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Lost in Transition

Ellie Keen — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:12:16 +0000

SCHNEWS fails to understand the logic of climate group

As global capitalism and its failing markets threaten to fall around our ears, it must be worth imagining what a different way of doing things might look like. And working towards it.

That’s what the Transition Towns (TT) supporters want to do. TT’s are a ‘think global act local’ strategy for fighting climate change first put forward by an permaculture academic, Rob Hopkins, in 2005/6 in Kinsale, Ireland. It was first exported to the UK in Totnes, Devon – and converts have been eagerly promoting the idea ever since.

And the message seems to be getting through. In the past couple of years the concept (and the leafleting) has been spreading around the country, nay, the world, with over a 100 communities signed up from all over the UK as well as Australia, New Zealand, Chile, the US and most recently, Japan.

The movement has also been hitting the headlines here in the UK recently, with just the other week a small town a few miles down the road from SchNEWS towers, Lewes, proudly launching it’s own currency to much media fanfare.

With such an emergent new force for social change, you’d think we might have mentioned it in SchNEWS before – it’s obviously long overdue for us to put the boot in, er we mean, provide an unbiased and dispassionate rational analysis of the whole shebang.

So what’s the big idea? Transition Towns (TT) make a good case for the need to change. They recognise the pressing threats of climate change and peak oil (OK, well, the end of super-abundant cheap oil we can agree on, at least – see SchNEWS 644). This means that the globalised, air-mile, oil-driven nonsense needs to stop and more locally based, lower carbon living solutions are needed. The question is, how are we going to get there? But they are not calling for major reform or revolution – the clue is in the name, folks! – they are looking for an ordered gradual switch over – a transition. The way they propose this should come about is a somewhat tortuous affair, with the resultant danger that the eco-system or global economic system (or both) may collapse in the meantime.

To start the process of your whole town, or city, being designated a ‘TT’, all that is needed is a small group of well-meaning committed do-gooders, usually PR friendly middle-class types, to form a Transition Group. This group then works on publicising themselves, arranging film showings, printing leaflets and networking.

Once momentum has been sufficiently built, the group can then hold a great ‘public unleashing’ where the plan goes ‘live’. As well as a wave of talks, trades and skills workshops and green-inspired local projects such as tree planting and small permaculture schemes, the main plank of the plan involves gradually formulating a Local Energy Descent Plan’ (LEDP), to map out how the local community might one day become more self sufficient, less oil dependant and much greener. If enough local businesses, people and councillors go along with it, or palatable parts of it, the town can officially adopt the mantle of a ‘Transition Town’ and brand itself accordingly.

Measures suggested include the laudable aims of reducing the reliance on multinational corporations for food and goods production, improving energy use and efficiency, increasing recycling, reducing car dependency and a host of other lefty-green objectives. It’s a ‘big tent’ which allows it to scoop up the efforts of a range of social change groups under one large banner.

So what’s the problem? Whilst it’s hard to be too disparaging – these are all people with the best intentions, attempting to actually take some sort of action as opposed to sitting idly by and waiting for the big collapse – and some change for the good is obviously better than none, there are some flaws in the thinking.

Firstly, TT acknowledge that they have no desire to do away with all the trappings of capitalist society – merely reduce local dependence on it, gradually. They avoid taking on the political roots of all the problems and concentrate on symptoms. A key aim is to get the local council on board. Which many have been surprisingly willing to do…up to a point. Local government itself is charged by central government with working out how to roll out various greenish initiatives, such as to minimise energy needs and increase recycling levels for example, and the LEDP overlaps to some degree with many of their own blueprints for the future – as long as it’s controlled and the results leave the status quo as little changed as possible, with power flowing upwards, private money still in charge of all those recycling facilities and a capitalistic model still underpinning the local economy.

So the council can now use the TT brand wagon to increase uptake of these plans on a wave of public enthusiasm, whilst simultaneously seeming uber green and championing the local over the national. Put this way, its easy to see why many a town hall bigwig are talking up the scheme.

Which explains why Lewes council are so behind the latest big venture in the TT vision of the future – launching local currencies. As people previously used to get hanged for such impertinence as starting yer own money, there must be a catch. And there is.

The Lewes Pound (LP) was unveiled last week with a windfall of media coverage. As global financial markets have been taking a beating, perhaps this was a model for the brave new world? Er, not really. Because it isn’t actually a currency at all. It’s actually an ingenious scheme using existing book token legislation. It involves effectively buying a certain amount of sterling (in Lewes’ case, £10,000) and then issuing vouchers to the equivalent value, accepted in local shops signing up the scheme.

Which many local shops in Lewes were of course only too happy to do – a welcome free boost to trade as consumers voluntarily pledge to spend their cash with them. Who wouldn’t? The idea is that the LP will increase interest in spending more cash locally, which in theory keeps more of the profit generated circulating locally, as opposed to being syphoned out of the community and into the pockets of global institutions (like Tesco, for example) and their shareholders.

Which is great, surely. Well yes, except that the vouchers are redeemable back into cash any time you, or a business-owner wishes – presumably for going shopping at Tesco or making more import deals with third-world tat suppliers.

And one of the stated aims of the year long test project is to get national chains accepting them – which seems a rather strange measure of success and contradicts the whole stated purpose.
Money already spent in local shops will continue circulating with little effect on the outside world. While OK for PR and raising public awareness of the explotation by global corporations, it’s not achieving more than affecting a few better-off people’s spending habits.

In any event, in Lewes, the big launch has not really gone as planned. Whilst there was massive interest and local flag-waving parochial support for the LP, the well-meaning urging of the TT organisers to keep circulating the vouchers and not change them back into cash has not exactly been heeded.

All the LP notes ‘sold out’ in hours… only to be hoarded and swiftly offered on Ebay for up to £40 for one Lewes Pound as the local populace immediately capitalised on the opportunity to indulge in some rampant currency speculation!

They reasoned that as there is a limited supply of individually numbered LP’s, they will in the future be highly collectable – and there have been no shortage of over-the-odds buyers, leaving the whole scheme looking somewhat farcical.

The TT group – having considered but eventually rejected the idea of selling LPs itself for £10 each in order to lesson the black marketeering, have now pledged to print up some more stock – although whether they’ll ever be able to afford to devalue the LP enough to out-bankroll the speculators remains to be seen!

As does the overall effect of the Transition Towns movement itself. Whilst we broadly support many of its stated objectives, we cannot see how failing to plan for the much more radical reform of society needs will really work. Attempting to push the existing power structures into implementing some of the required measures will only ever lead to partial change and speaks mainly to people who want things more or less as they are, only slightly greener.

...But we could be wrong! To judge for yourself (and don’t let us put you off working for more localisation and all things green!), see www.transitiontowns.org

The Trapese collective’s in depth critique of the Transition Movement is available at www.sparror.cubecinema.com/stuffit/trapese

Climate, Class and Coal

tim — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:10:09 +0000

In August, me and Arthur Scargill enter another big field to fight the corner for the miners and coal our industry and cause. Last time it was that field at Orgreave, this time it’s the Climate Camp at Kingsnorth Power Station and instead of thousands of cops there’s thousands of eco-warriors who now believe coal is killing the planet and want to stop all new coal stations.

If truth were known, they want to close down all coal stations per se. This time there is only Arthur, and me, we have no squads of pickets, no marching bands and no flying banners. It is in many respects as daunting a prospect, but it shows the quality of this man, our differences aside, he came into the teeth of opposition with an unpopular and untrendy message, among people who are hardly receptive to his old school brand of Marxist-Leninist socialism but prepared to debate till the cows come home why the NUM and clean coal technology are allies in the struggle for a socialist ecology and a just world.

Arthur is now 70 and I am 60, I think we present a figure of two rather battered and scarred alley cats come for a peace conference with the league of dogs. This is a sad and confusing conjuncture of forces. I have never in my life experienced a situation where the miners and what we do is the unpopular foe except among the ruling class and Tories.

Outside of the Young Conservatives, I have never known young people regard mining and pit heads as their enemy. What is worse is that these are my traditional constituency on the Anarchist left, they have the aura of the hippies, they aspire to the freedoms and love of life, which our 60s/70s generation did. I come across the Newcastle and Scottish camp, and know many of the activists from the Toon scene and demonstrations. Previously we have always held each other in a silent mutual respect, now there is a mutual distance, coolness, a sort of mutual Et tu Brutus. However, I see here also the mortified conviction of my own anti-nuclear youth. The conviction that myself and the world were on the brink of extinction. The certainty that if we delay we are all doomed to a wretched and painful end. Now it is climate change, and the gathering speed with which the earth is crashing toward climatical obliteration ironically for all carbon based creatures and vegetation on the earth as we know it. A change, which will cleanse us all from the surface of the globe for eternity.

The camp like some latter day Woodstock; they are a commonwealth, locked in debate and dedication, little communities with kids romping through the fields, longhaired, dreadlocked, singing and dancing. It is deeply wounding to be the enemy.

This is an anti-Durham gala, everywhere are Workshops on mining, on resistance around the world to mining of all descriptions, pictures of headgear and open cast, industry and miners, and the campaigns against them. It is like a Durham miner’s gala on bad acid. Instead of everywhere a celebration of the miners, our work, our communities, are protests for its end. I am shocked that many left groups are now Groupies to the eco movement and have abandoned all attempts at class analysis.

Arthur’s worst critic in the field is the local secretary of The Socialist Party, who tells him the NUM and miners’ struggle was yesterday’s cause, this was where the struggle was now, that EON and the big generators to facilitate their profits are using us. I argue the opposite that every attack on coal feeds the nuclear agenda, sets the agenda for government policy. I remind them too that they are enthusiastic supporters of EON when it comes to ramming wind turbines down the throats of protesting locals resolved not to have them.

Around the tent, are dotted Trade Union members of the SWP are they now ready to bury him having once been full of his praise? For a month, the Weekly Worker has carried uncritical adverts for the camp while the Morning Star warned me I was underestimating the forthcoming climate holocaust and declined my article criticising the camp.

I have the honour to have wrote the official NUM bulletin The Miners and The Climate Camp, which Ken Capstick the Miner’s editor has managed to reduce from eight sides to four with a bit of clever editing. I’ve humped 2000 of them in a huge bag from Doncaster and have spent the morning spreading them round the field, where they are received with less than enthusiasm. About 150 protesters turn up to the tent, where Arthur and I are speaking from 1500 in the field. Their bottom line argument is we shouldn’t be generating so much power anyway, it should be cut by 50% and we need to get use to not having electricity.

Arthur gets one of the Greens scientific officers to admit she was talking about taking out all nuclear and coal capacity, which would leave Britain virtually without power generation of any sort.

They are non-plussed by the fact that we both accept practical renewables, that we see solar energy as the long-term future for the planet. That many other clean sources, as long as they are not equally environmentally damaging (like land wind turbines) should be deployed along with mass insulation projects and energy saving programmes. But that coal should be the base supply agent and buy the world a breathing space so long as we developed carbon capture systems to burn it cleanly.

There is sympathy for the miners generally accepted as the most exploited people in Britain over the last century, but there has to be losers if we are to save the Planet, and we have been chosen to be it. Few people believe that CO2 capture works, and anyway will not be ready ‘in time’ to stop the climate going into free fall.

At the same time as facing the Climate Camp and linked to it across the left and green movement, more and more people are coming over to the Government programme for nuclear power, and an end to coal mining and coal burning in Britain. I have argued far and wide that clean coal is the alternative to a civil nuclear programme. I am stunned to be told the NUM’s new policy supports both coal and nuclear although I still claim this to be untrue. It needs urgent clarification, because this is a central plank in our defence.

I am asked to give a Workshop on the relevance and importance of the great 84/5 coal strike, nine people come. The relevance clearly isn’t too well established. ‘The Earth’ becomes an abstraction, humanity is some sort of foreign and alien invader and the storm troops, this time not of the TUC but of tidal waves, poverty and death, are the miners.

Of course, Arthur’s arguments are not totally mine, he talks of ‘dirty foreign coal’ and unfair competition, slave labour and child labour, these are not my arguments. Import controls are not a progressive answer, in my view, but I am for a level playing field of subsidies and a ‘fair trade’ standard of terms, conditions and union rights, which would be, for the millions of coal miners abroad as much as for us. We agree though that clean coal technology is an achievable science now, and it is vital that it is applied wholesale across coal generation.

The cops are arseholes as usual I am stopped and searched two sometimes three times a day, against my consent and often with force. Indeed, I am almost arrested, which would have been proved interesting in court. They could hardly argue they had reasonable grounds for suspecting I was going to sabotage the Power Station when I had gone down two thirds of the country with half a tonne of literature in its defence.

They attack the camp on numerous occasions and lay into protesters with truncheons; day after day, they line people against the fence from the very youngest toddlers to very old people, and search and harass them. Arthur makes a very strong Statement to the media at the gate, in defence of the right to protest and welcomes the protesters invitation to him and to debate this vital issue.

It was a privilege to stand with Arthur again, in the teeth of opposition again, though we could have done with thousands more supporters so short sighted ‘greens’ are not allowed to dominate this crucial debate.

I am trying to put together a Labour Movement Conference on Climate, Class and Clean Coal in Newcastle for the end of the year, and very much hope the NUM sponsor it and supply key speakers.

Strange Fruit

JamieSW — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:24:57 +0000

I feel almost shy about writing this column. It contains no revelations, no call to arms. No one gets savaged – well, only mildly. The subject is almost inconsequential. Yet it has become an obsession which, at this time of year, forbids me to concentrate for long on anything else.

Though we still subsist largely on junk, even bilious old gits like me are forced to admit that the quality and variety of most types of food sold in Britain has greatly improved. But one kind has deteriorated. You can buy mangoes, papayas, custard apples, persimmons, pomegranates, mangosteens, lychees, rambutans and god knows what else. But almost all the fruit sold here now seems to taste the same: either rock-hard and dry, or wet and bland. A mango may be ambrosia in India; it tastes like soggy toilet paper in the UK. And the variety of native fruits on sale is smaller than it has been for 200 years.

Why? Most people believe it’s because the supermarkets select for appearance, not taste. This might be true for vegetables, but for fruit it’s evidently wrong. Green mangoes, Conference pears, unripe Bramley, Granny Smith or Golden Delicious apples look about as appealing as a shrink-wrapped stool. Appearance has nothing to do with it. What counts to the retailer is how well the variety travels.

Take the Egremont Russet, for example. It’s a small apple that looks like a conker wrapped in sandpaper. But it has one inestimable quality. It can be dropped from the top of Canary Wharf, smash a kerbstone and come to no harm. This means it can be trucked from an orchard at Land’s End to a packing plant in John O’Groats, via Sydney, Washington and Vladivostock, then back to a superstore in Penzance (this is the preferred route for most of the fruit sold in the UK) and remain fit for sale. The supermarkets must have had some trouble shifting it because of its strange appearance, so they promoted it as a connoisseur’s apple. Such is our suggestibility that almost everyone believes this, even though a dispassionate tasting would show you that it’s as sweet and juicy as a box of Kleenex.

For the same reason, we are assaulted with Conference pears, most of which resemble some kind of heavy ordnance, rather than any one of a hundred exquisite varieties such as the Durondeau, Belle Julie, Urbaniste, Glou Morceau, Ambrosia, Professeur du Breuil or Althorp Crasanne. It is because these pears are so delicious that they cannot be marketed. They melt in the mouth, which means they would also melt in the truck before it left the farm gate. As the best pears, plums, peaches and cherries are those which go soft and juicy when ripe, the grocers ensure that we never eat them.

To compound the problem, the supermarkets demand that fruit is picked long before it ripens: it doesn’t soften until it rots. This makes great commercial sense. It also ensures that no one in his right mind would want to eat it. But, happily for the retailers, we have forgotten what fruit should taste like. The only way to find out is either to travel abroad or – the low-carbon option – to grow your own. I find myself becoming a fruit evangelist, a fructivist, whose mission is to show people what they are missing.

When I lived in Oxford, at a time when allotments were underused, I spent a week in the Bodleian library reading Hogg and Bull’s Herefordshire Pomona, a massive book of apples and pears, written in the 1870s (you can now buy it on CD from the Marcher Apple Network). Then I cleared two and a half plots and planted the best varieties I could find. I left just as the trees were ready to fruit. But land here in mid-Wales is cheap. I bought half an acre and have started planting a second orchard.

When I first tried to place an order, I caused great excitement among the nurseries I phoned. Where had I seen these apples? Who recommended them? Two of them, I discovered, had been extinct for at least 50 years. So I have had to settle for second best, by which I mean breeds that still exist. I began by planting a Ribston Pippin and an Ashmead’s Kernel. These apples, both exquisite when fully ripe, can be stored from October till May. To spread the fruit as far through the year as possible, I have ordered an apple called the Irish Peach, which ripens in early August; a St Edmund’s Pippin (September) and a Wyken Pippin (December to April). After a long search I think I have pinned down the apple I once tasted and loved in a friend’s garden. I’m pretty confident that it was a Forfar, also know as the Dutch Mignonne, so I’ve bought one of those too. If I’d had more space, I would also have planted a Catshead, a Boston Russet, a Sturmer Pippin and a Reinette Grise.

I have bought two pears – a Seckle and a Beurré Rance – a green plum (the Cambridge Gage), a fig, a medlar, a peach, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, loganberries and blueberries. But what excites me most are the suggestions made by a man called Ken Fern. Once a London bus driver, Fern has spent most of his life cataloguing and growing the edible species of fruit and vegetable which can survive in this country. His list now extends to 7,000, some of which are featured in his book Plants for a Future. I’ve decided to buy an Arnold Thorn (Crataegus arnoldiana), which belongs to the same genus as the hawthorn, but grows sweet juicy fruits the size of cherries, and to replace my hedge with Elaeagnus x ebbingei, which produces sweet red berries with edible seeds, in (uniquely) April and May. This means, if it works out, that I can eat fresh fruit all the year round. I can store apples and Beurré Rance pears until the Eleagnus fruits, then my strawberries should be ready more or less when it stops. One day, when I can afford it, I will buy more land and plant a few dozen of the weird species Fern has found.

Most people have less space than I do, but even a tiny garden can support half a dozen apple trees, if you grow them as cordons (single stems with short spurs) 80cm apart against a wall. If you have room for only a couple of pots, you could grow blueberries, strawberries, cranberries or some of the little shrubs Fern recommends, such as Vaccinium praestans and Gaultheria shallon. Or you could become a guerrilla planter or guerrilla grafter, growing fruit on roadsides, on commons and in parks and wasteland. Apple twigs of any kind can be grafted on to crab trees. Medlars and one breed of pear (a delicious variety called Joséphine des Malines) can be grafted on to hawthorn. Kiwi fruit, passion fruit and a vine called Schisandra grandiflora will climb into trees of any kind.

It’s not just the produce I love. When you start growing fruit, you enter a world of recondite knowledge, accumulated over centuries of amateur experiments. You must choose the right rootstocks and pollinators and learn about bees, birds and caterpillars. But above all you must learn patience. Growing fruit forces you to think ahead, to imagine a sweeter future and then to wait. Perhaps it is this, as much as the forgotten flavours, that I have been missing.

Climate Camp and Class

tim — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:06:34 +0000

Picture the scene. The setting sun is glinting off the visors of the police lined up in front of me. It’s the second or third day of the weeklong Camp for Climate Action – already I’ve lost count – and for the second or third time since I last slept it looks as if the cops are about to invade. I’ve just bolted from the opposite end of the site, where I’ve helped dig a defensive trench at another gate. To my left, atop a red van, a woman who sounds scouser than scouse exhaustedly screeches words of encouragement into a megaphone and somehow dances to Radiohead. To my right, a posher than posh couple casually talk up Cornish nationalism and agree that political correctness means white people suffer more oppression than anyone else on the planet. All the campers care about the environment, but that seems to be the only thing we have in common. That and – by now – a dislike of police.

The first Climate Camp was set up in 2006, by activists who had been heavily involved in organising protests against the G8 summit in Gleneagles the year before. Their immediate target was the Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire, but they sought to demonstrate two things. Firstly, that direct action was an effective way of making changes within society – like shutting down power stations – and secondly, that people could live non-hierarchically, in an environmentally sustainable way. Many of the initial organisers self-identified as anarchists, and they wanted climate camps to be anarchy in action.

At least that was the theory. Now in Climate Camp’s third year, the results are highly questionable. In terms of building a movement for environmental sustainability, the camp experience and how it is perceived by the wider population both need to be considered.

Certainly, to be a climate camper is to participate in anarchy in its original and best sense – running things without bosses. The camp is clustered into regional neighbourhoods, which hold meetings every morning. These assemblies discuss organisation within the neighbourhoods and camp policy as a whole, such as whether to accept the police’s latest ultimatum. Decisions are eventually reached via consensus, and ‘spokes’ are delegated to express the collective’s views to the ‘spokes council’, before reporting back. This can be seem like a long-winded process if you’re used to taking orders, but it works to ensure that everyone feels ownership over decisions, and are therefore usually happy to implement them.

Anarchy can work fast too, and not just when riot police arrive on site at 5.30 in the morning. Perhaps my favourite illustration of this took place on the final Sunday evening, when a trail of wooden boards that snaked through the camp needed to stacked. Someone took the initiative to do this, then someone else joined in next to them. Within a couple of minutes, the idea of stacking had gone along the trail, and about quarter of an hour later it was all done. Quite a strenuous task had quickly been completed, without a single order being given.

However, halfway through the week ‘An open letter to the neighbourhoods’ was circulated, authored by ‘…a large group of anti-authoritarian participants in the climate camp’, and expressing ‘deep concern about the direction that the debates have taken over the past days’. It went on to claim that ‘In more than one workshop we have heard calls from the podium for command-and-control and market-orientated measures to address climate change’, and ‘The responses to these proposals have been far too polite’. Calling for ‘A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism’, as well as ‘all forms and systems of domination and discrimination’, it emphasises ‘A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations’.

The letter hit on one of the central problems facing the camp: how to make it ‘a welcoming and non-sectarian space’ for people new to anarchist ideas, whilst ensuring that career environmentalists like George Monbiot and Mark Lynas (who outraged many by backing the government’s nuclear power plans, the former on BBC’s Newsnight) don’t get an easy ride. This issue is compounded by the inevitable tendency of more militant campaigners being drawn to the barricades and defending camp against police.

Saturday was the climax of the week, and had been declared the day when we would “…go beyond talk and culminate in a spectacular mass action to shut down Kingsnorth. Permanently!”. The camp separated into blue, green, silver and orange blocs, with the plan being that we would take different routes over land, sea and air to get to Kingsnorth, arriving en masse, and E.ON bosses would order a shutdown. The end result was that one person climbed over the second security fence onto company property, and was immediately arrested. One boat made it onto a jetty, and a police charge sheet reveals that one of the four water inlet systems was shut down, but E.ON claimed it was “business as usual”. Fifty arrests were made, about half the total for the week.

So much for what actually happened. How much of the intended message survived the mainstream media’s filters and made it into public consciousness?

At the start of the week, coverage focused on the police attacks. Monday, 4th August saw BBC exposure of the police’s brutal dawn raid, giving details of casualties, showing police in riot gear attacking campers, and quoting camp media team members at length. On Tuesday, they ran with local Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews’ claim that the police had been “provocative and heavy-handed”. On the other hand, none of the other almost daily attacks got any press. This may be partly due to the pressure of the police’s announcement that they’d discovered a stash of knives and other weapons in woodland near the site. Campers immediately denied any connection with the stash, and none has since been found. But it seems likely that for many, this discovery provided retrospective cover for the police’s use of force, potentially dissuading waverers from paying a visit.

For the mainstream media, the camp wasn’t so much an experiment in sustainable living as a collection of oddities. When they discussed on-site conditions at all, they seemed more intrigued that there were people in the 21st century who voluntarily used compost toilets and grey water systems, than by the green implications. That this was part of an ‘eco village’ seems largely to have passed them by, a fact illustrated by a Google News search. Bizarrely, the Custer County Chief in Nebraska, USA picked up on it, as did a New Statesman article (not very encouragingly titled ‘Woolly minded hippies?’). This contrasts with 109 results for “climate camp” “compost toilet”. For their part, The Guardian even produced a tourist-style survival guide, entitled ‘How to go to Climate Camp – and enjoy it’.

As in previous years, the camp got the mainstream media talking about the role that carbon emissions play in manmade climate change. However, outlets overwhelmingly portrayed this as a protest against emissions at Kingsnorth in isolation, rather than the structural need of capital to expand, degrading the environment in the process. One deviation from this was when the Kent News quoted camper Anya Patterson as saying “If we are serious about fighting climate change, we have to tackle the root causes, and those are greed and a commitment to relentless economic growth.” Similarly, the non-hierarchical decision-making process was largely ignored, with the BBC merely describing it as ‘exhaustive’ and ‘somewhat baffling’.

One facet of the week that all mainstream media went big on was the idea of direct action. Unfortunately, it was only covered in the most superficial way, focusing on the supposed dangers that campers would be letting themselves in for. Of course, police attack was not listed amongst these hazards, but electrocution and drowning were. The implicit message in all of this was that once people stepped outside the law, their safety was at risk, and that therefore the state and – by extension – police really are there to serve and protect everyone – batons, riding crops, pepper spray and all.

Though the Climate Camp website is declaring the week a resounding success, it can surely be judged a valiant failure in terms of its stated objectives. E.ON were inconvenienced for a few hours, but Kingsnorth was not shut down. Some campers learned about non-hierarchical organising and strategies for sustainable living, but this made little impact on the wider public. ‘Direct action’ became a media buzzword, but only as something irresponsible and to be feared. Carbon emissions became a hot topic, but in the context of the above, only as ‘footprints’ to feel guilty about.

Indeed, some campers were hoping for this. On the Thursday morning, I had a discussion with an activist about his ambitions for what is being dubbed the ‘climate movement’. “To make a lot of people very guilty”, he replied.

This emphasis on guilt as a precursor for individualistic lifestyle change is perhaps the very opposite of what many original organisers hoped for. However, I believe it is fundamental to what is sometimes called ‘green and black’ anarchism. The idea of a class-based transformation of society is rejected – in some cases because of righteous disillusionment with traditional forms of class struggle, in many cases because the individual is from a relatively wealthy background. When such people see impending environmental catastrophe as the number one threat to their lives, their philosophy often becomes more anti-technological than anti-capitalist. Taking this perspective to its logical conclusion, capitalism and the state wouldn’t be much of a problem if they could somehow leave people alone in ecological peace, but since they can’t, both must be overcome. But with international class-based solidarity apparently ruled out, the result is that “setting an example” (as one woman put it) becomes the main method of ideological recruitment.

This sets green and black anarchism up for its own failure. Due to the built-in ideological structures of mainstream media and the state, the example set is of using those compost toilets, getting attacked by police, and putting yourself in mortal danger on your week off. Understandably, this is not an example that many are willing to follow.

The boast that Climate Camp would “shut down Kingsnorth” was always about bravado and bluster, a tendency which people from all strands of activism are vulnerable to in times of unrelenting defeat. But how could Kingsnorth really be shut down?

Medway Council have approved E.ON’s plans, and the final decision rests with the government, who have already indicated they will grant permission. Demolition of the current site and the construction of the new one is scheduled for February next year. On camp, there was a lot of talk about trying to build on current “momentum” and systematically blockading work from then onwards. Clearly, because of the long term commitment to direct action necessary, this would attract a smaller and ever dwindling number of people, unless substantial local support is forthcoming. Even if it is, there are plans for seven more coal-fired stations in the pipeline, plus all the other myriad ways capital is destroying the environment. There simply aren’t enough of us to wage such a struggle.

Any campaign against environmental destruction has to be rooted in a movement against the profit motive and the capitalist system, or it is doomed to symbolic gestures and failure. Industry doesn’t create carbon emissions, working people do, because they are paid to do so and see no viable alternative. While capitalist ideas prevail amongst the working class, invasions of power stations are less direct action and more dramatic lobbying; ultimately impotent appeals to the government to see further than the short term bottom line, something it is organically incapable of doing.

Ironically, this plays into the hands of people like George Monbiot. ‘Climate change is not anarchy’s football’, he patronisingly declared in a post-camp online reply to an article by radical journalist Ewa Jasiewicz, before going on to declare that ‘I don’t know how to solve the problem of capitalism without resorting to totalitarianism’. And every dictatorship needs paid advisors.

No George, climate change is not ‘anarchy’s football’; it’s a matter of life and death. That’s why we need working class revolution, so we can sort it out.

Policing of climate camp a major attack on democratic rights

tim — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:34:55 +0000

A week-long climate protest camp in north Kent has ended, amidst widespread claims of disproportionate and aggressive policing. Around 100 people were arrested over the course of the protest, 46 of whom have been charged, mostly with obstruction offences. The multimillion-pound policing of the camp marked a significant attack on democratic rights and civil liberties.

The camp was held to protest the building of a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth, on the Medway estuary. Energy company E.ON UK is proposing replacing the existing coal power station with a new one. This would be the first new coal power station built in Britain in more than 30 years. The proposal has yet to be agreed by John Hutton, whose portfolio as secretary of state for business, enterprise and regulatory reform includes energy security issues. The proposal has been passed to Hutton’s office following its agreement by the local authority, Medway Council.

Kingsnorth is the first of several new coal-fired power stations proposed for sites across the UK. The government has made these stations a key factor in ensuring energy supplies. Protestors argue that coal power stations, with their high CO2 emissions, are the most polluting means of producing electricity. Between 1,000 and 2,000 protestors came to the camp over the course of the week to protest at the development of Kingsnorth. Aside from their direct protest activities, the camp also staged workshop and discussion events.

Assistant Chief Constable Gary Beautridge of Kent Police acknowledged in a press conference that the police had been planning their response to the camp since April of this year. That response saw 1,400 officers, from 26 different forces across Britain, being brought into the area. They were supported by constant air surveillance. The Medway Ports Authority also authorised the police to “enforce” sections of their bylaws to prevent protestors approaching the power station from the river.

The final cost of the policing operation is not yet known, but has been estimated variously between £1 million and £8 million. It is understood the Kent Police are considering applying to the Home Office for financial support in footing the bill.

There has been a noticeable trend in recent years for the police to underreport numbers of demonstrators and protestors. In the case of Kingsnorth, the police set the attendance at 1,000. According to their own figures, therefore, they had provided a level of policing intended to overwhelm the protestors. The organisers’ own estimate of attendance was 1,500, giving a 1:1 ratio of police to protestors. Even the highest estimate only put attendance at 2,000.

That the police levels were aimed at discouraging protest was reinforced when Beautridge said he regarded “the majority of the protestors” as “law-abiding people there for a legitimate reason.” He justified the policing levels as a response to “a small hard core of people…prepared to use criminal tactics and criminal activity.” According to one report, this “small hard core” was set at just 150 people. As the camp’s legal spokesman Kevin Smith noted, “Every year police use the supposed existence of a hardcore minority as justification for the heavy-handedness and every year this hardcore minority fails to materialise.”

It is quite evident that the policing was aimed at deterring any form of protest. Protestors at the camp have described the constant attention of police helicopters, which served to disrupt meetings and speeches. There are also reports of police impounding vehicles being used by protestors to bring supplies into the camp.

In particular, protestors drew attention to the aggressive tactics of the riot police, who used batons and shields in making arrests. Several protestors were injured when police baton-charged them as they tried to enter a cornfield. Beautridge maintained that such a response was “proportionate…. Because of the level of resistance, officers were authorised to carry batons during two days of the protest. There are strict legal standards for their use and we gave clear warnings when any specialist team was deployed.”

Green MEP Caroline Lucas, who visited the camp, said she was “horrified that [the] police…have used pepper spray, riot gear, [and] physical intimidation.” The police controlled demonstrators with horses, dogs and trail bikes, as well as with constant helicopter coverage.

To sustain this level of intimidation and intrusion, the police sought extraordinary powers to stop and search protestors. Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was implemented to authorise this. Initially, the Section 60 provisions were applied only to the immediate area of the camp. They were subsequently extended to cover the whole of the Hoo peninsula. The provision allows police to stop and search a suspect if an officer of superintendent rank or above believes there may be incidents of serious violence.

At Kingsnorth, Section 60 was used to monitor all visitors to the camp. One eyewitness describes joining a queue to be searched. The searching officer did not know who had authorised the searches. Having been frisked and had his bag searched, the witness was then issued with a pink slip. He had to show this to another three officers before he actually reached the camp. He was searched again when he tried to leave the camp. There were also reports of protestors being threatened with strip searches. Elsewhere there were reports of police attempting to use Section 60 to justify destruction of homemade rafts.

Lucas, along with Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker and Labour MP Colin Challen, wrote to Kent Police to express concern about such use of discretionary powers. Lucas warned that this was “undermining our civil liberties.”

Lucas, amongst others, has also drawn attention to a booklet apparently dropped by an officer policing the camp. The booklet, “Policing Protest,” is produced by the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit and offers “tactical advice and guidance on policing single-issue domestic extremism.”

Police mounted a systematic programme of confiscation from the protestors during the searches. The police told press that they had confiscated many knives, although demonstrators described this as a smear tactic. Police also showed journalists a satirical board game (“War on Terror”) they had confiscated. There seems to have been a policy of making life as uncomfortable and awkward as possible for protestors. Other items confiscated included glue, soap, a clown costume, bits of carpet, toilet paper, disabled ramps, marker pens, blackboard paint, nuts and bolts for toilet cubicles, and banners.

They also confiscated demonstrators’ emergency radios and lifejackets. One demonstrator involved in the river-borne protest described a meeting with a local coast guard crew. The coast guards were complimentary about the demonstrators’ attention to safety, but criticised the police confiscations of lifejackets, saying, “It was irresponsible and could have put lives at risk.”

Such tactics were clearly designed to stifle any form of dissent and deter any future protests. Of particular concern in this regard is the complaint by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) that its members were also subject to the same searches, manhandling, and observation. The NUJ is looking at legal challenges against “this unwarranted conduct by the police.” According to the NUJ, journalists were searched as they entered and left the camp. Searches continued after police were shown press cards. Journalists were also “pushed and shoved” by police, and filmed whilst using WiFi facilities at a local McDonalds.

Such developments indicate a determination to clamp down on any form of legitimate protest, and should be taken as a very serious attack on democratic rights.

The truth is, we're fighting for survival

JamieSW — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:47:26 +0000

Up to 4 billion people left without water. Up to 5 billion at risk of flooding. Half a billion left hungry as agricultural yields decline by 15-35% in Africa with entire swaths of the world ceasing food production altogether. More than 80 million exposed to malaria in Africa. The Amazon collapses and 50% of species go extinct. It’s basically the end of the world. And it’s reported in this morning’s Guardian.

There is such a gaping chasm between the matter-of-fact reporting of this nightmarish 4C scenario that government scientists now say we should be planning for, and the total failure of apparently rational people to understand what is happening on the Hoo peninsula this week.

Reports from Kingsnorth, the site of this year’s climate camp, completely fail to scrutinise the pin-striped criminals who are pushing the planet towards the brink. Instead, the Press Association runs stories on apparent conspiracies to attack police with knives without even phoning the accused activists for a reaction to these smears. What other set of people could be accused of conspiracy to commit cop killings without being asked for any reaction? This is a victory for the police and the rightwing media they leak to.

Equally, E.ON UK’s greenwashing PR campaign is run without any question. Every report repeats the myth that the proposed new power station would be a “cleaner coal” plant. No one reports that in fact, this coal plant will pollute as much as more than 30 developing countries combined, that there will be no use of carbon capture and storage (CSS) technology, and that the plant will be so inefficient as to waste half of all the energy it creates. No mention of the fact that Chris Davies, the Lib Dem MEP, who is notoriously pro-CCS coal, has pledged to attend the camp precisely because Kingsnorth won’t be a “cleaner coal” plant.

E.ON UK keeps pumping out the spin that “we need coal to keep the lights on”, even following reports in the Financial Times that independent energy experts, Pöyry, have proven (pdf) that if the UK hit its existing renewables and efficiency targets, no new coal would be required. Even when emails expose close contact between E.ON UK and the business department, they are only reported in the Guardian.

As the prime minister has a last look at a bit of beautiful coastline already succumbing to the sea, the media frenzy focuses on the same old soap opera personality politics. Is so-and-so too remote/young/jaded/damaged to be the next majorette marching us over the cliff? Whoever it is, we know it’ll be one of the same crew who got us into this mess and can’t get us out because the solutions don’t fit the electoral cycle. There is an echo here too of the US media’s response to Iraq. Even now, anyone who opposed the war is on some sort of “radical fringe”, and having supported the war, at least at the time of its inception, is a necessary qualification to be seen as “serious”. With climate change, in order to be “serious” you need to acknowledge that the end of the world is an interesting detail in the broader pattern of economic “progress”, but never succumb to the incredible naivety of the protesters, who fail to realise that the survival of life on earth is a bourgeois luxury which we can ill afford in these times of economic constraint.

The harsh reality is that there is no way we could plan for a 4C rise. No amount of adaptation is going to make that liveable for most of the world’s population, and it’s going to be pretty damn nasty for those lucky few of us living in the north as well. Despite this, we end up with two possible stories – the front page banner “dangerous anarchists threaten chaos”, or, tucked away at the back of the paper, “peaceful protest passes without incident”. And all the time, not even the liberal press is concerned that, even if every single person at the camp arrived with a heavy machine gun, they couldn’t kill half the number of people who will die as a result of the effects of climate change.

I'd rather be a hypocrite than a cynic like Julie Burchill

JamieSW — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:01:17 +0000

In her new book, Not In My Name, Julie Burchill reserves her grandest fury about hypocrites for environmentalists. We are, she (and her co-author, Chas Newkey-Burden) say, pious, sexless and contemptuous of humankind. We are all are posh and rich, and have found in environmentalism a new excuse for lecturing the poor. We tell other people to live by rules we don’t apply to ourselves.

Like all stereotypes, these claims are lazy, familiar and sometimes true. Burchill knows nothing about environmentalism, and, almost as a point of pride, hasn’t bothered to find out, but when you use grapeshot you are bound to hit someone. Yes, many prominent greens are posh gits like me. The same can be said of journalists, politicians, artists, academics, business leaders … in fact, of just about anyone in public life. But it is always the greens who are singled out.

In truth, while the upper middle classes are, as always, over-represented in the media, the movement cuts across the classes. A recent ICM poll found that more people in social classes D and E thought the government should prioritise the environment over the economy (56%) than in classes A and B (47%).

Environmentalism is the most politically diverse movement in history. Here in the Kingsnorth climate camp, I have met anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, conservatives and, mostly, pragmatists. I remember sitting in a campaign meeting during the Newbury bypass protests and marvelling at the weirdness of our coalition. In the front row sat the local squirearchy: brigadiers in tweeds and enormous moustaches, titled women in twin sets and headscarves. In the middle were local burghers of all shapes and sizes. At the back sat the scuzziest collection of grunge-skunks I have ever laid eyes on. The audience disagreed about every other subject under the sun – if someone had asked us to decide what day of the week it was, the meeting would had descended into fisticuffs – but everyone there recognised that our quality of life depends on the quality of our surroundings.

The environment is inseparable from social justice. Climate change, for example, is primarily about food and water. It threatens the fresh water supplies required to support human life. As continental interiors dry out and the glaciers feeding many of the rivers used for irrigation disappear, climate change presents the greatest of all threats to the future prospects of the poor. The rich will survive for a few decades at least, as they can use their money to insulate themselves from the effects. The poor are being hammered already.

In reality, it is people like Julie Burchill – who is, incidentally, far richer than almost any green I have met – who treats the poor with contempt. So that she can revel in what she calls “reckless romantic modernism”, other people must die. But at least you can’t accuse her of hypocrisy: she cannot fail to live by her moral code, for the simple reason that she doesn’t have one.

Sure, we are hypocrites. Every one of us, almost by definition. Hypocrisy is the gap between your aspirations and your actions. Greens have high aspirations – they want to live more ethically – and they will always fall short. But the alternative to hypocrisy isn’t moral purity (no one manages that), but cynicism. Give me hypocrisy any day.

Where there's brass there's muck

tim — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:55:25 +0000

The environmental crisis that currently faces our planet is a matter of life or death. The potential for human suffering through environmental devastation over the coming decades is truly staggering. It is unquestionable that the time to act is now. The state and corporations would have us believe that environmentalism is a matter of personal choice. That buying energy-saving light bulbs, carbon-neutral flights or so called “biofuels” have the potential to stall (or even stop) the coming crisis.

Even those within the environmental movement will preach the virtues of “ethical” lifestyle. They argue that it is only a matter of persuading enough consumers to “buy into” environmentalism (with a price-tag far beyond the budget of most working people). While some of these efforts have some impact as shortterm solutions, they fail to address the very system that drives and sustains the destruction of our environment – capitalism.

Calling for increased state intervention to meet environmental targets is equally counterproductive. The state exists for the maintenance and protection of capitalism. Since targets and promises were set there has been no government that has ever reached a target it set to tackle on climate change. Creating a sustainable future for our planet is not in the interests of profit.

Ecology IS a class issue. How many working class people do you know with a private jet? The ruling classes have used the corporate mass media to fight environmentalism at every turn. We live in a truly crazy world where despite scientific proof that humanity is responsible for climate change you are still able with enough money, influence and power to deny this is the case. And why? Because the bottom line is that environmental destruction equals profit.

And who suffers? We already know that those countries in the developing world are likely to suffer the worst affects of Climate Change. Droughts, floods and food shortages affect millions when there is no infrastructure to protect impoverished populations. We have seen in the catastrophic events that followed hurricane Katrina the people who suffer the worst in the face of environmental destruction– the urban working poor.

Last year throughout the UK there was a great deal of hardship following the floods as those in the poorest and worst affected areas lost everything when insurance companies refused to pay out. Across the world working people are poisoned by pesticides, power plants and industrial by-products.

Our message is simple. If we want to great a truly free society, a truly sustainable society then it has to be one which is free from capitalism. Working people across the world have to rise up and fight the system that oppresses and alienates them every day. It’s about time we gave bosses and politicians the boot and built a better future for everyone.

Camp For Climate Action

Despite coal representing the most polluting of fossil fuels, the government plans to build six more atmospherecrunching power stations. Collectively these will emit around 50 million tons of C02 a year!

The camp for climate action represents a radical attempt to build a mass movement against climate change through self-organisation and collective effort. The Camp for Climate Action will be taking place at Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, Kent, 3rd to 11th August. www.climatecamp.org.uk

Caroline Lucas at Climate Camp

tim — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:56:43 +0000

South East MEP and Green activist Dr Caroline Lucas will be joining protesters at Climate Camp 2008 this weekend at Kingsnorth in Kent to rally against the Government’s continued commitment to unsustainable fossil fuels and its failure to adapt to tough environmental and economic conditions.

Speaking ahead of the Camp, which was held last year at Heathrow and attracted in excess of 1500 people, Dr Lucas said:

“I am delighted to be taking part in Climate Camp this year, and where better to highlight the Government’s failure to provide leadership on climate change than Kingsnorth, the proposed location for the first coal fired power station in Britain for 30 years.

“A new coal facility at Kingsnorth would emit up to 8 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year – and potentially keep doing so for 50 years. That annual emissions figure is as much C02 as the world’s 24 lowest emitting countries combined.

“Despite all its climate rhetoric, greenhouse gas emissions have risen under this Labour adminstration. Any government which commits to more coal fired power stations – and Kingsnorth is only the start – then claims to be aiming for a massive reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 is quite simply living in a fantasy land.”

On Sunday (3 August), Dr Lucas will take part in a rally on incineration and climate change. Then on Monday (4 August), she will address fellow Climate Campers on the triple crisis of food price rises, economic downturn and climate change facing governments the world over, and what lies ahead for conventional capitalist economics.

She continued: “Our political leaders seem unable to grasp a more radical social and environmental agenda. They can no longer commit to endless free market economic growth, which has played a huge part in the rapid generation of damaging climate emissions, and then wring their hands about climate change.

“The Government should be showing real leadership in this debate, with measures to tackle rising energy costs and fuel poverty, as well as initiating major investment in energy efficiency, renewables and decentralised energy. According to its own figures, we could achieve a 30% reduction in energy use in the UK through existing efficiency measures alone.

“Instead, ministers stick with their business-as-usual approach, further enabling the fossil fuel industry to profit and pollute, while paying scant regard to the average citizen or the environment.”

The climate change clock is ticking

JamieSW — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:17:47 +0000

The UK is in denial about its real carbon emissions, suggests a report from the Stockholm Environment Institute. The academics conclude that if “outsourced” emissions produced in countries like China on goods which are imported into the UK are included in our total carbon footprint, this country’s total greenhouse gas emissions are 49% higher than currently reported. So we should think twice when blaming the Chinese for emitting the CO2 that is required in the manufacture of our fridges and televisions.

The report illustrates once again – as if we had forgotten – that global warming is an, er, global issue. A tonne of CO2 is a tonne of CO2, wherever it is emitted. How you do the counting is more a matter of politics than mathematics. A much greater concern is that all the politics is in danger of obscuring the increasingly drastic nature of the climate change threat. According to Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation, the world has only got 100 months left if we are to have a reasonably high chance of staving off runaway global warming.

This is a pretty dramatic claim, and the associated onehundredmonths.org website has an equally dramatic ticking clock counting down until runaway warming begins. “When the clock stops ticking,” it states ominously, “we’ll be beyond the climate’s tipping point, the point of no return.” Yikes. So how valid is this claim? Luckily, NEF’s website provides a 100 Months technical note (pdf) explaining the calculations behind the new campaign. The first thing I noticed is that there isn’t any new modelling work underlying the claim: it is based on existing science, in particular on an analysis (pdf) by a researcher called Malte Meinshausen which was published in 2006.

Meinshausen was the first scientist to quantify with percentage figures the probability of exceeding certain climatic thresholds: in his 2006 paper he concluded that only by stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at 400 part per million (ppm) would it be “likely” (defined as 66-90% chance) that the world would stay below an eventual warming of two degrees. The NEF analysis has performed a fairly simple calculation, simply counting the time left before this 400ppm level is reached. The deadline, it turns out, is 1 December 2016.

There are several complicating factors, however. The 400ppm figure in question is not for CO2 only, but for a basket of atmosphere-altering gases – some of which have a positive “forcing” effect (like CO2 itself) whereas others have a negative (cooling) effect, like sulphate aerosols released by industry. Add the sum of these forcings together and you can arrive at a “CO2-equivalence” figure, which is the one that both NEF and Meinshausen use. The timescales need to be borne in mind, however: CO2 resides in the atmosphere for a century on average, whereas aerosols are washed out by rain in just a week or so.

There are other caveats too. Meinshausen is not saying that two degrees of warming will be reached with certainty when we cross the 400ppm threshold, but that the risk of seeing two degrees increases steadily thereafter. (Even at 400ppm there is still a risk of overshooting 2C, of somewhere between 2% and 57%.) At 450ppm the risk of crossing the 2C line rises to between 26 and 78%, whereas at 550ppm the risk of overshooting is between 68 and 99%. Indeed, for 550ppm the risk of overshooting even 3C ranges from 21% to 69%.

So what do all these numbers mean? Reading the small print, sceptics might complain about the false precision implied by the 100 months clock, which seems to suggest that the minute, indeed the second, we pass 400ppm we are certain to see two degrees of warming. The truth is that no one knows where any of the relevant climatic tipping points – from the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap to the release of methane from melting permafrost – actually lie. There are uncertainties regarding both what level of carbon emissions equals what temperature rise, and what temperature rise equals which climatic impacts. All we can say with near-certainty is that the warmer it gets, the further into dangerous territory we stray.

And again, there is the question of timescales. Meinshausen’s two degrees calculations referred to two degrees of warming, not the minute the 400ppm line is crossed in December 2016, but when the atmosphere reaches “equilibrium” – in other words when all the warming processes have had a chance to feed through the system. Like a boiling kettle, the planet has a substantial thermal timelag – it takes a long time for ice sheets to rebalance themselves and for warmer waters to penetrate to the bottom of the deepest oceans. So even at this “tipping point” we still wouldn’t see the expected two degrees of warming until the end of the century at least, if today’s climate models are to be believed.

Reassuring, perhaps – but no cause for complacency. The earth’s thermal timelag also means that today’s emissions will keep on causing warming for decades to come, and that decisions made today on emissions cuts are essential if we are to rebalance the climate in the second half of the century.

The great danger of climate change is that it is a long-term systemic process. Self-evidently urgent threats – like wars or economic collapse – are easy to put at the top of our list of priorities. But climate change is a very slow process (note the current sceptic line of decrying the lack of year-on-year warming as hoped-for proof that it’s all been a big mistake), and one where cause and effect (CO2=climate disasters) are not at all obvious at any intuitive level, hence the continuing predominance of wishful thinking, conspiracy-theorising and outright denial. Climate change clearly does not engage our natural psychological self-defence mechanisms.

This is the value of the 100 months campaign, which injects a sense of urgency into what is in reality a very slow process of cooking ourselves. We need to frame this issue as an urgent one to generate anything like an appropriate response, and indeed NEF explicitly uses the wartime analogy. But the drawback is also clear: in January 2017, after the deadline passes, people might either become fatalistic (“we’ve passed the tipping point, so let’s give up”) or might turn increasingly sceptical (“things don’t look any different – I thought you said the world was going to end?”). In reality, this is a matter of risk analysis: how much risk of destroying our planetary habitat are we prepared to bear in order to keep on burning fossil fuels? Quite a lot, it would seem.

Coming to a screen near you - me!

JamieSW — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:48:14 +0000

Three years ago, the environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben made a striking observation: that despite overwhelming evidence of a world-threatening rise in temperatures, our cultural realm seemed unaware of the looming crisis. “Where are the books?” he demanded. “The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” Global warming, he concluded, “hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture”.

How things have changed. Today, bookshops have entire shelves devoted to climate change. Television, too, has belatedly begun to catch up. Which is not to say every contribution has been well-informed or progressive: Channel 4 commissioned a contrarian polemic, The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast in March last year. Directed by the committed anti-environmentalist Martin Durkin, the spectacularly misleading Swindle marked a broadcasting nadir for the number of distortions, errors and misrepresentations that can be crammed into 75 minutes.

On 21 July the broadcasting regulator Ofcom handed down a severe censure, ruling that the programme had breached impartiality guidelines and treated contributors unfairly. This should be embarrassing for a scrupulous public service broadcaster, yet Channel 4 seems to have a higher regard for controversy than for truth.

But, into the intellectual and ethical vacuum that is Channel 4’s environmental programming steps the BBC with a new, two-part TV drama called Burn Up. Screened on 23 and 25 July on BBC2, this thriller surely marks the belated coming-of-age of energy politics as a legitimate topic for popular entertainment. Written by Simon Beaufoy, screenwriter for The Full Monty, and starring Rupert Penry-Jones (from Spooks) and Bradley Whitford (The West Wing), Burn Up really is thrilling (if you missed the original transmission, make sure you get hold of the download on the BBC’s iPlayer, quickly).

The story finds the young chief executive of a British-based oil company wrestling with his conscience as the deadline looms in global climate-change talks. There’s a fast-talking scientist and a bad-turned-good government apparatchik, both trying to confront the evil axis of oil blobbyists and the US government.

Yet this is not a televised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report: there’s sex and murder. I could quibble that, in the interests of gripping drama, the portrayal of climate negotiations isn’t quite as I’ve seen in reality, but I imagine policemen feel the same way about The Bill.

Also well worth watching out for on the cultural front is the upcoming feature film The Age of Stupid, a drama-meets-documentary epic that casts Pete Postlethwaite in the role of “the archivist”, alone in the year 2055 in a specially constructed Arctic museum-cum-fortress, one of the last surviving human beings on the climatic ally devastated planet. The archivist – using his cache of all the world’s broadcast material from past decades – is constructing a digital broadcast for other, future civilisations about why humanity failed to save itself from global warming.

This is where the real documentary comes in. The director, Franny Armstrong, spent years filming people in various countries who illustrate the dilemmas of climate change: an elderly French mountain guide, the chief executive of an Indian low-cost airline and a Shell petroleum geologist who lost his house to Hurricane Katrina, among others. The film is anything but a good guys-versus-bad guys polemic; it is angry but nuanced, despairing but also strangely motivating. Indeed, the hero (in my opinion) – the one who coins the name of the film itself – is none other than the Shell man, who saved dozens of people in his boat in the aftermath of the hurricane, and has clearly done more thinking about the environment than many greens I know.

I should probably mention that I appear in the film (sketching carbon-emissions graphs in the garden shed), and I also had a hand in writing and advising on the scientific content of the script. Armstrong hopes for UK-wide cinema release in October or November this year, and discussions regarding a prime-time television slot are already under way. Watch out for the fast-paced animations and for the peculiarly captivating soundtrack. It seems that, finally, someone is answering Bill McKibben’s lament.

Leave it in the ground!

tim — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:30:44 +0000

A new open cast coal mine site is about to get under way in beautiful Derbyshire unless we stop it. Lodge House site which is east of the village of Smalley and spans either side of Bell Lane, is one of seven new sites that UK Coal is to open cast.

The area is about to be devastated. Despite objections from local councils, residents and local environmental groups the Secretary of State granted planning permission in 2007. The 122 hectare site will have one million tonnes of coal ripped out over 5 years and UK Coal claims that it will be returned back to its natural state afterwards.

However residents fear there may be more to the plot, as they were excluded from parts of the planning meeting under grounds of commercial confidentiality. According to campaigners UK Coal are one of those companies that looks to maximise their profits by raping the land and profiting from it any way they can. After coal extraction, they often turn the area into business parks, housing and industrial estates. According to their website in some cases they return it to farmland and charge the farmers rent or in low grade land grow energy crops. They are apparently even into wind power, but have yet to erect a single turbine.

Coal is not clean energy and is a major contributor to climate change. With the new onslaught of proposed power stations, UK Coal are looking to cash in on climate devastation and destruction unless we stop them.

The area is rich with wildlife and backs onto Shipley County Park. Some houses, (the sort of place you dream of living in) have been shuttered up and items like toys, dog kennels and other personal bits remain looking like something from a hurried evacuation from a war zone. UK Coal has stated that the site will be returned to farm land, but they are able to expand beyond the 122 hectares without needing further planning permission.

www.leaveitintheground.org.uk

The Price of Carbon: What should it be and why?

tim — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:04:21 +0000

Introduction

The back‐drop to this seminar was the Government’s Climate Change Bill, currently being debated in Parliament, which will set a series of carbon budgets for the UK economy up to 2050. The Committee on Climate Change is advising the Government on what these budgets should be, and will report by the end of 2008.

These carbon budgets are likely to be a challenge for the UK, and require the use of both new policies and strengthened existing policies. Carbon pricing has been identified, by the Stern Review amongst many others, as a critical policy tool for achieving carbon reductions, so how carbon pricing is implemented or revised will have a crucial effect on whether the UK meets these new carbon budgets.

Carbon pricing of course takes many forms – for example market prices per tonne of carbon in the traded sectors in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, prices applied by Governments via taxation, or “shadow” prices applied by Governments in policy and project appraisal, to determine the relative weight to attach to carbon compared with other positive and negative impacts of potential policies.

This seminar focused on the latter point – what approach should be used towards carbon pricing in policy and project appraisal. Which approach is used has significant impacts – it affects the determination of whether big infrastructure projects have positive or negative net benefits, it affects the decision as to what is, say, the “optimal” level of energy efficiency or renewable electricity to adopt in new buildings. Getting this approach right will be a fundamental part of a successful carbon budget strategy.

However, it is not clear what is the best approach to take. There are a number of plausible options with numerous pros and cons for each. There are genuine difficulties here. What is clear though is that to ensure a successful strategy for delivering carbon budgets, these issues need resolving quickly. And so, the purpose of this seminar was to bring together people from Government, academia, business and the NGO sector to discuss what is the best way of tackling this problem. Friends of the Earth welcomes the Government’s decision to review the use of its current method for valuing carbon in appraisal – the Shadow Price of Carbon (SPC) – and hope that the discussion at the seminar, and this meeting summary, will be helpful to the Government as it reviews its policy. Friends of the Earth would like to thank all the participants for their constructive engagement in this seminar.

Context – where are we now?

Carbon valuation for appraisal is controversial. The argument for its use is that there are often real choices between competing objectives – explicit pricing in appraisal helps decision making by putting a price on something currently without one. However, which method to use for setting the price is controversial, and in addition there are arguments that the difficulties with each of the methods are so substantial that a different approach is required. The figure the Government uses is based on the Social Cost of Carbon (“SCC” ‐ broadly, the societal cost of a tonne of emissions) set out in the Stern Review, assuming the world is on course to meet a 550 ppmv CO2e target concentration. This value is currently £26.5 tCO2e, and is called the “Shadow Price of Carbon” (SPC).

The current carbon price approach has come in for some criticism, and is being reviewed by Government. An extra factor for this review will be the need to ensure compatibility with the new approach to carbon budgeting set out in the Climate Change Bill. One concern, for example, is that if high‐carbon and very‐long lived infrastructure is approved via the current carbon pricing approach, this locks the UK into a high carbon trajectory when in future decades carbon budgets will be becoming very small, making these budgets extremely difficult to achieve.

There are alternative methods – such as basing it on the cost of abating a tonne of emissions (“MAC”), or the market price. A further approach is to say that the difficulties in accurately calculating SCCs or MACs are too great for them to be of practical use as a guide price in policy appraisal, and that a different approach altogether is required. However, all of these approaches, like the SCC, have pros and cons as well.

Summary of discussion

The discussion focused first on the purpose of carbon pricing, in general and then more specifically for policy appraisal. It then went on to look at the advantages and disadvantages of four possible approaches for treating carbon in policy appraisal.

A) Purpose of carbon pricing

There was general consensus that the purpose of carbon pricing is to help deliver the Government’s policy goals on climate change – soon to be set out as a series of carbon budgets as part of the Climate Change Bill currently going through parliament. Two additional points were made. First, the purpose of carbon pricing is not primarily to “internalise the external costs” of carbon emissions (although in practice it will go some way to doing this). In this sense pricing is analogous to the situation with the development of the UK landfill tax, which started off set at rates to internalize external costs, but has since moved to be set according to the level deemed necessary to reach politically agreed targets. Second, carbon pricing is not the only policy tool needed, a point strongly emphasised in the Stern Review, and indeed does not on its own necessarily guarantee that the overall policy objective is met.

B) Carbon pricing in policy and project appraisal

There was general consensus too that there needs to be clarity over the different types of carbon pricing. The focus in the seminar was how to use carbon pricing in project and policy appraisal – in deciding what level of carbon emissions reduction to aim for in a particular policy, or how to assess the carbon impact of a specific new proposal against other objectives. Carbon pricing is already in place in other areas to some degree – for example in the EUETS, the use of a carbon cap leads to a (changing) carbon price; and in other areas the use of a variety of environmental taxes creates a carbon price of sorts, albeit varying considerably by sector.

C) Different approaches to carbon pricing in appraisal

Four different approaches were discussed:

1) “Social Cost of Carbon” approaches (SCC)

Social cost approaches come from valuing in monetary terms the costs to society of a tonne of additional carbon emissions. This is used to assess the “cost” of the carbon emissions of any policy, for comparison with other impacts, both positive and negative.

The main advantage of this approach is that it is an attempt to measure actual costs, and as such is good for comparing with other types of costs and benefits of any proposal. However, there are a series of major disadvantages. The first is that any estimate is riven with significant uncertainties, at many levels – from how to value ecosystems and knowledge of likely catastrophic damages, to how to value damage to different generations and how to model the effects on economic systems. The combination of all these difficulties leads to major difficulties in assigning any level of accuracy and precision to any figure, let alone the +20/‐10% range currently used.

Many of these uncertainties are unresolvable any time soon, certainly not within the period we have left to cut emissions; many of them are also ethical issues, and reflect distributional concerns to which there are no definitive “right” answers. Second, because many of these impacts are so uncertain, the models which do exist usually assign a zero value to them – particularly for “socially contingent” and ecosystem losses. These represent a trend for SCC to be underestimates. A further recent trend for underestimates is that the SCC values are inevitably based on relatively old science. As the trend has been for the science of climate change to show things are getting worse with every passing year, the current SPCs are based on an overly optimistic and increasingly outdated view of lower costs of climate damages.

Third, values for the SCC are future‐dependent. With strong emissions reductions in decades to come, future climate damages will be lower, so a tonne of emissions now has less impact. The SCC figure has to be based on some vision of the future. Unfortunately, assuming a world of strong future action on climate leads to a lower value for the SCC now, which when used in policy appraisal means less weight given to climate policies, which leads to less strong action on climate…a self‐defeating cycle. In addition, the current value for the SCC used by Government in its Shadow Price of Carbon is based on a 550ppmv C02 future, which will require far stronger policies than currently exist to be achievable.

The reality is that we are on a higher trajectory, which under this methodology would require a higher price. Fourth, there is little certainty about the link between this approach and with the Climate Change Bill’s carbon budgets. It could well be that carbon pricing here results in major carbon intensive projects or policies going ahead (if the carbon costs were outweighed by other benefits). The current Heathrow expansion proposal was cited as an example of where the carbon cost of the proposal using SCC is outweighed by calculations of benefits of expansion – the proposal thus passes its impact assessment, despite its projected large net increase in carbon emissions, in likely conflict with carbon budgets requiring large overall cuts.

2) “Marginal Abatement Cost” approaches

This approach assesses the cost of cutting carbon emissions by an additional tonne, and compares the figure derived from this for the “cost” of the carbon emissions with other impacts.

The main advantage of this approach is that it is in theory compatible with the carbon budgets in the Climate Bill. If the carbon price used in appraisal is simply the most expensive measure in the strategy to meet the budgets, then a new policy or proposal is judged more easily against other carbon abating policies.

However, there remain a number of significant problems with a MAC approach. First, MAC estimates have major uncertainties too, although possibly not to the same extent as for SCC estimates. MACs can change massively over time (eg as innovation kicks in), MACs can be artificially high due to market failures, many MACs assume policies which are not likely to happen at present for other reasons (for example wholesale improvement in domestic energy efficiency). MACs also have major problems with consistency in definitions from different studies. The issue of whether global or UK based MAC curves should be used also has a major impact on MAC values. Overall, there appears to be little sensitivity analysis around these figures.

Second, if used in appraisal, MAC figures would not be comparing like with like. For example, for all its flaws, cost‐benefit analysis currently remains the main arbiter in policy appraisal. All other impacts would be considered in terms of their costs and benefits, monetized where possible. But using MACs for carbon would mean using the cost for cutting a tonne of carbon, rather than the cost to society of emitting a tonne – two completely different measures. There is no guarantee at all that the MAC and the SCC are the same.

3) Market price approaches

This approach is to take the already existing market price for carbon – for example the price for a tonne of carbon traded in the EUETS. The advantage of using a market price is that it is very “real” – this figure is the one financiers and business people use; it is the one which genuinely affects business decisions. A second advantage is that the price relates to a target that has been set; it is an approach which is in theory quite compatible with carbon budgets.

The market price is created by Government policy – so for appraisal purposes what that policy is is crucial. The disadvantage of this market price approach for appraisal (where there are no real prices) at the moment is that the market price is going to be very low, because it is based on an EUETS cap which is far too high in relation to a cap needed to keep climate change damages to an “acceptable” level, and also likely to be incompatible with the soon‐to‐be set UK carbon budgets.

A further potential disadvantage with this approach is that the market price is currently based only on particular sectors, and does not bear much relation to other sectors such as surface transport and households.

4) “Precaution and Pragmatism” approaches

The main argument for this approach is that the previous approaches, owing to their major uncertainties (SCC and MAC), are impractical to ensure carbon budgets are met. It was argued that a more pragmatic approach is needed instead. This proposed approach uses an escalating carbon tax to have a medium‐long term influence on decisions (until it is having a strong enough effect on decision making to ensure carbon budgets are met) combined with a policy presumption against high carbon infrastructure to address the potential for carbon lock‐in via short‐term and high impact proposals.

The advantage of this approach is that it is likely to be compatible with the Bill’s budgets, whereas the other three are likely to throw up situations where major carbon‐intensive proposals get the go‐ahead, requiring major revision of the strategy to deliver carbon budgets. However, there are disadvantages over as yet unclear definitions – how would “carbon intensive” or “carbon‐increasing” be defined, and at what rate would the carbon escalator need to rise?

D) Which is the best approach?

There is a genuine unresolved question as to whether the uncertainties surrounding both SCC and MAC figures are so large as to make them unsuitable for setting a carbon price for use in appraisal. There is strong evidence that these uncertainties are too large for the SCC. For MACs, the jury is still out. Even if these figures can be calculated with any precision and accuracy it may not also ensure that the UK’s carbon budgets are met – applied to very long term capital projects they may lock the UK into long‐term high carbon infrastructure which although justifiable on short‐term MAC or SCC analysis, in the long run would prove very costly to the UK. It may be more effective to use a different approach.

Using one based on market based prices does not look attractive at present, as carbon markets are new, based on inadequate caps and coverage of too small a fraction of total emissions. The fourth approach – around a combination of an escalating carbon tax and a presumption against high carbon projects or policies ‐ has potential, and should be looked into in more detail. Critical questions would be how to define the boundaries as to what is carbon intensive or high carbon, and at what levels to set an effective carbon escalator.

Environmental Groups Slam G8 Leaders

Ellie Keen — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:40:20 +0000

In Japan, world leaders at the G8 summit have announced they would work toward cutting carbon emissions by at least 50 percent by 2050. The White House hailed the declaration as a major step forward, but environmental campaigners criticized the lack of a commitment to midterm targets. Global warming ties into other big themes, such as soaring food and fuel prices, being discussed at the three-day summit. We go to Hokkaido to speak with Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South.

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AMY GOODMAN: G8 leaders say they will set a global target of cutting carbon emissions by at least 50 percent by the year 2050 in an effort to tackle climate change. In a statement released during a summit in northern Japan, the Group of Eight leaders agreed they would need to set midterm goals to achieve that “shared vision” by 2050 but gave no numerical targets.

The White House hailed the G8 declaration as a major step forward and said it was a validation of President Bush’s global warming policy. But environmental campaigners slammed the lack of a commitment to midterm goals. Greenpeace International called it a “complete failure of responsibility,” and WWF said the target date of 2050 was insufficient and the lack of progress “pathetic.”

Global warming ties into other big themes such as soaring food and fuel prices being discussed at the three-day summit. Leaders from the G8 nations—Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States—are being joined by counterparts from some fifteen other countries. The gathering is taking place at a plush mountaintop hotel on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, where 21,000 police have been mobilized. Despite the crackdown, protests have been occurring for days in the lead-up to the summit.

RENATO REYES: We’re here in solidarity with our Japanese friends who are standing up against the G8. We feel very strongly about this issue, especially since the poverty happening in the Philippines right now is really bad. The oil crisis, the fuel crisis and the war on terror has really affected many of our countrymen.

KIM HEUNG HYUN: [translated] What I’d like to say most is that food should not be used as a political tool. If you allow it to happen, food could eventually be a weapon. The important thing is for each country to maintain agricultural self-sufficiency.

MASUYUKI TOMITA: [translated] This is a meeting by world thieves. They, the G8 countries, are causing all the current problems, such as environment destruction and food crisis. That is why I am against them.

AMY GOODMAN: The G8 summit wraps up Wednesday. We go now to Japan to speak with Walden Bello, senior analyst at Focus on the Global South. He joins us on the phone from Hokkaido. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Walden.

WALDEN BELLO: Hi, Amy, yes. The line is a bit choppy, but I hope I can hear you and you can hear me.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe what is happening? First, your response to the stated set of goal, 2050, to cut carbon emissions by 50 percent?

WALDEN BELLO: Yes, I think that, you know, this has been sold as a big thing, but it’s really not, and it’s, in fact, quite backward, because the US in fact killed the efforts to have in the declaration in Bali last—during the summit over, that, you know, 25 to 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions should be cut by 2020. And the consensus right now is that you have to have at least an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. So this is really a low target. And this was really an effort to basically please the United States. And the thing about this also is that the US is subverting the UN process, because he’s put this within the context of another rival grouping called the Major Economies Meeting, which is a US effort to parallel the Kyoto UN framework process. So this is bad news.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, can you talk about the activists who tried to get in? There are 21,000 Japanese police there.

WALDEN BELLO: Could you repeat that, Amy? The line’s a bit choppy here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the difficulty of activists trying to get in to protest the G8 in Japan?

WALDEN BELLO: I—wow, you know, that really didn’t come across. The difficulties of what now?

AMY GOODMAN: Of the protesters getting into Japan, getting to Hokkaido?

WALDEN BELLO: Oh, wow, I can’t—I couldn’t get that. I couldn’t get that. I’m terribly sorry. It came up as very, very unclear.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll have the producer ask you the question. We’re talking to Walden Bello, senior analyst, Focus on the Global South, joining us on the line from Hokkaido. We’ll go to a break, and we’ll come back, and we’ll clear up the phone line. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We go back now to Walden Bello. He’s speaking to us from the Japanese island of Hokkaido. He’s senior analyst at the Focus on the Global South. And we hope the phone line has cleared up. Walden Bello, I was asking about the difficulty activists had of getting to the G8 summit.

WALDEN BELLO: Oh, yes. Well, they’re following the example of Singapore, which is to really screen people and not admit people that are, you know, people who have been longtime activists in these issues. And, you know, like it’s—these twenty-four Koreans who were here, they were held for about, you know, over twenty-four hours and then sent back. And many others did not receive their visas on time. And, of course, many of us who came through already had visas, we were pulled aside and subjected to heavy questioning. So this is what we call really the—Japan following Singapore’s policy of really, you know, restricting the entry of people associated with social movements. And this is a very, very bad precedent, because, in fact, in terms of—I’ve been in quite a number of summits of the G8, and I would say that, in terms of border controls, this is the worst so far.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the people who were actually prevented from getting in, like Susan George?

WALDEN BELLO: Well, Susan George, you know, was able to come in, and—but she was questioned for about, I believe, four hours in a small windowless room. And so, this—and Lydinyda Nacpil of the Jubilee South, for instance, the anti-debt coalition, was questioned for about three-and-a-half hours. And basically, this is—you know, this is harassment. So, you know, this is Japan on sort of a security footing that is really quite a departure from previous policies with respect to the entry of activists.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, can you talk about the food crisis?

WALDEN BELLO: Well, you know, it’s said to be—the agenda here is said to include the food crisis, but people are not really expecting anything to come out, because the G8 countries really don’t—or the G8 governments really don’t know how to deal with this problem, because, you know, it’s been something that’s been caused by their policies. Now, certainly the diversion of corn to biofuel production from food is a cause, one of the causes, of the sharp rise in food prices. But we’ve got to see this in a longer-term perspective, that basically the policies of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment and WTO-, World Trade Organization-mandated liberalization basically destroyed the capacity of so many developing countries to be self-sufficient producers. It turned them into net importers of food, and then they were made into dumping ground for highly subsidized food commodities from the European Union and the United States. So this is the sort of already weakened agricultural economies in which the biofuel diversion took effect. So the weakening of these economies really began with G8-supported free market structural adjustment policies.

So, this is why the G8 governments really don’t have, you know, a solution for this, except platitudes, to say that they’re going to help increase food production. Some of them have been talking about supporting a new green revolution based on genetically modified organisms, seeds, in Africa. You know, so it’s all these real techno fixes, which are dangerous in the case of so-called green revolutions on genetic engineering. So this is really the wall, you know, that the G8 faces. They—it’s a problem of their creation, and they don’t really have any solutions for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, we reported yesterday that The Guardian newspaper obtained an unpublished World Bank report that found biofuels have caused world food prices to increase by 75 percent. The report apparently was finished in April but reportedly not published in order to avoid embarrassing the United States, which has claimed plant-derived fuels have pushed up prices by only three percent. The report found biofuels have distorted food markets by diverting grain away from food for fuel, encouraging farmers to set aside land for its production and sparked financial speculation on grains.

WALDEN BELLO: Yes, definitely. I think that is a very critical report, and I think this just goes to show how the World Bank essentially follows, you know, the concerns and lead of the United States here. So, I mean, if it were a really transparent institution, they should have come out with that.

And what I’m—I guess what I’m trying to say is that the weakening—you know, the biofuel diversion has certainly been a very big factor behind the food crisis, but that this occurred within the context of already weakened economies that had been destroyed by the imposition of free market policies. So we’ve seen that over the last twenty to twenty-five years, from Africa to Latin America to Asia, self-sufficient economies have been turned into import-dependent economies. And it is those countries that—for instance, like Mexico, you know—that have become—made dependent on corn imports from the United States. They are the ones suffering now very greatly the impact of this diversion of corn from food to biofuel, because they’re dependent on corn imports from the US. Now, that dependency was created in the first place—and this is the sort of total context, this is the sort of comprehensive view that we need to have in order to be—to really understand the causes of the agricultural crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Walden Bello, I want to thank you for being with us, senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, speaking to us from the Japanes island of Hokkaido, where the G8 are meeting and thousands of activists have come out to protest.