Rob Edwards

Council accused of breaking climate law

from Sunday Herald, 18 July 2010

A major local authority has been accused of breaking the law by failing to cut climate pollution, raising the first prospect of a legal challenge under Scotland’s world-leading climate legislation.

Aberdeenshire Council is under attack for not insisting on tough enough measures to improve energy insulation in new homes and offices. Its proposed local development plan contains less ambitious targets than those specified in the 2009 Climate Change Act.

According to the Scottish Greens, this means that the council is exposing itself to court action in the future. The council says its stance has been backed by the Scottish government, though this was not confirmed by a government spokesman.

A public consultation on Aberdeenshire’s proposed development plan, which has been backed by a majority of councillors, was launched this month. In its supplementary guidance the plan promises to only approve new buildings “if the predicted carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by at least 30% beyond the 2007 building regulations’ carbon dioxide emissions standard.”

Failing to protect people from a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant

from Sunday Herald, 11 July 2010

If it had been real life, it would have been the most audacious act of terrorism since September 11.

When Exercise Lindisfarne got under way on Wednesday, March 17, at the Torness power station in East Lothian, it was to test the defences of Scotland’s nuclear industry.

And it revealed just how slip-shod safety procedures are in what should be one of the country’s most secure facilities. During the role-playing exercise a “terrorist” with a stolen security pass penetrated the Torness nuclear power station. He damaged the reactor, caused casualties and took several staff hostage.

The emergency response launched by the plant’s operators was so riddled with flaws that it failed to deal safely and promptly with the crisis. Exercise Lindisfarne resulted in British Energy having to revamp its emergency procedures to prove to government safety watchdogs that they wouldn’t go wrong again.

Secret post-mortems on Exercise Lindisfarne were compiled by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) and the Office for Civil Nuclear Security (OCNS), both part of the government’s Health and Safety Executive. Their reports have now been released to the Sunday Herald under freedom of information law.

“Action to ensure safety of personnel and plant appeared to lack urgency at times and the station should correct this,” concluded the NII report. There were delays in tracking and making contact with the intruder, failures tracing missing persons, and poor communications.

Why we need to green the concrete jungles

from Sunday Herald, 11 July 2010

More than 70 per cent of people in Scotland are deprived of easy access to woodlands, putting their health and well-being at risk, says a new report.

In some areas like Renfrewshire, South Ayrshire and East Lothian, the proportion of the population without accessible woodlands nearby rises to over 90%. 

This is despite mounting evidence that green spaces can do much to reduce the stress of living in 21st century concrete jungles. Studies have shown that greater exposure to nature can help combat mental illness and reduce social problems.

The Woodland Trust, a conservation charity, argues that everyone should have a woodland of two hectares or more within 500 metres of their home. But according to a report it published last week, only 28% of Scots now meet this standard.

This is significantly better than in 2004, when only 15% of Scotland’s population met the standard, and significantly higher than in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. But it still leaves 72% of people without nearby areas of trees to enjoy.

Exposed: a series of safety lapses in silicon glen

from Sunday Herald, 04 July 2010

A series of worrying safety lapses in the high-tech microelectronics industry have been exposed in a new report from the government’s watchdog, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

Companies using highly toxic chemicals to etch silicon chips for computers are under fire for failing to protect the health of their workers. HSE inspectors uncovered “weaknesses”, “misunderstandings” and poor practices in vital safety procedures.

Seven legal enforcement notices have been served on four companies in the past few months for breaching health and safety rules. One Scottish company, Intense Photonics, was rapped three times for failing to control hazards at its former plant in Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, including risks from arsenic dust.

HSE inspectors last year visited 17 companies in the UK involved in making semiconductors for the computer industry. Five were in Scotland’s ‘silicon glen’: National Semiconductor in Greenock, Semefab and Raytheon Systems in Glenrothes, Shin-Etsu Handotai in Livingston and Intense Photonics.

The HSE was checking to see what had changed since it last had a serious look at the microelectronics industry in 2002. Although it found some improvements, a string of remaining safety shortfalls are highlighted in its report, released online last week.

Monitoring to ensure compliance with safety rules in high hazard situations “was weak at several sites”, the report said. “Often, there was no consideration of risks to others arising from maintenance and cleaning, for example from spread of contamination.”

25 years on, Chernobyl stops poisoning Scottish sheep

from Sunday Herald, 04 July 2010

Nearly a quarter of a century after the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the Ukraine exploded and spewed radioactivity across the world, it has finally stopped making Scottish sheep too hot to eat.

For the first time levels of radioactive contamination in sheep on all Scottish farms dropped below safety limits last month, enabling the government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) to lift restrictions on farmers. Controls on the movement and sale of sheep have been in force since after the accident in 1986.

The Chernobyl reactor near Kiev scattered a massive cloud of radioactivity over Europe, after it overheated, caught fire and ripped apart because of errors made by control room staff. It was the world’s worst nuclear accident, and has been blamed for causing ten of thousands of cancer deaths.

Peat and grass in upland areas of Scotland were polluted with radioactive caesium-137 released by the reactor and brought to ground by rain. This was eaten and recycled by sheep, and has persisted in the environment far longer than originally anticipated.

In 1987 the restrictions on sheep covered 73 farms across southwest and central Scotland. Animals that contained more than 1,000 becquerels of radioactivity per kilogram were banned from being slaughtered for food.

Revealed: BP’s 54 safety breaches in the UK

from Sunday Herald, 27 June 2010

The troubled oil giant, BP, has broken vital health and safety rules 54 times over the past five years in the UK, according to the government watchdog, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

The British multinational corporation, under international condemnation for its polluting gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, has been accused of a series of maintenance and operating lapses which put workers and the environment at risk from major leaks, fires and accidents in the North Sea and elsewhere.

As a result BP companies have been served with 21 legal enforcement notices since 2006 by HSE, requiring lax and dangerous practices to be improved. The company, however, has not been prosecuted by the watchdog since 2005.

The revelations have been greeted with horror by experts and environmentalists, appalled at BP’s track record in the UK. The company’s failings here are directly linked to the unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in April, they say.

An analysis of the HSE enforcement database by the Sunday Herald shows that four BP companies - BP Exploration, BP Oil UK, BP Chemicals and BP Shipping - have been hit with legal notices in the last five years. Altogether, there have been 54 breaches of eight health and safety laws or regulations (see table below).

Home insulation scheme failing to reach many homes

from Sunday Herald, 27 June 2010

A scheme designed to boost home insulation and cut climate pollution has reached fewer than one per cent of households in Scotland, prompting condemnation and calls for action from critics.

A new report from Consumer Focus Scotland reveals that the Scottish government’s home insulation scheme has only been taken up by one in ten of those targeted. And it only targeted fewer than five per cent of Scottish households.

The performance of the scheme has been damned as “embarrassingly poor” by the Scottish Greens and energy campaigners. But ministers promise that they will do better in the future.

Consumer Focus Scotland, which replaced the Scottish Consumer Council and other consumer groups two years ago, has investigated the effectiveness of ten area-based energy efficiency projects across the country.

It concludes that, though their performances vary, there is much that can be learnt from them. They could play a “key role” in helping to encourage more people to insulate their homes, it says.

Cutbacks could make nuclear weapons unsafe, warns MoD

from Sunday Herald, 20 June 2010

Worsening shortages of staff and funds could jeopardise the safety of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has secretly warned.

In an internal safety report for 2009 just released under freedom of information law, the MoD says that it is facing increasing difficulties managing its nuclear programme “with due regard for the protection of the workforce, the public and the environment”.

Experts fear that the outcome could be disastrous. They point out that the MoD has already run into major problems with decommissioning defunct nuclear submarines, and with leaks from its ageing radioactive waste facilities at the Faslane naval base on the Clyde.

“This really is rapidly tipping into a calamitous situation,” John Large, a leading nuclear consultant, told the Sunday Herald. The MoD’s entire safety system was under-resourced, outdated and largely unaccountable, he alleged.

“The signs are that the MoD’s nuclear regulatory and safeguard framework is already creaking and cracking at the seams with a number of crucial nuclear safety and environmental protection programmes being put on hold or subject to expedient repair and maintenance.”

Scotland’s beaches are some of the most polluted in Europe

from Sunday Herald, 20 June 2010

Scotland has become one of the dirtiest nations in Europe. The pollution of our beautiful beaches with sewage is now worse than almost every other country on the continent, according to a new report by the European Environment Agency.

The bathing waters around the coasts of twenty countries are cleaner than Scotland’s, including those of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria. Only two countries have beaches that are more contaminated with faeces:  Poland and Ireland.

Scotland’s record has been condemned as “shameful” by environmental groups. They point out that, with tougher standards due to be introduced from 2015, many of Scotland’s beaches will be labelled “unfit for bathing”.

The European Environment Agency has published its latest analysis (pdf) of the quality of bathing water in the European Union for 2009. This shows the proportion of coastal bathing waters in each country that failed to meet  basic sewage safety limits set more than 30 years ago.

These are beaches where the levels of faecal pollution from humans and animals are so high that bathers, surfers and paddlers run serious risks of getting stomach, skin or ear infections. In extreme cases, infections can be lethal.

Are Scotland’s national parks failing us?

from Sunday Herald, 20 June 2010

It’s an ugly bug, but it’s a controversial one. That’s because its most northerly home in the UK is about to be covered in concrete.

The slender groundhopper, which looks like a kind of dusky grasshopper, has been found near Aviemore in the Cairngorms where developers have just won permission to build a huge new housing estate.

Its survival is threatened, and wildlife groups are upset. But the issues raised by the fate of this humble insect are not superficial: they go right to the heart of how Scotland treats its natural heritage.

In giving the go-ahead to up to 1,500 new houses at An Camus Mor earlier this month, the Cairngorm National Park Authority has stirred up a hornets’ nest. It is precisely the kind of major development that environmentalists say should never be allowed in a national park.

As well as endangering the slender groundhopper, the housing scheme will threaten wildcats, otters, red squirrels, badgers and several bird species, they argue. It will also damage the landscape, they say, and put more pressure on vulnerable mountain areas.

The park authority voted by a narrow majority to reject advice from its own officials to limit the number of houses to 1,100 to prevent “unacceptable” environmental damage. The authority also ignored a recent report by Scottish government planning officials which concluded that the development breached national planning policies, and wasn’t justified.

Unveiled: undercover eco-spooks emerge from the shadows

from Sunday Herald, 13 June 2010

For 15 years they have been working undercover to expose environmental criminals around the globe, spying on wildlife smugglers, secretly filming animal abusers and infiltrating planet-trashers.

They have witnessed appalling cruelty, adopted numerous fake identities and sometimes put their lives in danger. In so doing they have helped put crooks behind bars, changed government policies and made many headlines.

But they have not, until now, claimed any credit. Today, for the first time, they are emerging from the shadows to court a little publicity for their daring deeds. 

Welcome to the eco-spooks - or, to give them their proper name, Tracks Investigations. They are, as they say, “not MI5, not 9 to 5”, and they boast an “amazing success record.”

They don’t want to be pictured, and some of them don’t want to be named. They don’t like speaking about their current investigations, but they have just set up a website. And they’ve agreed to talk to the Sunday Herald.

Since 1995, Tracks Investigations has carried about 250 investigations in scores of countries. They have exposed destruction of the Amazon rainforest, mass sheep shipments from Australia, pig cargoes trucked across Europe and the stripping of protected peatlands in the UK.

Anger over repeated delays to energy-saving plan

from Sunday Herald, 13 June 2010

A plan to help householders and business save energy and money in Scotland has been delayed for the sixth time, sparking outrage from opposition politicians and environmental groups.

The Sunday Herald can reveal that the Scottish government’s long-awaited energy efficiency action plan - meant to boost home insulation, aid the installation of smart meters and kick-start small-scale renewable and heat technologies - has been postponed until the autumn.

The delay calls into doubt the commitment of Scottish ministers to cutting climate pollution, say critics. And it undermines their efforts to promote Scotland’s “world-leading” targets to tackle climate change on the international stage, they claim.

The action plan was first proposed back in December 2004 by the then environment minister, Ross Finnie. The previous Labour and Liberal Democrat administration said it would be published in 2005, then 2006 and then 2007.

Curbing the hillside ‘vandalism’ of the lairds

from Caledonian Mercury, 07 June 2010

Landowners accused of “mindless vandalism” for bulldozing rough tracks across Scotland’s wild and beautiful landscape are facing calls for a crackdown this week.

MSPs and mountain conservation groups will be demanding tougher controls to prevent scores of hill tracks from scarring slopes and spoiling views across the highlands.

Mountaineers and walkers are angered that landowners can construct “ugly” tracks to enable easier access for stag shooting parties in 4x4 vehicles - without even needing to apply to councils for planning permission.

“It’s outrageous that a privileged few have the power to scar a pristine landscape,” said David Windle, chairman of the North East Mountain Trust, a conservation group. 

“They shouldn’t be allowed to make the tracks in the first place. Thirty years ago they walked the last half a mile for a shoot; now it seems they can’t be bothered.”

McDonald’s: playing chicken with British food

from Sunday Herald, 06 June 2010

The cattle crowded into the barn near Bishopton stared intently at the group of visiting dignitaries, blissfully unaware of their fate. “These animals are very close to being burgers,” said the farmer, John Ritchie, with a smile.

He was helping the world’s most famous fast food chain, McDonald’s, do its public relations. Surrounded by the US company’s irrepressible executives, he carefully spelled out how his beef cattle were reared locally on local food, before they were killed to make Big Macs.

It’s the patriotic pitch at the heart of McDonald’s new, high-profile marketing campaign, which jetted in and out of Scotland on Friday. The company’s beef, pork, eggs, milk and potatoes were virtually all British: that was the message, repeated ad nauseam.

“Our customers care about where their food comes from,” insisted Nick Hindle, the company’s vice president for communications from London. “People want to eat British food. They think it is supporting the British economy and they trust the quality.”

But there’s one McDonald’s staple that is not mentioned in any of the blurbs, that fails to feature in any of the media spin, and that makes a mockery of the whole PR exercise: chicken. That’s because 99% of it comes from abroad.

Scotland: still polluted after all these years

from Caledonian Mercury, 1 June 2010

More than a quarter of a century after it was banned, the notorious pesticide, DDT, is still contaminating eels throughout Scotland, a new scientific study has revealed.

A range of other persistent pollutants, including PCBs and BDEs, have also been detected in a survey of eels from 26 Scottish rivers. The highest levels were found in the River Clyde in Glasgow and the River Don in Aberdeen, a legacy of their industrial pasts.

Although evidence suggests that most of the pollution is declining, there are a few places where it seems to be refusing to go away. Traces of DDT in River Don eels were higher than they were in 1986, while levels in eels from the River Cree at Newton Stewart hadn’t dropped.

DDT - dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane - holds a unique place in twentieth century history. It was seen as the farmers’ saviour in the 1940s and 1950s, and was widely used to kill agricultural pests.

But in the 1960s it was blamed for wiping out birds in Silent Spring, the famous book by US naturalist, Rachel Carson, credited with giving birth to the modern-day environmental movement. It was also said to cause cancer and other diseases.

Crackdown on Sellafield after radioactive leaks

from The Guardian, 31 May 2010

by Rob Edwards and Terry Macalister

The government’s safety watchdog is cracking down on Britain’s biggest and oldest nuclear complex after a series of radioactive leaks and safety blunders, despite private sector managers receiving multimillion-pound “performance-related” payments from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has closed down a vital nuclear waste plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, and is taking legal action to force the site’s operators to improve their flawed safety procedures.

The HSE has also rejected a £40bn plan for cleaning up Sellafield because of proposed delays in dismantling ageing and potentially hazardous facilities.

The disclosures come at a critical time for the nuclear industry which is trying to convince Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change secretary, it is efficient enough to build a new generation of reactors.

But the crackdown is also embarrassing because Nuclear Management Partners (NMP) – a consortium involving Amec, URS and Areva – is believed to have made “profits” of up to £50m over a 12-month period.

Long quest for cancer data fails at last hurdle

from Sunday Herald, 30 May 2010

Scotland’s first, longest and most disputed freedom of information case has ended up keeping vital cancer statistics secret.

After two investigations by the Scottish information commissioner, Kevin Dunion, plus appeals to the Court of Session in Edinburgh and the House of Lords in London, numbers that might shed light on the links between children’s blood cancer and radioactive pollution have been kept under wraps.

The Scottish Green Party, which made the original request, is frustrated and annoyed. The Scottish Health Service, which fought to keep the information confidential, sounds relieved.

Back at the beginning of 2005, Michael Collie, a researcher for the then Green MSP, Chris Ballance, asked the Scottish health service for the annual incidence of childhood leukaemia in every census ward in Dumfries and Galloway from 1990 to 2003.

They wanted to test widespread suspicions that the debilitating and potentially fatal cancer could be caused by radioactive contamination. Plutonium from the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria washes up on the Solway coast, and has been detected around the shoreline.

Does factory farmed meat make us sick?

from Sunday Herald, 30 May 2010

The video clips are upsetting. There’s a big bin full of dead lambs, a piglet slipping across a filth-strewn floor in search of its mother and a calf lying dead in a shed with blood seeping from its nose and mouth.

The latest compilation of factory farming horrors assembled by the campaign group, Animal Aid, packs an emotional punch. But it also underlies the serious message that the anti-meat activists want to get across: that industrial farms can hurt humans as well as animals.

At least 12 major diseases, which between them cause millions of people to suffer and tens of thousands to die around the world, can be blamed on factory farming, they claim. These include swine flu, bird flu, salmonella, e-coli and mad cow disease.

But their campaign has provoked a vitriolic response from the National Farmers Union (NFU) in Scotland, who condemned it as “poisonous”. Others, however, are less critical, arguing that the campaigners have a point, but just take it too far.

The arguments, though sometimes bitter, are important because they are about how we look after the animals on which we rely for food. And they raise the question of what we can eat without being cruel -  and without putting our own health at risk.

Ministers under fire for failing to green government

from Caledonian Mercury, 26 May 2010

Scottish ministers have been condemned by their own expert advisers for failing to meet most of their targets for cutting pollution and greening government.

Their performance has been described as “poor” and “worrying” by the Sustainable Development Commission, which was set up to advise ministers on environmental policy. Ministers will only be forced to improve if they are subject to external scrutiny, the commission warned.

The Scottish government’s failure to live up to its much-vaunted green credentials has also been lambasted as depressing and hypocritical by environmental groups and opposition politicians. In its defence, the government says that it is now trying harder.

When ministers’ latest environmental performance report was published a few days ago, the spin was all positive. “The Scottish government is taking action to improve its environmental performance as it pledges to lead by example,” boasted the news release.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the blurb, the real picture revealed by the report for 2008-09 was very different. Of the eleven environmental targets ministers set themselves, eight are on track to be missed.

SNP face defeat over climate targets

from Sunday Herald, 23 May 2010

The SNP government could suffer an embarrassing defeat in the Scottish parliament this week unless it toughens up its targets for cutting climate pollution.

Labour, LibDems and the Greens are threatening to combine to throw out ministers’ latest plans to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by just half a per cent in 2011 and one per cent in 2012.

The opposition parties all point out that the government’s targets are way below the three per cent a year promised in the SNP’s 2007 manifesto for Holyrood. Ministers’ targets are “woefully inadequate”, they say, and in breach of their election promises.

“The SNP’s failure to set meaningful targets for reducing carbon emissions shows they cannot be trusted on this important issue,” Labour’s environment spokeswoman, Sarah Boyack MSP, told the Sunday Herald.

“The SNP’s own manifesto promised mandatory carbon reductions of three per cent per annum, but ministers now say this won’t be achieved until 2018. Their target for this year is only 0.05 per cent and shows they are not taking the issue sufficiently seriously.”