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German Churches Set Up Energy Firm to Fight Rising Fuel Prices
Ulrike Hummel, Deutsche Welle
To counter rising fuel prices, a group of Catholic and Protestant Churches in southern Germany has set up its own one of a kind non-profit energy company to supply gas to parishes and charitable institutions.
Hit hard by spiraling energy prices, four big Catholic and Protestant churches in the southwestern German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg have joined forces to create the Society for the Supply of Energy to Church and Social Institutions (KSE) last month.
The company aims to provide gas some 10 percent below market prices in Germany by January 2009.
It’s hoped the venture will help the churches get a grip on runaway energy prices…
(18 August 2008)
Climate change is not anarchy’s football
George Monbiot, Guardian
In seeking to put politics ahead of action, Ewa Jasiewicz is engaging in magical thinking of the most desperate kind
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If you want a glimpse of how the movement against climate change could crumble faster than a summer snowflake, read Ewa Jasiewicz’s article, published yesterday on Comment is free. It is a fine example of the identity politics that plagued direct action movements during the 1990s, and from which the new generation of activists has so far been mercifully free.
Jasiewicz rightly celebrates the leaderless, autonomous model of organising that has made this movement so effective. The two climate camps I have attended – this year and last – were among the most inspiring events I’ve ever witnessed. I am awed by the people who organised them, who managed to create, under extraordinary pressure, safe, functioning, delightful spaces in which we could debate the issues and plan the actions which thrust Heathrow and Kingsnorth into the public eye. Climate camp is a tribute to the anarchist politics that Jasiewicz supports.
But in seeking to extrapolate from this experience to a wider social plan, she makes two grave errors. The first is to confuse ends and means. She claims to want to stop global warming, but she makes that task 100 times harder by rejecting all state and corporate solutions. It seems to me that what she really wants to do is to create an anarchist utopia, and to use climate change as an excuse to engineer it.
Stopping runaway climate change must take precedence over every other aim.
(22 August 2008)
Ewa Jasiewicz’s article is online: Time for a revolution (“There can be no state solutions to climate change: governments won’t give up the powers that lead to environmental ruin”)
UK risks climate leadership over dirty coal, say US groups
Juliette Jowit, Guardian
The British government will lose its leadership position on climate change and risk scuppering a global deal to cut emissions if it presses ahead with a new generation of dirty coal power, say leading US scientists and environmental leaders.
The heads of three influential groups, representing more than 2 million members, have written to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, warning that the UK proposals for up to eight new coal plants threatens the chance of the US joining a post-Kyoto international agreement to be agreed in 2009.
It is the first public sign of growing international anger over the plans and will add to pressure on Miliband and the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, to oppose the government’s new coal policy in cabinet. Most immediate is the decision on whether to approve the first major planning application for a new coal plant at Kingsnorth in Kent, the site of this month’s Climate Camp protest.
(22 August 2008)
