Category Archives: Environment

Arts, Books, Environment, History, Science

Book Review: Otherlands

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: A history of Earth suggests humanity will eventually perish – but new life forms will rapidly evolve to take our place

IF you were to dig deep below contemporary London gravel you would find among the clay astonishing fossilised remains of crocodiles, sea turtles and early relatives of horses.

They lived and frequented the earth in an era when London was “forests of mangrove palm and pawpaw, and waters rich in seagrass and giant lily pads, a warm, tropical paradise”.

More recently there was a time when, instead of carved stone lions built on plinths looking at people, real lions lived in what is now Trafalgar Square, gazing down on herds of elephants and hippos grazing beside a wide and meandering river.

This somewhat mind-boggling scene introduces us to the concept of “deep time”, explains Thomas Halliday, as he leads the reader on a mesmerising journey into those vast stretches of Earth’s pre-history that lie behind us. He does so on such a scale that you experience a kind of temporal vertigo just thinking about it.

Halliday is a Fellow in Earth Sciences at Birmingham University, but he is also a brilliant writer. His lyrical style vividly conjures a myriad of lost worlds from the patchy but sometimes startling fossil records. Each chapter takes us further back in time, to an older and more alien earth with every passing epoch.

It begins a mere 20,000 years ago, in the heart of the last Ice Age, and on the dry plains of Alaska: the eastern end of the awesome Mammoth Steppe, an unspoilt grassland that stretched all the way from the Americas across Russia to Ireland (sea levels being much lower then).

Over those plains roamed vast herds of herbivores: camels, bison, horses and mammoths. Camels were originally American which later migrated to the Old World over the Bering Strait.

The last mammoths survived until just 4,500 years ago, contemporaries of the Pyramids and Stonehenge, a small and increasingly inbred group on Wrangel Island near Russia.

Top predator of the Steppe was unquestionably the short-faced bear, which on its hind legs towered a metre above the three-metre-high shoulder of a mammoth.

But there were also humans around. We know this from “the footprints of a gleeful group of children, running through the ditchgrass into the mud of a chalky lakeshore, 22,500 years before the present,” and still visible “in the white sands of New Mexico”.

Imagine, then, what stories they must have told each other by the evening fire, sharing their landscape and territory with creatures including mammoths and short-faced bears.

APOCALYPTIC

By chapter three, we have dived back 5.33 million years to a truly apocalyptic moment. Then, the Mediterranean was sealed off from the Atlantic by a land bridge at Gibraltar, joining Africa to Europe.

The inland sea had evaporated, so where the Med now sparkles there was only a huge dried-out salt lake, in some places 4 kilometres below sea level, with temperatures down there reaching 80C – some 25C warmer than anything ever recorded even in the hotspots of California.

This burning saline desert was dotted with cooler volcanic island plateaus covered in cedar trees, and “a shrubland of pistachio, box, stooping carobs and gnarled olives”.

One day, a trickle of Atlantic sea-water began to seep over the top of the Gibraltar land-bridge, eroding the dry earth as it went, until the trickle became a stream, then a river – then an unstoppable cascade.

A mile high and several miles wide, the torrent roared over and dropped at 100 miles per hour, throwing up a “tumultuous cloud mist”, with the eastern Mediterranean becoming a sea once more in just one astonishing year.

Sicily and Malta became islands in that sea, populated by hippos, dwarf elephants and the Terrible Moon-Rat.

There are so many wonders here: a rock wall in modern Bolivia where dinosaur footprints climb gecko-like up a sheer vertical cliff, because the surface of the earth has tilted 90 degrees over 32 million years; beavers and hedgehogs, Asian arrivals, wiping out native European primates; the incredible fact that it was on huge rafts of vegetation riding the ocean currents that many animals, including monkeys and guinea pigs, travelled accidentally from Africa to South America, surviving an ocean voyage of at least six weeks on their uncertain craft.

Going back 550 million years ago, our world seems like another planet altogether.

Then there were animals so strange that scientists have named them Hallucigenia, and there was no North Star in the sky, nor a single star of the seven in Orion, nor brilliant Sirius. None of these familiar stars had even been born yet.

Journeying into the abysses of deep time in Otherlands will certainly make the reader feel very small and transient – a feeling both humbling and comforting – and surely reminds us that we pay too much attention to many of our own minor daily troubles.

Barring some miraculous and unprecedented effort of global cooperation, which seems rather unlikely at present, the world will rapidly head back soon to something like the swampy Eocene epoch of 50 million years ago, bringing a mass extinction of today’s flora and fauna (including us, unfortunately), and then, after a few more million years, a huge explosion of unimaginable new biological species better suited to this hothouse earth.

As the book’s subtitle aptly reminds us, this planet is still “a world in the making”.

Otherlands is a carefully and skilful choreograph of the earth’s evolution and has a very good chance of being shortlisted for Book of the Year. It is a stunning and exquisite narrative and the author deserves huge acclaim for it.

Standard
Britain, Energy, Environment, Government, Politics, Society

Why the energy crisis? We’re sitting on a gold mine.

ENERGY

THE crisis in the nation’s energy supplies has reached a level unseen for two generations. Nine firms have been liquidated so far this year amid soaring wholesale gas prices, while companies supplying around six million homes are said to be at risk of imminent collapse.

Millions of pensioners and the most vulnerable households now face untold hardship this winter, while others can expect their bills to soar far higher than anything they are used to.

For years now, successive governments have focused on renewables and other non-polluting energy sources as a means of addressing climate change.

DRILLING

The result is that Britain faces an imminent crisis in its energy security. And the worst part? This chaotic and alarming situation should have been wholly unnecessary.

More than 50 years since the first North Sea oil was struck, the British Isles remain surrounded by unexploited oil and gas reserves; while beneath the country’s surface lie layer upon layer of shale.

With careful and environmentally sensitive modern drilling techniques, these untapped gold mines of natural resources could keep our fleet of mothballed natural-gas generators fired up until long-lasting sources of greener energy have been secured.

In decades to come, Britain may well sustain carbon-free energy solutions at huge scale in solar, water and hydrogen. We could even, as Boris Johnson once colourfully put it, become “the Saudi Arabia of wind power”.

But until those technologies have been properly invested in, many fear we now face the prospect of the lights going out just as they did in the 1970s.

Quite simply, Britain must look for alternatives. If we do not, the consequences will be grave.

British Steel is warning that prices are “spiralling out of control” amid an unbelievable 50-fold increase in quoted rates for power.

Yet while the industrial fallout from the present crisis is obviously horrendous, the potential damage to households is even greater.

The current energy “price cap” limits the annual energy bill for UK households at £1,277.

As wholesale prices spiral out of control, the pressure on the regulator to raise the cap, or see the industry strewn with failures, is now almost overwhelming.

Without an eye-watering increase in the price cap of perhaps £400 (some 30 per cent or so), even the biggest players such as Centrica, owner of British Gas which has more than 12 million customers, could be under enormous pressure.

Fixated on “net zero” as part of his political legacy, fresh from delivering his address on Climate Change to the United Nations last week and looking forward to strutting the global stage at COP26 in Glasgow, Boris Johnson has clearly failed to understand the risk to the country of relying excessively on energy purchased from abroad.

It ought to be obvious that surrendering our energy needs to the Moscow-controlled Gazprom (a huge gas supplier to Europe) and a ghastly collection of Middle-East potentates has been a grievous error. Making matters worse, a serious fire on a key undersea electricity cable from France has further limited supplies and shown the value of a reliable domestic source.

So, what are the alternative technologies that the Government should now urgently be exploring to prevent this crisis from worsening still further?

Like many in Scotland, I am sympathetic to the green objections to fracking, from despoiling of country roads to potential earth tremors in nearby urban areas, I would prefer we avoid that path if possible.

Nevertheless, we should not overstate its dangers, and we should certainly not fall victim to untruths about “earthquake” risks and other lurid allegations.

In 2017, for example, the advertising watchdog rapped environmental charity Friends of the Earth for a “misleading” leaflet that claimed fracking can cause cancer.

Meanwhile, one only has to look across the Atlantic to witness the vital strategic gains that can be reaped from regaining a measure of energy independence.

Having risen steadily for 30 years, American imports of oil are now negligible thanks to the fracking revolution, as the process releases oil as well as gas.

Washington, therefore, enjoys somewhat greater freedom in its relations with the dictatorships of the Middle East, and is no longer beholden to those who control the rivers of cheap oil that flow from Arabia’s desert sands.

EXPLORATION

When the UK Government halted fracking in November 2019, it made clear that this was a moratorium, not a permanent ban. If ever there was a moment to rethink this pause, it should be now: especially given that the evidence suggests the “earth tremors” from exploration were far less than originally measured and also confined to a much narrower area than was claimed.

But fracking is only one possibility. A less intrusive way of bringing oil and gas to these shores might be for Boris Johnson to license applications for development of the Cambo field situated some 75 miles to the west of Shetland. This contains more than 800 million barrels of oil as well as considerable potential gas deposits.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer may come to regret his opposition to the drilling, which would have created a reported 1,000 jobs, on “carbon emission” grounds.

Similarly, a new modern and safer coal mine in Cumbria has been held up despite the willingness of investors to plough more than £150 million into the project. Instead, coal imports to Britain have been soaring – up 45 per cent in the first quarter of 2021 on the same period last year, to a total of 1.5 million tonnes. Some 60 per cent of Britain’s imported coal comes from – where else? – Russia.

ALARMING

One of the best ways of rapidly delivering a greener and more secure energy supply would be for the Government to commit far bigger sums of money – perhaps as much as £1 billion rather than the £215 million already earmarked – to speed up Rolls-Royce’s plans for “miniature nuclear plants”.

The engineering giant has announced plans to build up to 16 of these so-called “small modular reactors”. Rather than spending decades building huge and inordinately expensive plants such as Sizewell and Hinkley Point, the smaller plants are assembled from “modules” in factories, thanks to technology that is already used in the nuclear turbines that power the Royal Navy’s submarines.

Sure, most sensible people want to see Britain and the world’s carbon emissions fall for the sake of generations to come.

But sacrificing our prosperity and the health and comfort of our people on vociferous green arguments alone – when technology exists that renders this entirely unnecessary – would be unforgivable.

Standard
Britain, Climate Change, Environment, Government, Politics, Society

The urgency of the IPCC climate report

CLIMATE

AGAINST a backdrop of orange skies, as vast wildfires sweep through Greece and California, the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published. In western Germany, thousands of homes remain without running water or other vital utilities following the devastating floods of July. In the Siberian city of Yakutsk, deemed the coldest winter city on earth, residents were warned last month to stay indoors as forest fires filled the air with acrid and toxic smoke, following extraordinary heat waves that began in the spring.

The IPCC’s report which took eight years to compile, and which was authored by the world’s leading climate scientists and approved by 195 national governments, confirmed the meaning of the evidence before our eyes: the cumulative impact of human activity since the Industrial Revolution is “unequivocally” causing rapid and potentially catastrophic changes to the climate. The predictions that environmental scientists foresaw with such alarm when the IPCC produced its first report three decades ago has arrived.

Without an accelerated reduction in greenhouse gases during the next decade, the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit global heating to 1.5C will not be met. The price of failure will be a world vulnerable to irreversible and exponential effects of global heating: there will be worse floods more often, more frequent heatwaves, devastating and repeated droughts, and an increase in mortality through disease.

The science is irrefutable. Less certain is the political will to act upon it. The burden of responsibility upon this generation of world leaders as humanity finds itself at a fork in the road is immense. The decisions and actions taken or foregone during the next 10 years will define the parameters of what is possible for future generations. A step-change is required, but across the world green rhetoric continues to translate into policymaking at a pace which is fatally slow. China has committed to the target of net zero emissions by 2050, but it continues to build coal-fired power stations both at home and abroad. Along with the top carbon-emitters such as Russia and India, it refused to endorse the 1.5C goal at an April summit convened by the American president, Joe Biden. As Mr Biden’s special envoy for climate, John Kerry, has said, if countries such as these cannot be persuaded to enact faster reductions over the next decade, the target looks unachievable.

Whilst this treacherous turning point in history must be dealt with, Britain finds itself both uniquely placed and unprepared to host the crucial Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. The government’s climate minister and Cop26 president, Alok Sharma, has tried to use the IPCC report as a means of concentrating minds. Speaking in the last few days, he said that the world was almost “out of time” in dealing with the effects of global heating. Yet, ahead of arguably the most important summit held on British soil since the second world war, delay and equivocation have become the government’s trademark response to the greatest challenge of our times. The publication of a net zero strategy, which had been due in the spring, has been delayed until the autumn amid fears over the possible cost. Some backbenchers have also begun to lobby for a slower transition, based on the false presumption that poorer families will disproportionately bear the burden of change.

It is imperative that a fair transition to net zero is set. With the right forms of intervention and subsidies, it is eminently achievable. The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us that the most daunting challenges can be met by political leaders who recognise that exceptional times require exceptional measures. Thus far, though, there is little sign that Boris Johnson’s government is willing to treat the climate crisis in the same way. The stark conclusions of the IPCC study, and Britain’s vital convening role at Cop26, make that position untenable. The science is unequivocal. The verdict is clear. There is no more room for political manoeuvring, delay or prevarication in dealing with an emergency which is this generation’s responsibility to address.

Standard