Environment | guardian

Heaving with heavy goods, the A67 from Eindhoven barrels through the flat, featureless fields of the south-eastern Netherlands on its way to the German border. On a frozen December morning, nothing very much moves beyond the road's edge; a horse stamps at a trough, a tractor pushes along a narrow track. Every half mile or so, behind a stand of poplars, a neat brick farmhouse - raked gravel drive, lace curtains at the windows - slides into view. Next to it is a large, windowless and vaguely ominous shed, the size, perhaps, of a small aircraft hangar.

It will hold, almost certainly, several hundred pigs. In a country famed for the unnatural feats of its intensive farming sector (the Netherlands occupies less than one-thousandth of the world's surface, but is its third largest exporter of agricultural produce), this area, known as De Peel, is more densely populated with pigs than anywhere else on the planet.

Some of the sheds are multistorey; they're called pig-flats. There's a fair chance - especially if you're partial to bacon - that you've eaten meat from one of them. A good proportion of the 20m pigs born, fattened, sent abroad or slaughtered each year in the Netherlands come from here, and the Netherlands has become the biggest single supplier of our morning rasher.

"This," Hans Baij of the animal welfare group Varkens in Nood, or Pigs in Distress, had told me the day before in his office in Amsterdam, "is advanced industrial pig farming. There's nothing natural about this whatsoever. It's about science, sperm selection, antibiotics, piglets per sow, grams per day, muscle-to-fat ratios. It's what this country does. Welfare doesn't come into it."

Picture, for a moment, a pig. Engaging, maybe. Large, pink, ungainly, certainly (though that's not how they always were; the original pig was compact and capable of speeds up to 40mph). That strong, muscular snout was designed for rooting around in soil and undergrowth; a sense of smell acute enough to snuffle out buried truffles was plainly intended for forensic foraging.

In many languages, pigs are a byword for anything gross, unpleasant, unhygienic. They're actually very clean; they hate a dirty bed, and will select a latrine area and use it. They are the most curious and intelligent farmyard animals. (A professor from Pennsylvania State University has demonstrated that pigs learn problem-solving games faster than dogs and as quickly as chimps, and will remember the lessons for three years or more.)

Orwell, of course, knew that. Winston Churchill, a serious pig fancier, saw it too. "I like pigs," he said. "Dogs look up to you; cats look down on you; pigs treat you as equal." A shame, then, that we treat pigs the way we do. Britons ate 1.6m tonnes of pork in 2007. We're so fond of the meat that we now import more than 60%, including 40% of all fresh and frozen pork and an astonishing 80% of all bacon. In fact, our pig meat imports - mainly from Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany - have been soaring for nearly a decade; the Netherlands, and those sheds, account for almost half our bacon imports. Demand for UK pork, meanwhile, has slumped 36%.

There is one very good reason for this, say British farmers. It is that in 1999, we introduced standards on pig welfare - regarding the space in which they are reared - that have yet to come into force across the rest of the EU. They have made our pork a great deal more expensive.

"To rear our pigs the way we do," says Vicky Scott, who with her sister and father, Kate and David Morgan, wean more than 500 piglets a week on their 1,000-sow intensive farm near Driffield in Yorkshire, "costs us about 12p a kilo extra. Will that be reflected in the price we get for it? What do you think?"

Some Dutch and Danish producers do rear pigs for the UK market to UK rules. But according to the British Pig Executive, an alarming 70% of the 970,000 tonnes of pig meat we import each year does not meet British welfare standards. What's more, you are probably buying it without knowing it: retailers are perfectly entitled to label foreign meat British if it has been processed here.

The pigs from which much of that foreign meat comes will have led very different lives to many of those reared in Britain. Here, for example - and in Sweden, Switzerland and Norway - the use of a particularly nasty piece of kit called a sow stall has now been outlawed; it is legal in the rest of the EU until 2013. A sow stall is a narrow metal cage, on a bare concrete and slatted floor, in which pregnant sows spend all three months, three weeks and three days of their gestation. They can move a few inches back and forwards, but not turn around. Lying down and getting up is difficult, too.

"It prevents almost all their natural activities," says Phil Brooke, welfare development manager for Compassion in World Farming (CIWF). "They can't forage, they can't root around, they can't prepare a nest for their young. They're subject to bone and muscle weakness, digestive and urinary illnesses, cardiovascular problems. Many display signs of severe psychological problems, stress and frustration."

In much of mainland Europe, too, and on a by no means negligible percentage of British farms, naturally boisterous and playful fattening pigs also spend their days and nights on bare concrete and slatted floors; their faeces and urine fall through and are flushed away. In theory, EU regulations require plentiful "environmental enrichment" - straw, in other words - for bedding and rooting, but an undercover report by CIWF last month showed that 100% of farms surveyed in Spain, 89% in Germany and 88% in the Netherlands provided none. Such rules are, it seems, not very easy to enforce when animal welfare is weighed against export earnings.

If they're lucky, the animals may get a chain or a plastic football to play with. But since there is rarely enough light to see by (pigs are quieter in the dark), fighting and biting are more common than playing. To minimise the effects of this, the vast majority of piglets' tails are routinely docked soon after birth, and their teeth clipped, again in breach of EU rules.

Routine tail-docking in particular, Brooke and Baaij both argue, is a good general indication of pig welfare: pigs reared on extensive farms, outdoors, with plenty of scope for foraging and rooting, rarely need their tails docked. "If they've got plenty to do, they're happy," says Baaij. Otherwise, basically, they go for each other, with tails and ears the favoured targets. And once a pen full of pigs gets the scent of blood, the consequences can be catastrophic; pigs are, after all, omnivores.

In much of Europe too, male piglets are routinely castrated. That's because the powerful flavour of male pig meat - boar taint - is distasteful to many consumers. The operation is performed without pain relief, although the Dutch plan to adopt a gas anaesthetic, voluntarily, later this year. (British pigs are not castrated because they are slaughtered younger, before the taint develops.)

"Across Europe, we found examples of poor welfare and excessive use of confinement systems and mutilations in lieu of good welfare practice," the CIWF report concluded, lamenting the effects of "an industrial system on a highly sentient, intelligent" animal. "Pigs looked uncared for, they showed aggressive behaviour and there was nothing for them to do. Across Europe, pig legislation is being ignored and welfare conditions are often appalling."

So is that what it's like, then, in those Dutch pig farms? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it isn't all that easy to find out. The big farms at least seem distinctly wary of allowing a journalist access. Any number of Dutch welfare groups, including the highly vocal Varkens in Nood, backed by an array of Dutch writers and artists, are now on their case. CIWF has accused them, along with most other continental pig farmers, of routinely breaking EU laws. This month they might also have to face up to Jamie Oliver, in a TV special aiming to do for intensively reared pigs what the TV chef did last year for battery chickens.

At the pristine and gargantuan Houbensteyn Group in Ysselsteyn, home to a barely imaginable 25,000 pigs, a manager tells me bluntly that they can't let me in as they have too much work on in the run-up to Christmas. Another factory farm near Helmond cites stringent hygiene laws that mean no one can so much as poke a nose round the door without taking their outdoor clothes off, donning disinfected boots and laundered boiler suit, even taking a shower.

Introduced after a catastrophic outbreak of swine fever in 1997 that saw 10m Dutch pigs slaughtered, they're a useful deterrent for the curious visitor. "Too much of a bloody performance," says Jaap, the chief stockman. "What do you want to see, anyway? Look, everything here's spotless. You can't even smell this place from the outside. We put in a new air filtration system last year."

Smaller farms prove more open. A few have even installed neat little viewing windows so visitors can gaze into a couple of presumably carefully selected pens - Step in the Shed, the scheme is called, and it's very popular with Dutch primary schools.

John Rooijakkers, who runs a farm of 750 breeding sows with his brother Martin at Aarle-Rixtel, near Eindhoven, will not tolerate British farmers' accusations of unfair competition. "I'm losing money," he says. "Most Dutch pig farmers are. Only the most efficient 20-30% are making any. The European pig market is cut-throat, and it's swings and roundabouts - you may have tougher welfare regulations, but we have far more stringent environment and hygiene laws. Holland is much smaller, much more densely populated than Britain. Don't talk to me about regulations."

Rooijakkers is unusual in the Netherlands in keeping some of his pregnant sows on a mountain of straw, because a portion of his pigs are destined for "a big British supermarket" which he declines to name. For the same reason, some of his male piglets are not castrated. (He does, though, dock their tails: "Show me a single intensive pig farmer who doesn't.")

Elsewhere, tiny piglets - Rooijakkers says proudly that he averages 15 in a litter, where a free-range sow will typically deliver 10 or 12 - scrabble around their mothers on a blue plastic grate. The sows are locked into farrowing crates, similar but slightly bigger than sow stalls and used by many intensive pig farms in Britain too. The sows find it just as difficult to move in them, but they protect the baby pigs from being crushed.

"I have a 0.2% mortality rate," boasts Rooijakkers. "On organic farms they're lucky to get away with 16%. Where's the animal welfare there, then, when you're talking dead piglets? Anyway, you have to be realistic: today's pigs would all be sick within a week if you started raising them outside. They couldn't take it. All those germs."

But next door to the farrowing crates, weaned piglets squal and leap viciously at each other in a bare concrete pen, a punctured yellow ball their only distraction. When you open the door to the small viewing room Rooijakkers has installed, they're suddenly bathed in fluorescent light. Hang around for a while, and the light goes off: it's there for the visitors. Unless you're looking at them, the pigs live in near-total darkness.

Upstairs in his office, Rooijakkers blames the system. "We're supplying what the market wants," he insists. "And where are we, the farmers, in the chain? The retailers tell the slaughterhouses what they'll pay, the slaughterhouses set their prices for us. Everyone takes their margin, and right at the bottom it's the farmer. People, consumers, just aren't being realistic; they want cheap meat, then they're worried about welfare. Buy organic, then! Pay twice the price. But no one will do that."

A few miles down the road in Panningen, Lowie and Jeanette Kersten are similarly blunt. Their farm, Op den Haegh, is small: around 300 sows. Through their viewing windows, you can see pregnant sows lumbering around a barren concrete pen. They are fed automatically. It's an ingenious system. When each pig sticks her head round the feeder door, a computer reads an electronic chip clipped in her ear and calculates whether or not she she has had her daily fill. If she has, the door stays shut; if she hasn't, she's allowed in.

Next door are sows and piglets in spotless but desolate crates. Signs explain that the climate is computer controlled, and make much of how modern pig-farming is doing all it can to minimise the risk of disease, and reduce its impact on the environment. Weaned pigs are on stark concrete and slats; a chain swings from the ceiling and a piglet makes a desultory grab. And there is a whole long side of this big shed whose darkened windows you simply cannot see through; inside is a pale pink mass of occasionally writhing forms. And the occasional furious squeal.

The Kerstens are a charming, and plainly thoughtful, couple in their 50s. They invite me into their immaculate farmhouse kitchen for coffee. "It's all a compromise," says Lowie. "Everyone would like to see better conditions for pigs, but change demands time, good laws, an effort from everyone in the chain and responsibility, from the producer, the retailer, the consumer and the politician. The cold fact is that better welfare means more expensive meat. We'd love to produce it; are people ready to buy it?"

In fact Lowie already does produce some more expensive meat. Half of his piglets are of a different race to the others. They are taken off the farm and raised, in the open air and with special feed, on the grounds of a monastery, under a new label he has developed with colleagues. "The meat from my monastery pigs is tastier, with good fat - supermarkets don't want fat, they want pure lean, and modern pigs are bred to deliver that," he says. "But good restaurants want flavour, and they want meat with a story. Something distinctive."

Wouldn't he like to raise all his pigs that way? "Look," says Jeanette firmly, gesturing at the shed behind her. "We're producers. We do this to earn money. That's what I tell the schoolkids who come here. There's been a whole lot of research to see if we could produce the amount of meat we need any other way ... We're very professional. And pigs aren't people."

On the whole, if you're concerned about pig welfare, you generally are better off buying British (assuming, of course, you can be sure it actually was reared in Britain). Things are not perfect here, but they are quite a lot better: CIWF's undercover inspectors found only 36% of British farms they visited did not use straw, although 54% still carried out routine tail docking. But Vicky Scott and Kate Morgan's farm in Yorkshire feels a world removed from those stifling Dutch sheds. Their pigs are reared on straw, in huge, open-sided sheds that let in all the daylight and - on another chill winter morning - the fresh air you could want.

Scott uses farrowing crates for birthing, although she prefers the term maternity units. "It may look like factory farming," she says, "and it's not very nice to see, but I really believe no better system's been invented." She docks her animals' tails ("We're planning on doing a trial without it, but if they start tailbiting, really, it's horrendous") and clips their teeth ("We've tried not doing it, but they make such a mess of their pen mates. Pigs' teeth are incredibly sharp.") Both operations are done when the piglets are a day old. But the most important thing, for her, is the straw.

"I would never, ever finish [fatten] pigs on slats," she says. "I've always said that. You only have to look at them. They need it, it's the way they're made. It's inconceivable to deny them it." And the family's pigs do, indeed, look pretty damn happy. But there's precious little encouragement from the market to do things that way, or to refund the extra pence per kilo of pork that the straw - and the extra labour to muck it out and replace it - costs them.

The business is tough enough as it is: when animal feed prices went through the roof last summer, Morgan and farmers like her were losing £26 on every pig they sold. "The retailers always say the customer likes the cheapest," she says. "We say we think the customer would actually like the choice. But the bottom line is, if people don't want to pay for higher welfare, farmers will stop doing it."

The best conditions, of course, are free-range, although there is a lot of confusion about what that means. Some 40% of breeding sows in Britain are kept outdoors, compared to fewer than 1% in the Netherlands; but only 7% of the piglets born to them are reared outdoors after they're weaned and only 2% are fattened, or finished, outdoors. "Outdoor bred" is not the same as "outdoor reared". The best guarantee of all is organic, but that comes at a considerable cost.

On a magnificent high field bordered by the Ridgeway near the Wiltshire village of Bishopstone, Helen Browning keeps her 250 saddleback sows producing some 65 piglets a week, about 3,500 a year. The pigs sleep in spacious, clean, straw-filled arks and have free access to the open field around them. Eastbrook farm is a mixed farm and the pigs are integrated into the agricultural cycle; they'll spend a couple of months trashing - and very effectively fertilising - a patch of land and then move on, to be replaced by grass or an arable crop for a few years.

Unlike high-intensity systems, in which pigs are removed from their mothers at three weeks or even earlier, Browning's piglets are weaned at a more natural eight weeks. "They're stronger, maturer, they don't need antibiotics," she says. Farrowing crates and the like, Browning believes, have bred the maternal instincts out of most modern sows. And the never-ending, retailer-led search for ever-leaner meat means they simply don't have enough fat on them to nurse their litters for long anyway.

Browning's pigs are kept in the same family group, and they have an awful lot of room to create an unholy mess of their field. The day I was there, wading through the mud, they were positively gambolling: racing round the field, playing (there's no other word) games. In 20 years of raising pigs, Eastbrook farm has not experienced a single case of tail biting.

"Pigs are clever animals, curious animals, they're clean animals, they tell you about their problems," Browning says. "They're not like cows, they're not stoics, they vocalise. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. And they're funny. They have pretty simple needs, really: space, lots to do."

But all this comes at a price. Tim Finney, managing director of Eastbrook's organic meats business, reckons that amounts to an extra 30 or 40p a kilo just to keep the system running, plus another 70p a kilo for the organic feed. "Overall," he says, "it probably costs us about double what it costs to produce a conventional pig. Although if we weren't organic, we could run the farm the same way and produce meat that was maybe 25% more expensive. That would still be a huge step forwards in welfare terms."

High-welfare organic meat is of course a niche market, recession-sensitive, and Finney admits he's is budgeting for zero growth for the coming year. But the alarming thing is that today, even moderately good welfare standards are coming under pressure. When it comes to pig welfare Britain is, Browning reckons, "genuinely squeaky clean" compared to much of the rest of the world; "probably the best in the world, in fact, for conventional pig-keeping". But what counts, it seems, is price.

Some years ago, the late Lyall Watson, who devoted his last book to The Extraordinary Potential of Pigs, wrote that if you look properly behind the eyes of any pig, you will see "a liveliness, an intelligence for which you are just not prepared". These are not like other animals. If it matters to us that our morning rasher or chop or pork pie does not comes from a genetically engineered fat-free pig that spent its brief life in a dark, bare, windowless shed stuffed full of antibiotics and reduced to attacking its pen-mates for entertainment - a pathetic parody, in short, of a pig - we're going to have to reach deeper into our pockets. Right now, that seems increasingly unlikely.

Rasher by rasher
Buying better bacon

• Sainsbury's Basics Cooking Bacon Rashers, 670g: £1.57 (£2.34/kg)

• Asda Smartprice Unsmoked Streaky Bacon (250g): 87p (£3.48/kg)

• Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Wiltshire Unsmoked Back Bacon, 240g: £3.19 (£13.29/kg)

• Helen Browning's Organic Unsmoked Streaky Bacon Rashers, 184g (available from Sainsbury's): £2.79 (£15.16/kg)

• Duchy Originals Organic Dry Cured Unsmoked Back Bacon Rashers (184g) £4.89 (£26.58/kg)

• Prices taken from mysupermarket.com

• Animal welfare
• Food
• Food & drink
• Food & drink industry
• Netherlands
• Supermarkets

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We came down from the high ground as the first lights were twinkling in the frosty air over Macclesfield. We could just make out the black whale-back silhouette of Alderley Edge but, in general, the Cheshire plain seemed lightless and lifeless. Along the hillside lane at Calrofold we passed the former home of the late, lamented Brian Redhead, then entered even deeper shade where the trees began. It was the end of a short winter's day on these heights, crossing from the confines of the Goyt Valley in Derbyshire to come over the moortops and into view of broad prospects across Cheshire as far as the Clwydian Hills over the Welsh border.

The lane beyond Calrofold circles down around Cliff Hill to come by Higher Hurdsfield, at the very upper-eastern limit of Macclesfield, before coming through the great trees that wrap about Swanscoe Hall. By taking narrow Kerridge Road we slant northwards up the western flank of delightful Kerridge Hill, that spine of gritstone once the scene of busy activity to quarry this useful rock. Down at the north-west corner of the ridge stands Kerridge village, its unusual name derived from the Old English Gaeg Hrycg - key ridge. This stone settlement clusters close below the flank of its hill and, to my mind, is one of the prettiest in all the Peak District. It's a busy little place but quite overlooked by visitors to these south Pennine hills.

We, of course, never saw the crest of Kerridge Hill, but the street lights were on in the village, casting our long shadows across the empty byways as we went. And then we were down in adjacent, bustling Bollington where the Macclesfield Canal crosses on its towering aqueduct, now a solid block of blackness under the stars. This fine waterway once served the several flour and textile mills that still stand as giant edifices in this district; now, though, it is a well used recreational facility, part of the Cheshire Ring.

• Rural affairs

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Britain's leading green commentator, George Monbiot, goes head-to-head with the chief executive of oil giant Shell, tackling ethics, greenwash advertising, renewable energy investments and gas-flaring in Nigeria

Editorial: All political parties need to think much more broadly and radically if this really is going to be a green recession

For a while it seemed that Shell had stopped pretending. The advertisements that filled the newspapers in 2006, featuring technicians with perfect teeth and open-necked shirts explaining how they were saving the world, vanished. After being slated by environmentalists for greenwash, after two adverse rulings by the Advertising Standards Authority, Shell appeared to have accepted the inescapable truth that it was an oil company with a minor sideline in alternative energy, and that there was no point in trying to persuade people otherwise.

The interview I conducted with its chief executive, Jeroen van der Veer, broadcast on the Guardian's website today, contains what appears to be an interesting admission. I asked him whether Shell had stopped producing ads extolling its investments in renewable energy. Van der Veer does not express himself clearly at this point, but he seems to admit that his company's previous advertising was not honest.

"If we are very big in oil and gas and we are so far relatively small in alternative energies, if you then every day only make adverts about your alternative energies and not about 90% of your other activities I don't think that - then I say transparency, honesty to the market, that's nonsense." So, I asked, Shell did not intend to return to that kind of advertising? "Probably not," he told me. "I'm very much: keep your feet on the ground, tell them who you are and explain why you are who you are."

But since the interview was filmed, Shell's messianic tendencies appear to have resurfaced. In December the company ran a series of ads in the Guardian suggesting again that it had come to save the world. "Tackling climate change and providing fuel for a growing population seems like an impossible problem, but at Shell we try to think creatively," one boasted. It features a diagram of a human brain, divided into sections labelled "fuel from algae", "fuel from straw", "fuel from woodchips", "hydrogen fuels", "windfarm", "gas to liquids" and "coal gasification". This suggests progress of a kind, in that the company is acknowledging that it sometimes dabbles in fossil fuels, but its core business - oil - and its massive investments in tar sands extraction are missing from the corporate mind. Could Shell be having a senior moment?

The confusion deepens when you watch its latest publicity film. It's called Clearing the Air, and it does just the opposite. It is supposed to tell an inspirational tale of discovery, but the script and the acting are so gobsmackingly bad that it inspires you only to rip your clothes off and run screaming down the street. The lasting impression it leaves is that Shell's staff are chaotic and incompetent. Perhaps the clean-cut corporate clones featured in the ads of 2006 put people off.

Jeroen van der Veer is neither an incompetent nor an automaton. He is charming, friendly and smart. But he refused to answer some of the questions I had prepared.

Reading Shell's reports and publicity material, I kept stumbling on an absence. In 2000, the company boasted that it would be investing $1bn in renewable energy between 2001 and 2005. But since then it appears to have produced no figures for its renewables budget. The company now claims that it is "investing significantly in wind energy", but it doesn't say what "significantly" means. Of the 10 windfarms listed on its website, only one appears to be in the planning or development stage: the others are already in operation. Where is the evidence of new money? When Shell pulled out of Britain's biggest windfarm, the London Array, last year, did this represent the end of its major investments?

I asked Van der Veer a simple question - 15 times. (Only a few of these attempts feature in the edited film.) "What is the value of your annual investments in renewable energy?" He waffled, changed the subject, admitted that he knew the figure, then flatly refused to reveal it. Nor could he give me a convincing explanation of why he wouldn't tell me, claiming only that "those figures are misused and people say it is too small", and it "is not the right message to give to the people". It strikes me that there is only one likely reason for these evasions: that Shell's spending on renewables has fallen sharply from the figure it announced in 2000. It's a fair guess that the current investment would look microscopic by comparison to its spending on the Canadian tar sands, and would make a mockery of its new round of advertising. I challenge Shell - for the 16th time - to prove me wrong.

Nor would Van der Veer give me a straight answer to another straight question: "Is there any investment you would not make on ethical grounds?" I asked this six times. He was unable to furnish me with an example. It's not hard to see why. As well as exploiting the tar sands, which means destroying forest and wetlands, polluting great quantities of water and producing more CO2 than conventional petroleum production, Shell is still flaring gas in Nigeria, at great cost to both local people and the global climate. It has been fiercely criticised for its secret negotiations with the Iraqi government, which led last year to the first major access for a western company to Iraq's gas reserves. It is prospecting for oil in some of the Arctic's most sensitive habitats.

All this makes my question difficult to answer. Aside from the greenwash, it is not easy to spot the practical difference between this civilised, progressive company and the Neanderthals at Exxon.

Like all oil companies, Shell simply follows the opportunities. Shut out of the richest fields by state companies, struggling to extract the dregs from its declining reserves, it has been turning to ever more difficult oil extraction, some of which lies beneath rare and fragile ecosystems. When the price of oil was high, it announced massive investments in the tar sands. Now the price has dropped again, it has cancelled further spending. It has even less of an incentive to invest in renewables. Shell does what the market demands.

I don't blame Shell or Van der Veer for this: they are discharging their duty to their shareholders. I do blame them for creating the impression that the company has a different agenda, and I blame governments for allowing them to drift into whatever fields they find profitable, regardless of the consequences for people or the environment.

On this issue Jeroen van der Veer and I agree. Oil companies, he says, should not seek to determine a country's energy mix: that is for the government to decide.

Saving the biosphere, in other words, cannot be left to goodwill and greenwash: the humanity of pleasant men like Van der Veer will always be swept aside by the imperative to maximise returns. Good people in these circumstances do terrible things. Companies like Shell will pour big money into alternative energy only when more lucrative or immediate opportunities are blocked. Where is the government that is brave enough to block them?

monbiot.com

• Royal Dutch Shell
• Oil and gas companies
• Green business
• Alternative energy
• Fossil fuels
• Energy
• Climate change

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There is no doubt that the US needs a really large stimulus package and that the focus should be spending that can be initiated in the near future. We need a boost to the economy yesterday, which means that we should be looking for projects that can be started in 2009, or 2010 at the latest, not blueprints for projects that won't be ready to go for three or four years. "Shovel ready" is the catch phrase for the stimulus package.

But just because we can do something does not mean that we should do it. Some infrastructure spending will actually be harmful to the environment and the economy over the long-term. This is stimulus that we better do without.

Specifically, there are many ready-to-go projects on the books for further highway construction. While not all highways are bad, highways that promote the pattern of sprawl that we have seen in many metropolitan areas over the last 30 years are bad.

We should not be making it easier for people live long distances from their jobs, so that they have lengthy commutes each day. This would directly counteract efforts in other areas to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

It doesn't make sense to spend money retrofitting buildings so that we use less energy heating and cooling them if we're also spending money in ways that encourage people to use more gasoline driving to and from work every day. In the same vein, it doesn't make sense to pay money to develop more fuel-efficient cars so that they can go further on each gallon of gas, and then go out spend tens of billions of dollars building highways that encourage people to drive more.

We know that some of the money in the stimulus package will not be well spent. There is a rush to spend money, and that means that some of the projects that get chosen will not be the most useful ones and the contractors who get hired will not always be the lowest-cost providers. This is a necessary cost of getting money out the door quickly.

But, it is possible to prevent projects that are not just wasteful, but actually counterproductive, from being included in the stimulus package. It should not require too much analysis to identify highway projects that are likely to promote sprawl. Such projects should be excluded from a fast-track stimulus package.

That would not doom these highways from ever being constructed. There will be ongoing appropriations in future years. If it turns out that some of the projects that are excluded from a stimulus package are actually worth doing, even when their environmental costs are fully considered, funding for these highways can be appropriated as part of the normal process in 2010, 2011 or later. The point is to not let the rush to stimulus lead us to do things that we actually would rather not see done.

The amount of stimulus required to offset the impact of the collapsing housing bubble and the plunging stock market is substantial, but there are good ways to spend large amounts of money. The huge shortfalls incurred by state and local governments are an obvious place to start. The National Conference of State Legislatures has identified close to $200bn in budget shortfalls in the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years. Since many state governments are required under their constitutions to balance their budgets, these deficits are leading to large cutbacks and tax increases. These cutbacks and tax increases will worsen the recession.

There is a wide range of "green" initiatives that President-elect Barack Obama can include in the stimulus package in addition to weatherising buildings. For example, he could provide subsidies to public transportation agencies to cover the cost of lower transit fares. He could also pay people (presumably mostly lower-income people) to turn in older, more polluting cars and get them off the road. Such measures can both help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and boost the economy.

The other obvious way that Obama can boost the economy is with healthcare spending. Some of the money going to the states will be through state Medicaid programmes. However, Obama could usefully spend much more money subsidising Medicare for people who do no currently have insurance. This will be an important downpayment on healthcare reform.

There are other ways in which Obama could spend more money on stimulus. As Keynes noted more than 70 years ago, if we can't find ways to spend money, we can always pay people to dig holes and fill them up again. This is of course wasteful, but paying people to dig holes will put money into the economy.

Digging holes and filling them again would be a better route than letting the economy slide even deeper into a recession. It is certainly better to have wasteful spending than to spend money on items than can actually do harm, like building highways that promote sprawl. In other words, the construction of the road to hell should not be part of the stimulus package.

• United States
• US economy
• Barack Obama

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China's environmental and renewable energy sectors are poised for another year of strong growth. However, green industries still face a daunting array of challenges, writes Ray Cheung from World Resources Institute, part of the Guardian Environment Network

Government consultants have been accused of miscalculating the costs of a project to generate vast amounts of green electricity in the Severn estuary, promoting a 10 mile-long tidal barrier strongly backed by ministers in preference to a scheme that engineers and environmentalists say is far less damaging.

The US engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff has been hired by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) to assess technologies that could meet, from the Severn estuary, up to 7% of the electricity consumption of England and Wales. Its feasibility study for the estuary, which has the second highest tidal range in the world, has been sent to ministers, who will soon announce a shortlist of potential schemes based on the assessment.

Finding a way to harness the power of the Severn's tides is important as it would represent a big step towards Britain's target of generating 35% of all electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Sources in Decc say the firm favourite is the 10-mile barrier, which would span the entire estuary and is costed at about £14bn. Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) said the barrier could generate between 5GW and 8.6GW of renewable electricity at a cost of about 3p/kWh, but that it would impede shipping and lead to permanent flooding over more than 100 miles of shoreline.

Ministers have already called the scheme "visionary" and a "trailblazer for clean, green energy".

But correspondence seen by the Guardian shows that a row erupted between PB and a company promoting a scheme that environmental groups and other engineers claim would be far less damaging, as well as cheaper and more efficient.

Tidal Electric wants to generate electricity by using tidal lagoons built on the estuary floor from rock. Up to 13 lagoons would be dotted around the Severn estuary, not across it. These would trap water at high tide and release it later through electricity-generating turbines.

Studies carried out by the engineers AS Atkins, for Tidal Electric, have suggested that the lagoons could generate twice as much power, per square mile impounded, than the barrage, and therefore generate about 25-40% more energy without damaging the shoreline.

However, the plan sent by PB to ministers says the tidal lagoon option would be eight times more expensive than the barrage scheme and would not generate as much power.

But Peter Ullman, chief executive of Tidal Electric, said: "PB has made huge miscalculations. They have submitted [to ministers] cost-numbers on power from tidal lagoons that are roughly 800% higher than all the previous studies of tidal lagoon power conducted by UK engineering giant WS Atkins and corroborated by AEA Technology, Ofgem and Rothschild Bank. They have arrived at their extraordinarily high numbers by ignoring the technology developer's design parameters and introducing their own design."

One key issue is that Tidal Electric plans to site the lagoons in shallow water, while PB assumes they would be built – at a higher cost – in deeper water.

Tidal Electric is backed by many leading environment groups, including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and Friends of the Earth, as well as a vocal west country lobby, which believes a barrage would be ecologically and socially disastrous. According to the Bristol-based group Stop the Barrage Now a barrage would add to local flooding, reduce fish stocks, damage bird life and destroy the Severn bore, as well as ruin mudflats across an area of more than 77 sq miles. They say a barrage would impede shipping, adversely affecting ports such as Bristol, Sharpness, Gloucester and Cardiff, and put at risk thousands of jobs.

A PB spokesman said: "We are unable to comment on Mr Ullman's complaint, but it is important to stress that during the selection process all options have been technically assessed to a common engineering and cost baseline.

"The same technical and energy yield approach has been applied to all options and the process and outcomes have been subject to peer review. The selection process is reviewed by an independent panel of experts appointed by Decc."

In correspondence with Tidal Electric, seen by the Guardian, PB executives note that the consultation will continue: "There [will be] ample opportunity for dialogue to continue even though the public consultation documents are in the final stages of preparation. The public consultation process provides you with the opportunity to formally respond to the consultation documents, which will include our appraisal of the long-listed schemes. If the offshore lagoon concept is shortlisted, specific optimisation of proposals will be carried out in the next phase, which will require further dialogue."

A range of barrage studies were made between 1974 and 1987 at a cost of £65m, out of which a specific Severn barrage scheme was drawn up by the Severn Tidal Power Group. A revised report was published in 2002 but all the plans were rejected at the time as being too expensive or too ecologically damaging.

• Wildlife
• Wave, tidal and hydropower
• Conservation
• Renewable energy
• Energy
• Alternative energy
• Green politics

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The fall in the pound's value undermines any financial case for nuclear energy, writes Chris Goodall from Carbon Commentary, part of the Guardian Environment Network

Propellers on ships have been tried and tested for centuries in the rough and unforgiving environment of the sea: now this long-proven technology will be used in reverse to harness clean energy from the UK's powerful tides.

The tides that surge around the UK's coasts could provide up to a quarter of the nation's electricity, without any carbon emissions. But life in the stormy seas is harsh and existing equipment – long-bladed underwater wind turbines – is prone to failure.A Welsh renewable energy company has teamed up with ship propulsion experts to design a new marine turbine which they believe is far more robust.

Cardiff-based Tidal Energy Limited will test a 1MW tidal turbine off the Pembrokeshire coast at Ramsey Sound, big enough to supply around 1,000 homes. Their DeltaStream device, invented by marine engineer Richard Ayre while he was installing buoys in the marine nature reserve near Pembrokeshire, will be the first tidal device in Wales and become fully operational in 2010.

To ensure the propeller and electricity generation systems were as tough as possible, the tidal turbine's designers worked with Converteam, a company renowned for designing propulsion systems for ships. "They've put them on the bottom of the Queen Mary ... and done work for highly efficient destroyers, which is exactly the same technology that we're looking at here," said Chris Williams, development director of DeltaStream.

DeltaStream's propellers work in reverse to a ship's propulsion system – the water turns the blades to generate electricity – but the underlying connections between blades and power systems are identical to those on the ship.

Tidal streams are seen as a plentiful and predictable supply of clean energy, as the UK tries to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Conservative estimates suggest there is at least 5GW of power, but there could be as much as 15GW – 25% of current national demand.

A single DeltaStream unit has three propeller-driven generators that sit on a triangular frame. It weighs 250 tonnes, but is relatively light compared with other tidal systems which can be several times heavier. The unit is simple to install and can be used in closely packed units at depths of at least 20m. Unlike other tidal turbine systems, which must be anchored to the sea floor using piles bored into the seabed, DeltaStream's triangular structure simply sits on the sea floor.

Duncan Ayling, head of offshore at the British Wind Energy Association and a former UK government adviser on marine energy, said that one of the biggest issues facing all tidal-stream developers is ease of installation and maintenance of their underwater device. "Anything you put under the water becomes expensive to get to and service. The really good bit of the DeltaStream is that they can just plonk it in the water and it just sits there."

Another issue that has plagued proposed tidal projects is concern that the whirling blades could kill marine life. But Williams said: "The blades themselves are thick and slow moving in comparison to other devices, so minimising the chance of impact on marine life."

The device also has a fail-safe feature when the water currents become too powerful and threaten to destroy the turbines by dragging them across the sea floor – the propellers automatically tilt their orientation to shed the extra energy.

Pembrokeshire businessman and sustainability consultant Andy Middleton said: "People are increasingly recognising how serious global warming really is, and in St David's we are keen to embrace our responsibility to minimise climate change. DeltaStream is developing into a perfect example of the technology that fills the need for green energy and has the added benefit of being invisible and reliable."

The country's first experimental tidal turbine began generating electricity in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland last year, built by Bristol-based company Marine Current Turbines. SeaGen began at about 150kW, enough for around 100 homes, but has now reached 1,200kW in testing. It had a setback early in its test phase, with the tidal streams breaking one of the blades in July.

• Energy
• Wave, tidal and hydropower
• Renewable energy
• Alternative energy

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