately there are the same problems associated with the burning of Biomass as there are with the burning of biofuel.

• Contrary to the views of industry, there is no scientific consensus as yet that biomass is a carbon neutral technology
• REDD clasification of biomass plantations means that countries like Brazil are able to receive (supposedly environmental) subsidies that drive the replacement of biodiverse rainforests with monocultures
• Eucalyptus has been identified as an “ideal” crop because as proudly recognised by EucalyptusFacts.org it “is among the fastest growing hardwood trees in the world, is grown in more than 90 countries and represents 8 percent of all planted forests”.  However the same site also acknowledges that “a large part of the global supply is concentrated in Brazil, with approximately 3.5 million hectares (a little over 8.5 million acres) in plantations”.  Eucalyptus plantations are helping to drive deforestation.

One of the problem’s with fast growing plants such as Eucalyptus is that they require a substantial amount of water to do so.  A key adaptation of Eucalyptus trees is that they have deep roots to help tap groundwater supplies.  Prolific use of Eucalyptus is therefore likely to not only reduce the water table but as a result draw up salt levels.  In effect, poisoning the ground.

• As with the manufacture of liquid biofuel, land grabs and human rights abuses are likely to be endemic
• Finally, at a local level, there are substantial potential health risks associated with the local pollution caused by biomass power stations.  Climatelab.org report that “because of incomplete combustion, biomass burning emits many chemicals such as small particles (also called particulate matter, PM), CO, NO2, Formaldehyde, Acrolein, Benzene, Toluene, Styrene, 1,3-Butadiene, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, etc.

But in fact, biomass may be even more problematic than the issues associated with Biofuel simply because there is less public awareness about the implications associated with, and the political opposition against, biomass.  For example, DECC (the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change) has just announced that it will provide a long term guarantee of support for biomass technology – at a set rate irrespective of whether or not that technology is viable in the future.  DECC (rightly) has refused to provide the same kind of support for Biofuel, in part due to public and NGO opposition.

DECC reports that industry believes there to be approximately “5GW of biomass plant in the planning and pre-build pipeline”.  DECC’s new policy will undoubtedly encourage the further development of a substantial proportion of that pipeline.  Indeed that is exactly the point of the policy – but the side effects may have a substantial and negative impact on deforestation and communities across the globe and the UK.

Time to get mobilised on Biomass?  We think so.

We’ll be running a few campaigns on biomass over the next few weeks.  Watch this space.

Related posts:

1. REDD – does money grow on trees?
2. Biofuel in our Petrol
3. No Leith Biomass Power Station