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.

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.

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 3^rd 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.

Mr Foot! I’d like you to meet Mr Bullet.

Oh my word. Whoever would have thought it?

The award for the biggest supporter of the Camp for Climate Action 2007 goes to…the British Airports Authority and their ludicrous attempt at an injunction.

Aided and abetted by corporation-lovin’ lawyer Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden (famed for defending poor defenceless multinationals from nasty peaceful protesters), BAA have spent the last week attempting to slap climate change campaigners with the most extraordinary and wide ranging criminal injunction in British legal history. They wanted to make it illegal for members of fifteen groups (ranging from local anti-runway lobby groups to the National Trust) to protest anywhere near Heathrow Airport, including the Piccadilly Line and parts of two major motorways. BAA tried to use the 1997 Prevention from Harassment Act to criminalise up to 5 million people and prevent them from coming to the Camp for Climate Action (14^th – 21^st August).

They completely and utterly failed. One farcical court case later and BAA’s proposed sweeping ban on peaceful protest was reduced to a small civil injunction against three individuals and the direct action group Plane Stupid, with the upshot being that if certain people do certain things at Heathrow that are already illegal, then they might face stronger penalties than usual, if it can be proved in court that they were breaking the terms of the injunction as well as the law. For this glorious non-triumph BAA ended up paying not only Lawson-Cruttenden’s doubtless extortionate fees, they also had to pay for everyone else’s costs as well (apart from the three injunctees and Plane Stupid, whose costs were covered in any case).

The mini-injunction (minjunction?) that BAA ended up with provides no extra powers of arrest and does not cover the Climate Camp, which will go triumphantly ahead and will probably be much bigger than it would have been thanks to the enormous amount of publicity generated by the court case. (You can check out the latest fantastic-looking timetable of workshops and events planned for the camp here.)

Other good things to come out of this:

• Thanks to the juicy court case story, campaigners were able to pop up all over the media this week talking about the link between aviation and climate change;
• BAA managed to simultaneously look evil and buffoonish, which can’t really add much credibility to their already-pretty-pathetic arguments for airport expansion;
• The judge (Mrs Justice Swift) made some clear rulings on how the Prevention from Harassment Act was not intended to be used to stifle peaceful protest, which will hopefully make it much harder for amoral slimetoads like TLC to play their nasty little legal games in the future.

There was one slightly sour twist in yesterday’s events, however: those cheeky rapscallions BAA sneaked out of court before the hearing was finished and, displaying the integrity and honesty that make them such a beacon of good corporate practice, they told all the media that they’d won the case. Combine this with a healthy dash of lazy journalism and what do you get? All the major media outlets trumpeting BAA’s “victory” for a few hours before getting round to reading the results properly and realising they’d got it wrong. By this time, the almost hilariously dire freebie “London Paper” had already printed their brilliant “Heathrow kicks out eco-demo” headline, accompanied by an article so crudely cut-and-pasted from the newswires that it included both of the following sentences:

“But campaigners claim the order will stop up to 5 million people using the roads and public transport near the airport.”

and

“A spokesman for Plane Stupid, one of the organisations behind the protest, said: “BAA sought a criminal injunction against 5 million people and in fact didn’t get anything like that – it was a complete failure.””

Sheer genius.

Even the usually-reliable George Monbiot managed to get confused over this – in today’s Guardian he’s written what would have been a great article about the erosion of the right to peaceful protest if only BAA had won their case. Except they didn’t.

One last time then, just to clear this up: as explained on the camp’s website, the Camp for Climate Action is completely injunction-free, is going ahead as planned, and is going to be utterly brilliant.

Special thanks must go to BAA for all of their hard work in making this possible.

Injunctivitis

See below for a statement from the Camp for Climate Action on the injunction that BAA are currently trying to get imposed on peaceful protestors (originally posted as a comment to my earlier posting). For some background see this Independent article, for the news from yesterday's hot court action see this Indymedia article. The court case is due to finish tomorrow, and the first best place to look for the outcome will almost certainly be Indymedia.

Sorry I've not posted for a while - ludicrous busyosity!

Proper update soon...well, probably at the end of August.

Dx

*************************************************************

Whether or not BAA win their injunction today, the Camp for Climate Action and direct action against corporate criminals will go ahead.

We accuse BAA of abusing these people’s right to freedom of expression.

We accuse BAA of pushing for the expansion of airports in the full knowledge that it will lead directly to climate change and indirectly to the deaths of millions.

We accuse BAA of lying to local people, having first promised an end to the expansion of Heathrow in 1978.

We accuse BAA of being climate criminals. A crime for which they cannot be punished under UK law and which the government is actively supporting them in committing.

Today we are sending out a call to anyone that believes that BAA are the real criminals in this case, that knows that governments and corporations will not solve the problem of climate change but that it is down to ordinary people to find the solution, that sees that we are living beyond what the earth’s resources can sustain and need to create major social change to live sustainably.

We call on anyone who wants to find a way back from the brink of climate catastrophe to come to the Camp for Climate Action near Heathrow Airport from the 14th to the 21st August. To join a day of mass action against corporate climate criminals on the 19th, and to learn together how we can turn this situation around.

The responsibility to tackle climate change lies with us all.

============

The injunction's under the Protection from Harrassment Act 1997, intended to protect vulnerable women from dangerous stalker ex-boyfriends. It's insane that one of the best protected sites in the UK could feel harrassed by peaceful protesters outside its perimeter, let alone a member of the RSPB with a balloon - one of the named prohibited items - standing on a Finsbury Park tube platform.

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

A Changing Media Climate?

Following on from the last post, looking at some of the other press reports (the Guardian, Bloomberg, the Times) in conjunction with the Telegraph article mentioned earlier, shows a strange trend – they all take a reasonable or even sympathetic angle on the protest. The Times is probably the most surprising, with a well-balanced and even – gasp – interesting article on how more “mainstream” NGOs are now considering non-violent direct action to be a reasonable tactic in the face of environmental destruction and climate chaos.

A big chunk of the credit for this must go to the volunteers on the Climate Camp media team who’ve spent the week talking to journalists and newsdesks to ensure that our side of the story gets across. But perhaps – just perhaps – this more sympathetic tone reflects the fact that the public mood has changed in our favour, and that activists standing up for the climate and for social justice can no longer be written off so easily?

Well, maybe. Just don’t read the Express. But then, when isn’t that good advice?