Are Canada's sustainable forestry claims accurate?

Following new allegations from the BBC that a UK power station is "burning wood from some of the world's most precious forests" in British Columbia, Bertie speaks to Richard Robertson about Canada's forestry sector.

Richard Robertson is a Forest Campaigner at Stand.Earth, and recently contributed to a report prepared by numerous NGOs, which accused the Canadian government's own forestry report of being “akin to an industry ad, promoting questionable and misleading claims.”

Bertie and Richard discuss these findings, the biomass industry, certification and regulation, and whether Canadian forestry deserves its leading reputation.

Further reading: 

• Read the report by Canadian environmental organisations:  The State Of The Forest In Canada: Seeing Through The Spin
• Read the Canadian government's own report, which the new publication responds to: The State of Canada’s Forests
• Read Stand.Earth's report about their old growth satellite monitoring tool: Forest Eye: An Eye on Old Growth Destruction
• 'Drax: UK power station still burning rare forest wood', BBC, 28/2/24

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

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As the EU butts heads with the UK over fishing policy, Bertie speaks to Steve Trent, CEO of the Environmental Justice Foundation, to get a more global overview of fishing regulation and its importance to environmental and human rights.

They discuss past and future EU policy and its impact in South East Asia, and use Thailand as a case study to discuss the issue of durability with environmental reform. The Thai fishing sector's reliance on forced labour and overfishing reduced dramatically in the 2010s, but reforms may now be overturned.

Further reading:

• 'Europe already has the tools it needs to end forced labour', Land and Climate Review, 2023
• 'Civil society urges Thai government to stop deregulation of the fisheries industry', Environmental Justice Foundation, 2023
• Thailand’s progress in combatting IUU, forced labour & human trafficking, 2023
• The ever widening net: mapping the  scale, nature and corporate structures of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing by the Chinese distant-water fleet, 2022
• A manifesto for our ocean, 2023
• 'Denmark and Sweden press Brussels to act against UK in fishing dispute', Financial Times, 2024

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

Find more podcasts and articles at www.landclimate.org

This week, the EU's Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra warned that "You cannot magically CCS yourself out of the problem". But the new policy he was presenting that day still called for 280 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to be permanently stored underground.

The extent to which carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology should be a part of climate planning is contentious, but advocates often point to Norway's long-running CCS plants as proof that it can work.

Are Equinor's North Sea gas field facilities the gold standard for successful CCS, or have they had issues too? Last year, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) published a report exploring that question.

Bertie spoke to the report's author and IEEFA's Strategic Energy Finance Advisor for Asia, Grant Hauber, to hear about his findings.

Further reading: 

• Norway’s Sleipner and Snøhvit CCS: Industry models or cautionary tales?, IEEFA, 2023
• Blue hydrogen: Not clean, not low carbon, not a solution, IEEFA, 2023
• 'Carbon capture key to reaching net-zero, but climate chief urges caution', Euronews, 7/2/24
• 'What is happening with Carbon Capture and Storage?', Land and Climate Review, 2022
• 'Why Carbon Capture and Storage matters: overshoot, models, and money', Land and Climate Review, 2022
• 'Capturing and storing problems', Land and Climate Review, 2022

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What are the impacts  of new flying technologies? Are policymakers and the aviation industry taking the right steps to avoid global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees?

Alasdair speaks to Dr Daniel Quiggin, senior research fellow at the Chatham House Environment and Society Centre. Dr Quiggin is an expert in the analysis of how national and global energy systems will evolve to 2050 and author of recent research on Net zero and the role of the aviation industry.

Further reading:

• Net zero and the role of the aviation industry, Chatham House, November 2023
• 'First net zero flight takes off but decarbonisation remains on runway', November 2023

Link to the Chatham House webinar on the research:
3pm GMT on Wednesday 31st January 2024

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

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Bertie speaks to Agathe Bounfour, Oil Investigations Lead at Transport and Environment, about her investigation into the fossil funded research group CONCAWE.

The investigation revealed that CONCAWE undermined the European Union's attempt to regulate human exposure to benzene, a carcinogenic pollutant. After oil industry lobbying and research, the new regulated limit from 2024 will be ten times higher than the original suggestions from scientific agencies. 

Read the full investigation here.

Podcast editing by Vasko Kostovski.

Further reading:

• 'Action to tackle air pollution failing to keep up with research', The Guardian, 2023
• 'Benzene and worker cancers: ‘An American tragedy’', The Center for Public Integrity, 2014
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway, 2012
• Doubt is Their Product: How industry's assault on science threatens your health, David Michaels, 2008 

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

Find more podcasts and articles at www.landclimate.org

In this episode Alasdair caught up with Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and policy at campaign organisation Corporate Accountability to discuss their new research with the Guardian which found considerable flaws in the 50 most used offset projects.  He asked about the recent research and what value offset projects might actually have.

The Land and Climate podcast is produced by Vasko Kostovski

Recommended reading:

• ‘Revealed: top carbon offset projects may not cut planet-heating’, The Guardian, September 2023 
• ‘Gas-Lit: No, the Dubai Climate Talks Did Not Save the Planet’, Newsweek, December 2023 
• '10 myths about net zero targets and carbon offsetting, busted’, Climate Home News, December 2020
• ‘Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change mitigation’, Science, August 2023 
• ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) Carbon Crediting’,Berkeley Public Policy, September 2023  
• ‘The Verra Scandal Explained: why avoid deforestation credits are hazardous’ London School of Economics Blogs, January 2023
• ‘The Land Gap Report’, Various, 2023 
• 'The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets'

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

Find more podcasts and articles at www.landclimate.org

2023 was expected to be a big year for Europe in reducing harm from agrochemicals. But in a surprise move in November, European Parliament rejected a law to halve pesticide use. That same month, The European Commission stated it would renew the controversial approval of glyphosate for another 10 years.

What happened?

Alasdair talks to Dr Martin Dermine, Executive Director of Pesticide Action Network Europe, about why EU regulation of agrochemicals is moving so slowly.

Further reading: 

• 'Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weedkiller Roundup, is showing up in pregnant women', The Conversation, December 2023
• 'EU Commission hosts a secret 3-day meeting with the pesticide industry as their exclusive guest', Pesticide Action Network, December 2023
• 'Green Deal is dead', Pesticide Action Network, November 2023
• 'Beneath the orange fields: Impact of Glyphosate on soil organisms', Pesticide Action Network, November 2023
• 'Conservative backlash kills off EU’s Green Deal push to slash pesticide use', Politico, November 2023
• 'EU to renew herbicide glyphosate approval for 10 years', Reuters, November 2023
• 'Long-term evidence for ecological intensification as a pathway to sustainable agriculture', Nature Sustainability, 2022
• Listen to our previous episodes on Monsanto, EU lobbying, and Neonics.

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

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Alasdair talks to Sir Dieter Helm, a Professor of Economic Policy at The University of Oxford, about his new book Legacy: How to Build the Sustainable Economy. Cambridge University Press has published the work online as a free open acess title.

Further reading: 

• Read Legacy for free here. 
• Video presentations and slides on the book's components can be found here. 
• The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

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Bertie speaks to environmental journalist Stephen Robert Miller about his new book, Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature. Spanning Bangladesh, Japan, and Arizona in the US, it covers the risks involved in adaptating to changing climate and weather, and the deadly costs of poor planning.

Also featuring our new theme music - let us know what you think!

Further reading from Stephen Robert Miller: 

• Buy Over the Seawall from Island Press.
• 'When Climate Adaptation Backfires' in Discover Magazine
• 'Why Are We Paying for Crop Failures in the Desert?' in Apocalypse Soon
• '‘White gold’: why shrimp aquaculture is a solution that caused a huge problem' in The Guardian 
• 'What Should Farmers Grow in the Desert?' in Mother Jones 
• 'Arizona’s water supplies are drying up. How will its farmers survive?' in National Geographic

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

Find more podcasts and articles at www.landclimate.org

Nuclear energy is not renewable, but it is low-carbon. Whether it should be part of the post-fossil fuel power grid is heatedly debated.

Bertie took this question to Dr. Paul Dorfman, an Associate Fellow of the University of Sussex's Science Policy Research Unit, and the Chair of nonprofit institute the Nuclear Consulting Group. Dr. Dorfman is an expert in nuclear risk and has advised the Irish, UK, French and EU governments on nuclear policy.

Further reading: 

• 'Is nuclear power the key to reaching net zero?', by Paul Dorfman in The New Statesman, August 2023
• 'Saudi nukes: A desire for energy, weapons, or just leverage?' by
  Stasa Salacanin in The Cradle, October 2023
• 'The end of Oppenheimer's energy dream' by Allison Macfarlane in IAI News, July 2023
• 'The West hasn’t gone after Russia’s nuclear energy. Here’s why' by Clare Sebastian in CNN, March 2023
• 'The Debate: Nuclear is already well past its sell-by date' by Paul Dorfman in The New Statesman, May 2022
• 'Nuclear energy isn’t a safe bet in a warming world – here’s why' by Paul Dorfman in The Conversation, June 2021
• 'Things fall apart' by Paul Dorfman in The Ecologist, October 2021

Click here to visit The Future Unrefined, our curated collection of articles and podcasts on raw materials and extraction.

Find more podcasts and articles at www.landclimate.org