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Beneath Heathrow’s pall of misery, a new political movement is born
George Monbiot, Guardian
It was not flawless, but the climate camp was still the most democratic and best organised protest I’ve witnessed
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There are plenty of people at the Heathrow climate camp who say they are campaigning on behalf of their children. But when Alf Pereira spoke on Sunday outside the church in Harmondsworth, we knew he meant it. His daughter died of bronchial problems caused, he believes, by pollution from the airport. She was buried in the graveyard behind us. He fears that if a third runway is built, the developers will disinter her.
Until this week, Mr Pereira’s voice was drowned by the roar of jet engines. The people of the villages around the airport have been campaigning for years against the threat of expansion, but no one in power has listened. Both the government and the airports operator BAA appear determined to evict the living and raise the dead.
Heathrow is already the busiest international airport on earth. The new runway and the terminal and approach roads it needs would demolish around 1,200 homes; one primary school will be flattened; six others will be permanently blighted by noise. Separated from the rest of Heathrow, this would, in effect, be a second airport.
…In a previous article I showed that, depending on whether you believe the government’s figures or those produced by academic researchers, by 2050 the greenhouse gases produced by the UK’s air passengers will equate to between 91% and 258% of the carbon dioxide the government says the whole economy should be producing. Its airport expansion plans, in conjunction with those of other nations, will cause runaway climate change even if we were to spend the rest of our lives shivering in the dark. So much for the economic benefits of new runways.
The people seeking to prevent this expansion know that when the government supports a development, explaining your objections at its public inquiries is about as much use as shaking your fist at the sky. An elaborate theatre of consultation and democracy is designed only to hide the fact that the decision has already been made.
So what else do the critics of direct action expect us to do? How else do they suggest we drag this issue out of the shadows and thrust it to the front of the public mind?
We did not get everything right. The media strategy was hopeless: sympathetic journalists were excluded, while unsympathetic journalists went undercover and stayed in the camp for as long as they wanted. But in other respects it was better organised, more democratic and more disciplined than any I have seen before. It drew on the protests of the 1990s but introduced two new elements: much better logistics and a model of popular democracy imported from Latin America.
(21 August 2007)
US Castoffs Resuming Dirty Career
Beth Daley, Boston Globe
Old plants, buses are sold to poorer nations
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TURNERS FALLS, Massachusetts — Some townspeople in this 19th-century mill village on the Connecticut River celebrated when workers began tearing down a shuttered coal-fired power plant this year. First, they dismantled the towering boiler. In June, the smokestack that belched hundreds of thousands of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air came down. Last month, workers hauled away the five-story steel skeleton, leaving just a concrete silo as a reminder of this local icon of global warming.
But the demolition is hardly a victory in the battle against manmade climate change.
Virtually every piece of the 2,600-ton plant is being shipped to Guatemala to be rebuilt, girder by girder, to power a textile mill that sells pants, shirts, and sportswear to the United States. It could last, and continue to pollute, for another 50 years.
From 4-ton trucks to 40-ton boilers, US vehicles and equipment are finding a second life in developing countries — postponing meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by inefficiently using energy or directly emitting carbon dioxide.
(19 August 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
Greenhouse Development Rights: Climate-Clean and Fair?
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
…Those of us in the developed world, especially North America, have pumped out a heck of a lot more greenhouse gasses than people anywhere in the developing world, and for far longer. However, the growth in emissions is very much concentrated in the developing world — especially fast-industrializing nations like China, Brazil, India, South Africa and Mexico. Any plan which does not curtail the growth in developing world emissions will fail.
Leaders of those nations quite rightly point out both that they did not create this mess, and that per capita, their peoples still emit far less carbon pollution than the average citizen of an industrialized nation. They argue that they have a right to develop, and if changes must be made, they must be made first by those of us who bear the largest responsibility.
So finding the balance between our practical need to slash emissions and our ethical obligation to distribute repsonsibility fairly is a pretty central task in any global climate plan we may create as a successor to Kyoto.
That’s why the latest global issue paper from the Heinrich Boll foundation, bearing the unfortunate titleA Brief, Adequacy and Equity-Based Evaluation of Some Prominent Climate Policy Frameworks and Proposals (PDF), is actually quite provocative.
(16 August 2007)
Getting Cold to Spread Global Warming Message
Reuters via Common Dreams
Hundreds of people posed naked on Switzerland’s shrinking Aletsch glacier today for US photographer Spencer Tunick as part of a Greenpeace campaign to raise awareness of global warming.
Tunick, perched on a ladder and using a megaphone, directed nearly 600 volunteers from all over Europe and photographed them on a rocky outcrop overlooking the glacier, which is the largest in the Alps.
Later he took pictures of them standing in groups on the mass of ice and lying down. Camera crews were staged at five different points on the glacier to take photographs.
Glaciers are sensitive to climate change and have been receding since the start of the industrial age but the pace of shrinkage has accelerated in recent years.
…Tunick has staged mass nude photo shoots in cities across the world, from Newcastle in Britain to Mexico City, where a record 18,000 people took off their clothes in the Mexican capital’s Zocalo square in May.
…Switzerland has about 1800 glaciers and almost all of them are losing ground.
(19 August 2007)
Warming Will Exacerbate Global Water Conflicts
Doug Struck, Washington Post
… A few miles south of Fresno, Steve Arthur is looking the other way for water. His company is working around the clock drilling wells to irrigate fields in California’s 400-mile-long Central Valley, one of the most productive food-growing areas in the world.
“People are really starting to panic for water,” said Arthur, whose father started drilling wells in 1959. They must drill ever deeper to tap the sinking water table. “Eventually, the water will be so deep the farmers won’t be able to afford to pump it,” he said. “There’s only so much water to go around.”
As global warming heats the planet, there will be more desperate measures. The climate will be wetter in some places, drier in others. Changing weather patterns will leave millions of people without dependable supplies of water for drinking, irrigation and power, a growing stack of studies conclude.
At Stanford University, 170 miles away, Stephen Schneider, editor of the journal Climatic Change and a lead author for the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), pours himself a cup of tea and says the future is clear.
“As the air gets warmer, there will be more water in the atmosphere. That’s settled science,” he said. But where, and when, it comes down is the big uncertainty.
“You are going to intensify the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long, dry periods. Where the atmosphere is configured to be wet, you will get more rain, more gully washers.
“Global warming will intensify drought,” he says. “And it will intensify floods.”
According to the IPCC, that means a drying out of areas such as southern Europe, the Mideast, North Africa, South Australia, Patagonia and the U.S. Southwest.
(20 August 2007)
