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  • There isn’t enough ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel to make a dent in our emissions – and there won’t be for years

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    Most of this fuel is currently made from used cooking oil. Scharfsinn / shutterstock

    Ben Purvis, University of Sheffield

    The UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has described so-called sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) as a “game changer”. As she announced government support for a series of airport expansions, she said that the fuel “can reduce carbon emissions from flying by 70%”.

    This number is misleading. Optimistic estimates do suggest that fully replacing fossil jet fuel with its sustainable alternative could lead to total savings of around 70%. But it will be hard to produce enough SAF to make a difference on that sort of scale. Even if the UK meets its ambitious targets, an annual saving of 7% by 2030 is more plausible.

    SAF is synthetic liquid fuel derived from something other than fossil fuels. These inputs have to be processed into a liquid that can be burned safely while also storing a lot of energy for its weight, since minimising weight is crucial. This is why long-haul electric battery-powered planes are unlikely to take off any time soon.

    The UK classifies three major pathways for creating sustainable aviation fuel. It can be derived from oils or fats, including used cooking oil or tallow. It can come from other sorts of material, such as municipal solid waste, agricultural residues, or sewage. Or it can be made from hydrogen and captured carbon using renewable electricity.

    SAF can also be produced from bioenergy crops, and products such as palm oil. However the UK won’t certify it as sustainable, due to concerns about land use and impacts on wildlife.

    Emissions that would have occurred anyway

    Burning SAF actually emits a similar amount of CO₂ to fossil jet fuel. Instead, most savings come from how we account for the waste and renewable energy that is used to produce it.

    landfill
    Waste emits greenhouse gases anyway, sustainable fuel supporters argue. So why not have those emissions do something useful, like power a plane? Jenya Smyk/shutterstock

    SAF fundamentally relies on assumptions that if waste or energy crops were not used to make this fuel, they would be incinerated, would degrade, or would in some way release their embodied carbon anyway. In the case of fuel derived from renewable energy and captured carbon, it assumes that carbon came from the atmosphere in the first place. This allows these emissions to be deducted from the total impact of SAF, leading to lower emissions than conventional aviation fuel.

    Is sustainable aviation fuel even sustainable?

    Estimates of how much greenhouse gas SAF could cut vary greatly due to the many different ways it can be produced, and the complexities of accounting for emissions across the entire life cycle from waste, to fuel production, to plane engine. A 2023 review by the Royal Society illustrates this nicely. It found SAF could at best produce effectively negative emissions (a 111% reduction), while at worst it could be more carbon intensive than fossil kerosene jet fuel (a 69% increase).

    While policy incentives are likely to encourage increased production, there remain serious concerns that will need to be addressed before SAF can become a serious competitor for conventional jet fuel. There are hard limits to the amount of used cooking oil available for instance, and the use of other feedstocks is still in its infancy.

    Meanwhile any renewable energy used to make the fuel will have to compete with growing demand from electric vehicles, AI data centres and more. And there are big worries the industry simply won’t be profitable enough to attract initial capital investment, let alone take on its well-established rival.

    UK SAF production

    Coming into effect in January, the UK’s SAF mandate sets legal obligations for aviation fuel suppliers in the UK to progressively increase proportions of sustainable fuel, from 2% of total jet fuel in 2025 to 10% in 2030, and 22% in 2040.

    This is one of a growing number of commitments globally, including RefuelEU, and the US SAF grand challenge, which seek to increase demand and encourage more investment in production.

    As of 2023, 97% of the UK’s supply is derived from used cooking oil, with the rest from food waste. Only 8% of this cooking oil is sourced from the UK, with most being imported from China and Malaysia. The UK also comprises 16% of the global SAF market, despite representing only 1% of total passengers.

    Currently, the only commercial producer of SAF in the UK is the Phillips 66 Humber Refinery which processes used cooking oil. The previous government allocated £135 million of funding to nine projects, aiming to have five plants under construction by 2025. Despite several projects selecting sites, at the time of writing none appear to be under construction.

    In an industry with razor-thin profit margins, SAF remains considerably more expensive than conventional aviation fuel. With potential producers filing for bankruptcy and companies including Shell pulling out due to profitability concerns, the market is looking rocky.

    A 7% saving is more plausible

    Let us assume that Rachel Reeves’ 70% saving is deliverable if fossil jet fuel was fully replaced with SAF. That’s optimistic in itself, but not beyond the realms of possibility.

    Getting hold of that much sustainable fuel is less plausible, however – the total demand for jet fuel in the UK is more than ten times the current global production of SAF. But let’s assume that the rocky global market can deliver the UK’s ambitious demand of 10% SAF use by 2030.

    Reeves’ figure then becomes an optimistic value of 7% savings across the UK industry. If we then correct for anticipated growth of passenger numbers, assuming plans for airport expansion, those savings are likely to vanish.

    While SAF has a role to play in decarbonisation, growth sits in clear opposition to its impacts and potential. If the UK has any hope of meeting its climate targets, it should instead be seeking alternatives to flying where possible.

    Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
    Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

    Ben Purvis, Research Associate, Sustainability Assessment, University of Sheffield

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

  • What public-private-partnership scandals can tell us about wrongdoing in the water industry

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    Jory Mundy/Shutterstock.com

    Daniel Fisher, University of Sussex

    Water bills are going up in England and Wales, even after the series of scandals around water companies. Last year water firms paid £158 million in fines following a record-breaking number of sewage dumps in rivers and seas.

    Severn Trent Water and United Utilities alone reportedly made 1,374 illegal sewage spills over two years. (Both companies took issue with the analysis that led to this figure but acknowledged concerns about sewage discharges.)

    There have been other notable incidents. Whistleblowers have told of water companies that fail to treat legally required amounts of sewage and divert that sewage to public waterways. To add to the disgrace, water companies have generally failed to invest enough in the UK’s water infrastructure.

    Research suggests that governments have been pressured to become more “business-like”. This has given rise to the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) to run important public services, such as water, transport and even prisons. Water companies in England and Wales are private companies that bid for their contracts, while in Scotland, the water provider is a public organisation.

    While other findings show that PPPs can support important public service needs, such as public health, research by my colleagues and I examines a consistent pattern in UK PPP scandals and wrongdoing. Over the past decade and a half, billions of pounds of taxpayers’ funds are unaccounted for. This appears to be largely because private interests have been prioritised over public needs.

    As a researcher of PPP wrongdoing, the reasons for many of the scandals seem obvious. My colleagues and I studied parliamentary inquiries and reports that have scrutinised PPP wrongdoing. This research can tell us a great deal about the UK’s predicament with regard to the failings in the water industry.

    The first lesson is that, in general, many PPPs are motivated actually to reduce the quality of the services they deliver. One parliamentary inquiry found that contracting services out from the public to the private sector had become a “transactional process” where cost-cutting is favoured and the “knock-on cost” to users results in a lower-quality public service.

    Other findings showed that companies regularly reduced the quality of a service to maximise profits. One way was to bid for a public service at a low price. A Public Accounts Committee member observed that companies coming in with low quotes for contracts can end up damaging services by under-investing in them.

    Another example is Sodexo – a private prison management provider. It cut employee numbers by around 200 and a subsequent BBC Panorama documentary detailed escapes and widespread drug use in the prisons they managed and also criticised a lack of safety for both prisoners and prison officers. Sodexo acknowledged the programme had highlighted problems and said it would investigate, but added that there had been “positive actions and improvements” already.

    Similar practices were observed at a children’s prison run by security firm G4S, where an officer was left with brain damage after an attack by inmates. G4S admitted liability for the officer’s injuries and agreed a settlement with him.

    Pay the fine, it’s cheaper

    The second lesson is it can be cost-effective to breach contracts and pay fines. Companies sometimes breach the terms of their public-private contracts because it’s in their economic interest. This even has a name – economists call it “efficiency breach”.

    For instance, a parliamentary report found that between 2010 and 2016 G4S was fined 100 times for breaching contracts – paying out roughly £3 million. As one MP suggested, these fines compared to its profits are a “slap on the wrist”. The same has been said of water companies.

    When observing the fines in comparison to the profitable contracts, it’s easy to posit what the motivations of many in the UK’s public service system are. In 2017, despite previous indictments of wrongdoing, G4S won £25 million of government contracts.

    In 2020 the firm won another £300 million contract to run Wellingborough “mega-prison” in England. Despite some raised eyebrows, G4S said at the time it aimed to make the site a blueprint for “innovation, rehabilitation and modernisation” in the prison service.

    Pay the shareholders, invest later

    The third lesson is that shareholders are more important than long-term investments in a service. This is perhaps the most notable feature of the UK’s public service system, where a vast array of shareholders benefit from the profits made by PPPs. In one of the parliamentary reports we analysed, which details the collapse of the facilities management firm Carillion, it was clear that shareholders’ interests trumped good management and long-term investment.

    As was noted in the report, despite Carillion’s collapse, the firm paid out £333 million more to shareholders than it generated in cash between 2012 and 2017. Often, this shareholder primacy can even go against a firm’s own employees rather than just the state and taxpayers. One MP noted that despite its pension scheme being in deficit, shareholders were still receiving dividends.

    Often, shareholders are prioritised because of short-term thinking. These processes can lead to firms passing these bad practices down their supply chains.

    The behaviour of water companies is suggestive of these dynamics. Since water companies have been privatised, they have loaded themselves up with debt (£64 billion) but paid out £78 billion to shareholders. Some 70% of these shareholders are “foreign investment firms, private equity, pension funds and businesses lodged in tax havens”.

    aerial shot of Bantham beach and estuary, Devon
    Water companies could give the UK’s rivers, estuaries and seas representation at board level. jimcatlinphotography.com/Shutterstock

    So what should be done? There are plenty of ways to enhance and improve the UK’s PPP problems. The most obvious may be to renationalise public services and renew the quality of public services through New Deal-style investments. After all, this is what what most of the UK electorate wants.

    There are other options. An innovative and exciting frontier is opening for businesses to recognise their environmental responsibilities – initiatives in New Zealand, India and Ecuador are giving the status of personhood to rivers and ecosystems, for example.

    Outdoor fashion brand Patagonia has “the Earth” as its only shareholder, and hair and skincare brand Faith in Nature has appointed nature to its board. Imagine if the UK’s water companies had the rivers and seas represented.

    In the end, only time will tell how water companies will be held accountable. But for the moment it’s the UK taxpayer and consumer paying the price.

    G4S was approached about this article but declined to comment.

    Daniel Fisher, Assistant Professor in Management, University of Sussex

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

  • Greens say Labour are “plumbing new depths” with filmed immigration raids

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    Image of the Green Party's Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
    Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.

    Responding to the news that Labour are now publishing videos of police immigration raids, Green Party Co-Leader, Carla Denyer MP, said:

    “This Labour government are plumbing new depths with their plan to broadcast footage of people being detained and deported. Those involved should be searching their consciences to ask if such breath-taking cruelty is really worth it all for the sake of aping the rhetoric of Reform. The bitter irony is that following Reform to the right on migration won’t win Labour any support – it will only lend legitimacy to Reform’s extreme views. It’s time this government showed a bit of backbone and told the truth – that migration is good for this country.”

  • ‘He’s Building a Concentration Camp’: Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo

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    Original article by Jon Queally republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    “An open-air tent facility was rising on a field near the base’s Marine barracks,” reads the NYT caption, “housing for foreign laborers and crude sanitary stations. The edge of the base’s airfield can be seen in the distance.” (Image: Screenshot via NYTimes of photo taken by Doug Mills, embedded with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem)

    “There’s no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don’t think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It’s easy to put tents in Florida. But they’re putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why.”

    Fears are growing that the offshore U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba are an ominous sign for what President Donald Trump has in store as he further disregards the rule of law and normalizes actions that previously would have been unthinkable or faced immediate, bipartisan opposition in Congress.

    After the first pictures emerged Saturday of still unidentified persons transferred to the island from the U.S. mainland by immigration officials, progressive journalist Nathan Robinson was among those raising the alarm, accusing Trump of “building a concentration camp and deliberately putting it where it is hardest to monitor or enforce the law.”

    The New York Times, alongside pictures of newly-erected tents taken by photojournalist Doug Mills, reported Saturday that the administration had already “moved more than 30 people described as Venezuelan gang members to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, as U.S. forces and homeland security staff prepare a tent city for potentially thousands of migrants.” Mills was traveling Friday with Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, as she made her first visit to the offshore site.

    According to the outlet:

    Ms. Noem visited the nascent tent camp, where the administration has suggested that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of migrants who pose lesser threats could be housed. She watched Marines rehearse how to move migrants to the future tent city, and she was shown a tent with cots and a display of basic items to be provided each new arrival — T-shirt, shorts, underwear and a towel — and then got an aerial view of the mission from a Chinook helicopter.

    “The Trump administration,” the Times reported, “has not released any of their identities, though they are believed to all be men, nor has it said how long they might be held at the island outpost.”

    According to critics like Robinson, “There’s no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don’t think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It’s easy to put tents in Florida. But they’re putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why.”

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    On Friday, a coalition of more than a dozen rights groups—including the ACLU, National Immigration Law Center, and others—sent a letter today to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DoD), and the U.S. State Department demanding Trump officials provide immediate access to those who have been transferred out of the country to the offshore facility.

    In addition, the groups demanded to know:

    • The immigration status of the ten noncitizens detained there
    • Who the government intends to transfer to and detain at Guantánamo, including what criteria, legal or otherwise, the administration is or will be using to decide who to transfer and detain at Guantánamo
    • Which government agency has custody of the transferred noncitizens at Guantánamo
    • What authority is the government invoking to transfer noncitizens from the United States to Guantánamo and what authority the government is invoking to hold them at Guantánamo
    • The length of time that the government will be holding these noncitizens at Guantánamo and plans for them after

    “Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison,” said ACLU deputy director of immigrant rights Lee Gelernt. “It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing.”

    Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, said Friday that expansion of operations at Guantánamo “is especially alarming given its remote location and the decades-long documented history of abuse and torture there, which will only be exacerbated by the well-documented abuse inherent to the ICE detention system, including abuse, unsanitary conditions, and medical neglect. In no uncertain terms—lives are in jeopardy.”

    While previous administrations have exploited the land seized by the U.S. in Cuba to detain and process asylum seekers and migrants in the past, those were individuals interdicted at sea or prior to having ever set foot on American soil. The facilities have not been used to hold noncitizens deported from the U.S. mainland.

    Last week, Slate’s Mary Harris interviewed journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” who acknowledged that while many immediately think of Nazi Germany’s death camps under Adolf Hitler when they hear the term “concentration camp,” it is not wrong to describe the U.S. prison facilities at Guantánamo that way and for important reasons.

    In her questioning, Harris posed to Pitzer how the existence of Guantánamo “doesn’t mean it’s going to become Auschwitz” necessarily, but that it does make “the road to Auschwitz more possible.”

    And Pitzer responded:

    That’s exactly right. And so what it means is even to do the most horrible things that humans have done takes time. It takes sort of a space and imagination and tools and resources. And the more of those kinds of tools and resources we line up in one place, the more room there is for the obscene or the perverted imagination to work. And even Auschwitz—keep in mind that it was 1933 when Hitler came to power and they started with concentration camps right out of the gate. So within the first weeks, Dakau is opened, though not quite in its final form, but it is already a camp and it takes almost a decade to get to even this final solution. And so, yes, absolutely, the Holocaust as we know it, as we remember it, has never been repeated. Nothing has come close to that. But you do not get to the death camps without having several years of Auschwitz, of Buchenwalds, of those beforehand.

    “And right now,” Pitzer said of Gitmo’s legacy and the new purpose that Trump is giving it, “we have a place where there has been torture, we have a place where there has been riots, we have a place where there have been people held without trial for more than 20 years. And those are some of the most dangerous seeds that humanity can plant.”

    “The Holocaust as we know it, as we remember it, has never been repeated. Nothing has come close to that. But you do not get to the death camps without having several years of Auschwitz, of Buchenwalds, of those beforehand.”

    In a weekend column, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch warned that even as much of the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants and refugees thus far should be seen as a “propaganda” exercise designed to titillate his base and antagonize his liberal opponents, the danger present by the Gitmo policy and others are very real.

    “The bigger worry, ” writes Bunch, “is that just because the cruelty of mass deportation is largely performative doesn’t mean these performances won’t scale up dramatically in the months ahead. Trump reportedly is already badgering his border czar, Tom Homan, and ICE to meet ambitious arrest targets, which would probably require crueler and more legally dubious measures that would fill those empty tents at Gitmo. If the president needs his phony war against a nonexistent border invasion to distract the American heartland from the coming evisceration of government services, the cruelty will become a bigger and bigger point.”

    Referencing the great Russian playwright’s famous quote about the introduction of a gun onstage, Bunch opined that Trump’s performative brand of governance does not mean the threat isn’t real.

    “You don’t need Anton Chekhov,” noted Bunch, “to understand that you don’t build empty tents at Gitmo in Act One of your presidency unless you plan to fill them in Act Three.”

    Original article by Jon Queally republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
    Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.

  • Confirmation of Project 2025 Architect Russ Vought Expected to Intensify Lawless Trump Rampage

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    Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the White House budget office, arrives for a Senate confirmation hearing on January 15, 2025. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

    “Now that Vought is officially running the show, he’ll be able to unleash his radical agenda across the federal government. And if the courts stop him, he’s got a billionaire friend with the government’s keys and checkbook: Elon Musk.”

    In a party-line vote late Thursday, the U.S. Senate confirmed right-wing extremist and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought to lead the White House budget office as the Trump administration works to unilaterally dismantle entire federal agencies and choke off funding already approved by Congress.

    Vought’s confirmation, backed only by Republican votes in the Senate, comes after the chamber’s Democrats used up all 30 hours of debate on his nomination to warn of the damage he could inflict as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

    Lawmakers and progressive activists echoed those warnings in the wake of his confirmation. Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement that “Vought’s fingerprints are all over last week’s illegal funding freeze.”

    “Halting funding for Americans’ healthcare, childcare, and food assistance wasn’t a bug,” said Jacquez. “It was by design, and Project 2025 is the blueprint. Now that Vought is officially running the show, he’ll be able to unleash his radical agenda across the federal government. And if the courts stop him, he’s got a billionaire friend with the government’s keys and checkbook: Elon Musk.”

    During his confirmation process, Vought expressed agreement with Trump’s view that the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act (ICA)—a law passed in response to former President Richard Nixon’s refusal to spend congressionally approved funds on programs he opposed—is unconstitutional, a view that Musk has also expressed.

    Politico reported Thursday that Vought “is expected to soon press his theory on impoundments, the idea that the president can ignore congressional spending edicts.” Analysts have argued that even without the ICA, unilateral impoundments of the kind the Trump White House is expected to pursue in the coming months and years would still be unconstitutional.

    Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Thursday that “in confirming Vought, Republicans have put their stamp of approval on ending American democracy—built on three co-equal branches of government—and on creating a government of billionaires, by billionaires.”

    “Our nation is facing an extraordinary crisis,” said DeLauro. “Donald Trump is attempting to claim absolute power for the presidency. The chaos, confusion, and flagrantly unconstitutional actions of the early days of this administration are largely of Vought’s design and doing. With Vought’s encouragement, the administration has taken the groundless position—and demonstrated—that they believe the White House has the absolute power to determine spending, and that they can choose to simply not fund programs and services that Congress has promised to the American people. This could not be further from the truth.”

    “The Constitution empowers Congress, not the president, with the power of the purse,” DeLauro continued. “The president is not a king who can pick and choose which laws to follow and which laws to ignore. But the president is relying on the guidance and counsel of Russ Vought to do just that.”

    In one of his appearances before the Senate last month, Vought told lawmakers that he views the Clinton-era welfare reform law that doubled extreme poverty as a crowning achievement and declared that “we need to go after the mandatory programs,” which include Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

    “Vought is an extremist who has made clear he’ll ignore our nation’s laws, cut funding that helps people across the country, and give Trump unprecedented and unconstitutional power,” warned Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, following Vought’s confirmation. “There will be consequences.”

    Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
    Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.