Campaigners’ tenacity pays off

November 19th, 2009

Views: 375

Posted by ChrisG at 2:48 pm

Lack of transparency about risk often underlies environmental injustice.

Look at any planning issue with an environmental impact, and this becomes apparent – especially where there is a trade-off between some definition of “national interest” and local impact, as with energy infrastructure (wind turbines as much as nuclear power stations). Risk has, for example, been at the heart of so many of the conflicts which sprang up along the length of the South Wales Gas Pipeline while it was being built.

It’s important to understand that risks are not free-floating objects with which we simply collide. They are created through social relationships, and are impossible to understand outside these relationships, which are themselves inflected by inequalities of power. For example, I am a “financial innovator”, and so get to run a risk, if I choose to; whereas, you, as a homeowner, get to have one imposed on you when my flush is busted. Risks which are imposed are typically viewed as less acceptable than ones which are chosen – and the consequences of imposing risks can be individually and socially serious harms: creating social conflicts further down the line (splitting communities, breaking implicit links of trust and so on), and entrenching exploitative and oppressive relationships (testified to by the history of environmental racism and environmental justice more widely, and nicely summed up by William Freudenberg’s remark regarding how often technical planning criteria tend to be satisfied “on the poor side of town”). The sociological and psychological evidence for the damage done by the imposition of risk and the attendant everyday uncertainty it brings is contained in, for example, the work of Peter Marris, Michael Edelstein and Kai Erikson.

This is why it is vital to ensure that there is some kind of mechanism through which explicit consent from those who will bear the risk can be sought and given. But here it is vital that there is transparency about what risks are actually involved. And here the problem of planning often gets entangled with the discourse of “security”, especially when it is energy security that is at issue. Information about installations of “national importance” is now held to be highly sensitive, and is subject to the DA-Notice system, where these installations come under the definition of Critical National Infrastructure. Consequently, transparency – before the issue of whether democratic means of seeking consent are in place – tends to falter at the first hurdle.

This has undoubtedly been the experience of campaigners against the LNG terminals at Milford Haven and those fighting the South Wales Gas Pipeline. In particular, the tortuous battle fought by campaigners at Milford to get the authorities to release copies of risk assessments undertaken on the full spectrum of risks (and uncertainties) surrounding the use of LNG tankers in the Cleddau estuary demonstrates that the basic elements of proper consent are ignored and suppressed by the conjunction of corporate and political interests that defines energy policy in terms of “energy security”. But now, the long, hard-fought campaign has struck a major blow thanks to a demand by the European Court of Human Rights.

The court has said it wants more details. It has asked the government which bodies had responsibility for assessing the risks and advising the planning authorities, and how responsibility was divided. In particular, the court wants to know if the relevant authorities “properly assessed the risk and consequences of a collision of LNG vessels, or other escape of LNG from a vessel in Milford Haven harbour or while berthed at the jetty”, and if “relevant information on the nature and extent of the risk posed by the hazardous industrial activities has been disclosed to the public”.

The UK Government has until February to respond, and to enable some of the questions which have gone unaddressed since 2004 to finally get an answer.

(meant to write this up earlier in the week, but have been hit by the lurgy)