Environment

A new study confirms that the vast majority of scientists who research the climate accept that the planet is warming and human beings are largely responsible. Yet a large slice of the American public believes that scientists are deeply split about global warming.

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Almost £250bn worth of housing in capital at risk as flood defence budget cuts threaten homes and insurance policies across UK

One in four London properties, collectively worth around £250bn, are at risk of flooding, according to official assessments of the dangers now facing homes in England and Wales. Ten of the top 25 most at-risk local authority areas across England and Wales are now London boroughs.

The environment agency's 2013 national flood risk assessment, unpublished but seen by the Guardian, shows that London boroughs now dominate the local authorities with most properties in jeopardy from river and tidal flooding.

Hammersmith and Fulham, Southwark and Wandsworth are among the most threatened. Meanwhile, there was a 26% year-on-year drop in investment in flood defences between 2010 and 2011, with disproportionately high cuts in the capital.

Separate figures compiled by the Greater London Authority using environment agency data suggest London has 850,000 properties in areas at risk of surface water, river and tidal flooding. This ratio of one in four homes in risk areas is significantly higher than the national average, which the environment agency says is one in six homes.

The agency's national flood risk assessment reveals that overall 2.5m properties across England and Wales are at risk of river and coastal flooding; flash flooding would push the number even higher.

Outside the capital, Hull and the surrounding East Riding of Yorkshire local authorities have the greatest number of properties at risk, with more than 180,000. Lincolnshire also comes near the top of the list with four local authorities with over 160,000 properties at risk in total. Other high-risk areas include Cardiff, Windsor, Doncaster and King's Lynn in Norfolk.

The widespread flood risks are of particular concern because of the imminent expiry of a deal between government and the insurance industry that ensures high-risk homes can get affordable insurance.

The agreement between government and the insurance industry to replace that brokered by Labour was set to expire at the end of June, but on Thursday ministers were forced to seek a one-month extension. In the agreement, ministers said they would to increase flood defence spending while insurers pledged to provide affordable premiums for high-risk homes.

Without a new agreement, hundreds of thousands of properties could become uninsurable, threatening their saleability. Aidan Kerr, head of property at the Association of British Insurers (ABI), said: "With flooding the biggest natural risk the UK faces, it is important we have consensus on managing the risk going forward, which includes sustained, targeted flood defence investment and sensible planning decisions." A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) spokesman said: "The government is having constructive talks with the ABI and is meeting them regularly."

Campaigners say that the government needs to do more to protect homes and businesses. "Cuts to flood defence spending will come back to bite them with a vengeance," said Charles Tucker, chair of the National Flood Forum, which represents 160 at-risk communities. "Everyone knows it is getting worse, especially flash flooding." He said the impact of a flood can be devastating. "It is like a death in the family: the upset and depression stays with you a long time."

Government scientists acknowledge that the risk of flooding is rising every year due to climate change, and 2012 was the wettest year on record across England, with insurers reporting £1.2bn of damage from almost half a million claims. But coalition ministers oversaw a 26% year-on-year drop in investment in flood defences after entering office in 2010.

In 2009-10 in London alone, over £34m was spent on flood defence projects but this fell to less than £17m by 2012-13. Some boroughs were particularly hard hit, with funding in Hammersmith and Fulham falling 99%. In Richmond upon Thames, the borough with the most homes in the highest-risk category, funding has fallen from £1.5m in 2009-10 to zero in 2013-14.

An environment agency spokesman said: "Capital investment varies from one year to the next depending upon what schemes are under construction and where new schemes are in the planning cycle." Across the capital, funding is expected to rise again to £30m in 2013-14, but this remains 12% lower than 2009-10. The environment agency said: "Our priority is to do as much as we can with every pound of funding.Prioritisation is needed every year. There are always more schemes applying than funding available."

A Defra spokesman said: "We're spending over £2.3bn on tackling the risk of flooding. Together with contributions from other partners, this is moremoney than ever before."

From 2010-14, the government will spend 0.05% more in cash terms than 2006-2010. The latter period includes low-spending years before flood defence funding leapt up in response to the Pitt review of the catastrophic 2007 floods. The £148m "partnership" funding comes from local authorities and the private sector, but ministers have refused to say what proportion comes from companies, rather than public funds, citing commercial confidentiality.

Mary Creagh, Labour's shadow environment secretary, said: "Incompetent government ministers are playing Russian roulette with people's homes, businesses and futures. Extreme weather is here to stay, but the government's cuts – too far and too fast - risk compounding misery and leaving towns and cities blighted."

Why do areas without rivers flood?

Flash flooding, where intense rainstorms overcome the capacity of drains, is a fast-growing risk as climate change makes downpours more likely, which explains why properties even in outer London boroughs are at significant risk. Overall, one in four properties in the capital are endangered by flooding but in Barnet, one of the boroughs far from the Thames, 82% of the properties are at risk of flash flooding. However, local rivers, such as the river Brent, Dollis Brook and Silk Stream in Barnet, mean some river flooding risk remains.

Other boroughs with more than 20,000 properties at risk, but dominated by flash flooding, include Croydon and Bromley. The risk of river flooding is only completely absent from Camden and Islington, but low-capacity urban drainage systems means about 12,000 properties remain at risk of flash flooding. Enfield, another outer London borough, faces both river and flash flood risks equally, due to the River Lee and Salmons Brook. The figures used here only consider the risk of more than 30cm of flash flooding: if the risk of more than 10cm is considered, around four times more properties are considered at risk in many boroughs.

Riverside boroughs such as Hammersmith and Fulham, Wandsworth and Newham are dominated by the risk from the tidal Thames river and its tributaries. For example, over 85% of the 100,000 endangered properties in Southwark, the most at-risk borough, are threatened by Thames flooding, although Thames defences mean the risk is in the low category. Damian Carrington

• Flooding
• London
• Climate change
• Insurance
• Insurance industry
• Housing
• Property

Damian Carrington
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Royal Horticultural Society to unveil 100 'brightly coloured mythical creatures' painted for charity by celebs after lifting century-old ban

The petunias and irises are in full, creamy flower, the rhododendrons are blossoming, and the roses and phlox look splendid. But the exhibitors, planters and garden designers putting final touches to their creations for next week's Chelsea flower show are split as seldom before. The traditionally humourless Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has temporarily lifted its 100-year ban on "brightly-coloured mythical creatures", and war between the landscape snobs who want them kept out and the oiks who love them may be imminent.

"Pssst, want to see one?" says Sue Robinson of Hillier nursery, bringing out "Woodland Wilf", a fluorescent pink, pointy-headed chappie with two lurid orange buckets. Wilf, possibly the first garden gnome in 100 years to legitimately show his face at Chelsea, looked as if he wanted to hide in a massive display of delphiniums, but Robinson was having none of it, thrusting him into the bright light and sweet smells of the main marquee. "We haven't decided where Wilf will sit. Probably beneath that tree."

Next week, the RHS will unveil over 100 gnomes, painted for charity by celebrities. Elton John has reportedly garnished his with glitter and given him sunglasses, but those of Dolly Parton, Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, Rob Brydon and others will not be seen until the royal family and the garden grandees who have so long opposed the gnomes' introduction have had a look on Monday.

But Chelsea's attempt to reflect the tastes of ordinary folk may prove popular. A wholly unscientific poll of 15 exhibitors and gardeners at Chelsea by the Guardian on Friday found strong approval for the permanent presence of the little people. "About time, too. What's wrong with them? Yes, they're naff, but I've secretly got three myself," admitted one eminent garden designer who asked not to be named.

"I'm sitting on the gnomic fence," said Jinny Blom, who has designed a sentimental garden of forget-me-nots and baby's tears plants for Prince Harry's Lesotho children's charity, Sentebale. "It's a debacle. Chelsea is quite divided. Some people here really, really hate them. Others think it's all a bit of a laugh and quite OK." She expects Harry to rappel down into her garden from the plane trees in the Royal Hospital grounds. "I sent the design to Camp Bastion. He said he wanted to dig the garden but he couldn't get away."

"This is definitely a gnome-free garden," says Steve Marsh of the Woodland Trust at the Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera) garden, funded by the environment department, Forestry Commission and Welsh and Scottish governments, with the idea of not just stimulating the senses but scaring the 200,000 people expected to visit the sold-out show next week.

The exhibition is possibly the only one in a century to not just plant dead trees but to call itself "ugly". An avenue of eight 25ft tall leafless willows stand above a sinister black pool to make the point that British woods and gardens face a host of new killer pests and diseases such as ash dieback. Fringed by horse chestnut, sycamore and maple trees – which conservationists say could succumb in future – the garden is dark and shocking amid the frivolous yellows and pinks of most of Chelsea's other exhibits.

"We say they are not dead trees, but lifeless," says the ever-optimistic Marsh. "The trees actually died naturally and were removed by the Forestry Commission. We want to tell people that if we don't take notice of what is out there, there won't be any gardens in future."

In fact, half of Chelsea's attractions this year are centred round very expensive bits of dead trees. The £6bn garden industry sells plants but also £20,000 wooden statues of horses and panthers, £10,000 gateposts and sheds, as well as beehives, bird boxes and driftwood sculptures. "The plants are just a small part of the business these days. The money is in the objects," says Rob Francis, a Dorset garden centre manager in London this weekend in order to spot trends.

"It's been a real struggle to grow the plants this year, what with the cold weather," said Ruth Gooch of Thorncroft nursery in Norfolk, tying up a display of Polish-bred clematises. "We've been holding some back from flowering and encouraging others. The flowers are quite giddy – they have been brought inside and taken outside so many times to make sure they bloom on time."

She shows how to stimulate the buds by gently rolling them between her fingers. "Do it too early and they are distorted. The iris people are amazing. They use hairdryers, but we don't."

On Friday, neither the Garden Gnome Liberation Front, nor the supposedly less militant Garden Gnome Emancipation Movement – which take gnomes from gardens to "free them" from "enslavement" in flower beds, lawns, gardens and centres – could be contacted. But a spokeswoman for the RHS said the gnomes were safe and well-guarded in their offices.

• Chelsea flower show
• Gardens
• Ash dieback
• Trees and forests

John Vidal
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Ed Davey needs to do more on cutting energy consumption than the Green Deal. Looking to Germany would be a start

So Ed Davey, climate secretary, wants to "want to turn the non-switchers into savvy switchers", he said on Friday, talking about the importance of driving down energy bills. But switching supplier is never going to be enough. We need to start taking energy consumption seriously.

The UK currently has a handful of policies in place on this, in an attempt to catch-up with our European rivals on efforts to rein in energy consumption. The majority of UK energy programs are aimed at the housing stock. UK homes are among the least efficient in Europe, burdened by poor insulation, draughts and inefficient heating systems. They account for nearly a third of the nation's total energy use.

The Green Deal aims to tackle this issue. It's a finance scheme that helps people pay for energy-efficiency improvement in their home. It gets around the question of "why bother improving my home if I'm going to move out in two years anyway?" by tying the loan scheme's repayments to a property's electricity bill, rather than the individual who intiated the works.

Statistics out this week from the Department of Energy Climate Change show that nearly 19,000 Green Deal assessments have been made to date. But what we really want to know is how many of those assessments are being converted into actual Green Deal plans – those figures will be released next month.

While the scheme is certainly a step in the right direction, it's not too clear what that direction actually is. "The Green Deal should be part of an overall strategy, but the big mistake here is that the Green Deal has been mistaken for a strategy," says Dave Timms at Friends of the Earth. Timms points out that the UK needs to bring together incentives, regulations and financing schemes, like the Green Deal, to create an effective oversight. The Green Deal alone is unlikely to meet the nation's ambitious energy targets.

In comparison, Germany has its energy strategy clearly laid out in front of them. By 2020 it aims to lower its primary energy consumption by 20% (relative to 2008 figures). The government is also determined to concentrate on renewable energy, while phasing out its use of nuclear energy and fossil fuels. "In Germany they really know the direction they're heading in, and there's quite a broad consensus on their strategy," says Peter Sauer, the Counsellor of Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the German Embassy in London. He suggests that for the Green Deal to really kick off, there needs to be more focus on promoting the scheme and defining an overarching plan.

The UK has a number of other policies in the pipeline that will help create the tough set of regulations necessary to drive change in energy consumption. One that is currently pending final approval is aimed at private landlords. By 2018, it will be an offence for a landlord to let a property with the very lowest levels of energy efficiency. Improvements would have to be made to the property, be it a home or an office, to meet minimum standards in order to let it out.

Last summer, another proposal aimed at the UK's existing building stock was unceremoniously scrapped by Ministers in a 'U-turn' decision. The objective was to make it mandatory for any existing homes with plans for extensions to make 'consequential improvements', quickly dubbed a 'conservatory tax' in sections of the media'. This would mean that while the actual extensions would have to be energy-efficient, the pre-existing property would also have to be improved to meet minimum standards.

According to Andrew Warren, Director of the Association of Conservation of Energy, these proposals were estimated to bring in 2.2 million Green Deals, also generating £11 billion of extra economical activity in the construction sector. The policy was put under consultation and saw an 82% approval rate. Ministers dropped the idea after the media backlash. The issue is now being pursuing in the courts by the Association of Conservation of Energy.

"It's an astonishing state of affairs when one considers that the public announcements of government are that energy efficiency is the low hanging fruit of climate policy, the one that has the greatest benefits for businesses and households," adds Timms.

This event reinforces the need for a common UK energy objective. It's crucial for all parts of the government, not just Decc, to work together on a common goal. Taking a closer look at progress made by other European nations may also yield inspiration to the UK's energy approach.

In a series of upcoming blogposts, I'll be looking at the question of energy consumption in the workplace, education and the context of psychology. If you have any thoughts, please share them on email or below. As individuals we all play a part in the nation's energy use.

• Katherine Portilla is a science journalism MA student at City University London and will be investigating issued related to energy consumption for her final project. In the next few weeks she will interview experts and explore various sectors related to the subject. She can be contacted via email on koportilla@gmail.com and on Twitter @katherine_op

• Energy efficiency
• Energy
• Green deal

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Building programme advancing, says minister as expectations of timetable delay at Hinkley Point grow and Chinese 'lose interest'

The government has insisted it was still optimistic about plans to build a series of nuclear power stations despite expectations that EDF would delay its timetable for a new reactor at Hinkley Point and concerns that China was losing interest in being a co-investor.

"The UK's new nuclear programme is advancing positively with three projects currently being taken forward by NNB GenCo [EDF], NuGen and Horizon Nuclear Power," said the energy minister, Michael Fallon, in response to a select committee report.

"We are confident that we will see investment in the context of the government's policy on no public subsidies for new nuclear."

He added that negotiations were continuing over a "strike price" – or guaranteed minimum price for electricity generated. EDF, which wants a 40-year guarantee, said it remained optimistic that it could tie up a deal with ministers  before long.

On Friday, the construction trade paper Building quoted industry sources as saying that EDF did not expect to take a final investment decision on Hinkley in Somerset until September at the earliest.

The firm, 80% of which is owned by the French state, had originally talked about concluding negotiations by the end of 2012. That was later extended to the first quarter of 2013. Delays have traditionally dogged nuclear energy projects but are particularly worrisome in this case because Britain faces a potential energy capacity crisis within five years.

An EDF spokeswoman declined to comment on the latest speculation, saying. "I am not going to make up dates. Others might have their own views but we have nothing else to add."

A major slip in the Somerset timetable was one of the reasons British Gas owner Centrica pulled out of its original plans to invest in Hinkley alongside EDF, which the British company highlighted at its annual general meeting on Monday.

Sam Laidlaw, Centrica's chief executive, told shareholders: "Not only had the cost increased but also the schedule had lengthened very considerably. So instead of taking four to five years to build, EDF were telling us that it was going to take nine to 10 years to build. That is a long time to be writing out a cheque for this project."

EDF has been struggling with its own soaring £30bn debt levels and delays at its key project in France. The group opened talks with the Chinese as an alternative co-investor and earlier this month signed a formal co-operation deal with China Guangdong Nuclear Power Holding Company. But City sources working for the Chinese told the Guardian they thought it very unlikely they would participate.

"Money is no object but the Chinese have pulled back on nuclear in Britain. They realise they do not have sufficient know-how to pass the UK regulators but do not want to be just a passive investor," said one investment banker.

• EDF Energy
• Nuclear power
• Energy
• Energy industry
• Michael Fallon

Terry Macalister
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Study finds overwhelming scientific consensus that humans have caused global warming, but media still hasn't caught up

Here's the news from 1991 – a vanishingly small number of peer-reviewed studies in science journals argue that humans aren't the cause of global warming.

Here's the news from 2013 – since 1991, less than two per cent of all peer-reviewed studies say climate change is caused by something other than human activities (that's burning fossil fuels and digging up forests, to you and me).

Both the news from 2013 and the news from 1991 come from new research published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The study, widely reported, was led by Australian John Cook, of the University of Queensland's Global Change Institute and the founder of the Skeptical Science website.

The study looked at 12,000 peer-reviewed papers in science journals since 1991 to find out just how many studies agree that humans cause global warming – known as anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

What's really striking about the research is the red line on the graph showing the number of papers that claim something is to blame, such as the sun or natural cycles.

Like a cardiac monitor warning of a soon-to-be lifeless patient, for more than 20 years the red line hovers around zero showing barely a flicker of life. Cook says they expected to see a rising number of papers which had "no position" and didn't feel the need to state the obvious "just as geographers find no reason to remind readers that the earth is round".

In other words, the alternative arguments about the causes of global warming were already dead or dying 20 years ago.

Yet since then, climate science contrarians/deniers/sceptics have continually applied the defibrillator paddles to these failing theories in an attempt to bring them back to life.

Despite what you might have seen on TV hospitable dramas, when the heart goes all asystolic no amount of defibrillator action is going to chase away the reaper.

So after giving up on the peer-reviewed literature, the climate science contrarians – often bolstered by support from the fossil fuel industry and free-market idealogues - took their talking points somewhere else.

That is, out into the public domain, the mainstream media and the blogosphere and far away from the less forgiving operating theatre of peer-reviewed science journals.

To this day, these dead theories hang around like slack-jawed zombies in the graveyards of global media outlets.

Take a recent column published in the Wall Street Journal, for example, which tried to claim that global warming was down to natural cycles and changes in the sun's output. Carbon dioxide was just food for plants, wrote the authors.

Or how about London Mayor Boris Johnson's column earlier this year in The Daily Telegraph, where he also claimed climate change was driven by the sun. Johnson often quotes his "old chum" Piers Corbyn, a long-range weather "forecaster" who claims CO2 has no effect on global temperature.

Then there's The Australian newspaper which earlier this month concocted a story of a fake debate between scientists about a coming ice age.

The newspaper quoted a Russian physicist who is a member of Principia Scientific International – a group of contrarian scientists led by a man who claims CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas.

A 2011 study of opinion columns appearing in The Australian found that climate change contrarians outnumbered four-to-one those authors calling for firm action to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

In the US, the Union of Concerned Scientists has looked at climate change coverage in the Wall Street Journal and on Fox News over a six-month period.  In the case of Fox, UCS classified 37 out of 40 segments as "misleading" on climate change science. In almost a year of Wall Street Journal articles, just nine out of 48 articles were deemed to accurately reflect the state of the science.

Then there is the near omnipresence of free market conservative think-tanks – funded variously through secretive channels or the largesse of fossil fuel interests – who write books, columns and are asked to be "expert" commentators on climate change.

In Australia, one study has found how the free-market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs had been the source of a range of climate sceptic talking points echoed in mainstream media.

The current issue of the journal American Behavioral Scientist (ABS) is devoted to the phenomenon of climate change scepticism and denial and brings together studies and essays looking at the role of the media in trying to keep alive those climate change theories which have been under permanent cardiac arrest for the last two decades or more.

One self-explanatory study is titled "Leading Voices in the Denier Choir : Conservative Columnists' Dismissal of Global Warming and Denigration of Climate Science".

The authors, Professor Riley Dunlap and Shaun Elsasser, both of Oklahoma State University, looked at 203 columns written by more than 80 conservative writers published between 2007 and 2010. The authors conclude:

The overall results reveal a highly dismissive view of climate change and critical stance toward climate science among these influential conservative pundits. They play a crucial role in amplifying the denial machine's messages to a broad segment of the American public.

Similarly self-explanatory were some of the titles of the columns they investigated. There was "The Global Warmists' Deceit", "It's Got to Suck to Be a Climavangelist", "Hoax of the Century" and "Four Colossal Holes in the Theory of Man-Made Global Warming."

Dunlap and Elsassser also tally-up and categorise the arguments used to dismiss the science or dismiss the need to act. And the most common climate science denial argument used? "There is no consensus".

In an essay in the same issue of ABS, Maxwell Boykoff, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, notes how accurate media coverage alone won't be the panacea for genuine policy action to cut emissions.  He adds:

But improvements in reporting on claims and claims makers will help. The fossils of climate science and policy decision-making as well as communications may choose to continue along with the status quo. But to more effectively inform and engage - rather than confuse and bewilder - the public, 21st-century journalists and editors, as well as researchers, scientists, policy actors, and other non-nation-state actors, need to acknowledge the disproportionate influence of these outlier voices in mass media and communicate climate change with greater specificity and context.

While some media outlets have given their consumers the impression that climate scientists are split on the causes of climate change, the pulse of actual scientific debate on this issue faded long ago.

At least now, readers can be more certain that when they hear that climate change might not be caused by humans, it's probably just a zombie theory.

And kids, zombies aren't real.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change

Graham Readfearn
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Former senior official John Ashton attacks government for 'spooking potential investors' in energy infrastructure

The number of people employed by the government to work on the UK's response to the effects of climate change has been cut from 38 officials to just six, triggering accusations that David Cameron's promise to be the greenest government has been abandoned.

The UK is facing a multi-billion pound bill over the next few years for the costs of adapting to the effects of climate change – including flooding, much fiercer storms, droughts, heatwaves and more extreme weather. The government's advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, have warned that the measures needed to prepare the UK's infrastructure will include defences for power stations, transport and communication networks, changes to how buildings are constructed, and new ways of trying to prevent flooding, such as an upgrade to the Thames Barrier.

But the number of officials charged with dealing with the issue within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has been dramatically reduced. A freedom of information response to a question by Friends of the Earth confirmed the reduction from 38 to six posts.

Defra insisted that the changes were the result of a restructuring. A spokesman said: "How we adapt to any impacts of climate change has been embedded into every policy team in Defra. Staff numbers on the adaptation team will therefore be reduced and the expertise moved to other parts of the department. A larger team will then come together to deliver the next climate change risk assessment in 2017."

But the staff reduction was condemned by one of the former most senior Whitehall officials on climate change. John Ashton was charged with leading the UK's diplomatic efforts to forge a new international agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions at the United Nations.

In a fiery speech at the Royal Society of Arts on Thursday night, in which he lambasted his former political masters from every party for their failure to get to grips with the urgent problem of global warming, Ashton attacked ministers for "spooking potential investors" in the UK's energy infrastructure.

He said Cameron's famous husky – referring to when the then opposition leader was photographed in the Arctic as part of his efforts to change the image of the Conservatives – was dead "with a neat hole between its eyes".

Ashton, now a director at the environmental thinktank E3G, also called for a target for the decarbonisation of the UK's electricity industry to be included in the forthcoming energy bill, which is currently going through parliament.

The proposed target of making the UK's electricity generation almost carbon-free by 2030 has been removed by the government at the insistence of the chancellor, George Osborne, who has quashed all proposed environmental targets beyond 2020. But the former Tory minister Tim Yeo is planning a rebellion on the bill when it comes before the Commons next month.

Ashton said: "It is vital that the target be restored. I can't myself see how any MP who votes against the target will thereafter be able credibly to claim that they support an effective response to climate change."

He said the UK could not move out of recession without looking to green industries: "The government may think it has a growth story. Nobody else does. If it would stop looking at low-carbon growth in the way the Spanish inquisition looked at heretics, it could find one in front of its nose. The economy as a whole bumps along the bottom. The low-carbon economy keeps growing at nearly 4% [a year]."

Andy Atkins, director of Friends of the Earth which co-ordinated the event at which Ashton spoke, said: "After a year that has already brought flooding and other extreme weather to the UK, it's shocking that the department responsible for protecting us against the effects of climate change is to pare its staff to the bone."

• Climate change
• Green politics
• Liberal-Conservative coalition
• Owen Paterson
• David Cameron
• George Osborne
• Conservatives
• Liberal Democrats
• Civil service
• Energy
• Energy industry
• Renewable energy

Fiona Harvey
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Ted Cullinan's 50-year career culminates in a building that distills his simple 'loose-fit, low-energy' approach

"I like to think of the building as somebody sunbathing on a lilo in Marbella," says Ted Cullinan with a mischievous grin. He is sitting in the sunken courtyard of his latest project, a new Maggie's Centre for cancer care, surrounded by a tarmac landscape of car parks and sheds, in the grounds of Newcastle's Freeman hospital. It requires something of a leap of imagination to summon the Costa del Sol.

But Cullinan persists: "Look, it has its tummy exposed to capture the warmth of the sun," he says, pointing his walking stick towards the south-facing walls of glass. "While its shoulders keep cool in the sea" – the Mediterranean here being a mound of earth that shelters the building's northern face. Where we are sitting, he says, feels five degrees warmer than it would do, because of the protective earthen berm that blocks out the breeze, and the radiant panels of rusted corten steel that clad the facade.

For the last five decades, the 81-year-old architect has used similar metaphors to demonstrate how easily the natural environment can be harnessed to make spaces that are simply comfortable to be in, and use a little less energy in the process. Designing with the triad of "long-life, loose fit, low energy" since the 1960s, his buildings are worn by their users like a favourite cosy cardigan or pair of jeans, improving with age. For Cullinan, the idea of "sustainable design" – since commodified by others in a high-tech language of grills and flaps, gizmos and louvers – is basic common sense.

"People say Newcastle is always windy and freezing, that it has a horrible climate" he says. "But it doesn't – it's just the way we use it. Buildings can use their climate so easily, that it's such a shame not to do it."

The origins of his design for the Maggie's Centre are now framed on the wall of the reception, where watercolour sketches show a pagan sunburst, with a curious crimson face, beaming health-giving rays down over the building. A circular roof arches upwards to catch the sunbeams, forming a Pringle-shaped cap of photovoltaic cells, while rooms extend below in an L-shaped plan, like arms outstretched to embrace the sun. The building is a conscious celebration of its response to the elements.

This is the 16th Maggie's Centre, a programme begun by architectural theorist Charles Jencks and his wife Maggie Keswick, shortly before she died of cancer in 1995, to provide light and airy "homes from home" for cancer patients to receive a less clinical kind of care. Cullinan joins an all-star cast, with buildings by Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers and Rem Koolhaas, each project a distillation of their architectural manifestos.

"Each one is like an experiment in a petri dish," says Jencks, who continues to expand his laboratory, with forthcoming centres by Wilkinson Eyre, Steven Holl and Norman Foster among others. "They are all mini icons." So, after Gehry's crumpled tinfoil roof and Hadid's faceted concrete bunker, what kind of icon is Cullinan's?

"In the 1980s, Ted was the spearhead of a movement called 'romantic pragmatism'," says Jencks, who is no stranger to coining architectural taxonomies, as the godfather of postmodernism. "It isn't just green, warm and cuddly architecture. It's a very British, practical sensibility, mixed with platonic geometric forms and sometimes cosmic motifs" – as the mysterious celestial pods of Cullinan's Cambridge mathematics faculty demonstrate.

In Newcastle, the overriding geometry is a simple grid of concrete columns and beams, forming a nine-bay lattice across the site. Into this concrete shell – left exposed to absorb heat during the day – timber-bordered walls and partitions are slotted like pieces of movable furniture, giving the interior a Japanese sense of layered space.

The grid defines generous square rooms at either end of each wing – one for exercise, one for cooking and dining – with smaller private therapy rooms tucked in along the edges. A double-height living room and library stands at the centre of the plan, as the fulcrum from which the wings extend, with a staircase rising up to the timber ribs of the roof, which arcs up like the bulging hull of a ship.

Every surface has been turned into a potential place to cosy up with a cuppa and a book, with window seats and cubby holes lining the library shelves up the stairs, all upholstered in cheery fabrics.

"It's basically a very large house," says Cullinan. "A building where you relax, read, cook, take exercise: all of the elements of 'uomo universale'."

"Uomo", he says, because he was particularly keen to attract men to use what are often seen as "overly genderised" buildings for women. The centre is launching "Maggie's Men's Mondays", while outdoor exercise equipment on the rooftop garden is also part of the attraction, where lawns are framed by beech hedges – which will hopefully soon hide the rather clunky metal balustrade. Cullinan is also keen to introduce a croquet set on the roof: "It's a very good game for people who aren't feeling so confident," he says, swinging an imaginary mallet between his legs. "Because it's so vicious!"

Croquet might not have fared so well on the rooftop of the previous design for the site, produced by Foreign Office Architects in 2009, which was conceived as a continuous landscape rising up out of the ground in the manner of a Teletubby house. The architects withdrew when the site was changed – and it is unlikely that their undulating vision could have been built for the £1.5m construction budget of this project.

Cullinan's Maggie's Centre may be one of the less striking of Jencks' architectural collection from the outside, looking fortress-like with its rusty steel walls behind defensive mounds of earth and high railings marching around the rooftop. But within, it is undoubtedly one of the most humane and comfortable of the lot, and once the planting matures to soften some of the harder edges, his particular brand of "romantic pragmatism" will shine through.

• Architecture
• Design
• Healthcare industry
• Hospitals
• Cancer
• Health
• Newcastle
• Sustainable development

Oliver Wainwright
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US National Strategy for the Arctic Region prioritises corporate 'economic opportunities' at the expense of everyone else

One week ago, the Obama administration launched its National Strategy for the Arctic Region, outlining the government's strategic priorities over the next 10 years. The release of the strategy came about a week after the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President at the White House Complex hosted a briefing with international Arctic scientists.

Despite giving lip service to the values of environmental conservation, the new document focuses on how the US can manage the exploitation of the region's vast untapped oil, gas and mineral resources in cooperation with other Arctic powers.

US hinges success of Arctic strategy on diminishing sea ice

At the heart of the White House's new Arctic strategy is an elementary but devastating contradiction between what President Obama, in the document's preamble, describes as seeking "to make the most of the emerging economic opportunities in the region" due to the rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice, and recognising "the need to protect and conserve this unique, valuable, and changing environment."

Despite repeated references to "preservation" and "conservation", the strategy fails to outline any specific steps that would be explored to mitigate or prevent the disappearance of the Arctic sea ice due to intensifying global warming. Instead, the document from the outset aims to:

"... position the United States to respond effectively to challenges and emerging opportunities arising from significant increases in Arctic activity due to the diminishment of sea ice and the emergence of a new Arctic environment."

In other words, far from being designed to prevent catastrophe, the success of the new strategy is premised precisely on the disappearance of the Arctic summer sea ice.

The document identifies three main US objectives in the region: advancing US "security interests" by increasing US military and commercial penetration "through, under, and over the airspace and waters of the Arctic"; pursuing "responsible Arctic region stewardship" by continuing to "conserve its resources"; and strengthening international cooperation to advance "collective interests" and "shared Arctic state prosperity" - all the while, somhow working to "protect the Arctic environment."

Vast quantities of mineral resources

But the most important strategic objective is all about Big Oil.

Noting that "ocean resources are more readily accessible as sea ice diminishes", the strategy document points out that:

"The reduction in sea ice has been dramatic, abrupt, and unrelenting. The dense, multi-year ice is giving way to thin layers of seasonal ice, making more of the region navigable year-round. Scientific estimates of technically recoverable conventional oil and gas resources north of the Arctic Circle total approximately 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the world's undiscovered gas deposits, as well as vast quantities of mineral resources, including rare earth elements, iron ore, and nickel. These estimates have inspired fresh ideas for commercial initiatives and infrastructure development in the region. As portions of the Arctic Ocean become more navigable, there is increasing interest in the viability of the Northern Sea Route and other potential routes, including the Northwest Passage, as well as in development of Arctic resources."

The document emphasises that the Arctic is central to US "energy security", as the region:

"... holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet US energy needs."

Empty promises

Extraordinarily, the document offers just a single sentence acknowledging the potentially destabilising impact of rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice:

"These consequences include altering the climate of lower latitudes, risking the stability of Greenland's ice sheet, and accelerating the thawing of the Arctic permafrost in which large quantities of methane – a potent driver of climate change – as well as pollutants such as mercury are stored."

To address such risks, the document promises obliquely that:

"Protecting the unique and changing environment of the Arctic is a central goal of US policy. Supporting actions will promote healthy, sustainable, and resilient ecosystems over the long term, supporting a full range of ecosystem services."

Yet this generic promise offers no specific explanation of what US policy to "protect" the Arctic entails - particularly given that protecting the "changing environment of the Arctic" might well allude to a policy of doing nothing to stop the 'change' that is the diminishing of the sea ice.

This is all the more alarming given that more than 180 native communities in Alaska are, according to this week's in-depth Guardian investigation, "flooding and losing land because of the ice melt that is part of the changing climate."

Unfortunately, President Obama's new Arctic strategy offers nothing tangible for the country's "first climate refugees", despite giving copious lip service to consulting the region's indigenous communities already facing direct threats to their existence due to climate change.

A strategy for global catastrophe

But the strategy is not just bad new for so many Alaskan natives. It's also bad news for the rest of us.

America's new Arctic strategy, if implemented, will dramatically accelerate the very processes of fossil fuel consumption that have already led to carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations reaching a record 400 parts per million. And as Damian Carrington reports:

"... the last time this happened was several million years ago, when the Arctic was ice-free, savannah spread across the Sahara desert and sea level was up to 40 metres higher than today."

Studies based on paleoclimate data consistently show that conventional climate models of where this current business-as-usual trajectory is heading tend to underestimate the extent of the crisis.

A 2011 paper in Science found that at the current rate of increase of greenhouse gas emissions, by the end of the century they will reach levels last seen when the planet was 16C hotter - far more catastrophic than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) worst case projection of a virtually uninhabitable planet at 6C by 2100.

According to lead author Jeffrey Kiehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the study "found that carbon dioxide may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models of global climate."

Now a new study published last week in the same journal vindicates these conclusions, showing that at current atmospheric concentrations, the Arctic was 8C warmer:

"One of our major findings is that the Arctic was very warm in the Pliocene [~ 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago] when others have suggested atmospheric CO2 was very much like levels we see today. This could tell us where we are going in the near future. In other words, the Earth system response to small changes in carbon dioxide is bigger than suggested by earlier models."

So the new US Arctic strategy is not just short-sighted, ill-conceived and self-interested. If it proceeds as planned, it will condemn all of humanity to unimaginable disaster, just to sustain the near-term profits of a few giant energy corporations.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

• Arctic
• Polar regions
• Obama administration
• Energy
• Oil
• Gas
• Carbon emissions
• Climate change
• Climate change

Nafeez Ahmed
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Major US TV channels are promoting hysterical and outdated ideas about wildlife in popular, blood-soaked shows

Most people's wild beasts live in the TV.

What I mean is that, in my experience, most people are highly unlikely to come eyeball-to-eyeball with a large wild animal in their everyday lives, and much of their knowledge of wildlife comes from a screen.

If you're North American or get US-produced satellite TV, you've probably learned a lot about wildlife from outlets like the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and History. You might trust these channels because you've seen educational, factually accurate shows on them, unlike the 'trashy' material that dominates free-to-air network TV.

But not everything on on these 'factual' channels might be as ethical or even as accurate as you might think, and the implications for conservation could be profound.

I recently spent a few entertaining hours watching episodes of Discovery's Yukon Men, a hit 'reality' series about the residents of the small town of Tanana in central Alaska. Launched in August last year, it's consistently gained over two million US viewers in its Friday night slot, been syndicated overseas, and helped the channel win some of its biggest audiences ever.

The first episode brings us to midwinter Tanana, which a theatrical, husky male voiceover tells us is "one of America's most remote outposts" where "every day is a struggle to survive". A dramatic, orchestral score pounds as we see a lynx struggling in a leghold trap, guns firing, a man attacking a squealing wolverine with a tree trunk, a wolf which a voice tells us "might eat one of those kids", a hand lifting up the head of a bloodied, dead wolf to show us its teeth, and then a gloved hand dripping blood while the voiceover rumbles that in Alaska, it's "hunt or starve, kill or be killed".

That's all in the first minute.

In the second minute the voiceover tells us that "the town is under siege by hungry predators". We see wolves eating a bloody carcass, a growling bear, men with guns shouting bleeped-out words, then a coffin. Another voice says that "there's always somebody that's not going to make it home".

We're soon told that Tanana's water pipes are freezing up "but that's not the only crisis. Wolves have been spotted on the edge of town." Charlie, a hunter, shows us the tracks of "a lone wolf". "Wolves are mean, ferocious animals and they can tear a man apart real easy" he says, so "we have to get this wolf, it's not an if, its a must, because he'll go to any measure to eat. They're the worst kind."

We then meet Courtney, a local mother, who's scared that the wolf could eat her young daughter. Charlie agrees, "if we turned our backs for a couple of minutes, that baby would be gone."

"There have been twenty fatal wolf attacks in the last ten years", the voiceover intones.

Charlie kills the wolf in the next episode, pursuing it on a snowmobile and shooting it outside town with an AR-15, the same semi-automatic assault rifle used by the Sandy Hook school shooter. "The only good thing about a wolf is the quality of their nice fur", says Charlie, holding up the blood-smeared pelt. Courtney agrees: "Dirty little rotten bastard."

Another scene shows Stan, a fur trapper, dealing with a wolverine. Wolverines, about as big as a medium-sized dog, are the largest members of the weasel family. One has been caught by its front paw in one of Stan's steel leghold traps and is trying to get away, squealing and snarling as he approaches. "He's really dangerous", says Stan, "I don't think any human being could keep an attacking wolverine from killing them."

Stan chops down a small tree, which he bashes the struggling wolverine with — to "stun" it, he says. Once the wolverine's strength is somewhat depleted, he approaches it with a small handgun. The animal's head turns, tracking the gun, and he shoots it. The camera zooms in to show steam rising from the carcass.

Charlie, too, sets a leghold trap for a wolverine, and catches it. As it squeals in the trap, trying to run away, the voiceover tells us dramatically that "wolverines are capable of tearing human beings apart."

"He could gut me", says Charlie, before raising his AR-15 and opening fire on the hapless animal. Many of his shots miss, but he eventually kills it.

All through Yukon Men we see predatory animals being killed: a leghold-trapped lynx is strangled to death with a wire noose by Stan's son, a grizzly bear is shot in the head, etcetera, and every time the producers use the techniques of the reality TV genre to convince us that the animals are man-woman-and-child killers which are best turned into fur coats.

(Click here to view this video on YouTube.)

Frenetic edits and manic music are used to build drama, authoritative-sounding voiceovers combine with the tightly edited words of the on-screen characters tell how dangerous, vicious or deadly the creatures we're seeing on screen are. I spot occasions where animal noises seem to have been overdubbed to make them sound scarier. It makes for gripping viewing, but I wondered if Discovery wasn't betraying its viewers who trust it to deliver reliable, factual TV. As a trained zoologist and filmmaker, much of what I was seeing didn't make sense to me.

Take wolverines for example: I lived in Alaska for almost a year and never saw one. They're extremely shy and avoid humans. Although they're capable predators of small animals and found in many cold, high-latitude regions of the northern hemisphere, I'd never heard of a wolverine killing a person.

I searched the web and could not find a single documented case of a wolverine even attacking a person anywhere in the world, ever.

To double-check, I emailed Jeff Copeland of the Wolverine Foundation, who told me that "we are not aware of any instance in which a wolverine has killed a human, or even attempted to do so", which perhaps explains why the wolverines in Yukon Men are doing their desperate best to get away from their human assailants.

Wolves are a lot larger than wolverines, of course. But even though the US and Canada hold over 60,000 wolves, I found only two records of fatal attacks by wild wolves in these countries in last ten years; one controversial case in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 2005, which some experts think was actually a bear attack, and another in Alaska in 2010.

Why did the producers of Yukon Men tell their viewers that there had been twenty fatal wolf attacks in the last ten years, implying that these had taken place around Tanana? Why does a 'factual' show portray Alaskan wolves as man-eating monsters straight out of Victorian fairytales, a serious threat to life and limb, when the data show that wolf attacks are extremely rare in North America?

Idaho-based wolf expert Suzanne Stone told me that she'd once been surrounded by a howling pack of gray wolves while sitting by a campfire in the twilight, armed only with a marshmallow on a stick. The animals were only twenty or thirty yards away. Was she scared, I asked? "No, not at all. It was an incredible experience. I howled back and forth with them", adding that people and domestic livestock were the most dangerous creatures she'd encountered in many years of walking in wolf-inhabited backcountry.

Yukon Men isn't the only 'factual' show about people who kill wild animals that seems to hysterically hype up the danger the animals pose to humans while minimising (or completely failing to address) their important ecological roles.

The Louisiana alligator hunter stars of the History Channel's blockbuster show Swamp People use huge baited hooks to snare alligators and various guns to blow their brains out, all the while telling us how desperately dangerous they are. Despite Louisiana having almost two million alligators, I could not find a single record of a fatal alligator attack there in the last century, although Florida 'gators do occasionally eat people. (Swamp People gets record ratings for the channel, despite the contemporary alligator hunt's tenuous connection to history.)

(click here to watch this video on YouTube.)

Animal Planet's Rattlesnake Republic shows Texan snake wranglers capturing dozens of rattlesnakes at a time while repeatedly playing up their lethality. In the episodes I watched I never saw anything about how snake hunters have helped make the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake so rare that it's now a candidate endangered species. Rattlesnake Republic sends a clear meta-message that the only good rattlesnakes are dead ones, sewn into boots.

Discovery and the BBC Natural History Unit have arguably similar status in the wildlife filmmaking industries on their respective sides of the Atlantic, and have co-produced high-profile series like Planet Earth and Africa. The BBC displays its editorial guidelines for natural history shows on a public website which, on the face of it, Discovery's Yukon Men seems to fall afoul of. The BBC guidelines say that "audiences should never be deceived or misled by what they see or hear", that "we [the BBC] should never be involved in any activity with animals which could reasonably be considered cruel", for example.

This begs the question: What are Discovery's editorial guidelines?

After numerous calls and emails to the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, I've yet to find out. I've not received any indication that either of these channels (which are owned by the same company) even have editorial guidelines or an ethics policy. The Discovery Channel gave me only one line in response to my questions: "We are committed to the highest standards of natural history filmmaking."

Despite partnering with them on multimillion-dollar shows, the BBC's Natural History Unit also seems to have no idea what Discovery's policies are; when I asked, the BBC would only say that they expected any versions of their programs aired by co-producers to adhere to BBC standards.

The History Channel told me that their standards and practices department ensures that all their shows meet "the standards of good taste and community acceptability while also allowing our creative departments the freedom to explore new and innovative ideas." Each programme is individually evaluated, but "given the subjective judgments that are required, it is difficult to come up with a detailed list of guidelines." History's statement said nothing about factual accuracy or animal cruelty.

I contacted National Geographic TV, assuming that this flagship brand would have a policy something like that of the BBC's. Christopher Alberts, the Senior Vice President of Communications for the National Geographic Channels, told me that they have "one of the best policies there is", but refused to send it to me or tell me anything about it.

Why are these factual networks, whose survival depends on building trust with their audiences, so reluctant to clarify their ethics policies with respect to wildlife?

What does it mean for conservation if high-rating shows on leading channels are portraying wildlife in a negative, seemingly misleading way to millions of viewers worldwide? And why are so few people saying anything about it?

• Wildlife
• Television
• United States
• Animals
• BBC

Adam Welz
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Hungry sharks, frogs keen to mate and a mischievous leopard are among the pick of this week's images from the natural world

Patrick Barkham heads to the north-east of England to visit the Farne Islands, where the National Trust is embarking on an epic census of the puffin population

Noah Payne-FrankSimon RawlesPatrick BarkhamMustafa Khalili

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. He hopes to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where "the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys."

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Volunteer firefighter Mark Bezos tells a story of an act of heroism that didn't go quite as expected — but that taught him a big lesson: Don't wait — give now.

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Prof James Hansen warns public not to be fooled by 'diversionary tactic' from deniers

Suggestions that global warming has stalled are a "diversionary tactic" from "deniers" who want the public to be confused over climate change, according to the world's best-known climate scientist. Prof James Hansen, who first alerted the world to climate change in 1988, said on Friday: "It is not true that the temperature has not changed in the two decades."

Since 1998, when the Niño climate phenomenon caused global temperatures to soar, the rate of increase in warming has slowed, causing some sceptics to suggest climate change has stopped or that the effect of rising carbon dioxide levels on climate is not as great as previously thought.

Prof Hansen, speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, rejected both arguments. "In the last decade it has warmed only a tenth of a degree compared to two-tenths of a degree in the preceeding decade, but that's just natural variability. There is no reason to be surprised by that at all," he said. "If you look over a 30-40 year period the expected warming is two-tenths of a degree per decade, but that doesn't mean each decade is going to warm two-tenths of a degree: there is too much natural variability."

Prof Hansen said the focus by some on "details" was a smokescreen. "This is a diversionary tactic. Our understanding of global warming and human-made climate change has not been affected at all," he said. "It's because the deniers [of the science] want the public to be confused. They raise these minor issues and then we forget about what the main story is. The main story is carbon dioxide is going up and it is going to produce a climate which is going to have dramatic changes if we don't begin to reduce our emissions." In 2008, scientists anticipated an upcoming slowing in temperature rises.

Prof Hansen, who recently stepped down from his Nasa post after almost 50 years to focus on communication, said the forecast impact of climate change was little affected by the recent slowdown in the rate of rising temperatures.

"Climate is a complicated system but there is no change at all in our understanding of climate sensitivity [to carbon dioxide] and where the climate is headed," he said. "Our understanding of sensitivity is based on the Earth's history, not on climate models, and we have good data on how the Earth responded in the past when carbon dioxide changed. So there is no reason to change the forecast for the long term." On 9 May, a new study of lake sediments from a remote meteorite crater in Siberia showed temperatures in the region were 8C higher the last time CO2 levels were as high as they are today. Last week, atmospheric CO2 concentrations reached the milestone 400 parts per million, for the first time in millions of years.

Prof Hansen has caused controversy in the past with statements including "CEOs of fossil fuel companies should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature" and the assertion that "coal-fired power plants are factories of death".

• Climate change
• James Hansen
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change
• Radio 4
• Carbon emissions

Damian Carrington
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Residents in Chile discover around 600 dead animals washed up on the shore in Punta Choros, on the country's northern coast

Banned on the Hill tells how Canadian bureaucrats tried to silence Franke James because her views clashed with the government's push to develop Alberta's tar sands

Visual essays by Franke James reveal how the 'troublesome artist' was targeted because her views on climate change clashed with the push to develop Alberta's tar sands

• Franke James' art – in pictures

Canada, under the government of Stephen Harper, has exhibited little patience for dissent. The government has muzzled government scientists, insulted Nasa climate experts, and dismissed environmental protesters as dangerous radicals.

But there is apparently one woman whom the government can't shut up: the Toronto environmental writer, illustrator and activist Franke James, who turned the efforts to silence her into material for a new book.

Banned on the Hill: A True Story about Dirty Oil and Government Censorship, released this week, shows how Canadian bureaucrats tried to silence James because her views on climate change clashed with the Harper government's push to develop Alberta's tar sands.

The story is told through visual essays as well as official emails obtained by James, in which government bureaucrats discuss the troublesome artist and her work.

It also relies heavily on humour – some of it provided inadvertently by the government bureaucrats discussing what to do about James.

The artist said she received some 2,172 pages of official memos in which her name appeared.

The events go back to the summer of 2011 when Canadian officials intervened to try to shut down a show of James's work in Croatia hosted by a local environmental group.

James is not a household name in Canada, but she had apparently turned up on the government's radar for a series of visuals poking fun at Harper and demanding that polluters be held accountable for the tar sands.

For James, the decision to target her encapsulated the extreme measures taken by the Harper government to counter its critics, especially those who oppose the expansion of the tar sands, because of the heavy environmental consequences.

"It is almost like it's a corporation exercising extreme message control," she said in a phone interview. "It's as if Stephen Harper were the CEO of Canada the corporation and we were his employees and we were not allowed to step out of line or say what we believe is right or true because that would upset the company's brand.

"This fanatical obsession with message control to me is very much what you have in a company but in a democracy that shouldn't be the case."

The Harper administration's preoccupation with message control is now the stuff of legend in Canada. The government is acutely sensitive to criticism of its policies on fossil fuel and climate change.

The Alberta tar sands have until now operated as a vast store of carbon. Scientists estimate that mining it all would add a 0.4C temperature rise from Alberta alone.

Under Harper, Canada has ramped up production from the Alberta tar sands, and pulled out of the Kyoto climate agreement, as the country's greenhouse gas emissions rose.

The government also adopted a hardline approach to international critics, and dissenting voices within the Canadian bureaucracy. Government scientists were directed not to speak to the press and to remain in sight of media minders at international conferences – in case they happened to strike up a conversation with a passing reporter. Librarians were discouraged from attending outside conferences.

Scientific reports that arrived at findings not in keeping with the government's pro-energy policies were shelved for months, or published without the usual press release, so as to escape attention.

In one instance, reported by Macleans, 11 government bureaucrats exchanged more than 50 different emails discussing whether to grant an interview to an Ottawa Citizen reporter on a National Research Council study on snowfall patterns – and then turned him down.

Harper's iron-fisted message control is now viewed sufficiently seriously that Canada's information commission earlier this year launched an investigation into media controls on seven government departments, including environment and natural resources, which oversees tar sands development.

But the snowfall emails were just a fraction of the 2,172 pages of memos generated by Canadian bureaucrats discussing James's cancelled art show, and her subsequent protests. The emails – heavily redacted – were released to James after a laborious process of open records requests involving seven government departments.

The formidable email trail started when a local Croatian environmental group approached the embassy in Zagreb for support, which was initially received. But the then ambassador to Croatia, Thomas Marr, was furious to learn that James would be showing in Croatia and fired off an email to a staffer asking why she had ever been invited in the first place.

The email, heavily redacted, was eventually released to James under an open records request. "You have connected them with Ms James who has a 'green conscience' and whose work sharply criticises the men and women working in forestry and in oil sands in our great country?" the 11 July email asked. The subject line read: "Franke James is your fault?"

James's arts grant was cancelled, in what she said was an effort to shut down her tour.

She said the move came as a shock. "I was just going along in my blissful way," she said. "I really didn't think that I was at risk of getting shut down in any way."

James spent much of the next two years protesting against the move to blacklist her. She wound up installing her show as posters at Ottawa bus shelters, and began the lengthy process of getting the government to release its trove of emails discussing her show, and its decision to cut funding.

"It became clear that they really do not like my art speaking about climate change and I was censored especially because I promoted policies that were different to theirs," she said.

She became angrier as the pile of documents grew higher. At a time of government cutbacks, many resources had been put into maintaining her file. Harper's personal communications team followed her on Twitter. Senior civil servants signed off on emails discussing her. "There are people at really high levels monitoring my file," she said. "They are cutting a lot of important things, but wasting their time interfering with a climate change art show."

Unless there has been a major policy shift in the Harper government, the bureaucrats are unlikely to be done with James yet. Along with the book, she plans to take her campaign against the tar sands, and the Harper government's message control, on the road, putting up posters on street corners and bus shelters.

She also hopes the book will serve as a how-to guide to other activists hoping to take on the Harper administration, especially with humour. "It's kind of like a judo flip, meaning that you can actually flip someone who is much bigger than you."

• Activism
• Oil sands
• Protest
• Energy
• Fossil fuels
• Oil
• Canada
• Americas
• Stephen Harper

Suzanne Goldenberg
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Authorities push forward plans for 314 metre-high dam on Dadu river which would affect rare plants and fish

Chinese environmental authorities have approved construction plans for what could become the world's tallest dam, while acknowledging that the project would affect endangered plants and rare fish species.

The 314 metre-high dam (1,030ft) will serve the Shuangjiangkou hydropower project along the Dadu river in south-western Sichuan province, according to China's state news agency, Xinhua. A subsidiary of Guodian Group, one of China's five major state-owned power companies, will complete the project over a decade at an estimated cost of £2.9bn.

The dam will be far taller than the 185 metre-high Three Gorges dam along the Yangtze river – the world's most powerful hydroelectric project – and slightly edge out the current record holder, the 300 metre-high Nurek dam in Tajikistan. The world's second-tallest dam, the 292 metre-high Xiaowan dam on the Lancang (Mekong) river, is also in China.

China's environment ministry acknowledged that the dam would have an impact on the area's highly biodiverse flora and fauna.

"The project will affect the spawning and movement of rare fish species, as well as the growth of endangered plants, including the Chinese yew, which is under first-class state protection," the ministry said, according to Xinhua.

The ministry proposed counter-measures to mitigate the environmental impact, such as "protecting fish habitats in tributaries, building fish ladders and increasing fish breeding and releasing", Xinhua reported. The project is still awaiting a final go-ahead from China's state council.

The Dadu river is a tributary of the 450 mile-long Min river, which cuts through the centre of Sichuan province before joining the Yangtze further south.

Upon completion, the plant will have a total installed capacity of 2GW and produce nearly 8bn KW-hours of energy a year, about twice as much as the Hoover dam in the US.

China's hydropower development has surged in recent years as the country moves to increase non-fossil energy sources to 15% of its total energy use by 2020. Central authorities approved a controversial cascade of 13 dams on the pristine upper reaches of the Nu (Salween) river in January. The plans had stalled nearly a decade ago under pressure from environmental groups.

Scientists and environmental activists have raised concerns that a profusion of dams in south-west China could increase the area's risk of natural disasters, such as earthquakes and landslides.

Another hydroelectric project on the Dadu river prompted social unrest in 2004, as tens of thousands of farmers along its banks rioted against plans to relocate them. Authorities responded by halting the Pubugou dam's construction for a year.

• Hydropower
• China
• Asia Pacific
• Energy
• Renewable energy
• Endangered habitats
• Conservation
• Endangered species
• Animals
• Marine life

Jonathan Kaiman
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Cycle infrastructure isn't just about roads and junctions – it's about homes and gardens too. What can councils do to help?

In the recent flurry of local authority initiatives to promote cycling, the focus has been on junctions, cycle lanes, lorries and training. One question seems be almost totally neglected: "Where could I keep a bike?" For many people, a lack of secure storage rules out cycling completely. What if you live at the top of a block of flats and aren't strong enough to carry a bike up eight flights of stairs? Or perhaps there's no room in the narrow front hall of your house for one bike, let alone a family of wheels? What if your bike's been stolen once too often from the street and you can't afford to replace it?

Look at those places where people cycle as an ordinary way of getting around. In Cambridge and Oxford there are college bike sheds and lots of Victorian houses with back gardens. In Holland, blocks of flats – both private and council – either have a shared basement with bike racks and key access, or a basic shed for each household at ground level.

So why isn't cycle storage regarded as a housing issue? In Britain, there are guidelines for new buildings – for example, one cycle space per one- or two-bedroom flat in the London Plan – but no standards for retrofitting existing homes to enable cycling.

In April, local councils took over responsibility for public health from the abolished primary care trusts (PCTs). There is abundant evidence showing that investment in cycling brings huge public health dividends: reducing obesity, increasing levels of physical activity, cutting air pollution, benefiting mental health, and improving access to educational, work and leisure opportunities, especially for those on low incomes. This is backed up by a report from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. It will be interesting to see if the new health and wellbeing boards encourage council housing departments to invest in cycle storage.

Fresh thinking is certainly needed in planning departments. My council, Southwark, only approves one type of secure cycle storage for installation on its housing estates: individual vertical steel lockers. They are secure and convenient to manage. But at £600 each, plus installation (£300) and the cost of obtaining planning permission (£195), this is a pricey solution. Last year, Southwark spent £85,000 (including £50,000 from Transport for London) to install a total of 102 lockers on estates across the borough. At this rate, with 39,000 council tenants in the borough, it will take a century to make a dent in the demand.

One London borough has developed a significant improvement on the individual steel locker. The "Lambeth bike hangar", an adaptation of a Dutch design, sits directly on the street, taking up half a car-parking space, and has space for six bikes secured to racks under a lockable curved roof. Bike hangars are much cheaper per bike-space than individual vertical lockers, and they're easier to use: you roll your bike along the ground, rather than having to lift it up to shoulder height.

That's important, because providing bike storage isn't just about making life simpler for those who already cycle. It should enable new riders – young and old, tall and small. Following a successful pilot, Lambeth has now installed 27 bike hangars as part of an imaginative traffic-calming and greening project at Van Gogh Walk.

We need to ask who isn't cycling at the moment and think further about what's stopping them. In the late 60s, feminists who wondered why so few women came to political meetings realised that it was due to lack of childcare, rather than lack of interest; crèches were a practical response.

Similarly, the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 made it an obligation for institutions to identify and remove barriers to participation in social, political and cultural life. It's time for a similar shift to take place in cycling. Cycle infrastructure is not just about roads and junctions – it's about homes and gardens too.

• Cycling
• Fitness
• Planning policy
• London
• Local government
• Housing
• Transport policy
• Transport

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