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A climate of change: Heathrow airport demo
Helen Pidd and John Vidal, Guardian
A rainbow coalition of angry residents, greens and a local MP will defy BAA to join next week’s Heathrow camp.
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Only three people in the world are in on the secret of where the second Camp for Climate Action is going to set up next week. All anyone else – including the rest of the 150-strong organising team – knows is that it will be somewhere near Heathrow airport. If they want to find out exactly how near, they are to be at Staines railway station in west London on Tuesday by 10am. Then, after many months of planning, all will be revealed.
Though as many as 1,500 people are expected for the six-day gathering, no one even seems sure who will be there, beyond the activists, scientists, farmers, anti-capitalists and local residents who have already publicly RSVP-ed.
It’s irritating for the 600 police charged with protecting one of the world’s biggest airports from disruption at a time of heightened terrorism concerns – not to mention the 1,800 extras who will be drafted in next week. And it’s confusing for BAA, which on top of all its other woes believes Heathrow will be disrupted in one of the busiest weeks of the year.
This, though, is the new face of protest in Britain – somewhere between a DIY Glastonbury and Seattle, a rave and a seminar, with as broad a cross-section of people as can be found in Britain. The camp will be somewhere with no leaders, no named groups, no constitutions, and no chairman, but where people organise themselves, with all decisions made by consensus. Together they will erect a tented sustainable town, set up wind and solar power systems, plumb compost toilets, schedule 100 workshops, provide catering and music, bars, shuttle buses – and then break off to hold a day of mass protest that will involve direct, and quite probably illegal, action.
The catalyst was last year’s first climate camp at Drax power station in Yorkshire, when at least 600 people spent a week plotting a new utopia. They failed to close Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, but it took thousands of police officers from seven forces to stop them.
The camp spawned other radical climate change groups around Britain. Every month since, meetings have been held to discuss the next action.
(11 August 2007)
Related at the Guardian (there doesn’t seem to be much coverage in the U.S. press)
Police to use terror laws on Heathrow climate protesters
Heathrow protesters keep site a secret
Rising temperatures “will stunt rainforest growth”
Michael Hopkin, Nature
Plants suffering in the heat could make global warming worse.
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Global warming could cut the rate at which trees in tropical rainforests grow by as much as half, according to more than two decades’ worth of data from forests in Panama and Malaysia. The effect – so far largely overlooked by climate modellers – could severely erode or even remove the ability of tropical rainforests to remove carbon dioxide from the air as they grow.
The study shows that rising average temperatures have reduced growth rates by up to 50% in the two rainforests, which have both experienced climate warming above the world average over the past few decades. The trend is shown by data stretching back to 1981 collected from hundreds of thousands of individual trees.
If other rainforests follow suit as world temperatures rise, important carbon stores such as the pristine old-growth forests of the Amazon could conceivably stop storing as much carbon, says Ken Feeley of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum in Boston, who presented the research at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in San Jose, California.
(10 August 2007)
Energy workers choose path for survival
Tony Maher, Courier Mail (Australia)
WITH the launch of our TV ad campaign, we have been asked why Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union workers are promoting action on climate change? Aren’t we the beneficiaries of the single greatest source of greenhouse emissions?
Isn’t it in the interests of miners to back the Prime Minister in denying that climate change is a real threat?
I accept that the ad campaign caught a few by surprise and that it raises a few questions – after all, the decision to embrace the climate change debate head-on and in such a public way is not a decision our members have taken lightly.
In fact, our rank and file debated and discussed the proposition to campaign on climate change in every single mine and power station around the nation, before voting overwhelmingly to embark on this course of action.
The decision to back the campaign did not surprise me – for more than a decade the union has been an active participant in the climate change debate – after all our members and our families’ livelihoods are at the pointy end of the debate.
Our union attended the Rio Earth Summit back in the 1990s. We were at Kyoto where most of the world’s developed nations – with the shameful exception of Australia – embraced action to create a system of carbon trading. And we have engaged with our members to create our own policy on greenhouse – the first mining union anywhere in the world to take this initiative.
…Business needs certainty too. If mining companies invest billions into new technology they must receive a guarantee that such clean energy will have a market share.
For example, driving new clean coal technologies like carbon capture and geosequestration will reduce the impact of coal on the environment. As most mainstream thinkers agree, coal will remain a large part of the world’s energy mix for the foreseeable future – the real challenge is to minimise its harmful impacts.
At the same time, we need to be investing in and embracing renewable energy sources. Our argument is that without a clear Clean Energy Target – backed with a carbon trading regime – we will never have the incentive to invest in these new technologies.
Tony Maher is the mining and energy national president of the CFMEU.
(9 August 2007)
