Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts

Wednesday, 27 February 2013

I'm being sued for £5 million by an energy giant

You may remember that back at the end of October, I was one of sixteen people who occupied a power station chimney for a week, in protest at the Government's proposed massive expansion of gas power. While I was up there, I wrote and performed this poem. There's an awesome video of the action on the Guardian website - check it out.

Last week, the sixteen of us were in court, along with five other people who had entered the power station but not climbed the chimney. All twenty-one of us pleaded guilty to Aggravated Trespass, and are due to be sentenced on March 20th and April 2nd*. However, the company who run the power station - the French energy giant EDF - seem to think that this isn't punishment enough for us, and have started the process of suing us for an estimated £5 million in supposed "lost earnings".

Now, I've done some badly paid gigs in my time, but if EDF win then this one is going to be hard to beat.



Obviously, we don't have £5 million. Despite our glamorous lives as performance poets, community volunteers and charity workers, we're never going to earn that kind of cash. That means that if EDF's (un)civil claim is successful, we stand to lose our homes plus any savings we might have, and then either declare bankruptcy or be in hock to a power company for the rest of our lives.

So we can't let them win. This is about much more than just the 21 of us - it's about the freedom to protest. If campaigners can be slapped with lawsuits every time they take part in civil disobedience, then that will make it much more difficult for people to stand up and be counted on the issues that matter.

Luckily, the backlash against Greedy-F's repressive tactics has already begun - since we announced the lawsuit on Wednesday, we've appeared on Channel 4 News, the Guardian, Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show, the Telegraph, the Independent, and lots of other blogs and magazines. A petition launched on Friday night already has more than 37,000 signatures, and is still rocketing upwards. We've had support from NGOs and big Twitter hitters like Naomi Klein and Richard Dawkins, and George Monbiot wrote a powerful article in support of us. EDF's Facebook page is now a hilarious delight to behold, plastered with sarcastic messages and customers pledging to switch suppliers.

Thanks to Pete Speller for this one...
It's all great, but it probably isn't enough, not yet. We need to make this into such a massive PR disaster for EDF that they drop this like a hot uranium rod (oh yeah, they're big into nuclear as well as coal and gas). If you want to help rescue a performance poet and his friends from financial ruin whilst simultaneously defending the right to protest and giving an unaccountable energy giant a well-deserved headache, here are a few simple things you can do:

IF YOU HAVE 30 SECONDS:

- Sign the petition at www.change.org/edf21
- "Like" our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/No-Dash-for-Gas/301820216584422
- Follow us on Twitter at @nodashforgas, and help us retweet updates about our case

IF YOU HAVE A FEW MINUTES:

- Please share the three things above - the petition, the Facebook and the Twitter
- Watch and share our two videos - this one showing the action itself, and this one explaining how we're being sued.
- Share your favourite media story about us, from the links above
- Leave some messages for EDF on their Facebook page or via Twitter.
- We have reason to believe that EDF's corporate mascot "Zingy" has decided to rebel against its corporate masters in support of us, and so is now being held hostage and forced to dance in EDF's adverts! Show your outrage by joining the "Free Zingy" Facebook page, and demanding Zingy's release here.

IF YOU'RE AN EDF CUSTOMER:

- Please change your supplier (ideally to a green company like Ecotricity or Good Energy) and tell EDF why - preferably in a nice public way on Facebook, Twitter, or at the bottom of the petition. You'll probably be happier for it, because EDF apparently have the worst customer service of all the energy companies.

Thanks everyone - any small thing you can do would be a massive help.

With love and chimney rhymes,

Danny x

* Protesters in these situations often try to run a "necessity" or "justification" defence - i.e., they admit to blockading a piece of polluting infrastructure, but argue that they were preventing a greater crime, such as the damage caused by CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, it wasn't really feasible for us to run such a defence in this case as we were up in front of a District Judge rather than a jury. As a result, we decided that our time and energy was better spent on other aspects of the campaign, and so we pleaded guilty to get the criminal trial out of the way and get on with other stuff.

Monday, 8 December 2008

Be Careful What You Wish For

[Note: Calculations updated 11/12/08]

On the day that Environment Secretary Ed Miliband calls for a "popular mobilisation" on climate change...

...57 activists break into Stansted Airport and build a small fort on one of the taxi runways:


Local Councils initially refused to allow Stansted to expand but - in a fine example of democracy in action - this was overruled by the Government, who are now conducting another dodgy "public enquiry" that will shock no-one when it comes out in favour of a second runway. It now falls to brave activists like these to take action to stop the expansion of Stansted - which would produce an extra 7 million tonnes of CO2 per year, according to the British Airports Authority - and to make the wider point about aviation and climate change.

Stansted are now saying that 56 flights have been cancelled, all from Ryanair. Assuming that half of these were inbound flights (which will have been redirected to other airports), that's 28 flights that didn't happen. Let's do a rough calculation (I'll try to do a better one if I find some better data). The average Stansted flight generates 15.4 tonnes of CO2, according to the Aviation Environment Federation. To get the full climate change impact of burning jet fuel in the upper atmosphere, we need to multiply this by 1.3, meaning that today's protest directly prevented approximately 28 x 15.4 x 1.3 = 561 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. That's the same as the annual greenhouse gas emissions from about 93 UK homes (in terms of electricity and gas use).

That's clearly completely awesome in and of itself. But the protest has also been headline news on all the TV, radio and online news outlets all morning. These 57 people have not only saved more carbon in 5 hours than a typical local authority home insulation scheme would achieve in a year, they also got far more media coverage for climate issues than the thousands of people who marched through London on Saturday.

But of course, illegal direct action doesn't work and those 57 people would have achieved far more by writing stern letters to their MPs.

Meanwhile, news is also breaking that Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent was invaded by mystery intruders last Friday, who got into a control room and shut down one of the turbines for four hours. E.ON, the owners of Kingsnorth, haven't released any more details as yet but it's interesting to note that this took place during the Climate Camp's 48 hours of action against E.ON and new coal. Let's have some more fun with the numbers: according to the Times, 500 MW of generating capacity was lost for four hours. That's 2000 MWh of electricity. Coal-powered electricity generates about 1 tonne of CO2e per MWh, so that's a saving of 2,000 tonnes from shutting down a quarter of Kingsnorth for four hours. Of course, that capacity will have been replaced by firing up a back-up generator elsewhere on the National Grid, but even an inefficient oil generator will only have produced about 1,000 tonnes of CO2e, leaving a clear 1,000 tonne saving. That's the equivalent of 5,000 households switching to energy-saving light bulbs for a year. (Let me know if you want references for all these figures and I'll happily fish them out). Equally importantly, it's kept the spotlight on E.ON and their disgraceful coal expansion plans.

These are the kinds of peaceful direct actions that, as Ed Miliband notes, have been successful at creating social change in "all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s". If we want a meaningful deal at Copenhagen next year, we're going to need a lot more of this sort of thing, to urgently shove the whole political debate away from the current disastrous "growth at all costs" model and towards climate sanity. So presumably Mr Miliband will now declare his support for today's direct actions, and call for more of the same?

Tuesday, 26 August 2008

Turbulence Ahead? The Latest Aviation Emissions Science and What It Means for Climate Campaigners

Note: the diagrams in this post have been shamelessly swiped from an excellent presentation by Dr Chris Jardine of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University (you can see more of his work here). The words and opinions, however, are all my own fault.

Update - 8.30pm 26/08/08. I've corrected the figure for the percentage of the UK's domestic emissions that the Government estimates come from aviation, and added a reference - thanks to Joss for that one!

Update - 6.15pm 27/08/08. Stupid analogy added at the bottom of the post in case it helps.

Aeroplanes, eh? How can a technology be so utterly awe-inspiring and yet so hideously polluting at the same time? It really isn’t fair.

The roaring, jet-fuelled argument over the building of new runways at major airports has – quite rightly – dominated the aviation debate over the last year. However, a related issue that’s been quietly simmering away in the background is now coming to the boil, and pro-aviation lobbyists may be tempted to use a piece of new research to try to shift the debate in their direction.

The issue at stake may seem rather obscure at first. Aircraft don't just produce CO2, they also produce other gases that warm the planet. In order to calculate this extra impact, should the amount of CO2 produced by a flight be multiplied by 2.7, or 1.9, or something else entirely, in order to capture the total warming effect of burning aviation fuel in the upper atmosphere?

Although this sounds like something of interest to only the most hardcore eco-geeks and carbon obsessives, it is actually quite important for this simple reason: the lower the number used, the less polluting aviation seems to be. For an industry that’s been dragged over the coals (or the vat of burning jet fuel) for its disastrous environmental impact, anything that can make it appear less polluting is likely to be seized upon by industry apologists and milked for all its worth.

New and credible research suggests that the CO2 from aviation should in fact be multiplied by the relatively low figure of 1.3 in order to gauge its full climate impact. So far the big flight operators haven’t made too much of a public song and dance about this, but rest assured that they are very interested. The topic is being discussed intensely at industry conferences and in environmental consultancy circles, and it’s only a matter of time before it creeps out into the public sphere. When it does, climate campaigners need to be ready for it.

The rest of this blog post is therefore split into two sections:

A) The sciencey bit: Why the correct number to use for calculating aviation’s full climate impact is probably about 1.3, and why this is less to do with science than with (woo-hoo!) accounting.

B) The policy-y bit: Why using this number doesn’t actually change things that much in a practical sense, why mass aviation is still completely unsustainable, and how climate campaigners should respond to this latest potential distraction.


A) The Science Bit – Why 1.3?

Anyone who cares about climate change (which, honestly, should include anyone who likes living on a reasonably habitable planet) will know by now that mass aviation is a major barrier between us and a saner, safer future. Back in 2007, the Government admitted that flights from UK airports accounted for about 6.3% of the country’s domestic CO2 emissions. However, climate campaigners were quick to point out that the aviation figure was still an under-estimate, as it didn’t include the extra warming – or “radiative forcing” – caused by gases other than CO2 being released from planes into the upper atmosphere.

The best estimate at the moment is that aviation emissions cause about 1.3 times as much warming as the CO2 from aviation would alone. This differs noticeably from earlier estimates of 2.7 times and 1.9 times. Let me try to explain why…

The diagram below shows the chemical reaction that takes place when an aeroplane engine burns fuel in the upper atmosphere. The fuel, which is made up of carbon, hydrogen, and sulphur atoms, reacts with nitrogen and oxygen in the air to produce a shedload of motor energy and an exciting cocktail of exhaust gases (click on the picture for a bigger version):

The gases in red rectangles produce a warming effect when released at high altitude. The ones in blue rectangles have a cooling effect. NOx is rather special because although it has no direct global warming effect, it reacts with other gases in the upper atmosphere to create ozone (O3) which has a warming effect, and to destroy the greenhouse gas methane (CH4), creating a cooling effect.

As if this wasn’t complex enough already, all of these gases vary both in terms of the amount produced per kg of fuel burnt, and in the amount of warming (or cooling) they cause per kg released. In addition, the contrails produced by planes have a short-lived but powerful heat-trapping effect, and aircraft also have a not-yet-fully-understood impact on cirrus clouds. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) did an initial assessment of the comparative effect of all of these factors based on total aviation up to 1992 (the blue bars in the chart below); this was later scaled up to include data up to the year 2000 (the white bars below); the IPCC concluded that, up to this date, the warming impact of aviation had been 2.7 times the warming effect of its CO2 alone (not including the effect on cirrus clouds, which has still not been fully quantified). A more up-to-date study with improved methods (called TRADE-OFF, and summarised in the red bars below) in 2003 updated this figure to 1.9.

In the chart above, RF stands for “Radiative Forcing”, and is measured in milliWatts of warming per square metre of atmosphere - click on the picture for a bigger version

So historically speaking, aviation has been responsible for almost twice (1.9 times) the global warming that would have been caused if the planes had only been emitting CO2.

However – and this is the new bit – this doesn’t take into account the fact that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 200 years (on average), whilst contrails and nitrous oxide have much shorter-lived effects. Therefore, much of the CO2 released by planes in the past is still warming the planet today, whilst most of the contrails and other gases from historical aviation have had their impact already and have now dissipated. This means that the 1.9 figure underestimates the long-term warming impact of CO2, and makes the other warming effects seem more severe in comparison.

A well-argued research paper by Forster, Shine and Stuber takes all of this into account and suggests that, when we consider what impact a flight taken today will have over the next 100 years (which is the standard method for measuring climate effects), a typical flight will have a warming effect of about 1.3 times the effect of its CO2 emissions alone.

This doesn’t mean that the earlier 1.9 figure was wrong. It’s just that the two numbers are measuring different things – one refers to the total warming caused by aviation up to the year 2000, while the other represents the impact that flights taken today will have over the next 100 years. We should use this latter figure in our climate calculations because that’s how all other carbon footprints are measured.

If you’re still not sure what I’m on about (and fair enough if so), there are a couple more graphs at the bottom of this post that may (or may not) help. Do also feel free to drop a question into the comments box and I’ll do my best to answer it (or to point you to someone who might be able to explain it better than I can).

Of course, this all still leaves one crucial question: who cares?


B) What All This Means For Campaigners

First and foremost, it should be seen as a victory for campaigners that this stuff is being discussed by the aviation industry at all. The “new” research I’ve been referring to was in fact carried out back in 2006, and has only now come to the fore because of the increased pressure on flight operators to properly account for their greenhouse gas emissions. Because Kyoto doesn’t include aviation, there has been no statutory requirement up until now for the emissions from flights to be properly measured. The only real pressure on the aviation industry to own up to its full impact has come from climate campaigners, and (ironically) from the recent inclusion of aviation emissions in ineffective and corporate-friendly carbon trading schemes as an attempted response to those campaigns.

The discovery that the 1.3 multiplier is a more appropriate measure than the IPCC’s original 2.7 might seem like a boost to the aviation industry – but it isn’t really. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the 2.7 multiplier (and the 1.9 multiplier after it) came with all sorts of caveats and uncertainties (which were freely admitted by the researchers involved) and were recognised as being a rather crude measure of aviation’s extra greenhouse gas emissions; as a result neither figure was universally applied. The 1.3 figure is based on more solid methods, and stands a far better chance of being widely adopted. This would bulldoze though the aviation industry’s claims that “the science is unclear so we should only count the CO2 and not the extra stuff”, and is probably a reason why they’re not endorsing this new research too loudly just yet.

The second reason is that, even if you don’t count the extra emissions and only look at CO2, aviation growth is still hopelessly unsustainable. The graph below takes the amount of CO2 that would be produced by a range of global aviation growth scenarios (from high growth to low growth), and superimposes it on top of the IPCC’s graph of the global CO2 emissions cuts we need to make to have any chance of preserving a habitable climate (in gigatonnes of carbon, click on the picture for a bigger version):

The five thinner lines at the bottom represent the CO2 from five different aviation growth scenarios, and show that – if the number of flights taken continues to grow – then aviation will take up between 20 and 75% of our global CO2 emissions budget by 2050! This would clearly not only be ridiculous (do we really believe that flying is several times more important than heating, lighting, food production etc.?) but also utterly unjust (flying is and always will be the preserve of a wealthy minority). Note that these figures include generous assumptions about improved aircraft technology and flight efficiency, thus laying the huge concrete runway of physical reality over the aviation industry’s happy little village of technofix fantasies.

The above graph shows that aviation growth is unsustainable based on its CO2 emissions alone, even without taking other greenhouse gases into account.

It’s probably time to wrap up this stupidly long post. Below, in one of those numbered lists that I love so well, is my advice to climate campaigners on how to respond to all of this:

1) Start using the 1.3 figure. It’ll probably be refined by further research over the next few years, but for the moment it’s the best we’ve got and is definitely more defensible than the 1.9 and 2.7 figures. It has another important attribute: if the aviation companies do suddenly start trumpeting the 1.3 multiplier around, with cries of “Look! We’re only half as polluting as the IPCC made out!” we’ll be ready to say, nonchalantly, “Yeah we know, we’ve been using the lower figure for ages now. Oh, by the way, you’re still utterly unsustainable and we still need to massively reduce the number of flights we take, not increase them, to have a decent shot at avoiding catastrophe”.

2) Stand firm on those extra emissions. There’s a real possibility that the industry are going to say “Look, it’s 1.3 – but we shouldn’t really include that extra 30% at all, because those gases aren’t included in the Kyoto Protocol. In order to be consistent with international carbon accounting methods, we should only count CO2. So nerr.” This is a beautifully circular argument. The extra warming effects of aviation are specific to aviation – no other human activity creates contrails, fiddles with cirrus clouds or releases gases like NOx or SOx straight into the upper atmosphere (at least, not yet). Kyoto didn’t include aviation, and so it didn’t need to include these extra warming effects. In other words, the only reason that the extra impacts of aviation aren’t currently included in international climate agreements is because aviation itself isn’t yet included in these agreements – and as soon as aviation is taken into account, those extra impacts should logically be brought in as well. They may not exist under Kyoto, but they certainly exist up in the atmosphere, and are cooking us as surely as the “official” greenhouse gases.

3) Don’t get distracted. This is definitely one of those “acknowledge it and then move on, don’t waste time dwelling on it” issues. My main purpose in writing such a detailed post about this topic was to minimise the time and effort other campaigners might spend fretting about the issue. Don’t! Be aware of it if it comes up, check back here if you need the references, but remember that climate change is far more than a numbers game. We need to get our figures right, but we also need to remember what’s really at stake here, and keep focused on the bigger picture. Aviation growth is incompatible with any effective and fair solution to climate change. It’s a luxury activity that benefits a tiny minority whilst spewing out a disproportionate amount of climate-trashing pollution, devastating the lives of millions of the world’s poorest people. It’s one of the starkest examples of climate injustice in existence. A few figures may have changed, but the basic facts haven’t. So get involved!

www.climatecamp.org.uk
www.planestupid.com
www.airportwatch.org.uk

www.stopairportexpansion.org


Putting It Another Way: Further Explanation of the Science Bit (With Extra Graphs and a Daft Analogy)

If you add up all of the global warming caused by aviation so far in history, then about half of it is from CO2 and half of it is from other gases (i.e. the total impact is about 1.9 times the CO2 alone). This is shown in the graph below - click on the picture to enlarge it (note that this shows the amount of warming caused over time by the three different effects, not the amount of greenhouse gas produced in that time):


However, if you take the emissions from a single flight today, and look at the warming effect it will have over the next 100 years, you'll find that most of the warming will come from CO2 and only a minority from other gases, because of the short-lived nature of the contrails and the NOx effects, as shown in the (not to scale) graph below (again, click to enlarge):


This may seem counter-intuitive, but think about it this way: much of the CO2 released since aviation began is still in the atmosphere, and still warming the planet. This present and future warming effect from past CO2 emissions (right up to emissions released in the year 2000) isn't counted in the historical warming graph, and so the 1.9 figure underestimates the full effect of the CO2 over its lifetime. The 1.3 figure, by comparing the effects of all the different aviation gases over 100 years, captures more of the CO2's warming effect.

Remember, these two numbers are measuring different things – one refers to the historical impact of aviation, while the other represents the impact that flights taken today will have over the next 100 years. We should use this latter figure in our climate calculations because that’s the standard method of doing it, and allows us to compare the climate impacts of flying with the impacts of everything else.

Of course, if all else fails, there's always the "bad analogy" option:

Imagine a huge, pristine, white wall, somewhere near you, probably built and maintained using Our Bloody Council Tax. Unfortunately, the local Youth, probably wearing Hoodies and listening to Rap Music, have realised that it’s an ideal spot to ruin with their filthy, filthy, graffiti.

One day, ten youths arrive at the wall. Each youth carries a blue spray can, a small pot of red paint with a large brush, and a large pot of black paint with a small brush.

You can see where this is going.

Each young ruffian starts painting, using the can and both brushes at once (they’re surprisingly talented, these kids), and keeps painting until all of their paint runs out. The blue spray can produces large amounts of paint, but runs out after an hour. The red paint gets slapped on quickly and covers a decent area, but runs out after a day. The black paint with the small brush lasts 20 days – it goes on slowly, but there’s a lot of it.

The next day, twelve more kids arrive and start painting.

The following day, fifteen more join in.

The day after that, twenty more young rapscallions start painting. The next day, twenty-five turn up.

Now, we obviously want to control this disgraceful vandalism. One thing we want to know is – what colour of paint is the biggest problem, blue, red or black? And how do they compare to each other?

The first youths arrived at the wall five days ago. Looking at the wall, what do we see?

Firstly, we see that all eighty-two of the kids are still there, but that fifty-seven of them are now only applying black paint with a small brush. Twenty-five are using both red and black, but their red has nearly run out.

By the end of day five, the wall will have been daubed with the contents of eighty-two blue spray cans, eighty-two small pots of red paint, and about 13% of the contents of eighty-two large pots of black paint (yes, I worked it out, I am that sad). The wall is half black, a quarter red, and
a quarter blue.

“Aha!” we cry. “The black paint is only half of the problem. The red and blue paints make up the other half!” And in terms of all the painting that’s happened so far, we’d be right.

However, what we need to know today is: how much of a graffiti menace is one of these youths compared to, say, a professional street artist or an activist with a pack of marker pens? To work this out, we need to compare these different vandals fairly, so let’s say: how much graffiti would each of them produce in ten days?

In ten days, one youth would produce graffiti equal to one blue spray can, one small red paint pot, and half a large black paint pot. This ratio turns out to be about 77% black and 23% other colours – or to put it another way, multiply the amount of black by 1.3 to get the total amount
of paint used.

How's that?

(To be totally clear: each youth is one flight, the paint pots and cans are the different gases, and the paint on the wall is the amount of warming caused. Also, I have very little shame.)

Wednesday, 20 August 2008

Climate Camp – How was It For You?

Stand-out memories for me:

  • Watching the site transformed from a few tents in a field to a full-on sustainable community, education centre and action hub in a matter of days, despite the police confiscating half of the infrastructure.
  • Giving visitors tours of the camp and watching their preconceptions crumble.
  • Watching campers gently but firmly removing the police from the site on Sunday night using straw bales, wheelie bins, and bad karaoke.
  • Watching E.ON and Government officials squirming in the media as they attempted to defend their bonkers plan to build a new, dirty, coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth.
  • Chasing a BBC camera crew across a field towards a line of invading riot cops, and shouting “Wait! You can’t film them yet, it goes against the media policy, we need to have a meeting and reach consensus first!”. Strangely enough, they didn’t stop filming.
  • The resulting BBC interview with a riot cop who clearly had no clue why he was on the site. “We had intelligence received that said we needed to come onto the site”. A few riot police got into the camp at one point and stood there, bemused, with nothing to do: children were playing, toilets were being built, people were in workshops…five minutes later these cops were posing for photographs with campers. Meanwhile, some of their colleagues were beating unarmed campers round the head at a nearby gate in order to get onto this “dangerous” site. Utterly, horribly surreal.
  • Suddenly having to arrange transport for Arthur Scargill.
  • Performing poetry in the main marquee, around the campsite, and to the people on the barricades before the day of action. This is one of the main reasons why I write this stuff.
  • Not knowing whether to laugh or cry at this headline in the local paper. The picture shows a children’s play area that campers had built in the shape of a pirate ship; surprisingly, we had no plans to launch this onto the Medway. On the day, of course, everyone on the boats was completely safe and many got close to the power station before being nabbed by the water police.
  • Discovering that the camp was a major news story, despite the Olympics and Russia/Georgia; we even got an episode of Newsnight about coal vs. nuclear. It was also pretty much the only story in the local media all week, with the ITV Meridian reporter getting especially excited – his breathless, war-zone style reporting from above the scene on Saturday is particularly recommended. Watch it and tell me he’s not thinking “My big break at last – next stop Basra!”.
  • Realising that this was the biggest Climate Camp yet, despite everything the police were doing; feeling buoyed up and more powerful than I’ve felt in a long time, as part of this amazing and growing community of resistance.


One fact that I currently love is that despite the extraordinary provocation, all of the 2,500+ people who came to the camp and on the action remained non-violent throughout. You can guarantee that if there was a single bit of evidence of anyone fighting back against the police, the cops would have plastered it all over the media by now – but no. The only “violent clashes” (how the media love those words) that we’ve seen anywhere have been police trying to break (unlawfully) into a peaceful, legal camp, and attacking unarmed people with batons and pepper spray. There were a few “scuffles” (another favoured media term) on Saturday, as people were whacked by the cops as they did dangerous things like walking towards a power station carrying a banner, or trying to climb over a fence, but again there was only peaceful resistance from the campers. The term the police use for this is “obstruction”, and it’s no surprise that this was the most common thing that people were arrested and charged with – 25 arrests out of 132, and 21 charges out of the 50 charges we know about (I’m thinking about publishing a summary arrest list here if I can get hold of the relevant information).

That’s right – the supposed “hardcore, violent minority” that the police love to talk about didn’t show up. Again. For the third year in a row. Instead, we had thousands of peaceful and committed people taking meaningful action for climate sanity and global justice.

The Camp for Climate Action is holding a “What Next?” meeting in Manchester on the 26th – 28th September. It’s open to all, and it should be great. I’ll post more details here when I have them.

(All photos taken from the Climate Camp website - loads more can be seen here.)

Blog Resuscitation

Right – it’s time to kick this blog back into life. Let’s start with the following, which I've cribbed from the front page of the Camp for Climate Action website (and updated a little bit), and which pretty well sums up my feelings about the whole, extraordinary, glorious event:

We Really Did It – And We’ll Be Back

It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of huge institutions such as energy corporations and governments. But the Climate Camp has shown that we don’t have to feel that way. On that August weekend, we proved our power.

We have now learned that - despite E.ON’s bluster that the power station had been running normally all weekend – we most definitely succeeded in disrupting its operations. We learned this from a most unlikely source: the police.

Thursday, 15 November 2007

Look At My Big Train

I’m so sick of transport campaigning.

We know what the sustainable transport solutions are - it feels as though we’ve known them forever - and yet we’re still having to fight the same wretched battles over motorway expansion, the privatisation of public transport, new runways, and the continued existence of Jeremy Clarkson.

But wait, Danny, wait! What about the Shiny New Eurostar Terminal?

This was Greenpeace’s comment on the matter:

This did make me smile. However, even though commentators all over the place are queuing up to declare that this is a Jolly Good Thing and Why Did It Take So Long, and despite the fact that a two-hour-and-fifteen minute journey from London to Paris should make any flight-free holidays I might want to take in the future notably easier, my cynicism muscles still won’t stop twitching.

A fast train to the continent is clearly a good thing if it gets people out of planes, but why isn't this kind of money and organisational clout being used to sort out local bus services, cycling facilities, inter-city coaches and so on? Where are the decent, affordable public transport facilities for all of the people in the UK who don't make frequent business/shopping trips to Paris and Brussels, but do want to travel within their local area and occasionally around the UK (i.e. most of us)?

I think this article on Indymedia illustrates this problem all too well:

“Around 30 cyclists met at 8.30 this morning for the opening of the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras station, London. They were highlighting the poor facilities and planning for bikes in contrast with the much-publicised claims of carbon-neutral travel to Paris…”

As well as the complete lack of cycle access and parking at the station, the author also notes that if you want to take your bicycle to France,

“you either have a choice of dismantling your bike, putting it in a bike bag and carrying it on as luggage - I've done this and it's not great! - or you can take it to the station the day before you want to travel, and send it ahead for some £40 each way (adding another two-thirds to the price of a cheap passenger ticket).”

This is just one more small example to add to the heap, but once again a huge gleaming "prestige" project has taken priority over less glamourous but equally vital people-scale solutions. Sadly, it seems that the government (on the rare occasions that they’re prepared to give some serious backing to a public transport project) have decided that sorting out bikes, buses, coaches and pedestrian routes is fiddly and boring compared to big shiny trains, and might involve pesky "controversial" stuff like clamping down on profit-hungry private bus operators, subsidising "unprofitable" public transport routes and making things a bit less convenient for car drivers. Plus, of course, there isn't much scope for the government’s corporate mates to siphon large amounts of public money out of bicycle lanes and free bus rides for the elderly.

We definitely need more fast, reliable train services, but we mustn’t forget to get out there and shout for all the other, less prestigious (and less elitist) kinds of sustainable transport too. Even though the very thought of yet more bloody transport campaigning makes me want to crawl under a big pile of John Whitelegg transport policy documents from the early 1990s and weep.

Wednesday, 17 October 2007

What I Did On My Lunch Break

This is a video.

It happened on Monday as part of a National Day of Action against the Royal Bank of Scotland. At least 25 different actions happened all over the country. I'm feeling rather inspired by it all.

Friday, 31 August 2007

What I Did On My Holidays / A Climate Uprising

It was around 1am, and in the small tent village that had appeared across the only vehicle entrance of the British Airports Authority’s corporate headquarters, a giggling gang of protesters ate lentil pate sandwiches and sang daft songs while a large white bunny rabbit scampered around the feet of the bemused police officers standing nearby. This unlikely scene was part of the much-heralded Day of Mass Action for the Climate Camp near Heathrow, and it was the culmination of the most extraordinary, hilarious, inspiring, exhausting, terrifying and wonderful week of my life. Even as I fought through my fatigue and tried to prepare myself for the barrage of stupid questions that the morning media scrum would bring, I was filled with the warm, glowing knowledge that this week had been A Very Good Thing.

Inside the BAA car park shanty town (Image by Kristian Buus)

The fact that I have such powerful, personal memories of the Camp for Climate Action might cause some to doubt my ability to take a cool, rational overview of the whole affair. To such doubters I say: ahh, you’re just jealous that you weren’t there. Plus, you’re missing a really important point: many of the two-thousand-odd people who came through the camp will have left with similar feelings of inspiration, energy and hope – and this, more than anything, was the camp’s real achievement.

Yes, the camp got incredible global media coverage, reaching news outlets serving ¾ of the world’s population. Yes, activists were able to appear all over the mainstream media hammering out the key messages about aviation expansion being madness, about how climate change will only be solved by major social change, and about the importance of mustering people power against entrenched political and corporate interests. Yes, the political balance in the UK seems to have shifted, with Heathrow’s 3rd runway no longer seeming like a done deal, and the government now talking about including aviation in the Climate Bill. This is all fantastic stuff – but these weren’t the most exciting or important things to come out of the camp. Oh no.

During the eight days the camp was officially open, I counted at least nineteen peaceful direct actions taking place against climate criminals. You can find more information, pictures and first-hand reports at Indymedia, but the brief run-down goes something like this (with much text taken directly from the Climate Camp website):,

13/08/07:

- A group of activists set up a climate camp on the wing of an Airbus A380 on its way to be assembled in France. The Welsh police decline to arrest them, and they all walk free.

16/08/07:

- Farnborough and Biggin Hill airports, both exclusively used by private executive jets, are blockaded by two teams of climate activists in disgust at the obscenity of the super-rich using planes as a taxi service.

17/08/07:

- The doors of six London travel agencies are chained shut and plastered with signs saying 'Closed, gone to the Climate Camp.'

- Activists superglue themselves to the front doors of the Department for Transport's London headquarters. A tourist spontaneously joins the protest by chaining himself to the doors.

Main entrance to Department for Transport - closed (image from Indymedia)

- Ten people occupy the office of private charter company XL, which has a contract with the Home Office to deport rejected asylum seekers, exposing the connection between climate change and forced migration.

18/08/07:

- Children and their parents blockade the World Freight Centre at Heathrow in protest at the damage to the climate caused by unnecessarily flying food around the world.

Cargo terminal closed by slightly damp picnickers (Image from Indymedia)

- 60 people occupy Carmel Agrexco's Heathrow warehouse in Hayes, where produce is air freighted in from territories occupied by Israel, highlighting the issues of food miles and the unjust and unlawful distribution of natural resources in the Middle East.

19/08/07:

- Several marches take place around the site of the proposed third runway, involving local residents from Sipson and Harmondsworth (the villages that BAA is planning to demolish), John McDonnell MP, and the striking sight of hundreds of activists wearing copies of the Tyndall Report on their hands, carrying a banner reading, 'We are armed....only with peer-reviewed science'.

Pictures of people affected by climate change that doubled as handy cardboard shields when the police got their batons out...leading to the horribly surreal sight of cops trying to beat their way through the faces of Bangladeshi children to get at peaceful protesters. (Image by Kristian Buus)

- Despite the presence of 1,800 police wielding batons and the Terrorism Laws, BAA’s attempts to slap injunctions on people, and the fact that the date, time and target had all been announced in advance, hundreds of protestors still make it to BAA’s corporate headquarters, blockade the only vehicle entrance, set up a new neighbourhood of the camp and stay there for 24 hours. BAA tells most of its staff to stay at home or work elsewhere on Monday.

It was around this point that the words of the song "Power To The People" became changed to "Shower to the people...coz the people need a shower..." Look, it was funny at the time, OK? (Image by Kristian Buus)

- BA World Cargo depot is blockaded for about four and a half hours by eight protestors locked to each other.

- Three teenaged girls make it onto the roof of the Heathrow Business School and unfurl a banner that reads “Make Planes History”.

20/08/07:

- Two carbon offsetting companies (in Oxford and London) are targeted by protesters dressed as red herrings. In Oxford the campaigners get into the offices and have a round table discussion with the staff about the problems with offsetting.

- Five protesters use a concrete lock-on to block the entrance to Sizewell A and B nuclear power stations. Their banner reads, 'Nuclear power is not the answer to climate chaos.'

(Image from Indymedia)

- Eighteen protesters occupy the office of the owners of Leeds airport, Bridgepoint Capital, on Warwick Street in London, armed with Yorkshire puddings and a banner declaring “Yorkshire’s flooding, yer daft puddin!”

- Twelve protesters superglue themselves to the entrance of BP’s headquarters.

It's clearly meant to look like oil, right? Not blood. Journalists are weird. (Image from Indymedia)

- A troupe of rebel clowns stake out a fourth runway in the garden of Clive Soley, pro-runway lobbyist and Campaign Director of Future Heathrow.

21/08/07:

- The building works for a controversial gas pipeline being constructed through the Brecon Beacons are sabotaged overnight.

Despite the patchy-at-best coverage of all of this in the mainstream British media, it’s not hard to see why a CNN news bulletin referred to the week as a “climate uprising”. And for those of you sceptical about the effectiveness of this kind of action, here’s why it’s so important:

1) It’s proportionate to the scale of the problem. As George Marshall has pointed out, it’s hard for people to see climate change as a huge problem when the proposed solutions are “change your lightbulbs” or “pump up your car tyres”. Once people start taking peaceful, arrestable action on climate change – demonstrating that they are ready to break the law and go to prison over this issue – it significantly raises the game and marks climate change as a “real” issue.

2) It raises the political temperature. The Iraq war demonstrated how much attention the Government currently pays to large numbers of people marching from Point A to Point B. Every past movement which required major social change – from the anti-slavery campaigners to civil rights in the US to women’s suffrage – required an element of civil disobedience and peaceful law-breaking to keep the issues on the political agenda. Tackling climate change will require bigger changes than all of these previous campaigns were calling for. Direct action helps everybody working on climate change issues across the whole of society, by opening up new political space and pushing the debate forward.

3) It identifies and confronts the culprits. The uncomfortable truth is that the prevention of catastrophic climate change won’t happen with a big warm cuddly consensus. We have to stop burning fossil fuels, massively reduce our reliance on cars and planes, and make some fundamental changes to the way we run our lives and the economy. A lot of influential people and corporations who rely on the current system for their wealth and power will lose out in a big way (while the great majority of people should benefit from a low-carbon world, if we do things properly), and so we can’t pretend that there won’t be confrontation and conflict. There will. We have to accept that, and then figure out how, in the battle of people vs. corporate profits, the people are going to win.

4) It’s the most genuinely empowering form of action that anyone can take. To strip away all of the distractions and just place your body in the way of the bad stuff…it’s not enough by itself, but it’s infinitely more powerful and inspiring that turning down your thermostat or paying £50 for a pop concert.

There are now thousands of people all over the UK who have been informed, trained, educated and inspired by the Camp for Climate Action, and are gearing up for more action (as Green Party Speaker Derek Wall put it, the camp “built capacity, with a vengeance”). Hundreds of new people have been drawn into the movement (the poets and folk singers at the camp's open mic session were joined by rappers, post-rock noise merchants and a teenage emo-punk duo), and loads of older activists have been re-energised and re-inspired. If you want to know more about what’s happening near you and how to get involved, have a look at www.climatecamp.org.uk, or Indymedia, or ask whichever one of your online friends seems to be a member of the right sort of Facebook groups.

Even if you’re not ready to take peaceful direct action yourself, then think about what you can do to support it – the actions around the camp couldn’t have happened without the time and energy of hundreds of helpers, and the camp would have received far less favourable media coverage without the quiet (or, better yet, noisy) support of millions of people across the UK. So turn up to meetings, make sandwiches, organise benefit gigs, gather donations, give talks, write supportive letters to the local paper, set up or join community food/transport/renewable power projects, create stunning political artwork for people to take on demonstrations…there’s loads you can do. The Climate Camp was important, but it was still just one step along the path to building a real, powerful movement for climate action in this country – a movement that we all need to be a part of.