Here are a selection of articles about the environment you should read
Subsidising The Climate Crash
By George Monbiot
Why have government agencies been paying to increase the number of flights?
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 7th July 2009
Here’s an odd thing. Air travel to and from the United Kingdom has plummeted. Several small airlines have gone bust; British Airways has deployed its landing gear. In some respects, according to the industry, this descent could be permanent. Yet the government is still planning to double the capacity of our airports by 2030.
Between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, the number of people using airports in the UK fell by 6.4 million, or 13%(1). Convinced that its previous estimates for the growth of demand were wrong, the airport operator BAA has delayed its plans for a second runway at Stansted(2). British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair are demanding that BAA reduce the £900m it wanted to spend on upgrading Gatwick, because the business case is now “unproven”(3).
After we had finished filming our interview, broadcast by the Guardian in January(4), the head of easyJet, Andy Harrison, told me that there was no point in expanding airports outside the south-east because the demand wouldn’t materialise. According to the chief executive of the International Air Transport Association, “Business habits are changing and corporate travel budgets have been slashed. Video conferencing is now a stronger competitor.”(5) Companies have finally twigged that hoisting 80kg of human 10,000 metres into the air whenever you want to have a conversation is a waste of time and money.
Yet the government’s projections have scarcely changed. In December 2006, before the industry’s crisis began, it predicted that demand would double by 2030, to 465m passengers a year(6). Its latest forecast, published in January 2009, downgrades this estimate by 2% - to 455m(7). Its graph shows a modest decline in the rate of growth for a couple of years, after which the steep rise resumes(8).
Even when this graph was published it was wrong: passenger numbers were already dropping rather than growing more slowly. Now it looks ridiculous. Yet the government refuses to change course. Just as the Chancellor of the Exchequer issues ever more fantastical economic forecasts, so the Department for Transport sticks to its flight path over the cuckoo’s nest. It still insists that airports produce master plans to accommodate growth that the industry regards as pure fantasy. This is a government in denial.
Now here’s an even odder thing. For years campaigners have said that the government should intervene to discourage the growth in flying. More flights means more misery for the people living underneath. It also means more global warming. In 2007, before the airline crisis began, air transport turnover (including freight) in the UK was £20bn(9). Aviation accounted for 0.78% of total business turnover(10), a smaller proportion than the machinery rental sector(11). Yet it produced 13% of the United Kingdom’s greenhouse gas emissions(12). The case for impeding further growth seemed strong.
Ministers responded that you can’t buck the market: it would be wrong for government to interfere. So here’s the kicker. I’ve just received the last response to the information requests my researcher, Ketty Dean, has been making about airport policy. Our research shows that over the past ten years government agencies have spent £80m on helping private enterprise to increase the number of flights.
Airports in the UK are – or are supposed to be – commercial operations. Airport companies build them then recoup their money by leasing space and landing rights to carriers and renting out pitches for shops. Until we had completed this research, government policy looked wrong but consistent: the free market was being allowed to let rip, regardless of the environmental consequences. Now we know that the government has intervened to accelerate this growth.
Of the £80m, £17m has been spent by bodies controlled by the national assemblies. Scottish Enterprise has spent £8m on developing air routes between Scottish airports and English or European cities, and on subsidies and grants to British Airways, Ryanair, Loganair and BAA. Invest Northern Ireland has spent £3m on developing new air routes. The Welsh Assembly Government has paid £6m to construct and run a new airport terminal, subsidise the Scottish company Highland Airways, give the airlines discounts for airport charges and market flights from Cardiff to Paris and Barcelona.
These payments are unwarranted, outrageous, disgraceful. The devolved governments are spending our sparse discretionary funds on wrecking the environment and subsidising the shopping trips, holidays and second homes of the middle classes (who take the majority of flights). But at least, in the three smaller nations, we can vote the idiots who approved these grants out of office. Our national agencies, though run by corporate bureaucrats, are directly accountable to the national parliaments. The English have no such luck.
The remaining £63m has been spent by the English regional development agencies (RDAs). All nine of them have been wasting public money on supporting the aviation industry. The Guardian has posted the full spreadsheet on its website(13), but here are a few highlights. One North East has spent £11m on new routes and land to help airports expand. The North West Regional Development Agency has coughed up £12m for baggage handling, aircraft parking and marketing. Yorkshire Forward has spent £16m, mostly on refurbishing two hangars at Robin Hood airport. The South West Regional Development Agency has spent £19m on extending the airport terminals at Bristol and Bournemouth, aircraft parking at Exeter and airport works at Plymouth and Newquay. In all cases it has encouraged people to fly when they might otherwise have taken the train.
What can you do about it? Next to nothing. With the exception of the London development agency (a fairly modest spender), the RDAs are subject to no direct democratic scrutiny. They are nominally accountable to unelected regional chambers. From next year these will be replaced by local authority leaders’ boards(14). In principle this is a form of photocopy democracy: an elected body appoints a leader, who joins a committee to oversee another committee. Democracy becomes fainter and greyer with every transfer of power. But it’s not even this good. The government has decided that the RDAs and the leaders’ boards will have joint responsibility for producing regional strategies and monitoring their delivery(15), which means that the development agencies set their own terms of reference and assess their own performance. There are nine regional ministers in central government, but they are not charged with holding the development agencies to account(16). The RDAs (except London’s) are directly answerable to no one.
All nine of them are chaired by corporate executives, three of whom were previously senior officials at the big business lobby group the Confederation of British Industry(17). Whatever their official purpose (promoting regeneration and sustainable development, raising skills), without proper oversight the RDAs have turned into pork distribution offices, handing out lavish grants to undeserving causes.
This is what happens when the government ducks the issue of English democracy. The only nation in the UK without a parliament, England is now run by a new class of plenipotentiary: unelected, unaccountable, known to big business, not the electorate. You’ve just seen the result, but how do you mobilise against it?
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/16/uk-air-passenger-numbers-decrease-recession
2. ibid.
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/25/airlines-letter-baa-gatwick
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/jan/14/george-monbiot-andy-harrison
5. http://www.routesonline.com/news/34/travelmole-news/27939/worlds-airlines-set-to-lose-9-billion
6. Department for Transport, December 2006. The Future of Air Transport Progress Report, para 4.11.http://www.dft.gov.uk/about/strategy/whitepapers/air/aviationprogressreportsection/aviationprogressreport
7. Department for Transport, January 2009. UK Air Passenger Demand and CO2 Forecasts, para 1.7.http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/aviation/atf/co2forecasts09/co2forecasts09.pdf
8. ibid, Figure 1.2.
9. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/abi/section_i.asp
10. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/abi/whole_econ.asp
11. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/abi/section_k.asp
12.http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070502/text/70502w0005.htm
13. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/jul/07/airports
14. http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/briefings/snpc-05069.pdf
15. DCLG and BERR, 25th November 2008. Prosperous Places: taking forward the review of sub-national economic development and regeneration: the Government response to public consultation, page 15.http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/citiesandregions/pdf/1073344.pdf
16. Lucinda Maer, 26th June 2009. Regional Accountability at Westminster, page 8. House of Commons Library.http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/briefings/snpc-04411.pdf
Climate Campers Kick-Start “Anti-Bank” Holiday Weekend
August 28, 2009
This afternoon, over 100 Climate Campers, many of them first-time activists, planned and took part in a protest that exposed Barclays extensive and expensive involvement in global injustices. (1)
Walking straight up to the entrance of Barclay’s on Canary Wharf, the group plastered notices across the front of the building, and unfurled a brightly coloured banner saying “More Future, Less Capitalism.” The group also briefly blocked the road with a banner condemning the bank’s involvement in “killer coal”.
Raymond Tilby, who took part in the demonstration, said:
“I think it’s really important to highlight the involvement of banks like Barclays in climate change. This follows the pattern of big businesses trying to hide behind greenwash.”
“Both climate change and the arms trade are contributing to the death and suffering of millions, putting profit before both people and planet.” (2)
More groups from the Climate Camp are expected to take part in direct actions against climate criminals over the Bank Holiday weekend.
For comments and interviews:
Contact: Climate Camp Media Team - 07040 900905, 07772 861 099 or 0793 209 6677
On Protest – Sophie Williams or Sam Johnson - 07792 813907
Photos will shortly be available http://climatecamp.org.uk/actions/london-2009/photography Please contact photographers with enquiries about commercial reproduction.
Notes to the Editors
- Barclays has had involvement in up to $6 billion in coal related industries, and holds over $7 billion of shares in the arms trade.
- The UN estimates the annual death toll of climate change to be 300,000.
Printing Police Lies
The rightwing press has briefly turned against the police, but normal service will soon resume.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 21st April 2009
If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has been twatted by the police. As the tabloids turn their fire onto an unfamiliar target - the unprovoked aggression of Her Majesty’s constabulary - the love affair between the cops and the rightwing press has never been more fragile.
The policing of the G20 protests at the beginning of this month was routine. Policemen hiding their identification numbers and beating up peaceful protesters is as much a part of British life as grey skies and red buses. Across 20 years of protests, I have seen policemen swapping their jackets to avoid identification, hurling people against vans and into walls and whomping old ladies over the head with batons. A friend had his head repeatedly bashed against the bonnet of a police van; he was then charged with criminal damage to the van. I have seen an entire line of police turn round to face the other way when private security guards have started beating people up. I have seen them refuse – until Amnesty International got involved – to investigate my own case when I was hospitalised by these licensed thugs (the guards had impaled my foot on a metal spike, smashing the middle bone).
But none of this featured in the conservative press. The story was always the same: we would stagger home after our peaceful protests were attacked by uniformed skinheads to discover that we were “Anarchist Thugs on the Rampage” whose attempt to destroy civilisation had been thwarted only by the calm professionalism of the police. Violent police action mutated into violent protests. The papers believed everything the police told them.
This began to change when the police foolishly attacked a Countryside Alliance march in 2004. In the spirit of impartial policing, the cops gave these reactionaries the treatment they had been doling out to generations of progressives. It was grotesque, disportionate and entirely familiar policing, but there’s a world of difference between bloodstained hemp ponchos and bloodstained tweeds. The exposure of the lies the police then told about the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and the shooting of Mohammed Abdul Kahar made the newspapers - which had reproduced the official version - feel stung.
In other circumstances, Ian Tomlinson, the passer-by who died after being thrown to the ground by police, would have been treated by the press as a violent anarchist who had assaulted the road with his body. But video footage and disillusionment has changed that - for a few days at least. On Friday the front page of the Daily Express carried lurid pictures of the injuries sustained by a woman at the G20 protests, under the headline “Police Did This to Me: It was just like being whipped by the Taliban”.
Yesterday the Daily Mail posted up a film made by climate camp activists(1). Its columnist Melanie Phillips, who is yet to be celebrated for her support of radical causes, opined that “there are always elements in the ranks [of the police] who want to give people a good kicking.”(2) A column in the Telegraph explained that “there are individuals who join the police just because they like hitting people”(3), while the Spectator lamented the “disgraceful actions of a few Met officers”(4). Today’s Guardian poll suggests that the police are losing the wider battle for public opinion too.
The papers maintain that a few rogue officers got out of control. But as testimonies collected by Climate Camp’s legal team show, police violence at the G20 demos was organised and systematic(5). It is true that the police appear to have been carried away by testeria (a useful word which describes testosterone-fuelled male rampages). But this keeps happening, and senior officers make no attempt to prevent it.
Before the protests, the police fed stories to the media about terrorist plots hatched by G20 demonstrators(6). “We’re up for it and we’re up to it,” Commander Simon O’Brien told the press(7). Organisers from Climate Camp asked if they could attend police briefings to journalists in order to put their side of the story. They were rebuffed. The police initially refused to meet them even to discuss the protesters’ intentions. The police plan was called Operation Glencoe: it was named after the site of a notorious massacre.
If the police at the G20 protests were pumped-up, testerical, itching for a fight, it was partly because their commanding officers have spent years blurring the distinction between peaceful campaigners and terrorists. Until recently, this strategy worked well: by turning quiet protests into angry confrontations, the police could show the public that unless they received ever greater powers and resources, the country would be overrun by violent mobs. Now it has backfired.
Don’t expect this momentary backlash to change anything. The police appear impervious to criticism. Just eight days before the G20 protests, the parliamentary select committee on human rights published a report on the policing of protests(8). It recommended that “counter-terrorism powers should never be used against peaceful protestors”; and that “the presumption should be in favour of protests taking place without state interference”. The police ignored it. They used counter-terrorism powers to stop and search climate campers having supper at an Indian restaurant(9); they sought to prevent peaceful actions from taking place. Interestingly, they also appeared to allow a group of genuine rioters to break into a branch of RBS. This too is a familiar pattern: the police beat up peaceful protesters and stand by when vandals create some easy headlines for the tabloids.
The public revulsion towards the police lies about Mr de Menezes didn’t prevent them from attempting a similar cover-up over the death of Ian Tomlinson. Just as the furore over Mr Tomlinson reached its peak, the police again curtailed the right to protest when they pre-emptively arrested 114 people close to a power station(10). Their purpose was to impose sweeping bail conditions on the protesters, which will come in very handy when the decision to build a new coal-burning power station at Kingsnorth in Kent is announced. Yesterday the Guardian published evidence of collusion between the police and Kingsnorth’s operator, E.On(11).
The police behave like this, despite the opprobium of left and right, because they know they will get away with it. They know that the government won’t rein them in; that the Independent Police Complaints Commission eats out of their hands; that the sternest sanction an officer can expect for beating or killing a passer-by is some extended gardening leave. They know that in a few days’ time the rightwing press will revert to publishing stories about the anarchist baby-eaters seeking to turn Britain into a bloodbath.
But something else has changed in this country: the resolution of the protesters. Despite repeated assaults, they appear to become better organised and less afraid. That, so soon after Operation Glencoe, 114 people were prepared to risk arrest and another beating testifies to the resilience of this movement. These people know that protest is not a threat to democracy but its cornerstone. They know that the issues they contest outweigh any harm they may suffer. They know that getting beaten up is a sign that state has lost the argument.
www.monbiot.com
References:
3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/5178573/Police-hurt-themselves-in-a-propaganda-war.html
4. http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/3539761/brutality-exposed.thtml
5. The Climate Camp Legal Team, 18th April 2009. Demonstrating Respect For Rights?
The Policing Of The Climate Camp In The City On 1 April 2009.http://climatecamp.org.uk/themes/ccamptheme/files/report.pdf
6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/30/g20-protest-explosives-plot-arrests
7. http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news6723.php
8. House of Lords, House of Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights, 23rd March 2009. Demonstrating respect for rights? A human rights approach to policing protest.http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt200809/jtselect/jtrights/47/47i.pdf
9. The Climate Camp Legal Team, ibid.
10. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/13/nottingham-police-raid-environmental-campaigners
11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/20/police-intelligence-e-on-berr
Behind the label: Chain lube
Pat Thomas, The Ecologist Magazine
I know, I know. Every time you think you've gone your greenest, some killjoy comes along and raises the bar a little higher. Apologies in advance.
There are an estimated 20 million bikes in the UK, though it’s not clear how many are sitting in a shed in the garden and how many are actually used for regular transportation. In fact, hard facts on bike usage, production, sales, imports, exports and trade are hard to come by, and constantly changing, which means it is extremely time-consuming to assemble statistics and keep them up-to-date.
What is clear is that if you are one of the growing number of people who commutes as often as possible by bicycle, you really are doing your bit for the environment: according to the Worldwatch Institute, a short, four-mile round-trip by bicycle keeps about 15lb of pollutants out of the air we breathe. Bicycles are also more economical to make and run, since, once on the road, they require muscle power rather than fossil fuels to keep going.
Like every kind of vehicle, however, bicycles require regular maintenance to run well and be safe. In particular, your bike chain needs regular attention. An un-oiled chain suffers excess friction and, eventually, from rust, inhibiting performance and efficiency.
We have a lot of bike-riders at the Ecologist, so it came as quite a shock one lunchtime when, while doing a bit of necessary maintenance, one of them looked at the label of his can of chain lube to see the words ‘hazardous’ and ‘irritant’ alongside a giant black cross on an orange background.
Other brands seen since contain warnings such as ‘dangerous to aquatic life’, ‘dangerous for the environment’ and ‘harmful if swallowed... may cause lung damage’. On any product, such dire warnings should at least cause you to think twice before buying – and using – it.
Read the full article free, at this link: TheEcologist.org
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