Well, the Metropolitan Police in London have tried a charm offensive to make nice with the Climate Camp before it all kicks off. Or have they ? Many Campers have been suspicious of the softly, softly propaganda, and have put together a little message to give right on back to the Met, and it reads a lot like this :-
Category: Social Change
It seems that Prezza, our dear beloved Climate Change Chief Negotiator is having an attack of the “Tony Blairs” : back-pedalling on Carbon Dioxide reduction targets :-
Flickr Image : David Breslin @ b3ta
Not content with having four very similar Planning Applications overturned previously in quiet, suburban Highams Park, London E4, (including one taken to a Public Inquiry), nothing seems to be able to stop Tesco trying again, with a remarkably unchanged plan for a mega-superstore with crowded urban-style blocks of adjacent flats.
Only this time it’s got a “travellator”, you know, the kind of moving walkway normally found at airports, to take you from the ground floor car park atrocity to the first floor store.
This is their attempt to design the plan into our hearts. But not even a brilliant architect can make a catwalk model out of this bloated parasitical plan :-
https://www.highamsgreen.co.uk
The local residents are up in arms, flexing their telephone dialling fingers, and furiously typing letters and electronic mails about this abomination of a Planning Application :-
https://www.highamsparkforum.co.uk/tesco.html
If you yourself live in London E4, you can submit a comment on this plan yourself very easily on the Council’s website, quoting the Application Numbers 2008/1490 and 2008/1491 :-
Notes from PA21 Meeting with the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment
Meeting Date : Tuesday 25th March 2008
Meeting Time : 14:05 – 15:00
Meeting Venue: Whitehall
Attendees
Joan Ruddock MP, Under-Secretary of State, Environment
Annette Brooke MP
Tony Hamilton PA21 Chair
Theresa McManus PA21 Secretary
Naomi Matteson
Notes from Meeting
Reactions to the article “Wind Turbines Give You Spots” is encouraging, if contentious. Looks like we’ve mined a thick vein of dispute. Could a simple, happy, smiley Public Relations campaign to promote Wind Power counter this ? I think not !
The Climate Camping season has begun in earnest today, 3rd August 2009.
Here’s a few of the links below. If you’r bored, curious or otherwise ungainfully unemployed, why not come and pitch your canvas alongside the radical Carbon-free thinkers and doers of the future ?
The Campaign against Climate Change has been running a very thought-provoking extending compendium of ideas on how to reduce British Carbon Emissions by ten percent by (the end of) 2010, to which you are all welcome to contribute :-
https://portal.campaigncc.org/content/10-10-ban-domestic-flights
https://portal.campaigncc.org/content/10-10-ban-domestic-flights-0
https://portal.campaigncc.org/content/10-10-50-reduction-cost-public-transport
A momentous report in from Dorset, which seems to be one of Britain’s most radioactive frontlines in the battle between Climate Change Denial and Renewables common sense.
Susan Chapman, Green Party candidate, a colleague from the small but highly informational Take Global Warming Seriously campaign, and an active member of Poole Agenda 21, writes about the tedious, unforgiving work of campaigning for a Carbon-free energy future.
Categories
You Laughed, You Cried
Social engineering is simple : if you don’t want something to happen, starve it of funding, create lots of dodgy Press, and create artificial divisions between factions.
Climate Camp has been a hoot, until an accidental bystander got pushed to his death caught in a “kettle” formed by Riot Police in London, England in April 2009 on Fossil Fools Day. Some of the protest actions have been daredevil, some truly revolutionary, most have been properly educational.
In fact my main interest and energy in the Climate Camp has been the Workshop Programme, trying to increase general awareness, circulating information, encouraging people to lead workshops, bringing research from their diverse fields.
The basic stereotype of a research scientist is pretty accurate, actually. Somebody male, with an introspective demeanour and poor communication skills, maybe a little on the Asperger’s spectrum.
What these white coats cannot do is roar. They cannot cause an organisation to jump to attention, scurry to find solutions, demand definitive decision-making emergency conferences, in fact, these guys (because it is mostly chaps, after all) have got “humble entitlement culture” all worked out : they don’t create problems and their employers keep them in the job. Mostly.
I was at a conference not long ago where during one of the breakout sessions I found myself sitting next to an “ad chick”, you know, a woman in advertising.
We passed the time of day, and I found I needed to challenge her on her naive belief that cars will progressively continue to get less Carbon hungry. “Within 20 years,” I soothsayed, “each adult will only have a Carbon ration for a fifth of a car”. Her face had an expression on it that was akin to painful disgust : like I was denying her her human rights, or something.
Categories
The Energy Cliff
We all know we need Renewable Energy, by now, I think. It’s entering public consciousness. It’s no longer gun-toting woods-and-mountains survivalists and deep greens who are asking : “how will you ride the slide ?” :-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulxe1ie-vEY
The Oil Drum, whose mission is “to facilitate civil, evidence-based discussions about energy and its impact on our future”, is running a short series about transition to Renewable Energy, written by Jeff Vail :-
https://www.theoildrum.com/node/5580
This is condensed from a series he published on his own webspace about the issues, calling it the “Renewables Hump” :-
https://www.jeffvail.net/2009/07/renewables-hump-8-concluding-thoughts.html
Recalling the first Apollo moon landing, Ed Miliband tries to make the noble, heartwarming case for spending lots of public money in The Guardian :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/20/climate-change-low-carbon-economy
There was a rash, a veritable rash of media articles last week about Ed Miliband’s Low Carbon Transition :-
https://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/publications/lc_trans_plan/lc_trans_plan.aspx
It was an overwhelming torrent of fairly helpful and semi-accurate information, and it’s taken me a few days to wade through it to fish out some relevant threads.
As received by e-mail :-
“The fight to save wind turbine production on the Isle of Wight continues!”
“600 jobs are threatened at the Uk’s only wind turbine blade factory on the Isle of Wight.”
“It is crucuially important that everyone bombard the energy minister Ed Miliband with phone calls and emails.”
Feeling faint and fatigued by Climate Change news recently, with its tit-for-tat spats about Policy and Science and most of all the Economics; grappling with the detractors and wreckers on various channels, I decided to turn to another source of information, trusting to uncover a little alternative inspiration.
I wanted to find something that would be unburdened by corporate advertising, untainted by agendas of those with financial or political capital to be made from various shifts in Energy and Carbon; something transparent and sufficiently broad to avoid niche arguments.
I hit upon a Science book for children, you know, with primary colour diagrams and simplified English, and it was quite refreshing. But wrong.
This is possibly going to be Renewable Energy’s biggest week ever in UK history.
And we’re going to need all the Wind Power we can get to meet Ed Miliband’s lofty ambition.
At the Oscars and the BAFTAS and so on, the winners, always bleary, always blubbing, always drunk, always start with an “I’d like to thank” speech, offering genuine (or coerced) gratitude very publicly to those who collaborated (or financed) their venture : “you made it all possible”.
In true TV award ceremony style, the British Government, plus “Special Adjunct” Tony Blair, in amongst their good work pursuing Energy Efficiency and True Renewables, appear to be virtually obliged to mention the Energy and Climate “solutions” of their closest lobbyists and corporate allies, or even relatives, in the case of Gordon Brown’s brother Andrew’s company Electricité de France :-
Categories
Peak Everything
Just because we’ve reached the summit doesn’t mean the mountain’s about to disappear. But we have to recognise that, from now on, things are going to be heading in a sinking and falling away direction.
Some will fear and shake, as the Earth seems to slip away under their feet. Some will have psychological tremours as they have to adjust their world views extremely radically, and rather rapidly.
[ UPDATE : Things look more interesting that when I first wrote this. Changes are bolded. ]
Looks like the Copenhagen treaty deal thingy is doomed :-
As a bright-eyed Gospel-touting young person from a God-fearing Bible-bashing breast-beating Protestant Evangelical Christian family, one-time members of a troubled sect, I was drawn to the victim narrative of the Aid and Development agencies. Those poor people in those dirt-poor countries with their cripplingly poor lifestyles.
I needed to be a Campaigner, I reasoned. I needed to tell the World, make some converts to the Poverty and Development cause, draw some attention, create some devotion, raise some cash, raise some banners, wave some placards, get some pledges signed.
Not realising that this kind of missionary zeal marked me out as a complete lunatic, I applied to a Famous Development Agency for a job. I was interviewed but ditched, probably because I had wild eyes, and wouldn’t stop spouting fundamentalist claptrap.
Some simple analysis of the Carbon Dioxide emissions in the UK leads to several pertinent conclusions :-
In the hallway supping on orange juice and ice, I turned off the Sky Eternal Non-News on a fat, loud TV because I saw someone standing in front of it in a hynotic trance. He complained, but didn’t demand the show turned back on. Thankfully that provided the quiet for us all to talk some to each other and read a little.
I mustn’t be too hard on the man, he’s just become a father. And he is most congenial, friendly and well-motivated in his heart-felt engagement with Climate Change.
But seriously, if he really wanted to engage the people in the room, he would have been more careful not to be so dismissive of the magician outside the front door who was trying to show everyone very theatrically that Carbon Trading doesn’t work.
As usual at these events, I bumped into a couple of political activists of various flavours and persuasions at the Fabian Society conference “Six Months to Copenhagen”, today, held in the faded-yet-still-grand setting of the Foreign Press Association, just off The Mall in London.
[ The Mall is the street that links Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace. It’s not a shopping centre ].