Category Archives: Environment

Arts, Books, Environment, Literature

Climate fiction is extolling the real threats the planet faces

LITERATURE

Intro: A newly created award recognises the power of storytelling to address the biggest issues of our time

PAUL MURRAY, author of the bestselling novel The Bee Sting, told a media audience recently that no novelist should ignore the climate emergency: “It is the unavoidable background for being alive in the 21st century.” In recognition of the essential and vital role of literature in responding to the Anthropocene moment, the inaugural shortlist has just been announced for the Climate Fiction prize.

The five novels include “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey, set during one day on the International Space Station (and the winner of last year’s Booker prize); time-travelling romcom “The Ministry of Time” from debut novelist Kaliane Bradley; eco-thriller “Briefly Very Beautiful” by Roz Dineen; “And So I Roar”, about a young girl in Nigeria, by Abi Daré; and a story of migrants in an abandoned city in Téa Obreht’s “The Morningside”. All the shortlisted authors are women.

Climate fiction is not new. Some of the landmark literary novels to have taken on the crisis include Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam dystopian trilogy, Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, and Richard Power’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Overstory. Science fiction, inevitably, has become the genre of ecological catastrophe, with hits like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future”, with all the inhabitants of a small Indian town perishing in a heatwave.

The late Ursula K le Guin wrote that the task of sci-fi was “to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire”. The purpose of the realist novel is to reflect the world in which we live. For a long time, the possibilities of environmental breakdown were largely considered too wild and extreme for the realism. As a consequence, climate fiction hasn’t been taken seriously enough. In “The Great Derangement” in 2016, Amitav Gosh argued that the failure of so many novelists, including himself, to address the most urgent issue of the age was part of a broader cultural failure at the heart of the climate crisis itself.

Freakish and abnormal weather events are no longer the essence of speculative fiction – “global weirding” is upon us. What was once dubbed “cli-fi” is simply contemporary fiction. Ecological anxiety is as much a part of the fictional worlds of a young generation of novelists like Sally Rooney as the internet and mobile phones.

The novels on the Climate Fiction prize shortlist do not conform to dystopian stereotypes. Some aren’t even explicitly about the crisis. Some are hopeful. Far from being a portrait of a world ravaged by disasters, Orbital, for example, is a hymn to the awe-inspiring beauty of our planet.

It could be argued that having a Booker prize winner on the shortlist suggests there is no need for a specific award, which might marginalise climate fiction as a niche genre. There is no shortage of literary gongs. “The Wainwright prize”, set up in 2014 to celebrate the best nature books, now includes an award for writing on global conservation.

Yet awards amplify the message and reach of books that might otherwise be overlooked. Scientists have been cautioning about global warming’s dire consequences for decades. Governments and industry haven’t listened. Now novelists are taking up the challenge. Stories can create an impact far greater than data alone. They can inspire change. In a world where reality has become stranger than fiction, this new accolade is necessary and important. There can be no bigger story.

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Britain, Economic, Energy, Environment, Government, Politics, Society

Great British Energy risks decimating energy security

UK ENERGY POLICY

KEIR Starmer’s aspirations for a carbon-free and energy-secure nation fulfilled at a stroke through the creation of his new quango, Great British Energy (GBE), is at odds with the reality of the situation.

The UK would, of course, welcome a green and pleasant land with cleaner air, lower carbon emissions, cheaper fuel bills, and a reduced dependence on Vladimir Putin and his gas pipelines that run from Russia to the West.

But the truth is the creation of GBE will deliver few, if any, of the bold pledges that Sir Keir Starmer and his Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, are making.

In the King’s Speech, Sir Keir’s new government confirmed that GBE, the state-owned energy company, will develop, own and operate energy projects such as wind farms, using public money to help spur further private sector investment.

But the £8.3billion of money promised by the Exchequer for Britain’s energy transformation over the term of the current parliament will be a mere drop in the ocean.

In spite of the overblown language, this is a fraction of the sums of money already devoted to “climate reduction” goals by our UK-listed oil firms Shell and BP, as well as domestically owned power suppliers Centrica and Scottish & Southern Electricity (SSE).

Some argue it is reassuring that GBE will be headed up by Juergen Maier, the former boss of German multinational Siemens’s British arm, who might bring some much-needed private-sector experience to the job.

What is less reassuring, however, is the disastrous financial performance of Siemens Energy. It ran up losses of £3.7billion in 2023 alone. Combined with the desperate track record of past Labour governments to command and control the economy through grandiose quangos such as the National Enterprise Board of the 1970s, it looks almost inevitable that GBE will become yet another vast black hole, drawing vast public cash at the expense of other strained public services.

Most critically, by blocking future North Sea oil licences, as Starmer has done, and holding fire on the prospects for new nuclear production, the nation’s energy security is being sacrificed in order to pursue unproven green energy “solutions”.

In doing so, the UK is exposed to the danger of factories being closed, the elderly and poor freezing in their homes, and the lights going out when the wind fails to blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

It is also critical that the UK can maintain a minimum level of electricity production at all times – especially if the Government pursues a mad rush towards electric vehicles which, in many cases, are proving notoriously unreliable.

That is why Centrica-owned British Gas is investing heavily in renewing the nation’s gas storage capacity at Rough off the East Yorkshire coast and exploring other potential sites in Wales.

Not to mention that Starmer and Miliband appear willing to trash 100,000 North Sea oil-related jobs, sabotage Aberdeen, and lose £30billion of new investment in fossil fuels, and the engineering services which go with them, to drive the “green revolution”. Labour believes that by signing an agreement with the Crown Estate – which has command over most of the nation’s coastal waters – it can generate £60billion of new investment. The link to the monarchy alone could potentially attract some foreign investors on the grounds of offering a kind of royal imprimatur. But we shouldn’t get carried away by Labour’s hoopla.

The Crown Estate has much more skill and expertise on redeveloping real estate, such as Dumfries House in Scotland, than it does in energy projects. Despite its prestigious reputation, the Crown Estate’s new agreement with Labour, is at the hands of hard economic facts. The only thing that will attract investors is a competitive entry price. If the price at which energy generated at the offshore windfarms can be sold is set too low to make the projects viable, it will deter bidders.

We learnt this the hard way in a crucial auction last year, when not a single company bid to run a new offshore wind farm. That was because the Tory government had set the energy price too low. Even more seriously, a major proposed investment off the Norfolk coast was temporarily put on hold.

The same thing happened in the US last year when Ørsted cancelled £3.3billion of wind projects because it could not make the financial returns.

Earlier this year, BP also pulled out of its involvement in New York state wind farms – at a heavy cost to investors – because of the difficulty of getting decent returns.

The ultimate goal in all of these wind farm projects may have been lower prices for consumers. The reality is that only by offering a higher energy price to investors will they come forward – and the projects be built. It’s an uncomfortable truth for Labour, who want to be seen to be providing the cheapest energy possible to its citizens.

They have been repeatedly questioned about when, or even if, their “Green New Deal” would deliver lower prices for consumers, but Labour have been unable to answer. So much for cheaper bills and the election manifesto pledge that consumers would be £300 a year better off.

A secondary aim of GBE is to boost our manufacturing sector, creating new skills and employment opportunities to replace those in fossil fuels.

Certainly, this is a perfectly noble aim. But in Britain, we have already sold ourselves out. Most of the solar panels being installed on the roofs of homes and factories across the UK are being built in China at a fraction of the cost they can be made in the UK.

One only has to look at how Beijing is dominating the market for electric cars – and the 50 per cent tariffs imposed by the US and Europe to slow imports – to understand how difficult it is going to be to compete with Asian production.

There is also evidence that Chinese suppliers of wind farm equipment are using cheap Uyghur labour to manufacture wind turbines. It will be all but impossible for UK manufacturers to compete (currently responsible for less than 10 per cent of wind farm components).

There is one area of green technology where Britian does have a competitive quality and engineering advantage. Rolls-Royce, with the assistance of government funding, leads the world in the development of “small modular reactors”. These are mini, simple-to-construct nuclear reactors based on the turbines that power nuclear-powered submarines.

Rolls-Royce believes it is capable of capturing a £250billion global market if it receives the go-ahead from Whitehall for UK production. The Czech Republic has already expressed an interest in buying them.

Tens of thousands of real jobs – not the Potemkin quango roles envisioned by the UK’s new Government – are there to be created.

We can only hope for the success of Great British Energy and the zero-carbon nirvana envisaged by our mission-driven Government.

But there are huge fears in creating a taxpayer-funded white elephant which will decimate our energy security.

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Arts, Books, Environment, Nature

Book Review: Hedgelands

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Hedges are humble habitats that are a lively host to much wildlife – a secret safari providing a plethora of environmental benefits

THE humble and often-neglected British hedge, is described by author Christopher Hart as “an incredibly porous and self-sustaining feature of our countryside . . . one of the happiest accidents in human history.” It hums with bees and butterflies, is a rich haven for insects, birds, hedgehogs, shrews, voles, and bats, and also acts as a windbreak, stock fence, flood defence system, and an environmental barrier against soil erosion. The RSPB agrees; its research shows that hedges may be supporting up to four-fifths of our woodland birds, half of our wild mammals, and a third of our butterflies.

Hedges have been a feature of the British landscape since the Stone Age. The original ones were “dead hedges”, made from piles of branches and brushwood collected from cleared areas of woodland.

As the wood rotted, it was swiftly colonised by fungi and insects. Passing birds excreted seeds from trees and shrubs – such as hazel, oak, ash, hawthorn, dog rose, blackthorn, and bramble – which soon started sprouting in among the dead wood. From there, a living hedge was born. (A hedgerow, if you were wondering, is a hedge that includes features such as banks, trees, walls, fences, or gates.)

Our ancestors soon learned the best way to deal with an unruly hedge: by cutting half-way through a rising trunk and then to lay it back into the hedge sideways. In time, this creates a barrier so dense and tough that it can even hold back an amorous bull trying to get into a field of cows.

Yet as Hart rightly points out, these ancient hedges are much more than just a physical barrier. They mitigate flooding and soil erosion and give many animals an invaluable source of shelter from precipitous conditions. A hedge will protect smaller birds and mammals from predators like crows, magpies, sparrowhawks, and foxes – a dense hedge is difficult for predators to access and manoeuvre. This “narrow but incredibly complex ecosystem” is also an abundant source of food for wildlife, providing hips, haws, sloes, and blackberries for them to feast on.

Many of the countryside hedges we see today pre-date the Georgian era, some even being Anglo-Saxon. In a county like Devon, where the land is suited to sheep and cattle and less likely to be ploughed, at least a quarter of the hedges date back to Norman times.

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THERE are strong regional variations in Britain’s hedges. In the Midlands, traditionally cattle country, hedges tend to be mainly hawthorn, which is an excellent barrier to bullocks. The high rainfall in Wales and Ireland is just the thing for blackthorn, which happens to be a handy plant for snagging and restraining sheep.

The Somerset Levels typically have hedges made of osier, a small willow tree, while in Kent and Worcestershire you’ll find hedges of beech, poplar, and elder which tend to grow tall to protect prized orchards from the wind.

By 1820, there were 700,000 kilometres of hedges in England (and many more in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). Today the figure is 400,000 which still sounds impressive, but many of these hedges are so degraded that they have become “little more than a blunt, dwarfish lined of scarred and wind-scoured stumps”, as Hart writes despairingly.

On arable land, hedges are often seen as an obstacle for tractors, while on pastureland, farmers find it easier to put up a barbed wire fence than have a hedge separating livestock. Hart is sympathetic to farmers, who are not “the cartoonish villains of the countryside but, rather, hard-pressed food producers just trying to stay in business”.

But there’s no denying that replacing a bountiful hedge with barbed wire is a disaster for wildlife, which results in “no wild foods, berries, nuts, wild greens, or herbs . . . no shelter or habitat for birds and mammals, [nor] beneficial pollinators and insect predators.”

THREE

MOST of the damage to the country’s hedges was done from the 1960s onwards when, incredibly, government actually offered subsidies for their removal. After 1973, the EU’s damaging Common Agricultural Policy was even more zealous in paying farmers to destroy ancient hedges.

If all this sounds depressing to anyone who cares about the countryside and its wildlife, Hart offers some practical solutions. Many hedges in private gardens are a single variety, like privet or beech; the author suggests that you rewild yours, by weaving honeysuckle and brambles through your hedge, making it far more attractive to insects.

And if you leave a little verge around the bottom of your hedge, all sorts of wildflowers might pop up, from orchids and buttercups to cow parsley and bluebells.

Above all, we are urged to cherish our existing hedges. Instead of spending a fortune on planting millions of new trees, which Hart says are “of low ecological value”, he would like the Government to allocate a fraction of that money to restoring hedgerows.

With better management of hedges, “we might not need to worry so much about insects disappearing, bird numbers falling or our targets for carbon capture. Our lovely native hedgerows would do much of the work for us, if we only look after them.”

Hart has his own 300 yards of “beautiful, unkempt, pullulating hedgerow” at his home in Wiltshire, and he has seen for himself how endangered birds such as redwings and fieldfares will eagerly flock to a hedge which provides nutritious wild berries for them.

Christopher Hart has written an eye-opening and inspiring book which will leave the reader with a deep appreciation of these wonderful habitats – and perhaps a desire to create their very own hedge. As he says: “You don’t need to go to the Serengeti to see amazing animals. You just need a good thick hedge.”

– Hedgelands by Christopher Hart is published by Chelsea Green, 208pp

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