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.

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. NO_x 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 NO_x or SO_x 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.)

A Flight Of Fancy

(Note: I updated the passenger statistics in this post and put in proper references on 07/07/07. Instead of watching Live Earth. I feel I made the right choice.)

Slightly teeth-grinding article in the Observer Travel supplement this week. After a great start (two opening paragraphs about the Camp for Climate Action) the article meanders with cheerful incoherence through a mish-mash of statistics and quotes from the Indian government, Airbus, a Kenyan health and conservation project, the British Airline Pilots Association, an engineering professor from Lancaster University, the Tyndall Centre and Greenpeace, before concluding:

"So should we stop flying? If no one set foot on a plane again, it would undoubtedly help to stop climate change - though at the expense of killing off the tourism-based economies of many of the world's poorest countries. But in the real world, with the US and the developing world demanding thousands of new planes, surely we have to take a more sophisticated approach: to choose airlines with greener, newer fleets, and thus encourage plane makers to prioritise environmental performance; to travel to destinations that help local communities rather than destroy them; to take the train where possible; to reduce carbon emissions at home; and, above all, lobby politicians to tackle deforestation and to switch to green forms of energy.

"Do all this, and we can start to cancel flights in the knowledge that it really will make a difference"

Sigh. Once again a well-meaning journalist tries desperately to prove that we can tackle climate change without a drastic reduction in flights. I have some sympathy - it must be a really, really tough thing to come to terms with if you're used to flying off to all kinds of wonderful places as a travel reporter - but the unpalatable truth is that it's a highly destructive activity and if left unchecked will wreck all our efforts to reduce emissions in other sectors. Flying is a luxury - most of the population of the planet have never done it, and never will. There is no sustainable alternative, so we need to do much, much less of it.

For a more clear-eyed viewpoint - and a fantastic example of the self-contradictory nature of the mainstream press - you might want to check out the article about Plane Stupid from the same edition of the paper. Or, if you've got a few minutes to kill, you could join me on a merry journey through rant-land as I make myself feel better by pointing out the main things that are stupid or wrong in this article. Hurrah!

"Some ferries emit more CO2 than planes"

This is true for the high-speed ones with the inbuilt shopping centres which come out worse than planes even when you include radiative forcing (the extra impact from other greenhouse gases that planes emit, and the fact that they're emitted in the upper atmosphere). However, just because some ferries are highly polluting doesn't magically stop planes from being highly polluting. The same goes for inefficient cars and badly-designed trains. We shouldn't be using any of these things. Stupid argument. Next!

"Even if we cut our flights, the rest of the world's flights will still grow massively - India, China, blah blah blah"

Cutting flights in Britain would send a hugely significant signal to the rest of the world. It's hard to think of many things that could send a stronger message about the unsustainability of air travel. More generally, action on climate change must begin with the biggest polluters, and if we want to have any credibility in talking about global emissions cuts with the rest of the world we have to get our own house in order first. The Government's plans on aviation expansion would make it impossible to hit even their own inadequate targets, even using their favoured wacky measuring system of only including UK citizens' outgoing flights (even though, you know, most people do fly back as well). So this argument is pretty weak as well.

"People talk about taking fewer flights but no-one's really doing it, or if they are Ryanair haven't noticed, and it wouldn't make much difference if they did, except that we only need to take a couple fewer flights each per year to hit the Government targets"

Huh? OK, I'm going to ignore all the weird self-contradictory stuff in this article and just respond to the points raised. Clearly, the fact that people have started realising that flying everywhere is bad for the climate is a positive step, and shows the message is getting through. However, any individual action people are taking seems to be being lost amidst the overall growth of aviation. The author of the Observer article enjoys some GCSE maths fun by working out that, on average, five flights are taken per person in the UK per year, and so to make a 60% cut in emissions "we simply need to slowly wean ourselves down to two annual flights - one return trip". This is misleading in three ways. Firstly, it misrepresents the reality of the IPCC's carbon emissions reduction target: to hit a global reduction of 60% by 2050 will require larger cuts in the most polluting activities like flying in order to allow developing nations some room to develop – unless being able to fly out to one’s Spanish cottage every year is just as important as powering a Tanzanian hospital or an Indian school (this is what Contraction & Convergence is all about). Secondly, it pretends that all flights are the same length. Thirdly, it ignores the fact that UK citizens are not really taking five flights each per year - it is a minority of wealthy people who are taking the majority of these flights. Here are some statistics you might find interesting (with thanks to Airport Watch):

* The richest 18 per cent of the UK population are responsible for 54 percent of flights, whilst the poorest 18 per cent are responsible for just 5 percent (calculated by WDM based on 2006 data from the Office of National Statistics).

* In 2005, 86% of the passengers who used Heathrow were from the better-off socio-economic categories A, B and C1 (my calculations, using data from the Civil Aviation Authority 2005 Passenger Survey)

* The average annual income of people using Stansted (where low cost carriers account for nearly all the flights) is more than £50,000 (Civil Aviation Authority 2005 Passenger Survey)

* Each year, 60% of UK residents do not step onto a plane (MORI poll 2001).

The article claims that 3% of people have stopped flying and 10% have cut down because of "environmental concerns". If this is true, fantastic - but this will have little impact on the overall flight numbers if it doesn't include the people who are actually taking all those flights. The continuing boom in airline ticket sales suggests that it probably doesn't.

This is why campaigners like me aren't just asking people to stop flying - we're demanding that the Government halt, and then reverse, airport expansion. The only thing absolutely guaranteed to reduce the number of flights in the UK is a reduction in airport capacity. If we don't seriously reduce our flying, we are absolutely guaranteed to miss all our CO2 reduction targets, destabilise the climate and turn the planet into a floods-droughts-storms-and-resource-wars lucky dip of disaster. It's that simple.

“Flying is only 1.7% of global emissions – deforestation is much more important”

There's actually a good point hiding in here somewhere - deforestation is a massive problem, and we don't just contribute to it by purchasing forest-unfriendly products (burgers, palm oil, Government office refurbishments); the UK Government's role in the WTO, IMF and World Bank helps to encourage, finance and defend disastrously destructive projects all over the world. We do need to take action on this. However, there are some excellent reasons for the current campaign focus on flights:

Flying is growing rapidly, and we have the opportunity to stop it before it gets completely out of control. Flying is done by the wealthy, which puts the onus firmly onto us. Flying is an activity that produces benefit for a tiny minority but has a proportionally huge impact on the climate. When we try to figure out what a sustainable, low-carbon lifestyle would look like, flying is too polluting to fit into it as more that a once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime luxury. In addition, one of the major technological solutions being suggested to reduce the impacts of flights – biofuels – would massively increase deforestation. The UK Government is proposing a huge airport expansion that would wipe out all of its own climate change targets. If we don't win this one, everything else becomes much, much more difficult.

“Stopping flying is less important than insulating your roof”

Clearly, this depends on how much you fly! But more importantly, we know that there is a limit to how much greenhouse gas we can put into the atmosphere. This means there is a limit to how much we can each emit per year (somewhere between 1 and 2 tonnes of CO2e per capita by 2030, depending on whose analysis you go with). This means a massive, across-the-board cut in the UK’s emissions – we have to cut our energy use AND our flights. We can’t choose between them. The only difference is that no-one in the UK needs to fly, whereas everyone needs a warm home.

"Techno! Techno! Techno! Technofix!"

The absolute best case airline industry scenario is that aeroplane fuel efficiency might increase by 1-2% per year. Planes have a lifespan of about 20 years and so are replaced too slowly for efficiency gains to take effect at even this slow rate. Air journeys from the UK are currently increasing by 4% per year. No-one has any feasible plans for running planes on anything except kerosene, or kerosene with a splash of biofuel (bye bye rainforests).

“Flying isn’t a luxury activity – it’s vital for tourism in countries like Kenya”

This argument is fairly awful for three reasons. Firstly, unchecked climate change will do far worse damage to countries like Kenya than the loss of tourist revenue, and the fossil fuel industries that fuel the planes are already destroying the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the Global South. Secondly, the only way to cut global emissions whilst still allowing poor countries to develop is for the wealthy countries to make deeper, earlier cuts – with flights being top of the list of luxuries we can afford to lose. Thirdly, the equitable solutions to climate change that social movements in the South are demanding – renewable energy transfer, local and regional food and energy networks, the halting of extractive industries, community control of land and resources, a moratorium on biofuels and destructive offsetting projects – have the potential to provide far greater benefits to the people of the South than tourism ever has.

OK. Enough ranting. I'm going to try to condense some of this into a probably-doomed-but-worth-a-go letter to the Observer.

D xXx

And Only Two Months Later...

...I've finally got round to posting my summary thoughts on the World Social Forum! See below if you're interested.

In other news, the Hammer & Tongue poetry slam final (1st May) is hurtling towards me and filling me with some apprehension but mostly with excitement. All I need to do is gather up the various bits of scrawled-on paper from around my bedroom and somehow transform their contents into punchy three-minute performance poetry nuggets (because everyone loves a punchy nugget). I need to do this quite soon. Well, very soon. In between all of these other things I'm meant to be doing. Ah, I'm sure it'll be fine. I'm currently being haunted by the pigeons of the past, they seem determined to claw their way into a poem somewhere...we'll see what happens.

Anyway. I'd best get on with some research I'm doing for the Camp For Climate Action (which I can't recommend enough to you all - come along, it's going to be amazing).

Best,

Danny

P.S. So far, according to my helpful web-counter/stalking service, over 440 different people have read my Global Warming Swindle post. Which does make me feel glad that I put it up here, although I have a sneaking feeling that more than 440 people watched the programme, so I still have some way to go yet...

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Perspectives From The World Social Forum (WSF)

At the end of January I represented People and Planet at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya. The WSF is an incredible global gathering of grassroots activists and social movements, with the emphasis firmly on people and groups from the Global South who are struggling against injustice and environmental destruction in their own communities.

This year, around 60,000 people came to the Forum, and I had the privilege of meeting – and attending workshops, discussions and rallies with – a range of incredible activists from around the world. I wrote the following summary with People and Planet campaigners in mind, so it focuses particularly on the issues P&P is currently working on - climate change, extractive industry, trade, and AIDS/HIV; however, I hope that it might be of interest and use to anyone - not just P&P campaigners - who wants to hear more about the perspectives of Southern activists on these vital global justice and environmental issues.The Big Issues
Although thousands of different groups staged hundreds of meetings over the four days of the WSF, certain issues kept coming up again and again. These included:



Free Trade Agreements

There was enormous concern over the damage caused to the lives and livelihoods of the poor by unfair trade rules, with especial focus on EPAs (European Partnership Agreements). As the World Trade Organisation’s own efforts to install more and more unfair trade rules seem to have stalled, individual states and groups of states have started coming up with bilateral agreements of their own, with EPAs between Europe and Africa being the most high-profile and pernicious example. A new campaign is building around this issue...

Debt Repudiation

When it comes to snappy slogans, “Repudiate Now!” isn’t going to go down in campaign-soundbite history. But despite the awkwardness of the phrase, the concept behind it could represent the next major step in the campaign around “Third World” debt. Southern activists – particularly the Jubilee South coalition – were rallying hundreds of groups at the WSF behind the concept of debt non-repayment (which is what repudiation means). Tired of all the posturing from wealthy governments, and the tiny crumbs of debt relief (with strings attached – if you can imagine crumbs with strings attached to them) offered so far, Southern activists have changed their direction of attack and are instead demanding that the governments of poor indebted countries simply refuse to hand over their repayments. If they are successful, then the implications for the economies and banks of wealthy countries – many of which are propped up by international debt – could be enormous. If nothing else, this could be a way for the poorer countries to hold the rich ones to ransom and demand serious changes to anything from trade rules to Structural Adjustment to access to medicines and technology.

Extractive Industries

Some people are calling it “the new scramble for Africa” – but it isn’t only affecting African nations. People all over the world are finding their lands, local environments and ways of life threatened by a growing hunger for resources from the high-tech throwaway cultures of the wealthier countries, as well as from the breakneck (but uneven) development of countries like China, India, and Brazil. I met activists from across the globe who are struggling against rapacious mining and drilling corporations as well as corrupt governments in the battle over land, health, and the environment – and sometimes winning. There are surprising success stories out there that we rarely hear about – with the Ogoni women’s non-violent campaign against Shell’s gas flaring in Nigeria being just one example.

Biofuels and Carbon Offsets

This goes hand-in-hand with the issue of extraction, as it involves struggles over land rights and the environment, and links into climate change. I met campaigners from Brazil who were almost spitting blood in their rage about their agricultural land being turned over to growing sugar cane for ethanol production (“feeding cars instead of hungry bellies”), and Indonesians who had watched rainforest being razed to the ground to create palm oil plantations (thus contributing more to climate change than the petrol they’re meant to replace). I also heard the stories of people from Latin America who’d been promised income from carbon offsetting plantations and had instead been locked into financially crippling legal agreements to oversee unproductive stands of dying trees, planted in the wrong place in the wrong climate. When I asked the Indian activist and academic Dr Vandana Shiva what UK campaigners should be focusing on, she said “BP and Shell want to remove Indian farmers from their land and replace them with biofuel plantations”. Meanwhile, as several Southern activists pointed out, fossil fuel extraction continues apace – biofuels seem to be supplementing, not replacing, oil, coal and gas…

HIV and AIDS Independence

One of the most inspiring meetings I attended took place in a room packed with (mostly African) AIDS activists. They were there to share their experiences, forge alliances, and put forward their ideas for action. Their tone was almost unanimous: they were sick of having to rely on donations from wealthy countries – often channelled through corrupt governments – to provide the care and treatment that their communities so desperately needed. They were full of suggestions for raising the money themselves, tackling corruption and finding ways to take control of this issue into their own hands. I asked what campaigners in the North could do to support them; I was told that the best thing the North could do would be to stop screwing over their economies with unfair trade rules, privatising their healthcare through the IMF, supporting corrupt regimes and using intellectual property regimes to keep the price of AIDS treatment too high. In other words, although they conceded that right now they are dependent on money from organisations such as the Global Fund, they were more interested in trying to remove the barriers that are preventing them from developing their own healthcare and treatment programmes in the longer term, rather than just calling for more donations.

Plenty More

I wasn’t able to go to everything! But campaigners for labour rights, gender equality, gay/lesbian rights, corporate accountability and a whole host of other issues were very much in attendance. For a flavour of all this – and for the story of the local Kenyans who stormed the event after they couldn’t afford the entry fee – see my earlier posts from the Forum itself.

The Other Issue

Climate change, however, was not on the agenda – or at least, it was only being explicitly discussed in a handful of sessions. Yes, that surprised me too at first, until I realised that the majority of Southern activists are spending their time dealing with more immediate and pressing issues, and that the great majority of the research into climate change science and policy is still restricted to the wealthier countries. I did meet a number of activists who were very well-informed and inspiring, but they were very much the exception. As things transpired, I ended up standing up myself in front of the Assembly of Social Movements at the end of the Forum, and trying to remind everyone (in hopefully not too nervous and garbled a way) that climate change is not just an environmental issue, but an issue of global justice – a position that is becoming increasingly popular amongst those Southern movements and governments who are becoming vocal on climate change.

Some Campaign-Related Thoughts

Following on from all of that, here are some of the conclusions I personally drew from all of this (although you’re obviously free to disagree!):

• There is an enormous amount of amazing and inspiring activism going on all over the world that we rarely hear about. It might help us if we try to remind ourselves that we are not alone in this country, or even in the English-speaking world – there are so many people out there whom we could work together with, and learn a lot from. If anyone working on any of the above issues wants to be put in touch with the relevant Southern activists I met at the Forum please let me know - it is vital that we continue to build these links.

• Although making links with Southern activists around the stand-alone issue of climate change may be difficult, there is real potential for forming alliances around the related issues of fossil fuel extraction, access to energy, biofuels, land-grabbing carbon offset projects, and the concept of climate justice (everyone has the right to develop, and the countries that have got rich by polluting the shared atmosphere have a responsibility to provide clean technology to the rest of the world). We have a lot of potential allies out there who are struggling right now with these various impacts of our global fossil fuel addiction, and who ultimately share our goals.

• Many of the issues relating to poverty, uneven development, inequality, health and the environment which are affecting people across the world are either being directly caused or massively exacerbated by international rules on trade, investment and debt. These are issues where Northern governments – and thus, potentially, Northern activists – currently have far more direct power to influence things than people in the South (with some exceptions, such as the possibility of debt non-repayment); however, the voices of Southern activists must be included in this debate if we are to find equitable solutions. Finding ways to tackle these root causes will be very difficult and require global networking and alliances, but could potentially have enormous effects.

• Many influential people in developing countries were educated in the North. Many people who are currently international students at UK Universities will go on to play very significant roles in their home countries. Could student activists in the UK be doing more to work together with international students on these issues?

Some different perspectives:

Jess and Adam’s new Internationalist blogs

A more critical viewpoint from Firoze Manji of Pambazuka News

...and another one from Kathambi Kinoti, with a particular focus on the involvement of women at the Forum.