CLIMACTION

STOP THE GREENWASH!- Skycity Protest today

2008-08-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

Today; inside Sky City- the 4th Australia-New Zealand climate change and business conference is underway. This is a chance for the biggest polluting companies of both nations to get together and figure out how they’re going to keep causing the world’s most catastrophic environmental and social disaster human beings have ever been subjected to, while at the same time giving us all the impression that everything is fine. They would like you to think that business can keep ticking along as usual as long as you buy some new fancy lightbulbs and shut up, but this ain’t the case. Lets take a look at their credentials…

Fonterra - The worlds second biggest Dairy exporter and New Zealand's most powerful company. New Zealand's Agricultural sector is responsible for producing 49% of the country's greenhouse gases, with Dairy responsible for the biggest increases since 1990, for wrecking the country's rivers, driving small family farms out of the industry and being the single largest driver of deforestation including that of native forests. Fonterra is by far NZ enviro-criminal number one yet is exempt from climate change legislation , leaving it up to you, your taxes and your children to deal with the problem.

Genesis Energy - Owner of Huntly power station, the biggest source of carbon dioxide in NZ are now promoting carbon capture and storage technology. CC&S as it is known is one of the latest technological fairytales the coal industry have conjured up to delay real solutions coming into place to deal with climate change. Genesis are in the process of building a new Gas fired power station just North of Auckland despite a so called ‘moratorium’ on new thermal powered electricity generation. Rio Tinto Aluminum New Zealand - These guys own Tiwai Point aluminum smelter which devours 15% of New Zealand’s electricity generated each year. Rio Tinto, one of the worlds biggest mining companies holds a legacy of environmental, labor and human rights violations in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Namibia, Madagascar, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere.

Solid Energy - A state owned enterprise which was exposed last year for paying a private investigations company to spy on the environmentalist group 'Save Happy Valley coalition'. The investigations company is currently in court facing charges of using illegal investigative techniques. Internationally, Solid energy has recently secured an $80 million contract to supply 'coking coal' to the Tata group, India's largest private company. Coking coal is used in steel manufacturing and Tata have designed the world's cheapest car with PricewaterhouseCoopers suggesting that by halving the cost of India's entry-level vehicle Tata could create 1.8 million new car buyers. How stupid is this??

So would you trust these charactars to halt climate change? The point we’re making here today is that asking big business to look after the environment is a bit like asking a monkey to mind a banana. Executives who work for massive companies like these are legally obliged to maximise shareholder value no matter what. The climate, your welfare and that of your family, community, children simply dosen’t come into it. These are the same companies and people who organise campaigns to make sure that climate change legislation and our safety doesn’t get in the way of their profits and therefore is rendered useless. The New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme is such an example of rubbish legislation made even worse by the people inside Sky City today.

Get out there and Get active on climate change, because they don’t give a damn about you

What sort of society can save the planet?

2008-08-14T04:20:00.001-07:00

A sustainable future requires a radical break with capitalism, argues Martin Empson

There is no doubt that capitalism is bad for the planet. Multinationals exploit natural resources in the interest of profit, pumping their waste into our rivers, oceans and atmosphere.

Vast regions of the world are stripped bare in the search for coal and other minerals. Entire ecosystems are destroyed in the hunt for profits. And the problem of climate change threatens the planet as a whole.

Capitalism isn’t the first economic system to exploit the natural resources of the planet. However it is the first to do so on an industrial scale, using advanced technologies to maximise profits. This relentless drive to make money out of the world’s resources means there is no chance for the planet’s ecosystems to recover naturally.

In the past natural mechanisms would break down greenhouse gases before they would even approach a level that could trigger climate change. But ever since we started systematically burning fossil fuels, the amount of these gases pumped into the air has increased dramatically.

We now produce more greenhouse gases, and as their concentrations increase, they threaten to destabilise the world’s environmental systems to such an extent that life as we know it may be endangered.

Wasteful

What is true of climate change is also true of many other aspects of the environment. Capitalism’s short term interests are incompatible with the preservation of the natural world upon which society rests.

Capitalism is also tremendously wasteful. It is more profitable for companies to manufacture single-use packaging than reusable materials. Colossal amounts of money and resources are wasted on advertising. Bureaucrats and managers waste their lives working on jobs that have little social benefit. Inefficiency is built into the system.

And meanwhile we see the obscenity of massive overproduction of goods existing side by side with people starving because they don’t have the money to access the basic necessities of life. Capitalism is an unsustainable and unjust economic system.

Karl Marx described a “irreparable rift” between the natural world and humanity under capitalism. He argued that this relationship could only be restored through the rational organisation of society in the interests of people today and of future generations:

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.”

But what would a sustainable society look like? If capitalism cannot exist in balance with nature, how would we organise an alternative society that could?

Some aspects of what such a society would look like are quite straightforward. Instead of relying on fossil fuels, a sustainable society would generate the bulk of its energy from renewable sources. Such a society would need to use dramatically less energy in total.

Houses and offices would be properly insulated. Wasteful industries would either be made more efficient or be eliminated altogether.

Combined plants would produce both heat and power. Instead of venting waste heat into the sky, as they do today, this energy could be used to heat local buildings. Such a scheme at Battersea power station heated homes for 11,000 people at the end of the Second World War.

Collective

A sustainable city would have massively improved public transport systems. We would reduce reliance on cars, which are inefficient, dangerous and polluting, with better provision for cyclists and pedestrians. Over time we would redesign our towns and cities to ensure that the era of the long commute was over.

Longer distance transport would be shifted towards fast, efficient and cheap railways. Current airport expansion plans are thoroughly unsustainable – but this shouldn’t be a barrier to travel abroad.

Finally, a sustainable society would be one where collective social institutions, such as creches and laundrettes, would be much more common.

It’s not impossible to imagine many of these changes taking place under capitalism. But the problem is that production under capitalism is organised in the interests of profit, irrespective of the interests of people or the planet.

Indeed capitalist production often runs directly against the needs of society as a whole. In recent years, vast tracts of agricultural land have been shifted to the hugely profitable business of the growing of biofuels, rather than being used to produce food that could feed the starving.

In contrast, a sustainable society would be one where production is rationally and democratically organised. Every aspect of production, from the goods manufactured in factories to the design of computer software, needs to be collectively planned.

For many people, the idea of a planned economy brings to mind the bureaucratic command structures of the former Soviet Union, where a few unelected and unaccountable individuals made all the decisions.

Rather than produce for people’s needs, this system usually led to inefficiency, pollution and, at worst, terrible environmental disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

The socialist vision of a planned economy is entirely different. Genuine planning can only occur in the context of informed debate over every aspect of production.

Production decisions at each workplace would be made in conjunction with overall strategies on a city-wide, national and even international level.

Under capitalism each country tends to organise its own production in its own interest. But a more rational society would recognise the unequal distribution of natural resources and ensure that every region of the world had access to the materials it needed.

If we want to seriously deal with the problem of climate change and its consequences, then we need this kind of planning on an international scale. While the United Nations might come up with targets for carbon emissions today, there is no mechanism for implementing or enforcing these.

A rationally organised world would be able to decide what reductions were required and then ask every industry, city and workplace to come up with strategies for reducing emissions.

Every individual would be involved in deciding how to implement the required changes. Planning would eliminate overproduction and concentrate resources on developing better goods rather than chasing profits.

Planning requires social ownership – but the logic of capitalism is to divide the world into private property.

The people who own and control the factories and workplaces, the mines, forests and farms, won’t give them up easily. They will want to hold on to their wealth and power.

Mass movement

So this ruling class will have to be challenged by a mass movement determined to redistribute the land and the factories – a movement for the revolutionary transformation of society.

People have challenged the existing system in the past, and in those attempts we can see the potential for a new, rational society that is organised and run by the mass of people who create all the wealth in society.

From the 1871 Paris Commune to the 1917 Russian Revolution, and in many struggles since, working men and women have invented organisations that have helped them take control of their own lives.

In the midst of revolution, bodies such as workers’ councils have sprung up to organise strikes and demonstrations. But these bodies have also organised production to look after the distribution of essentials to ensure that people don’t starve and are kept informed of all the latest news.

For a brief period of time after the Russian Revolution, before its isolation and defeat in the 1920s, workers ran their own factories and workplaces in the interest of the collective.

But the overthrow of capitalism won’t create a sustainable society overnight. Marx predicted that after a successful revolution, a “new society will have emerged from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.

The productive apparatus of today has been created and designed in the interest of generating profits. It would have to be radically altered and rethought. Some industries are incompatible with a vision of a long-term sustainable society – the nuclear or the arms industries, for instance.

There would be much work to be done to create this new society.

We would need to ensure it is run in the interests of the majority of people and the future of the planet. But it is only after we have removed capitalism that we can fully explore this potential to create a sustainable future.

Stop Global Warming – change the world
by Jonathan Neale

Protest the CLimate Change and Business Conference

2008-08-12T04:22:00.001-07:00

Monday 18 August - 4pm - Outside the Skycity Convention Centre 88 Federal Street Auckland

Protest the Lack of real action on climate change and demand real and adequate change.

This Monday the Climate and Business conference will be held at the Skytower Convention Centre

schedule: The event goes from Monday morning (18th) till Wednesday (20th) 5.30pm evening. - Programme available here:
http://www.climateandbusiness. com/program. html

The official start is at 4pm on Monday 18th at 4pm.

Meet outside the entrance to the Convention Centre and give a clear message that immediate action is wanted, and half way measures are not going to cut it.

Greenwash and marketing

New Zealand is known for its clean and green image, but the reality reveals something else. Emissions trading schemes are the new corporate 'solution' to rising emissions and unsustainable growth dependent on fossil fuels. Simply re-branding industries like the coal and oil industries and allowing 'offset options' for airfares does not change the reality of a warming world and changing climate.

Demand change, and call for real action and polluter pays, not public subsides and corporate wellfare for the largest polluters, like Fonterra, Comalco and NZ Steel.

Take part in the welcoming committee for the government ministers and corporate lobbyists and CEOs who are debating out future, supposedly on our behalf, and make your voice heard.

There will be other events held too.

Read more about the climate and buisness conference:
http://www.climateandbusiness. com/

Read about carbon trading and the limits of offsets:
http://carbontradewatch.gn.apc. org/

Will it take a ban on flying to stop climate change?

2007-12-14T12:40:00.000-08:00

Stopping global warming means cutting air travel. Jonathan Neale looks at how this could be done without targeting the poor

Jonathan Neale’s book Stop Global Warming: Change the World will be published by Bookmarks in next year.

Tackling climate change means cutting carbon emissions drastically. We have to start now – that’s clear. But there’s confusion over what to do about air travel.

Half of global carbon emissions come from seven sources – heating buildings, air conditioning, cars, trucks, petroleum refineries, cement plants and steel plants.

Air travel may seem less important right now. Planes are responsible for 3 percent of carbon emissions globally.

But air travel puts other, more powerful and rarer greenhouse gases directly into the stratosphere. It’s the fastest growing carbon source.

It’s true that planes now use 70 percent less fuel per mile than they did 40 years ago, and further design changes are possible. But that alone won’t be enough.

One common answer starts by saying cheap flights are the problem – so tax them heavily, and fewer people will fly.

Sounds good. But then only the rich would fly. This is the problem with all green taxes.

There is always another solution that is fairer and cuts more emissions.

For instance, you can tax cars and roads heavily. Then only the rich will drive, and ordinary workers will hate environmentalists.

A better solution is to ban cars in cities and provide excellent public transport. Then you have beautiful cities where parks replace most roads.

Again, if you tax energy and make it expensive to heat houses, the poor and the elderly will freeze. And most people will hate environmentalists every time they open their bill.

But if the government gives grants to insulate every house, we can cut energy use from heating by more than half.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California is building one million solar roofs. We could do the same in Ireland.

The way to stop global warming is almost always not to cut what we have, but to do things differently. So it is with air travel. Here are some social justice solutions that will work:

First, ban all flights in Europe. But don’t make people give up their holidays. Instead have subsidised trains that prebook until they’re full, like cheap flights.

We would need new train lines. Those trains will have to be publicly owned. Privately owned railways invest less, cut the number of trains and raise the ticket prices.

What about longer flights? One answer is to ban expensive flights, not cheap ones. Luxury transatlantic seats create four to five times as much carbon.

But much more important, much long haul travel is done by business people. There are not so many of them, but each makes many flights.

The solution is rationing. Let people have one long flight a year. But don’t let them sell that ration – they use it or lose it. The business people can teleconference.

With new railways, that means more travel, more holidays, and less carbon emissions. And if we cover the world with wind farms and solar power, we can run the railways on almost carbon free electricity.

These kinds of massive public works that create jobs and improve people’s standard of living is what will stop climate change.

Otherwise, activists lay themselves open to the right. Look what Tony Blair said about air travel. He claimed his hands were tied because ordinary people wanted their holidays, and would never stand for airport cuts.

In reality right wing governments build new airports to please business travellers.

Blair posed as the working people’s champion because he could smell the weakness in green taxes – they’re unfair.

We have to build a global mass movement to stop climate change. Time is short, and nothing less will work.

We can’t build that movement by asking ordinary people to sacrifice when the rich don’t.

In almost every area where we have to act on climate change, there is a choice. The conservative answer is to keep the economy the same. Then we have to cut living standards.

The radical answer is to change the way the economy is organised, so we can have both growth and fairness.

None of this means we wait for the new railways before we shut down runways.

We have to fight for both, now.

Marx and the Global Environmental Rift

2007-12-14T12:34:00.001-08:00

Marx and the Global Environmental Rift

Written by John Bellamy Foster

Monday, 10 December 2007

Ecology is often seen as a recent invention. But the idea that capitalism degrades the environment in a way that disproportionately affects the poor and the colonized was already expressed in the nineteenth century in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Writing in Capital in 1867 on England’s ecological imperialism toward Ireland, Marx stated: “For a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil.” Marx was drawing here on the work of the German chemist Justus von Liebig. In the introduction to the seventh (1862) edition of his Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology Liebig had argued that “Great Britain robs all countries of the conditions of their fertility” and singled out Britain’s systematic robbing of Ireland’s soil as a prime example. For Liebig a system of production that took more from nature than it put back could be referred to as a “robbery system,” a term that he used to describe industrialized capitalist agriculture.[i]

Following Liebig and other analysts of the nineteenth-century soil crisis, Marx argued that soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) were sent in the form of food and fiber sometimes hundreds and thousands of miles to the cities, where, instead of being recycled back to the land these nutrients ended up the polluting the urban centers, with disastrous results for human health. Meanwhile, faced with an increasingly impoverished soil, Britain, as Liebig pointed out, imported bones from Napoleonic battlefields and from Roman catacombs together with guano from Peru in a desperate attempt to restore nutrients to the fields. (Later on the invention of synthetic fertilizers was to help close the nutrient gap, but this was to lead to additional environmental problems, such as nitrogen runoff.)

In addressing these environmental issues Marx took over the concept of Stoffwechsel or metabolism from Liebig,[ii] describing the ecological contradiction between nature and capitalist society as “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism.” Indeed, “capitalist production,” Marx explained, “only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.” This rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature could only be overcome, he argued, through the systematic “restoration” of the metabolism between humanity and nature “as a regulative law of social organization.” But this required the rational regulation of the labor process (itself defined as the metabolic relation of human beings to nature) by the associated producers in line with the needs future generations. “Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together,” Marx stated, “are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”[iii]

Marx’s ecological discussions, coupled with those of Engels, therefore went well beyond the general understanding of his time. Today the ecological issues that Marx and Engels addressed (albeit sometimes only in passing) read like a litany of many of our most pressing environmental problems: the division of town and country, the degradation of the soil, rural isolation and desolation, overcrowding in cities, urban wastes, industrial pollution, waste recycling in industry, the decline in nutrition and health, the crippling of workers, the squandering of natural resources (including fossil fuel in the form of coal), deforestation, floods, desertification, water shortages, regional climate change, conservation of energy, the dependence of species on changing environments, historically-conditioned overpopulation tendencies, and famine.

Marx saw the materialist conception of history as related to the materialist conception of nature, the science of history as related to the science of nature. He filled his natural science notebooks with studies of geology, chemistry, agronomy, physics, biology, anthropology, and mathematics. He attended the lectures at the Royal Institution in London of the Irish-born physicist John Tyndall. Marx was fascinated by Tyndall’s experiments on radiant heat, including the differentiation of the sun’s rays.[iv] It is even possible that he was in the audience in the early 1860s when Tyndall presented results of his experiments demonstrating for the first time that water vapor and carbon dioxide were associated with a greenhouse effect that helped to retain heat within the planet’s atmosphere. (No one at that time of course suspected that the greenhouse effect interacting with carbon dioxide from the human burning of fossil fuels might lead to human-generated global climate change—a hypothesis not introduced until 1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius.)

Today the dialectical understanding with regard to nature-society interactions that Marx and Engels embraced is increasingly forced on us all, as a result of an accelerating global ecological crisis, symbolized above all by global warming. Recent research in environmental sociology has applied Marx’s theory of metabolic rift to contemporary ecological problems such as the fertilizer treadmill, the dying oceans, and climate change. Writing on the social causes of the contemporary “carbon rift,” stemming from the rapid burning up of fossil fuels, Brett Clark and Richard York have demonstrated that there is no magic cure for this problem outside of changes in fundamental social relations. Technology is unlikely substantially to alleviate the problem since gains in efficiency, according to what is known as the “Jevons Paradox” (named after William Stanley Jevons who wrote The Coal Question in 1865) lead invariably under capitalism to the expansion of production, the accompanying increases in the throughput of natural resources and energy, and more strains on the biosphere. “Technological development,” Clark and York therefore conclude, “cannot assist in mending the carbon rift until it is freed from the dictates of capital relations.”[v]

The only genuine, i.e. sustainable, solution to the global environmental rift requires, in Marx’s words, a society of “associated producers” who can “govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.”[vi] The goals of human freedom and ecological sustainability are thus inseparable and necessitate for their advancement the building of a socialism for the 21^st century.

[i] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 860; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 164. See also Erland Mårald, “Everything Circulates: Agricultural Recycling Theories in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Environment and History, vol. 8 (2002), 65-84.

[ii] As indicated in the editor’s notes to the Penguin/Vintage edition of Capital, vol. 3: “Liebig is referred to several times in both this volume and Volume 1, and it seems that Marx took from Liebig the concept of metabolism (Stoffwechsel) that he applied there, suitably transformed, to the analysis of the labour process (Chapter 7).” In Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 878.

[iii] Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 155-70. See also Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, “Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy,” Theory & Society, vol. 35 (2006), 109-56.

[iv] Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 3-4; Y. M. Uranovsky, “Marxism and Natural Science,” in Nikolai Bukharin, et. al., Marxism and Modern Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935), p. 140. In 1865 Engels reported that a chemist that he had just met—probably Carl Schorlemmer, who was to become one Engels and Marx’s closest friends, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the first individual in England to occupy a chair in organic chemistry— had explained to him Tyndall’s “sunbeam experiment.” See W. O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London: Frank Cass, 1976), vol. 1, p. 262.

[v] Brett Clark and Richard York, “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift,” Theory & Society, vol. 34 (2005), p. 419. For further work on the metabolic rift and global ecological crisis see Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark, “The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology,” Organization & Environment, vol. 18, no. 4 (2005), pp. 422-44; Philip Mancus, “Nitrogen Fertilizer Dependency and its Contradictions,” Rural Sociology, vol. 72, no. 2 (June 2007).

[vi] Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 959.

Heathrow climate protest defies anti-terrorism laws

2007-08-15T06:37:00.000-07:00

1,800 police sent in to deal with the climate camp at Heathrow - using “anti-terrorism” as an excuse

by Kelly Hilditch

New Labour’s anti-terror legislation is being used this week against protesters wanting to take part in the climate camp near Heathrow airport.

The government has given the police the go-ahead to deal “robustly” with campaigners.

This move follows the failure last week of an attempt to use anti-stalking laws to prevent protesters from “harassing” BAA, the airport corporation.

The police used anti-terror laws to stop and search everyone approaching the camp, to prevent any access to the site by vehicles, and to “inspect” the site.

The heavyhanded tactics have been paralleled by scaremongering in the mainstream media, with headlines such as “Heathrow Protesters ‘Are Terrorists’ ” and “Extremists To Hijack Climate Change Demo”.

But these tactics have not been enough to scare off the protesters. “The camp is brilliant,” one told Socialist Worker on Tuesday of this week. “People of all ages and backgrounds have been turning up to take part.”

Released

The police haven’t been exactly welcoming, he added. “A woman on her way to the camp was held for 30 hours under the legislation – then they let her go without charge. Another guy was arrested then released – the police said he looked too old to have his student rail card.

“The police are being heavyhanded because they can be. At one point they were refusing to allow water or medical supplies onto the camp. It’s basically petty bullying.”

The number of police at Heathrow has more than doubled from the 800 meant to protect the airport against a terrorist attack to the 1,800 to protect the airport from climate campaigners.

Alistair from Birmingham was cycling to the protest on Tuesday of this week.

He told Socialist Worker, “Cyclists are coming from all over to join the camp – I’ve met people who have got this far from all over Britain.

“We went to meet people near London City airport and picked up police along the way as well – at the last count there were eight coppers on bikes with us, and six vans full of police following behind.”

One activist from Edinburgh said there was anger at police use of counter-terrorism legislation to hold demonstrators:

“To invoke anti-terrorist legislation to stop us from our protest is really inappropriate and irresponsible.

“This isn’t just about people’s freedom to fly. This is about people’s freedom to live on a planet that has a future.”

The following should be read alongside this article:
» Campers win solidarity from local people against BAA

Aotearoa LIve- Stop Climate Change!

2007-07-04T15:20:00.001-07:00

Climaction- Live Earth day protest for free Public Transport

2007-05-01T18:58:00.000-07:00

Click the poster above to view it life size, then print it off and put it up for all to see!

End of the line for coal: Protestors blockade coal trains

2007-04-28T22:42:00.000-07:00

End of the line for coal: Protestors blockade coal trains

Press release: Save happy Valley Christchurch
Sunday 29th April 2007

Save Happy Valley members have locked onto the train tracks near Christchurch to call for an end to new coal mines in New Zealand. Other members have hung a twenty-two metre banner – 'Solid Energy: Govt Sponsored Climate Chaos – along two of the coal wagons. They are on Kirk Road, Templeton.

"Catastrophic climatic events are already occurring; climate change is happening now," said Graham Jury, Save Happy Valley Christchurch spokesperson. "Earlier this year New Zealand finally reached the end of the line for coal fired power stations. It must also be the end of the line for coal mining."

Two activists are locked onto the tracks, while a further twenty are on the tracks by the train. Save Happy Valley works for the protection of Happy Valley, proposed site of Solid Energy's next opencast mine on the West Coast of the South Island. The group also campaigns for a just and swift transition away from coal mining.

"Solid Energy is ever increasing its production, leaving decimated ecosystems and waterways in its wake. Already, they are responsible for annual carbon dioxide emissions approximately equivalent to New Zealand's entire transport fleet. Saying "no" to new coal mines would be an easy first step in actually addressing climate change," said Simon Riddel, one of the activists locked to the tracks.

"The world's climate is becoming increasingly unpredictable and human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are evidently responsible. The fossil fuel industry is a preventable cause," said Gregory Curline, the second activist 'on the line.'

"Half of the coal extracted is sent off shore, generating emissions outside of our Kyoto Protocol obligations. However, New Zealand is responsible for the coal it exports. The Government must pull its state owned enterprise back under control," said Mr Jury.

// ENDS

Media Contact
Graham Jury, Save Happy Valley Christchurch spokesperson, 0273070448

Notes
In March 2007, Mighty River Power, another SOE, announced that it had discarded its plans to turn Marsden B into an operational coal fired power station.

Related

* http://savehappyvalley.org.nz

Free public transport systems already exist internationally!

2007-04-21T04:25:00.000-07:00

There are a large number of free bus services. Some of these are funded by private businesses (such as the merchants in a shopping mall) in the hope that doing so will increase sales or other revenue from increased foot traffic or ease of travel. Some, such as airport connectors, are funded by government agencies to ease bottlenecks or fill short gaps in the transport network, or as part of the services offered by a public facility. Employers often operate free shuttles as a benefit to their employees, or as part of a congestion mitigation agreement with a local government.

Some activists promote the idea that all the public transportation in a given city or community should be free. They claim that this would make the system more accessible and fair for low-income residents, and provide benefits such as decreased congestion, decreased air pollution from cars and related improvements in public health, fewer traffic accidents, easier parking, savings from reduced wear and tear on roads, and savings from not having to pay for fare collection equipment and personnel.

Examples of City Wide Free Transport

Whidbey Island and Camano Island, Washington State - since 1987
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Vail, Colorado - over 20 hours of service every day during Winter
Logan, Utah and Cache Valley - Logan since 1992 and Cache Valley since 2000
Clemson, South Carolina
Commerce, California
Châteauroux, France
Compiègne, France; free bus services since 1990s
Hasselt, Belgium - free bus services since July 1, 1997 (after increasing bus service substantially), which made expensive investments in streets and parking facilities unnecessary.
Lübben, Germany - influenced by Hasselt
Mariehamn, Finland - in addition to free bus services, persons and bicycles travel free of charge with the archipelago ferries (you pay a fee for motorcycles, cars, caravans and other vehicles).
Nova Gorica, Slovenia - since April 2006.
Türi, Estonia
Vitré, France - since spring 2001.
Övertorneå, Sweden - even 70 km free rides on local buses in this rural community

Examples of Limited Free Transport

Ann Arbor, Michigan — free bus services between University of Michigan campuses and student housing. UofM students are now also able to ride all routes of the AATA buses for free by showing their student card. While not "free for all" it is included in the package for students. Also, AATA runs a service called "the Link" which runs around the downtown and campus area and is currently free (for everyone) to ride.
Auckland, New Zealand — a free CBD loop service links the ferry terminus, railway station, universities, theatres, casino, galleries and shopping districts using hybrid electric buses.
Austin, Texas - free bus service (under citywide bus system Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority) is provided between the University of Texas campus and student housing, downtown trolley buses are free as well. Regular bus routes are free during "Ozone Action Days" to encourage more car owners to ride the bus and combat high levels of ozone pollution on a given day.
Brisbane, Australia has free bus trips around "The Loop" in the CBD on two routes mirroring each other, varying only because of Brisbane's one-way street grid.
Calgary, Canada - Free light rail transit within the downtown core.
Denver, Colorado — Free 16th Street Mall shuttle bus downtown; free transit for many public school students
Dordrecht — bus and ferry, some Saturdays at the end of each year
Gent — free night bus services (weekends only)
Halifax, Nova Scotia - free bus route around the downtown area
Huddersfield, England - Free Townbus daytime bus services in town centre
Leeds, England - Free Citybus daytime bus services in city centre
London, England - buses and trams are free for people under 16, and students aged 16 and 17. People 60 or over and eligible disabled folks ride the entire system for free.
Manchester, England — Free "Metroshuttle" daytime bus services in city centre
Melbourne in Australia has a free tram around the city center, and a free bus to popular tourist attractions. Both of these connect to other public transport. Free public transport is sometimes offered on major holidays such as Christmas and New Years Eve.
Noordwijk/Oegstgeest — Leiden Transferium — The Hague, express bus, running on weekdays during daytime, free of charge as a test during 2004; it was intended for commuters working in The Hague and living in Leiden or beyond who would otherwise travel by car to the Hague, to promote parking at the Transferium and continuing the journey by bus; the aim was to reduce road traffic congestion between Leiden and The Hague. The test was paid by the province of South Holland. It was discontinued in 2005.
Perth, Australia has free bus and train trips around the city centre (the "Free Transit Zone"), including three high-frequency Central Area Transit (CAT) bus routes. This is also in Fremantle and recently added in Joondalup.
Pittsburgh, PA Free "T" light rail service within downtown. Also, students at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh receive free rides with a school ID.
Portland, Oregon (the "Fareless Square"), Seattle, Washington (the "Ride Free Area") and Calgary, Alberta (the "7th Avenue Free Fare Zone") offer free public transit within their downtowns.
Renesse (mun. Schouwen-Duiveland), Netherlands — free bus services in the area (in summer only)
Seattle, Washington — Metro Transit buses are free from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. in Downtown Seattle.^[4]
Sydney in Australia also offers occasional free public transport travel to and from events at particular times, notably New Years Eve celebrations in Sydney CBD, or to ANZAC War Memorial Services for veterans. The rationale is a mix of traffic reduction and cultural recognition.
Tarbes in France offers a year-long free shuttle bus around the city, linking the main spots.
Vienna in Austria - students under 19 can travel free on sundays and school holidays
Wakefield, England - Free Citybus daytime bus services in city centre
Washington, D.C. —Congressional Subway — small free metro system
Zagreb, Croatia - buses and trams are free for university students

Community bicycle programs, providing free bicycle for short-term public use.
some ferries, such as the Staten Island Ferry, the Woolwich Ferry and the IJ ferries in Amsterdam, which are used as an alternative to bridges, which would have been very high in the port. These are free, just as a bridge would have been.
short-distance 'public transport' such as elevator, escalator, moving sidewalk (horizontal and inclined); these are often part of a larger public transport system or business (e.g. shop), of which the products and services are not free.
the ski/tourist resort town of Templin, Germany which has free public transport for all,
*Invercargill, NZ which has free buses during off peak hours
*Brussels, Belgium, which offers free public transport passes to students and senior citizens.
*Los Angeles offers free public transport on 'Ozone Action Days" to reduce high smog/pollution levels.
*Melbourne, Australia ran all their public transport fare-free for all Commonwealth Games ticket holders throughout the Games period last year, which had a great impact on reducing traffic congestion... The 'Melbourne Age' daily newspaper was so impressed that the have been promoting a campaign for fare-free public transport for all in Melbourne

Klimax Sweden occupy Airport runway- Stop Domestic Flights

2007-04-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

On 14 April, activists broke into Bromma Airport in Stockholm to occupy the runway for half an hour. The scheduled flight to Gothenburg – a very short distance indeed – was delayed, and some planes had to divert their landing. The ten activists, linked by chains and carrying a huge banner which read “Stop domestic flights”, managed to enter the airport and runway without being detected. After some five minutes, police arrived to the scene, but refrained from violent intervention. When the blockade had been carried to its planned end, the activists were arrested and informed of the formal charge of aggravated trespass. The most likely punishment is some heavy fines, but prison terms are possible.

The action was carried out by Climax, a group in Stockholm formed two weeks ago. It is the seed of a direct action-movement against the root causes of climate change in a country which has just recently woken up to the facts of ongoing global warming. Climax is inspired by Plane Stupid and Rising Tide. The action of 14 April, coinciding with the enormous National Day of Climate Action in the U.S., was the first of its kind to occur in Sweden. More is bound to follow soon.

Global action against global warming!

Klimax Stockholm
2007-04-15

There is climate change censorship - and it's the deniers who dish it out

2007-04-11T22:25:00.000-07:00

Global warming scientists are under intense pressure to water down findings, and are then accused of silencing their critics

George Monbiot
Tuesday April 10, 2007
The Guardian

The drafting of reports by the world's pre-eminent group of climate scientists is an odd process. For months scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle over the evidence. Nothing gets published unless it achieves consensus. This means that the panel's reports are conservative - even timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a scientific document can be.

Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians sweep in and seek to excise from the summaries anything that threatens their interests.

The scientists fight back, but they always have to make concessions. The report released on Friday, for example, was shorn of the warning that "North America is expected to experience locally severe economic damage, plus substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate change related events".

This is the opposite of the story endlessly repeated in the rightwing press: that the IPCC, in collusion with governments, is conspiring to exaggerate the science. No one explains why governments should seek to amplify their own failures. In the wacky world of the climate conspiracists no explanations are required. The world's most conservative scientific body has somehow been transformed into a conspiracy of screaming demagogues.

This is just one aspect of a story that is endlessly told the wrong way round. In the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail, in columns by Dominic Lawson, Tom Utley and Janet Daley, the allegation is repeated that climate scientists and environmentalists are trying to "shut down debate". Those who say that man-made global warming is not taking place, they claim, are being censored.

Something is missing from their accusations: a single valid example. The closest any of them have been able to get is two letters sent - by the Royal Society and by the US senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe - to that delicate flower ExxonMobil, asking that it cease funding lobbyists who deliberately distort climate science. These correspondents had no power to enforce their wishes. They were merely urging Exxon to change its practices. If everyone who urges is a censor, then the comment pages of the newspapers must be closed in the name of free speech.

In a recent interview, Martin Durkin, who made Channel 4's film The Great Global Warming Swindle, claimed he was subject to "invisible censorship". He seems to have forgotten that he had 90 minutes of prime-time television to expound his theory that climate change is a green conspiracy. What did this censorship amount to? Complaints about one of his programmes had been upheld by the Independent Television Commission. It found that "the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing" and that they had been "misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part". This, apparently, makes him a martyr.

If you want to know what real censorship looks like, let me show you what has been happening on the other side of the fence. Scientists whose research demonstrates that climate change is taking place have been repeatedly threatened and silenced and their findings edited or suppressed.

The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 58% of the 279 climate scientists working at federal agencies in the US who responded to its survey reported that they had experienced one of the following constraints: 1. Pressure to eliminate the words "climate change", "global warming", or other similar terms from their communications; 2. Editing of scientific reports by their superiors that "changed the meaning of scientific findings"; 3. Statements by officials at their agencies that misrepresented their findings; 4. The disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to climate; 5. New or unusual administrative requirements that impair climate-related work; 6. Situations in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific findings. They reported 435 incidents of political interference over the past five years.

In 2003, the White House gutted the climate-change section of a report by the Environmental Protection Agency. It deleted references to studies showing that global warming is caused by manmade emissions. It added a reference to a study, partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, that suggested that temperatures are not rising. Eventually the agency decided to drop the section altogether.

After Thomas Knutson at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a paper in 2004 linking rising emissions with more intense tropical cyclones, he was blocked by his superiors from speaking to the media. He agreed to one request to appear on MSNBC, but a public affairs officer at NOAA rang the station and said that Knutson was "too tired" to conduct the interview. The official explained to him that the "White House said no". All media inquiries were to be routed instead to a scientist who believed there was no connection between global warming and hurricanes.

Last year Nasa's top climate scientist, James Hansen, reported that his bosses were trying to censor his lectures, papers and web postings. He was told by Nasa's PR officials that there would be "dire consequences" if he continued to call for rapid reductions in greenhouse gases.

Last month, the Alaskan branch of the US fish and wildlife service told its scientists that anyone travelling to the Arctic must understand "the administration's position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues".

At hearings in the US Congress three weeks ago, Philip Cooney, a former White House aide who had previously worked at the American Petroleum Institute, admitted he had made hundreds of changes to government reports about climate change on behalf of the Bush administration. Though not a scientist, he had struck out evidence that glaciers were retreating and inserted phrases suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about global warming.

The guardians of free speech in Britain aren't above attempting a little suppression, either. The Guardian and I have now received several letters from the climate sceptic Viscount Monckton threatening us with libel proceedings after I challenged his claims about climate science. On two of these occasions he has demanded that articles are removed from the internet. Monckton is the man who wrote to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, claiming that their letter to ExxonMobil offends the corporation's "right of free speech".

After Martin Durkin's film was broadcast, one of the scientists it featured, Professor Carl Wunsch, complained that his views on climate change had been misrepresented. He says he has received a legal letter from Durkin's production company, Wag TV, threatening to sue him for defamation unless he agrees to make a public statement that he was neither misrepresented nor misled.

Would it be terribly impolite to suggest that when such people complain of censorship, a certain amount of projection is taking place?
Monbiot.com

Brilliant Scottish Socialist TV Broadcast for Free Public Transport

2007-04-11T17:52:00.000-07:00

watch video

Described by Proclaimer Charlie Reid as a "Brilliant broadcast, modern day Marxism meets Trumpton", the first of two Scottish Socialist Party election broadcasts for the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections 2007. This one is on the SSP's free public transport policy

IPCC identifies climate change impacts & vulnerability for New Zealand

2007-04-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

IPCC identifies climate change impacts & vulnerability for New Zealand

Water security, natural ecosystems, and coastal communities are the three
sectors most vulnerable to climate change in New Zealand, according to an
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report finalised in
Brussels last Friday.

Changes already observed since 1950 include:

- A warming in mean temperature for New Zealand of 0.4 °C;

- A decrease in cold nights and frosts by 10–20 days per year;

- Sea level rise of about 70 mm;

- Loss of at least a quarter of alpine ice mass;

- Increased seed production in beech forest.

Referring to New Zealand, the report’s findings include:

- As a result of reduced precipitation and increased evaporation, water
security problems are projected to intensify by 2030 in Northland and some
eastern regions.

- Sites at risk of loss of biodiversity include the alpine areas and sub
Antarctic Islands.

- Ongoing coastal development and population growth in areas such as
Northland to Bay of Plenty are projected to exacerbate risks from
sea-level rise and increases in the severity and frequency of storms and
coastal flooding by 2050.

- Production from agriculture and forestry is projected to decline by 2030
over parts of eastern New Zealand due to increased drought and fire.
However, initial benefits to agriculture and forestry are projected in
western and southern areas and close to major rivers due to a longer
growing season, less frost, and increased rainfall. A southward shift in
agricultural pests and diseases is likely with New Zealand becoming more
susceptible to the establishment of new horticultural pests.

Dr Jim Salinger of NIWA, who was a lead author of the chapter in the
report referring to Australia and New Zealand, says: “This chapter is the
product of a comprehensive survey of the science since 2001. It’s based on
over 550 research studies of what’s happening in Australia and New
Zealand. In addition, over 50 independent experts reviewed the chapter.”

“The potential impacts of climate change for New Zealand are likely to be
substantial without further adaptation. The most vulnerable sectors are
natural systems, water security and coastal communities.”

“Apart from natural systems, New Zealand has substantial adaptive capacity
to cope with small amounts of climate change. This is due to our
well-developed economy and strong scientific and technical capabilities.
But there are considerable constraints to implementation and there will be
major challenges from changes in extreme events and larger amounts of
changes in climate,” Dr Salinger says.

CTU Releases Statement On Climate Change

2007-04-10T19:36:00.000-07:00

CTU Releases Statement On Climate Change

The Council of Trade Unions today released its statement on climate change.

“The CTU submission states clearly that unions accept the overwhelming evidence that greenhouse gas emissions are having a harmful effect on the environment and on workers and their families,” CTU president Ross Wilson said.

“Unions accept that there may be a case for emissions trading but we put more emphasis on a regulatory approach alongside direct action to reduce emissions.”

The CTU statement highlights some particular labour market issues that must be considered in any climate change policy. The statement recommends the Labour Department monitor the impact of climate change policies on employment and calls for a 'just transition' for any workers affected. Unions also say that workers and unions must be included in any negotiations on emission reduction agreements, Ross Wilson said.

The statement also says that investment must be made to develop the skills for sustainability such as those needed, for example, to retrofit buildings and implement renewable energy programmes.

“Unions are a valuable partner in any emissions reduction and energy conservation programme, and we suggest a new project to educate and involve union delegates so they can have a direct role. The 350,000 members of unions affiliated to the CTU can be in the vanguard of any programme to address climate change,” Ross Wilson said.

The CTU statement is available here: http://union.org.nz/policy/Towards-Sustainability-Unions-and-Climate-Change

Towards a Globalised New Orleans, or the End of Capitalism

2007-04-10T00:39:00.000-07:00

Towards a Globalised New Orleans, or the End of Capitalism

Climate change is everywhere. Ramor Ryan gatecrashes the ineffectual UN Conference on Climate Change in Nairobi and comes back blaming Capitalism.

1. The Quiet Apocalypse of Rising Tides

A momentous report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) confirms that climate change is 'man-made and unstoppable'. The
21-page report, described as conservative by the IPCC itself, says
human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are to blame for heat waves,
floods and heavy rains, droughts and stronger storms, melting ice-caps
and rising sea-levels.

The IPCC is comprised of over 2000 climate experts and scientists. It
was set up in 1988 by the UN and the World Meteorological organisation
to guide policy makers on the impact of climate change. Despite
strenuous attempts by oil companies and big business to undermine the
final report, it remains quietly apocalyptic in its assessment.

Its mind-boggling conclusion predicts serious water shortage for
between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people, food shortages for 200 to 600
million people. Coastal flooding will hit seven million people within
70 years. The list of potential catastrophe goes on and on.

Yet critics say the report underplays the size of the calamity. James
McCarthy, a climate expert at Harvard and former IPCC panel member
says the report underestimated the true level of rising sea levels,
possibly making the findings of the panel 'foolishly cautious and
maybe even irrelevant' on the issue.

Climate change is everywhere.

Even penetrating the fears of the righteously paranoid psyche of the
scientists and nuclear physicists of the pre-eminent Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists. Their 'Doomsday Clock' has been ticking away to
midnight - the figurative end of civilisation - for 61 years of
nuclear holocaust watching. In an unprecedented move they have moved
the clock two minutes closer to midnight - now standing at a perilous
five minutes to midnight - not only because of the increase in
likelihood of nuclear war with the recent events around North Korea
and Iran. They also cite 'the potential for catastrophic damage from
human-made technologies'. In what represents a decisive paradigm shift
for the Atomic Scientists, Kennette Benedict, director of the bulletin
said, 'The dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those
posed by nuclear weapons.'

Climate change was a top priority at the conference of world business
leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, as well as the
conference of NGO operatives at the World Social Forum in Nairobi.
Meanwhile, the European Commission urged its members to adopt an
unprecedented common energy policy, aimed at cutting greenhouse gases
by 20% by 2020. It calls for a 'post-industrial revolution' based on a
dramatic shift to an internally produced low-carbon energy economy.

Climate Change has finally arrived at the White House. President
George W. Bush's State of the Union address, January 27, marked a
milestone for his administration by actually recognising that we may
indeed have a human-made problem after all. He acknowledged climate
change as 'a serious challenge' and the need for reduction in fossil
fuel consumption. Rather than announcing a mandatory cap on emissions
along the lines of the globally accepted Kyoto Protocol, Bush instead
meekly recommended an added emphasis on renewable or non-carbon energy
sources - ethanol, wind, solar and nuclear power. As the world's
leading producer of greenhouse gases, these are hardly the momentous
steps needed by the USA to put a break on runaway global warming.

What is to be done in the face of the looming catastrophe? The
predominant global platform to deal with fundamental issues that
affect all of humanity is the United Nations. The new UN boss Ban
Ki-moon has been asked to convene an emergency international summit.
'Climate change,' responded Ban, 'is one of the most important and
urgent agendas that the international community has to address before
2012.' An emergency global conference organised by the UN seems
imminently urgent and Nairobi has been suggested as a host.

But wasn't there an emergency climate change in Nairobi just last
year? Wasn't the much heralded 12th UN Conference on Climate Change
and 2nd Meeting of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol held there
November 6-17, 2006? Of course it was, and its abysmal failure to
produce agreements between nations and to begin to build capacity for
dealing with climate-induced problems has been brushed under the
carpet.

To understand how limited the UN structure is in dealing with the
urgency of the matter and how these grand global meetings are
manipulated and side-tracked by powerful business and economic
interests, it's worth returning to Nairobi in November to have a
closer look at the workings of the UN.

2. Journey into the Heart of UN Darkness

Nairobi, Kenya, November 2006.

Climate Change is everywhere, especially in Third World metropolises
like Nairobi. Stuck in a massive traffic jam from the airport to the
city centre, I ask the taxi driver if people here know much about
climate change and global warming. He nearly ploughs into a passing
family of four on a bicycle he was laughing so mirthfully.

'Droughts, floods, famines, the rains comes heavy or don't come at
all,' he says. 'Yes, of course we know all about global warning!'

He goes on to explain how the British colonisers had chosen the site
of Nairobi as the Capital because it was cool and mosquito free.

'This is no longer the fact,' explains the taxi man. 'Now Nairobi is
warm and we are plagued by mosquitoes.'

This bustling city is like a blueprint for all major population
centres in the not too distant future - a place overburdened by
massive migration from the countryside, chronic insecurity and an
infrastructure woefully inadequate to deal with basic matters of
water, drainage, transport, and communication. Nairobi hosts one of
the worlds largest slums - Kuresoi; population over one million living
in dire poverty. This very week in the nearby Mathare slum rival gangs
battled each other, causing ten deaths, dozens of burnt shacks and
thousands of slum-dwellers fleeing the violence. The near post
apocalyptic landscape of the enormous Mathare slum and its almost
unbearable living conditions contrasts obscenely with the lush,
enclosed UN enclosure occupying most of the posh district of Gigiri.
The wealthy enclave host numerous embassies, government minister
residencies, NGO headquarters and a massive shopping mall, all heavily
patrolled by armed guards and state of the art security features. The
walled oasis of the privileged elites exists uneasily amidst a desert
of the multitudes depravity, like a global Baghdad Green zone.

It's here at the extensive UN compound that over 70 ministers of
state, and 6000 of their bureaucratic UN and NGO lackeys gather under
the auspices of the UN's Climate Change Conference to hammer out a
strategy to tackle the calamitous situation.

'The world is keenly awaiting the outcome of the deliberations going
on there,' says Mr. Gilbert M. Kari somewhat anxiously, a local pest
controller who has witnessed first hand the chaos climate change is
wreaking on national coffee production. His is an almost universally
heard concern. He and the rest of the world are in for a big
disappointment.

This 12th session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) conference of parties also serves as the second meeting of
the parties to the Kyoto Protocol. The 1997 Protocol is a legally
binding set of targets for cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for
developed nations to an average of 95% of individual countries' 1990
levels. Baby steps perhaps, but still too great a leap for the USA.
186 countries have signed the Kyoto Protocol but still the US balks.
The US produces a quarter of global greenhouse gases but has only 4%
of the world's population. The whole of Africa, in contrast, emits
just 3.5%.

The keystone document for this particular Conference is the Stern
Report. Where once global warming was seen as an ecological and
environmental issue, the report focuses on the economics of climate
change. The study led by World Bank Economist Sir Nicholas Stern, with
its dizzying array of figures and calculations, leads inexorably to
the conclusion that the battle against climate change makes good
economic sense. The financial cost of action, it warns sternly, will
be much less than the cost of inaction.

Mingling somewhat uncomfortably amongst the throng of expensively
coiffured UN delegates sporting the ubiquitous top range lap-tops and
talking incessantly on cell-phones, I stumble down corridors flanked
by a trade-fair collection of stands hawking a variety of alternative
energy plans or carbon-free initiatives. Technical companies
advertising their genetically modified bio-fuel producing crops
compete for the carbon free market alongside representatives of the
nuclear industry: climate change for some is becoming big business.

With all the verve of Michael Moore, I door-step one of the official
US delegates rushing along the corridor. He is an immaculately
presented young man with the appearance of a Navy Seal and the
arrogant attitude of a cantankerous frat boy.

As the largest single contributor to the greenhouse effect and global
warming, I ask him, is there any sign of change in the US position on
restricting carbon emissions or signing up to the Kyoto Protocol, with
the other 186 nations?

'There are no signs of change in that policy soon,' the delegate
answers somewhat mechanically; definitely disinterested. 'The US won't
sign the Kyoto Protocol.'

'Even in light of the Stern Report, which suggests the world economy
will shrink by 20%, isn't there a clear economic imperative to tackle
the problem,' I insist somewhat earnestly, 'and ...'

He stops me in my tracks, looking me up and down for my credentials to
ascertain who I was or what organisation I belonged. Unaccredited, a
gatecrasher of sorts, I lack my badge.

'Who the heck are you?' he quips somewhat amusingly, 'some kind of Irish Borat?'

Over at Plenary Room 2, the conference is in full swing before a great
assembly of dignitaries and functionaries fanned out in a great swathe
of seated rows. The speaker's voice booms over the PA and their image
is projected on two huge video screens on the flanking walls like a U2
concert. The delegates glance at their lap-tops, whisper on their
cell-phones, sip bottled water and occasionally listen in on the
simultaneous translation earphones. Sure enough, the gripping words of
His Eminence Nurlan A. Iskakov, Minister of Environment Protection of
Kazakhstan go unappreciated. When the senior US representative, Paula
Dobriansky, Under-secretary of Democracy and Global Affairs takes the
stage, a hush finally descends, cell-phones are downed and the whole
auditorium pays rapt attention.

'The most effective strategies on climate change,' says
Under-secretary Dobriansky, a hard-core Bush-ite and neo-con, 'are
those that are integrated with economic growth, with energy security,
and reducing air pollution.' In her oblique obfuscation, she is
spelling out US refusal to agree on mandatory emissions limits,
thereby wrecking any concerted global attempt to move forward at this
conference. Dubriansky's supercilious presentation talks up US Aid to
Africa and, by omission, reiterates the Bush administration's mantra
that unfettered US-led capitalist globalization hand-in-hand with war
in the Middle East to secure oil supplies are the priorities. Global
warming, or 'air pollution' as the unctuous Under-secretary refers to
it, is a side-show to the main event - capitalist expansion. Business
as usual then on the United Nations world stage: US economic interests
come first and the UN is held hostage to the world's sole superpower.

Taking lead from US intransigence, other heavyweight capitalist
globalizers (and emerging major contributors to the greenhouse effect)
China and India steadfastly refuse to cap their emissions citing their
own economic interests. Joining the refusnik fest, Russia also begins
to drag its feet.

'There is a scandalous lack of urgency!' says Mr. Tearfund Andy
Atkins, summing up the conference mood and, it could be said, the NGO
position in general.

The rest of the conference seemed to fade after the US
Under-secretary's pronouncements, as if the participants knew little
could be achieved without the nod or blessing from the US. The much
lauded UN conference retreats into incoherent and incessantly
procedural issues that revolve mostly about recording itself, and its
own bureaucratic inanity. I attend one torturous two-hour meeting,
seating myself in the vacant Irish delegate's place and availing of
their bottled water and ear-phones. Casting a glance around at the
disinterested attendees who seemed as bored as I, it is clear that
they are more preoccupied with their personal email than the plodding,
inchoate official proceedings. The minutes released the following day
are delivered with the usual fastidious fanfare. Methodological
issues: protocol: HCFC-23: SBSTA adopted short conclusions.
(FCSTA/2006/L.23). Noting that the issue had not been resolved. I
would imagine little gets resolved at conferences like this ever, with
their inordinate bureaucracy and general obsequiousness - like a
secular Tridentine mass for 21st Century globalization zealots. There
is no place for dissent.

'The Nairobi Conference may not be remembered as one of the critical
milestones when a major breakthrough occurred,' records the official
UN summary benignly. Although perhaps, the report continues, it
prepares the way for what some hope will be another 'momentous
meeting' within the next four years.

'The conference has let Africa and the rest of the developing world
down,' say Oxfam,

Maybe the conference has let down Oxfam and the other NGOs speaking on
behalf of Africans, but some with a more critical understanding of
what the conference can actually achieve are getting on with some
practical direct action.

'We should not wait until Mombassa is under water,' says Kenyan Nobel
Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, at a conference side event. 'We
know the problems. The problem that we have is what to do. What will
make the difference is not the negotiations, but what we do when we go
home.'

Known locally as 'the tree lady' due to her propensity to encourage
Africans to plant trees, she is part of a movement whose aim is to
plant our way out of the crisis. Trees perform as carbon sinks,
inhaling CO2 and hence offsetting CO2 emissions: to re-forest Africa
with a billion trees appropriate to regional diversity is the target
of the Green Belt Movement.

3. Towards a Globalised New Orleans, or the End of Capitalism.

Many in the global north speculate upon the wisdom of having (more)
children considering the nefarious world they may well inherit. People
in the south - in places like drought-ridden northern Kenya - have the
more pressing issue of wondering how they will feed their living
children.

It seems a hopeless situation. Two thousand of the world's eminent
scientists confirm that climate variability is a product of human
activity, that we might have a short window of opportunity - say 15
years - to do something about it, but there isn't the political will
to act amongst the powers that be. Not just the USA, China and Russia,
but even European 'champions' of the cause refuse to set an example.
While his government will say in the strongest terms it is 'an
imperative' to take action to prevent further climate damage, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair will still balk at personal sacrifices. 'I
think these things are a bit impractical actually to expect people to
do that,' said Blair in response to the suggestion that cutting back
on flights might be a positive step. For him, science will save the
planet. 'All the evidence is that if you use the science and the
technology constructively, your economy can grow, people can have a
good time but do so more responsibly.'

A conclusion shared by President Bush. 'Leaving behind the debate
whether global warming is caused by natural or man-made causes,' said
Bush chillingly to the New York Times (25/05/2006), 'we are going to
focus solely in the technologies which can resolve the problem.' So
Bush is saying that we don't so much as have a problem (that doesn't
matter) but we don't have a solution. So what's on offer in terms of
technological or scientific solutions to wean us off fossil fuels (and
Muslim oil)?

The front runner is ethanol. But replacing fossil fuels - an intensely
compact source of fuel - with crop derived bio-ethanol requires
felling vast tracks of forest to make way for plantations, thereby
creating even more ecological damage.

Meanwhile, entering into the twilight zone of capitalist solutions to
capitalist problems, we find the resurrection of the old technological
bogeyman: nuclear energy, or the new bio-technical Frankenstein:
genetically modified bio-fuel crops. Both these solutions are
low-carbon, but the potential ecological cost of the energy succeeds
in merely pushing the climate change problem upriver a while.

Another solution involves juggling carbon around. With capitalism's
love of the market we now have complicated emissions trading schemes
for 'cost-effective' reductions in carbon emissions (selling them on)
and more bizarrely, carbon drops - including the notions of storing
emissions under the sea bed or down disused mine shafts.

Capitalism's last technological card and one that is proving a current
growth business is geo-engineering - the intentional manipulation of
the climate. Taking inspiration from the CIA's (unsuccessful) attempts
to provoke intense rains over Vietnam to wash out the rebel crops, to
the Chinese Olympic committee's promise to secure sunny days for the
2008 Olympics via technical measures, the geo-engineering industry is
having a field day in the era of climate variability. From attempts to
fertilise the ocean to lower the water temperature to filling the sky
with sulphate nano-particles to intercept sun-rays, geo-engineering
scientists are busy interfering with and intervening upon the climate,
undeterred by potential disequilibrium disasters or mass
contamination.

Beyond technological meddling, dealing with the problem of climate
change - ecologically, politically, economically and socially - needs
a lot more than the Kyoto Protocol, developing alternative energies or
holding another emergency Climate Change Conference.

It is necessary to consider the root of the problem. A global economy
based on the colossal demand for highly concentrated and rapidly
depleting fossil fuel deposits is ecologically unsustainable. Do we
need to change fuel or change the structure of consumption? But under
the present model - global capitalism - is change possible, or even
desirable?

'Capitalism has always relied on infinite expansionism in a finite
planet,' explains Alex Troochi of the Green Apple Collective,
'something has to give and at the moment, it's the planet that's
giving as Capitalism plunders ahead.'

Capitalism relies on ever-expanding markets and inputs to continue to
make profits based on the extraction of natural resources and
transforming them into dead capital. This ceaseless addiction to
growth-for-growth sake leads inexorably to ecotastrophe. Capitalism is
now being forced to consider other strategies. But the magic
technological or scientific bullet to save the day remains illusive.

Hope lies beyond the pale; it requires a fundamental shift in
thinking, a revolutionary paradigm shift away from the cloistered
confines of the imagination of the United States government, the
European Union or the United Nations assembly. In the long term, the
human world will have to evolve some kind of post-capitalist society
to survive.

The doomsday clock ticks away at a perilous five minutes to twelve.
Meanwhile its still early morning on the revolutionary clock. Despite
the alarm ringing, the revolutionary protagonist, although stirring,
has yet to awake. The writing is on the wall once more - be realistic,
demand the impossible.

(Ramor Ryan is the author of Clandestines : The Pirate Journals of an Irish Pirate, AK Press, 2006)

Beyond rail Electrification- Free Transport for all

2007-04-03T20:10:00.000-07:00

About ten activists from Climaction went to the Auckland Green Party meeting on Rail Electification on Monday 2nd Apirl. Our leaflet for Free and Frequent Public transport went down a storm, with many of the audience complimenting us on our work so far. There were about 400 people there, two thirds were older, with quite a lot of core Auckland City Green supporters. But a big meeting by any standards.

The first speaker was Cameron Pitches from the Campaign for Better Transport. He spoke about the success that campaign had in opening the Onehunga rail line, after an excellent video presentation comparing Perth's electric rail system to Auckland's transoprt chaos. Good, witty speaker, to the point, and received a huge round of applause.

Joel Cayford, Mike Lee and Jeanette Fitzsimmons also spoke. Their speeches were slighlty longer in duration!!! Mike Lee made a point about how radical ideas are first ignored, then ridiculed, then violently opposed, before they are then accepted as common sense. Hold that thought...

After the speeches, there came the time for questions. Daph Lawless was first off the block, eloquently explaining Climaction's support for rail electrification and more rail lines nationally, but saying that this needed to be complimented by frequent busses on the roads too, and that ALL public transport should be nationalised and fare free. Before she was rudely clipped off, she put the question to the panel. How many of them would support free and frequent public transport, and the renationalisation of public transport in Auckland. This got the cat amongst the pigeons straight off.

Mike Lee, Chairman of Auckland Regional Council, brought out the heavy artillery. Ignoring Climaction's existence, he made a veiled attack on the Residents Action Movement. Ridiculing demands for free public transport by saying that it would have to be funded by HUGE RATES INCREASES, which he would presumably (violently?) oppose.

Roger Fowler for RAM corrected some Mike Lee's distortions later on, and put the question again to Jeanette Fitzsimmons, who was the first signatory of the Free and Frequent Public Transport petition when it was launched at the Al Gore call out. Jeanette was more concillatory than Mike Lee, saying that although she supported free public transport in principle, she thought that we needed to work on the frequency and reliabilty first.

One of the major problems that went un answered was just how many people will benifit from the exisiting rail lines in Auckland. It is obvious that they serve only a very limited corridor at present. The shooting down of both Climaction and RAM's proposals on free and frequent busses means that large areas of Auckland would not be served in any sustainable way.

Mike Lee looks set to fight the proposal, by saying that it can only be funded by HUGE RATES increases. As such, part of Climaction's arguments must now move onto the big question- WHERE WILL THE MONEY COME FROM?

It should come from taxes on the multinationals and big business, as well as
the transfer of Central government funding from the Motorway lobby, as anindication of a serious commitment to make New Zealand Carbon Neutral in reality rather than rhetoric. (Central government funding was available for the Stadium when the political will was there.) Climaction definetly does not support rates increases for the ordinary working people of Auckland.

As the meeting broke up, we got Climaction leaflets into the hands of everyone we had missed coming in earlier. We had a good, solid intervention in the debate along with RAM, and did our profile good. We were seen to be a little more radical than what the Greens were proposing, whcih is no bad thing. A lot of people came up to the stall to thank us for the work we were doing, and we got some good new contacts.

Solidarity
Joe

CARNIVAL AGAINST CARMAGGEDON

2007-02-09T14:18:00.000-08:00

Reclaim K Rd
Stop Carmaggedon!
3pm 3rd of the 3rd 2007

Free and Frequent Public Transport Now
A Carnival Against Climate Change

Global warming claims first inhabited island

2006-12-27T15:32:00.000-08:00

Geocode for Lohachara Char, India
Latitude: 21.9 / Longitude: 88.1058333

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas. Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports

Published: 24 December 2006 Independent (London)

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

Get a satellite view of where Lohachara was at-
http://www.satelliteviews.net/cgi-bin/w.cgi?c=in&UF=387417&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;UN=484044&AF=T_L

From Wikipedia-

Lohachara Island was an islet on the Sundarban river delta in the Sundarban National Park, located near the Indian state of West Bengal which was permanently flooded in the 1980s.^[1]

The islet is one of a number of "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta: in the past two decades, four islands - Bedford, Lohachara, Kabasgadi and Suparibhanga - have sunk into the sea and 6,000 families have been made homeless.^[2] Although other islands have disappeared due to various man-made construction projects, Lohachara was the first inhabited island to disappear due to global warming.^[3] There are multiple causes^[4] of the disappearances of islands in the delta, including sea-level rise, coastal erosion, cyclones(the number has reduced but intensity increased^[5]), mangrove destruction and coastal flooding. The loss of land has created thousands of refugees in the area.

Overall population of the Sundarbans has risen 200% to nearly 4.3 million. ^[2]

From the Calcutta Telegraph
Oct 30th, 2006.-

Vanishing islands Displaced Climate casualties Underlying truth

Rising sea levels are playing havoc across the Sundarbans — two islands have already been submerged. More islands are facing the same fate, reports Subhra Priyadarshini

They saw the shore pushing in closer every day. Yet, Shamila and her mother never thought the sea would completely devour their tiny island of Lohachara in the Sundarbans. And then one day, it did. The family of four was forced to pack its modest belongings and head for Sagar, the largest island in west Sundarbans. In the late 1990s, more such families followed suit.

“There’s nothing any more where our island once was. It’s just a huge stretch of sea where vessels ply,” says Shamila’s father Seikh Abdullah, among the first batch of envirogees (environment refugees) who have now settled in Sagar. Nearly 7,000 of his former island mates are his neighbours again.

The seas are rising across the Sundarbans, the 100-island conglomerate in the Ganges estuarine delta in the Bay of Bengal. One more island in the vicinity — Suparibhanga (also called Bedford) — has sunk. It had no recorded human population, though.

In Calcutta, Jadavpur University’s School of Oceanographic Studies has gathered a number of glaring climate change indicators in the fragile estuarine ecosystem, home to the famous Royal Bengal tiger. Since 1965, the temperature of the group of islands has risen by over one degree. The number of annual cyclones, which wreak havoc in the small islands, has fallen but they are more intense now. This means more coastal flooding, erosion and more saline water moving in on the islands.

“The sea level rise south of Sagar island could go up to 3.5 mm a year over the next few decades because of global climate change. Sagar itself has lost about 30 km of land by now. The rising seas could wash out almost 15 per cent of the existing 9,000-plus square kilometres of the islands,” says Sugata Hazra, director of the School of Oceanographic Studies.

Mujibullah, who came to Sagar as a teenager and now sustains a family of six on seasonal Hilsa catch, agrees. “Today, I see Sagar’s west end — Boatkhali and Laudhas — gradually being eroded. If Sagar too has a similar problem, we don’t know where to go.” As of now, a friendly Sagar panchayat has given them refuge and livelihood out of empathy, a strong emotion binding islanders across the Sundarbans.

Displaced

Threatened? (Above) The Royal Bengal Tiger and the Barking Deer

The “vanishing islands”, as Hazra calls them, have rendered around 10,000 people homeless already and threaten to displace about 70,000 more in the next 14 years.

The team first noticed that the islands were vanishing while working on a Government of India funded project in 2001. The government census was still showing a population of 5,000 in Ghorama, one of the fast submerging islands. “But we could not find the island in the satellite images. Official records showed 102 islands in the estuary, but we found only 100. Where had the other two gone,” says Hazra of the basic premise which stoked his team’s curiosity.

The researchers then began mapping each island and established that there were 100 islands only. Their report to the Union government was sent recently as part of the national communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

As the islands sink, they estimate that the worst hit will be Sagar, from where nearly 30,000 people will be displaced by 2020. Namkhana will have produced 15,000 envirogees by that time. The other islands — all in the western end of the estuarine delta — that will have been deserted are Ajmalmari (east and west), Dalhousie, Dakshin Surendra Nagar, Moushuni, Lothian, Ghoramara, Dulibhasani, Dhanchi, Bulchery, Bhangaduani and Jambudwip.

Holy Cow

2006-12-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

Climaction plans to spotlight New Zealand’s biggest greenhouse gas, the methane from meat agriculture, by targeting multi billion dollar corporation Fonterra, in early March. Methane accounts for over half of New Zealand’s emissions, as opposed to over a quarter for carbon.

The next Climaction Carnival will see a 30 foot high Trojan Cow, belching stinky green gas, being pulled on rope by hundreds of student ‘slaves’ from Auckland Uni’s Quad, down Princes Street to Fonterra’s HQ. Call it a mass Moovement if you like. We need as much creative, material and financial help as possible (any good carpenters, prop builders or designers out there?) and will be going hard building student groups in the weeks beforehand on all major campuses! If you can help please contact Joe at 021 186 1450 or email solidarityjoe@yahoo.com

COW 'EMISSIONS' MORE DAMAGING TO PLANET THAN CO2 FROM CARS
By Geoffrey Lean
The independent
December 10, 2006

http://news. independent. co.uk/environmen t/article2062484 .ece

Meet the world's top destroyer of the environment. It is not the car, or the
plane, or even George Bush: it is the cow.

A United Nations report has identified the world's rapidly growing herds of
cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they
are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the
introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones
in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral
reefs.

The 400-page report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation, entitled
Livestock's Long Shadow, also surveys the damage done by sheep, chickens,
pigs and goats. But in almost every case, the world's 1.5 billion cattle are
most to blame. Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse
gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms
of transport put together.

Burning fuel to produce fertiliser to grow feed, to produce meat and to
transport it -- and clearing vegetation for grazing -- produces 9 per cent
of all emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. And
their wind and manure emit more than one third of emissions of another,
methane, which warms the world 20 times faster than carbon dioxide.

Livestock also produces more than 100 other polluting gases, including more
than two-thirds of the world's emissions of ammonia, one of the main causes
of acid rain.

Ranching, the report adds, is "the major driver of deforestation" worldwide,
and overgrazing is turning a fifth of all pastures and ranges into desert.
Cows also soak up vast amounts of water: it takes a staggering 990 litres of
water to produce one litre of milk.

Wastes from feedlots and fertilisers used to grow their feed overnourish
water, causing weeds to choke all other life. And the pesticides,
antibiotics and hormones used to treat them get into drinking water and
endanger human health.

The pollution washes down to the sea, killing coral reefs and creating "dead
zones" devoid of life. One is up to 21,000sqkm, in the Gulf of Mexico, where
much of the waste from US beef production is carried down the Mississippi.

The report concludes that, unless drastic changes are made, the massive
damage done by livestock will more than double by 2050, as demand for meat
increases.

HELEN CLARK REJECTS UNITED NATIONS FINDING
Carbon neutral blah blah blah, Methane neutral- over my dead body

Prime Minister Helen Clark and a farming leader in New Zealand, one of the world's biggest agricultural producers, rejected on Monday a United Nations' claim that cattle and other livestock were a bigger threat than cars to the global environment. Clark said at a news conference that claims in a report by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization that livestock was responsible for more greenhouse gases than cars, planes and all other forms of transport was "scarcely fair."

And Charlie Pedersen, a dairy farmer and leader of the national Federated Farmers organization, said of the report, "I suspect it was written by a vegan."

"We are not talking about cattle; we are talking about food," he told the New Zealand Herald. "If you take that food off the market, you have to replace it with something else. You still have to eat."

Clark said, "To treat methane emissions from animals in the same way one treats, for example, carbon emissions from coal-fired generation is scarcely fair."

She said it was rather obvious what can be done about carbon emissions from coal but not so obvious about what to do about methane emissions from animals. Both gases have been linked to global warming.

New Zealand has more than 9 million cattle and 40 million sheep, which account for about half its total greenhouse gas emissions - a higher percentage than any other country.

But Clark said New Zealand was leading the world in science and is developing a method to deal with methane emissions. Other countries, including Ireland, where farm animals account for about 28 per cent of greenhouse gases, were following its research with interest, she added.

System Change Not Climate Change Conference 2006

2006-11-18T14:58:00.001-08:00

Climaction Conference

Saturday November 25^th 2006 1-6pm

Latin American Cultural Centre

37 Selwyn Street, Onehunga, Auckland

We will have two plenary sessions introduced by panels of about four speakers each, reflecting the debate around our two major demands- free and frequent public transport in Auckland, and Beyond Kyoto- Sysytem Change Not CLimate Change. Speakers will be from political, environmental, trade union and community groups active in the fight against climate change.

Between these two plenaries we will break for four streamed workshops to encourage dialogue and discussion from the grassroots. These four workshops will report back to the conference after about an hour of discussion and debate.

The last plenary will then be on Beyond Kyoto- Syytem Change not CLimate Change, where we can look to formulating a national and international policy and strategy. We will also plan future Climactions at this conference, with a possible Carnival reclaiming the (Quay) streets outside the wharfs where they plan to place the unpopular used condom Stadium!

The main purpose of this conference is to build Climactions audience and membership base, to prepare for upcoming actions and to educate and network union, political and community groups around the necessity of taking action.' Spread the word. Get your union, group, college or workplace to send a delegate. Bring three friends. Copy and paste this, and forward it onto all your contacts and lists!

1^st Plenary Session- Free and Frequent Public Transport in Auckland
Panel discussion with four invited speakers, then open for debate.

Workshops streamed into 4 Dialogues-

(a) Methane and Meat Agriculture- liberating the land.

(b) Capitalism and Climate Change.

(c ) Monbiot’s Manifesto- a ten 10 point plan

(d) Reclaiming our Streets and our World- Mass Direct Action inspired by Martin Luther King

2^nd Plenary Session- Beyond Kyoto: System Change not Climate Change
Panel discussion with four invited speakers then open for debate.

Double Bill Film Screening:
The End of Suburbia
The Greening of Cuba

Latin American music and party afterwards

Corporate Greenwashers exposed at AL Gore meeting!

2006-11-14T16:02:00.000-08:00

AL Gore! What’s the score?
The System’s Rotten to the Core!

Leader of Green Party and Mayor of Waitakare first to sign Climaction Petition.

Al Gore paid a fleeting visit to Aotearoa, meeting with a handpicked audience of NZ’s corporate and political elite at Auckland University’s business school. Despite the fact that over 100,000 Kiwis have seen his film “An Inconvenient Truth”, Mr Gore only spoke to those who could afford a 950 dollar ticket, and declined Climaction’s offer to speak to the people outside.

Mr Gore’s film raises many of the problems we will face in the next 20 years, but is none too hot on possible solutions to the climate crisis. Climaction launched its petition for free and frequent public transport in Auckland as a tangible and achievable reform that will practically reduce carbon emissions, and invited Al to be the first signatory. But lost in the media scrum, he was ushered away by security guards to an awaiting gas guzzling limo, which sped off to the kerosene spewing airport. Climaction would have bought him a bus ticket!

(Audio at http://xtramsn.co.nz/news/0,,11964-6563186-300,00.html )

Instead, the first signatories of Climaction’s Free and Frequent Public Transport Petition were Green Party Leader Jeanette Fitzsimmons, Residents Action Movement Councillor Robyn Hughes and Mayor of Auckland’s Waitakare City Bob Harvey. Thousands more signatures will be gathered by Climaction over the next month- you can add your moniker online at www.climaction.blogspot.com

Many members of the corporate and political elite present at the Al Gore presentation did NOT sign, however. John Keyes of National, Minister Benson-Pope of Labour and ozone offender Peter Dunne of United Future seemed content that listening to a lecture for an hour was enough to save the planet. Auckland Regional Council chairperson Mike Lee defended his policy of motorway building, saying he would never support free and frequent public transport because busses ran on diesel. So one bus carrying fifty people causes more pollution than 50 cars, then Mike? Very scientific.

Climaction will now begin a public campaign to make individual politicians accountable for their positions on free and frequent public transport, and will publish their names and positions on our website.
(Any suggestions? Contact the blog at solidarityjoe@yahoo.com )

Climaction are also inviting all groups, unions and individuals concerned about global warming and a decent public transport system to our first Conference, to be held at the Latin American Cultural Centre, 37 Selwyn Street, Onehunga, Auckland at 1pm on Saturday November 25^th.

CARNIVAL!

2006-11-08T00:59:00.000-08:00

The Climaction Carnival on Sat Nov 4th was a big success, attracting a core of 300 people on the day, with many more taking part. The flagging of Civil Disobedience publicly on the day saw a climb-down from both police and possibly Auckland Council, in that 5 minutes before we were due to move onto the street, the cops offered to block the whole road off for us. They had a look at the numbers we had brought and the determination of the organising crew and made a decision to concede, possibly under orders from Auckland Council who had made a political decision of non confrontation. It was a major victory for advertising the location and our tactics, that just days beforehand were being questioned by both mainstream reformists and black bloc enthusiasts. So round one to Climaction in the battle for the streets. This will strengthen our non conspiratorial, democratic calls for mass direct action in the future.

The People's Assembly held around a ton of melting ice was also fantastically dynamic, with both Auckland Regional Councillor Robyn Hughes and Elaine West from RAM speaking strongly in support of Climaction's demands for Free and Frequent Transport and a 90% reduction in greenhouse gasses by 2030. Climaction hegemonised the debate; challenging Councillor Christine Caughey (Action Hobson) and Auckland Regional Council transport committee chair Joel Cayford whether they both supported RAM’s free buses policy. Councillor Caughey said she did, with Joel Cayford saying yes in principle but how was it going to be funded? A later vote at the Assembly resolved by a huge deafening majority that it should be funded not by taxing ordinary workers, but taxing the rich and the corporations. RAM’s free buses song “Moving On” sung by our own Roger Fowler went down a storm as it wrapped up the assembly- totally behind Climaction’s demands in the city.

The Union input into the People’s Assembly was also something mainstream environmentalist protests had not seen before- there were banners and reps there from the SFWU, NDU, EPMU, Unite and Solidarity. Fala Hualangi, the SFWU organiser leading the CleanStart campaign in the city for cleaners, spoke eloquently about the fate of her native Tuvalu , which will be under water in a few decades unless there is major change. She also passionately supported the demand for free and frequent public transport- not only would it help save the planet, it would be a major benefit for the working poor. Fala is now a key ally of Climaction, and will promote the Climaction demands within her union, and other “new unionists” there pledged to do the same. VaeVae Pokino, introduced by Solidarity Union’s secretary Grant Morgan, represented a delegation from the striking Independent Liquor Workers in Papakura, overcoming his shyness to speak at his first ever rally, in front of a banner from Independent Liquor striking Workers supporting System Change Not Climate Change!

The other noticeable thing about the People’s Assembly was it’s wholehearted support of the word “Revolution” as synonymous with the slogan “System Change not Climate Change”- Revolution was used as a political term unapologetically, confidentially and joyously by speakers as diverse as myself (Joe Carolan) from Socialist Worker , Simon Oostermann from the NDU, John Darroch from Radical Youth, and a woman called Josie in her 70s who made a beautiful speech at the end of the Assembly, saying that climate change would effect everyone on the planet regardless of race, gender or age, and that she would support a revolution to stop it. This got a huge roar of joyous applause from an audience not really expecting this from a woman in her 70s, but revolution is an infectious thing, and I had guessed from talking to her earlier she would make a dynamic and surprising wrap up. Not since the heady days of the early anti capitalist movement of 2000-2001 have I seen an openness on the left to discuss anti capitalism and revolution as openly as this.

The day was also a great carnival and celebration- the music was rocking, with anthems of struggle and resistance echoing across an occupied Queen Street-

Mick Jagger’s “Street Fightin’ Man”, Public Enemy’s “Shut em Down”, John Lennon’s “Power to the People”, Lindon Kwesei Johnson’s “War ina Babylon” and the Manic Street Preacher’s “Masses Against the Classes” providing a backdrop for the snowball fights, tobogganing, chalking, dancing, football, break dancing, samba, sunbathing, picnicking and networking going on in the middle of the street. Andrew the Polar Bear sat on a ton of melting ice, Food Not Bombs fed the masses, colourful banners and flags flew in the sun, and 45 new people joined Climaction. The Call Out to Al Gore next Tuesday should attract a good crowd too provided we do our media work well- last Saturday we got coverage from TV3, a picture in the Sunday Star Times and a write up in the Herald OnLine- Next Tuesday could be internationally significant if we play our cards right.

Climaction has attracted a new layer of supporters and potential members, some of them extremely committed and energetic activists. We have built a comradely and fiercely democratic culture that looks to mass direct action in the tradition of Martin Luther King. Climaction has imagination, daring, a cool level head under pressure but looks to mass, direct action and revolution as the only viable solutions to the ecological crisis of the 21^st Century.

CLIMACTION CALL OUT TO AL GORE to debate at PEOPLE's ASSEMBLY

2006-11-06T15:50:00.001-08:00

PEOPLE's ASSEMBLY and CALL OUT
10am Tuesday Nov 14th 2006
Assemble at the Quad, University of Auckland.
Then march to Auckland Business School for People's Assembly.

To con-incide with Al Gore's visit to Auckland's Business School,
Climaction will host a People's Assembly on Climate Change, as we
believe that big business is the major problem rather that the
solution to climate change. Al Gore is so far only meeting with the
political and business elite at a closed meeting- the People's
Assembly will be issuing a Call Out to him to join our debate on why a
radical system change is needed to climate change, and to talk to the
people of Auckland rather than the corporate polluters.

We will also be asking him to support the Climaction demands for free
and frequent public transport in Auckland and a 90% reduction in
carbon emissions by 2030.

Pls fwd widely!
More info at our blogsite- www.climaction.blogspot.com
Further info phone Joe at 021 186 1450
email- solidarityjoe@yahoo.com

Join our e group at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CLIMACTION/

From NZ Herald-

Al Gore to star at Kiwi Summit 29 October 2006 By GREG MEYLAN

Former US vice-president Al Gore will visit Auckland next month to
tell key business leaders and politicians in a closed meeting that
they must act now to avert climate change catastrophe.

Gore will jet in on November 14 for half a day en route to Australia
to promote the message of his widely acclaimed film An Inconvenient
Truth, which lays out evidence for the potentially devastating effects
of man-made climate change.

The film has been seen by almost 70,000 Kiwis and screened during this
weekend's Labour Party conference, at which Prime Minister Helen Clark
called for boldness in tackling climate change.

"Why shouldn't New Zealand aim to be the first country which is truly
sustainable?" she said. "I want New Zealand to be in the vanguard of
making it happen, for our own sakes, and for the sake of our planet."

Clark said the government would use "a mix of carrots and sticks" to
work towards sustainable land use and transportation and increase the
energy efficiency of our homes.

She credited An Inconvenient Truth with helping to sharpen public
opinion on the need to act.

Gore will address the board of the New Zealand Super Fund, then give a
90-minute lecture at Auckland University's business school to an
invited audience of MPs and business leaders - but no media. The
impending visit comes as the World Bank's former chief economist Sir
Nicholas Stern warns that climate change could tip the world economy
into a recession as devastating as the 1930s depression and that
governments must start spending serious money to stop it.

His report, due tomorrow, stands the orthodox economic argument on its
head by saying it will be cheaper for developed nations to tackle the
problem now with significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, than to
deal with the consequences.

It is a message that resonates with Gore's own.

The Super Fund, which manages billions of dollars of public money set
aside to help fund baby boomers' pensions, invited Gore in his role as
chair of UK-based company Generation Investment Management which
invests in companies that take into account issues such as climate
change and sustainable development.

Economist and Sunday Star-Times columnist Rod Oram said Gore's visit
was part of a growing consensus that the world must take the threat of
climate change seriously.

But he also warned that New Zealand's clean green image was vulnerable
to attacks in our key export markets.

A recent British ad campaign against New Zealand butter used the fact
that it had to be shipped half way round the world to encourage
shoppers to buy British butter, despite the fact that our farming
methods mean even after transportation the end product requires half
the energy of its UK rivals.

"The view from abroad would not necessarily be fair but it could take
bare facts about New Zealand and present them in an absolutely
unflattering way," said Oram.

The Stern report will also highlight the immense geopolitical
ramifications of rising sea levels, which over the next 100 years may
make New Zealand a destination for climate change refugees as well as
displacing our own coastal communities.

Neither the Super Fund nor Business School is paying Gore for the visit.

Bill Clinton, to whom Gore was vice-president for eight years, charged
$1694 a ticket for a talk in Auckland this year.

# Sunday Star-Times columnist Rod Oram will be exploding the myth of
New Zealand's clean green image at a public lecture called "100%
Impure New Zealand: A View From Abroad" at 6pm on Tuesday November 7
at the Red Lecture Theatre on the Unitec campus, Carrington Rd, Mt
Albert, Auckland.

UNION LEADERS, POLITICIANS, SUPPORT CARNIVAL AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE

2006-11-02T18:12:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King- "inspiration"

UNION LEADERS, POLITICIANS, SUPPORT CARNIVAL AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE-
QUEEN ST TO BE BLOCKED BY HUNDREDS OF PROTESTERS IN ACTION INSPIRED BY MARTIN LUTHER KING

Press Release- Climaction

Contact Joe Carolan – 021 186 1450

solidarityjoe@yahoo.com

Union leaders and activists from across the political spectrum are supporting tomorrow’s CLimaction Carnival Against Climate Change, that will block Queen Street to demand free and frequent public transport as a way of cutting Auckland’s greenhouse gas pollution.

Auckland Green MP Sue Bradford today wished the organisers of Saturday’s Climaction all the best for their rally in Queen St to mark International Climate Change Day on Saturday.

“Lack of action by Government and industry means it’s time for the whole community to come together to raise awareness of the need to take serious sustained action on the issue now, and to talk together about solutions that we will actually make happen.

“The time for ambivalence and inaction is past, and the Green Party welcomes support from all quarters for its longterm campaign to get New Zealand to fulfil its international and planetary obligations to ‘turn down the heat.’

Auckland Regional councillor Robyn Hughes sent an Open Invitation to other elected local body representatives urging them to join a ClimAction "civil disobedience" carnival and debate on climate change in the middle of Queen St. "ClimAction is adopting Martin Luther King's tactics of peaceful civil disobedience to promote public debate and action on climate change, which is the human survival issue of the 21st century," said Robyn Hughes.

"Taking over a section of Queen St for a few hours will spotlight the central problem of greenhouse gas exhaust fumes.

"To those who might say an elected councillor should always obey the road rules, I would reply: 'Tackling climate change so that humanity survives into the next century is more important than breaching some road rules for a couple of hours. Anyway, if more decisive measures on global warming aren't taken, Queen St may be under water in a generation or two, and then we will be swimming, not obeying road rules.'

"By forewarning people that a section of Queen St near Aotea Square will be a no-go area for vehicles for several hours from 1pm on Saturday, 4 November, motorists can avoid holdups by choosing an alternative route.

"I was elected to the Auckland Regional Council on the RAM (Residents Action Movement) ticket," said Robyn Hughes. "Over the last few years, RAM has been campaigning for 'free and frequent buses' across our region, a call that has been meeting with growing public sympathy. So I embrace ClimAction's call for 'free and frequent public transport'.

"And RAM supports ClimAction's call for 'system change, not climate change'. We must make radical social changes if humanity and other species are to survive the unprecedented chaos of climate change."

NDU National Secretary Laile Harre also wished the Climaction protesters will on the day-

As awareness of climate change grows, the kind of TINA (there is no alternative) thinking that gave neo-liberalism the upper hand in the 80s and 90s must not be allowed to shut down a debate among the worlds people around the fair and democratic management of limited resources. Economists and management consultants will tell us that only the market can tackle this crisis. After years of market-driven waste and inequality, giving the market the power to fairly allocate the atmosphere would be like getting the Managing Directors of Foodstuffs and Progressive to set the minimum wage.

Fala Haulangi, a unionist active with the SFWU’s CLeanstart campaign for cleaners, spoke of her anger that many Pacific Islands will be completely flooded within decades-

I fully support the International Climate Change Day on Saturday for the following reasons:

1. As a Tuvaluan who lives in New Zealand, global warming has always been a concerm for me and my people because Tuvalu and its people are going to be the first victim of global warming. In 50 years time Tuvalu is going to disappear from this planet. Not because of our choice. This makes me angry and very sad beause we are going to be the first environmental refugees and are forced to go somewhere else which is not the same as HOME.

2. As a union organiser for Service & Food Workers Union / Clean Start campaign we support Climaction because we need free and frequent public transport in Auckland as an environmentally responsible policy that will have major benefits for the working poor who rely mainly on buses and cannot afford a car.

If we are serious about saving the environment, then it is time for the whole community to come together and do something. Talking time is over, it is time for Action Now.

Mike Treen, Auckland Secretary for the Unite Union and a leading activist with Global Peace and Justice Auckland, also pledged his support-

It is welcome that the need to confront global warming is becoming mainstream common sense. What is disturbing is that the solutions being offered - taxes and carbon trading - offer no way forward and will penalise the poor.

Carbon taxes will increase the price of petrol which will be paid for by those using company cars but hit workers who lack adequate public transport. The obvious start is to have a massive increase in public transport available at little or no cost to the user. When that is in place we can think of taxes to encourage greater use not before.

While the World Bank estimates the value of the global carbon market nearly doubled from $11 billion in 2005 to $21.5 billion in 2006, there was no equivalent global increase in carbon emission reductions. In fact, they argue, as the carbon market has soared, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise - a stark indication that a more
pragmatic and direct approach to cutting emissions is urgently needed.

These "market-based" so-called solutions only entrench existing problems, enrich the already rich countries and individuals while discriminated against the poor. We need an alternative that penalised the corporate polluters while protecting the poor. That will require democratic social and economic planning on a national and international scale - the world can't be left to corporate markets to fix.

Finally, Joe Carolan, a central organiser with the Climaction Coalition and a member of Socialist Worker, warned the powers that be that this would be the first of many Climactions over the next few months to spur them into radical action-

Äl Gore is meeting the business elite of Auckland on November 14^th. We think big business is the problem, not the solution to climate change, and we will be organising a people’s assembly outside the Business School where he is speaking, challenging Gore to come and talk to the people and debate why need a massive system change to halt climate change. Kyoto and greenwashed capitalism is not enough- we need a revolutionary transformation of economic and political priorities with in a decade. We invite people to this assembly as a chance to debate with Gore what possible solutions are needed to the many problems he raises in his otherwise excellent film.

Monbiot- Save the planet in 10 steps

2006-11-01T02:34:00.000-08:00

With the publication of the Stern report, the consensus on climate change is clear.
Here's what we need to do.

by George Monbiot- UK journalist very involved in Global Justice movement
see http://www.monbiot.com

October 30, 2006 06:52 PM
It is a testament to the power of money that Nicholas Stern's report should have swung the argument for drastic action, even before anyone has finished reading it. He appears to have demonstrated what many of us suspected: that it would cost much less to prevent runaway climate change than to seek to live with it. Useful as this finding is, I hope it doesn't mean that the debate will now concentrate on money. The principal costs of climate change will be measured in lives, not pounds. As Stern reminded us today, there would be a moral imperative to seek to prevent mass death even if the economic case did not stack up.

But at least almost everyone now agrees that we must act, if not at the necessary speed. If we're to have a high chance of preventing global temperatures from rising by 2C (3.6F) above preindustrial levels, we need, in the rich nations, a 90% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. The greater part of the cut has to be made at the beginning of this period. To see why, picture two graphs. One falls like a ski jump: a steep drop followed by a shallow tail. The other falls like the trajectory of a bullet. The area under each line represents the total volume of greenhouse gases produced in that period. They fall to the same point by the same date, but far more gases have been produced in the second case, making runaway climate change more likely.

So how do we do it without bringing civilisation crashing down? Here is a plan for drastic but affordable action that the government could take. It goes much further than the proposals discussed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown today, for the reason that this is what the science demands.

1 Set a target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions based on the latest science. The government is using outdated figures, aiming for a 60% reduction by 2050. Even the annual 3% cut proposed in the early day motion calling for a new climate change bill does not go far enough. Timescale: immediately.

2 Use that target to set an annual carbon cap, which falls on the ski-jump trajectory. Then use the cap to set a personal carbon ration. Every citizen is given a free annual quota of carbon dioxide. He or she spends it by buying gas and electricity, petrol and train and plane tickets. If they run out, they must buy the rest from someone who has used less than his or her quota. This accounts for about 40% of the carbon dioxide we produce. The rest is auctioned off to companies. It's a simpler and fairer approach than either green taxation or the EU's emissions trading scheme, and it also provides people with a powerful incentive to demand low-carbon technologies. Timescale: a full scheme in place by January 2009.

3 Introduce a new set of building regulations, with three objectives: A. Imposing strict energy-efficiency requirements on all major refurbishments costing £3,000 or more. Timescale: in force by June 2007. B. Obliging landlords to bring their houses up to high energy-efficiency standards before they can rent them out. Timescale: to cover all new rentals from January 2008. C. Ensuring that all new homes in the UK are built to the German passivhaus standard (which requires no heating system). Timescale: in force by 2012.

4 Ban the sale of incandescent lightbulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights and other wasteful and unnecessary technologies. Introduce a stiff "feebate" system for all electronic goods sold in this country. The least efficient are taxed heavily while the most efficient receive tax discounts. Every year the standards in each category rise. Timescale: fully implemented by November 2007.

5 Redeploy the money currently earmarked for new nuclear missiles towards a massive investment in energy generation and distribution. Two squire government support to make them commercially viable: very large wind farms, many miles offshore, connected to the grid with high-voltage, direct-current cables; and a hydrogen pipeline network to take over from the natural gas grid as the primary means of delivering fuel for home heating. Timescale: both programmes commence at the end of 2007 and are completed by 2018.

6 Promote the development of a new national coach network. City centre coach stations are shut down and moved to motorway junctions. Urban public transport networks are extended to meet them. The coaches travel on dedicated lanes and never leave the motorways. Journeys by public transport
then become as fast as journeys by car, while saving 90% of emissions. It is
self-financing, through the sale of the land now used for coach stations. Timescale: commences in 2008; completed by 2020.

7 Oblige all chains of filling stations to supply leasable electric car batteries. This provides electric cars with unlimited mileage: as the battery runs down, you pull into a forecourt. A crane lifts it out and drops in a fresh one. The batteries are charged overnight with surplus electricity from offshore wind farms. Timescale: fully operational by 2011.

8 Abandon the road-building and road-widening programme, and spend the money on tackling climate change. The government has earmarked £11.4bn for new roads. It claims to be allocating just £545m a year to "spending policies that tackle climate change". Timescale: immediately.

9 Freeze and then reduce UK airport capacity. While capacity remains high there will be constant upward pressure on any scheme the government introduces to limit flights. We need a freeze on all new airport construction and the introduction of a national quota for landing slots, to be reduced by 90% by 2030. Timescale: immediately.

10 Legislate for the closure of all out-of-town superstores, and their replacement with a warehouse and delivery system. Shops use a staggering amount of energy (six times as much electricity per square metre as factories, for example), and major reductions are hard to achieve: Tesco's "state of the art" energy-saving store at Diss in Norfolk, has managed to cut its energy use by only 20%. Warehouses containing the same quantity of goods use roughly 5% of the energy. Out-of-town shops are also hardwired to the car - delivery vehicles use 70% less fuel. Timescale: fully implemented by 2012.

These timescales might seem extraordinarily ambitious. They are, in contrast to the current plodding pace of change. But when America entered the second world war, it turned the economy around on a sixpence. Carmakers began producing aircraft and missiles within a year, and amphibious vehicles in 90 days, from a standing start. And that was 65 years ago. If we want this to happen, we can make it happen. It will require more economic intervention than we are used to, and some pretty brutal emergency planning policies (with little time or scope for objections). But if you believe that
these are worse than mass death, then there is something wrong with your value system.

Climate change is not just a moral question: it is the moral question of the 21st century. There is one position even more morally culpable than denial. That is to accept that it's happening and that its results will be catastrophic, but to fail to take the measures needed to prevent it.

Feeling the Heat?

Interview by Andrew Stone, October 2006

Governments and big business clamour to show their green credentials but their 'solutions' fall way short of what is necessary. George Monbiot talked to Andrew Stone about his new book, Heat, and the more radical policies he believes are essential.

George Monbiot does not start Heat, his prospectus for fighting climate change, with melting glaciers or parched soil. He begins with the metaphor of Faust, the 16th century cautionary tale popularised by dramatist Christopher Marlowe in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: "Faust is a man who swaps the long term for the short term," he tells me, "in order to have 24 years of indulging himself to the absolute limit. He strikes a deal with the devil. He can get whatever he wants now, in return for eternal damnation. He refuses to believe that eternal damnation is a reality.

"Now, I'm not saying that climate change is eternal damnation, but it is a massive long term problem, which we are currently trading for a few decades of 'pleasant fruits and princely delicates', to quote from Marlowe. Like Faust, for a few earthly delights we are sacrificing the well-being of the biosphere for at least a couple of hundred years, probably for a lot longer.

"It's just not worth it. The pleasures we have extracted - such as bigger and faster cars, more and more junk to throw in the landfill, and food brought in from further and further afield - are not fundamental components of our well-being, and yet we're trading them for fundamental components of our well-being in the future."

The metaphor, fleshed out in greater detail in Monbiot's book, seems remarkably apt. Monbiot's ability to communicate complex ideas accessibly have made him a popular columnist and speaker for the environmental and global justice movements. He needs these skills in Heat to take the reader through a maze of complex and often contradictory economic and physical calculations. His aim? To prove that Britain can make 90 percent cuts in its emissions of carbon dioxide (the leading greenhouse gas) by 2030.

I ask why such a huge cut, when the Kyoto agreement only called for an average 5.2 percent cut by industrialised nations. "The Kyoto figure bears no relationship to any scientific assessment of what needs to be done. It was entirely a matter of political convenience. The purpose of Kyoto was to get some sort of figure on the table and to get some kind of action. But it's only a very small fraction of where we need to go.

"As the biosphere's ability to absorb carbon declines, and as the human population rises, just in order to stay where we are in terms of our total carbon emission and its relationship to the natural world, we need a 60 percent cut, which means a 90 percent cut in the rich nations."

This unequal cut emerges from the fact that carbon emissions per person are many times higher in Britain than in the poorer countries that will tend to suffer first and hardest from climate change. As a result, the model of contraction and convergence has gained widespread recognition. It proposes that each person in the world is allocated the right to pollute a set amount. The allocation would need to begin much higher for those in the more profligate richer countries, but would rapidly contract until it converged with that of the poorer countries.

This equitable proposition is less contentious than the method of achieving it. Much has been made of the potential for creating a market in emission allocations. Monbiot explains why the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme has set such a poor precedent: "It's founded on a great injustice, which is that the right to pollute, which should be fairly distributed among all the people in the world, has been given in big chunks to corporations. They were just handed an allocation which reflected the amount of pollution they had produced in the past. So instead of the polluter paying, in this case the polluter was paid. The more pollution they had caused, the bigger their allocation, so some of them have done very well out of it.

"The scheme can only work if at the same time you have a commitment to cutting emissions across the economy. It's simply a tool - by itself it's not a mechanism for reducing emissions." And perhaps quite a counterproductive tool, I suggest, given that the "hidden hand of the market" has done so much to create the problem. "Exactly. It's this mystical faith in market forces' ability to do everything, even reversing problems that it has caused in the past. There's this sense that we'll leave it to the market because it's terrifically convenient. But unless the government is prepared to create a framework within which those markets function then it's just not going to work at all."

Monbiot's alternative proposal is for a system of carbon rationing. While not rejecting the market outright, it more closely circumscribes its privileges. "It starts from the presumption of fairness - that everybody gets an equal ration. The corporations aren't given the rations that belong to us. Because carbon emissions are very closely correlated to income, the poorer you are, the more money you are likely to get from that system, because the more surplus ration you are likely to be able to sell on. So there's a redistribution of wealth built into the system, which is very important. If it's done through taxation, for example, the rich can just spend more money. They can just drive their Ferraris as far and as often as they want, because they can afford to do it. It's only the poor who won't be able to do it, because they'll be stung by the taxation.

"Eco-taxes have the potential to be very regressive. They don't always have to be, but you have to organise them very cleverly if they're not going to be. But a rationing system has fairness built into it. It's also very good for concentrating the mind. You've got this certain amount of carbon and you've got to decide how you're going to use it. You've got the freedom to choose how you use it but you know that if you're going to drive a Ferrari you can't heat your house."

Big business is fond of telling us that energy efficiency is the answer. Heat details why a mixture of empty corporate bombast and lack of politics combine to make their claims hollow. "While some people have been claiming that you can do the whole thing through energy efficiency, that's simply wrong. For example, across the whole housing stock, between now and 2030 about 30 percent cuts are possible. Because so many of our houses are so badly built, this can't be remedied beyond a certain point."

But significant potential does exist. "In other areas, for instance surface transport, there's a huge scope for energy efficiency. You can't get a 90 percent cut through efficiency measures alone - that obviously requires a change in the mode of transport - but there's some very big scope for efficiency there."

Green shibboleths

However there is a phenomenon, intrinsic to the drive for capital accumulation, which means that market-led energy efficiency could actually exacerbate the problem. Sounding more like a sci-fi cartoon than an economic theory, the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate builds on the 19th century observation of Stanley Jevons that decreasing the amount of coal needed to produce iron led to an overall increase in iron production. Since then, the world's energy efficiency has improved by about 1 percent per year. Yet our fuel consumption, with one or two blips, has risen steadily.

"It's an extraordinary proposition - that energy efficiency increases energy usage - the reason being that it releases capital for use on more energy intensive processes because the implicit cost of energy falls.

"I have to emphasise that this is a postulate. We don't know for sure that it functions but if it does then it's another good reason why the market alone can't work. Left to the market, it means that the energy efficiency measures which companies and people might take simply free up money which they can then invest in more energy intensive processes. So the energy efficiency measures that you introduce have to be locked in place with government regulations."

Monbiot is prepared to dismiss a few green shibboleths when discussing renewable power. "We have to be honest about these things. There's no point pursuing fake solutions. Climate change doesn't brook fake solutions. It responds simply to the amount of carbon that you put out.

"Some technologies in particular - micro-wind, solar power and biofuels - have been massively overhyped, quite irresponsibly by some of the people who have been selling them. They can make only a very small contribution to solving the problem. For example, in most cases biofuels are actually worse than fossil fuels in terms of their total climate impact.

"When it comes to electricity, my favoured solution involves two things. First of all, massive off-shore wind farms, built on a very large scale right across the continental shelf. By using high voltage direct current lines you can bring the electricity in from a very long way away without losing any of it, allowing you to extract renewable power from a much wider area than using alternating current.

"The other half of our energy supply would come from carbon capture and storage, which means stripping the carbon dioxide out of the exhaust of power stations and piping it away into salt water aquifers under the seabed. That technology is now fairly well established."

There are some important riders to this suggestion. Monbiot notes that regulation would be necessary to prevent carbon capture being used as a stalking horse for further fossil fuel extraction. "The coal industry loves the idea of what it calls 'clean coal'. It thinks that just because one part of the process is being sorted out, the whole process is then acceptable. Huge opencast pits, built around people's communities, are not acceptable under any circumstances."

Heat is very attentive to the relative market costs of energy. I ask Monbiot if there is a danger of losing sight of social costs and benefits. "Of course we have to take into account the fact that all costs exerted by any form of energy are not just costs which can be measured on a balance sheet. But it is important to make sure that the sources of energy we call for are as cheap as carbon resources, simply because our money then goes further. Solar panels are many dozens of times more expensive than producing energy from on-shore wind. So if you are faced with a choice of using £1 billion to install solar panels, or £1 billion to install wind turbines, you should go for the wind turbines, not the solar panels.

"However, there's no doubt that you've got to take into account all sorts of other issues as well. In that case you have to take into account that a lot of people very strongly object to having wind turbines put in scenic areas. But you have to have good value for money if you're going to have any hope of persuading people that it's worth investing in alternative energy."

We move on to another thorny issue - how to get people to drive less.

"This is a big problem. Technologically, it's incredibly easy to solve. In the book I champion the coach system proposed by economist Alan Storkey. At the moment, coaches are appalling. They're incredibly slow, a deeply depressing experience. You're made to feel like a third class citizen. They trundle in and out of the city centre, which is just insane.

"You need to have coaches which stick entirely to the motorways, with coach stops on the motorway junctions, linking up with public transport from the city centres. It could be an extremely fast, efficient and comfortable service, with coaches on dedicated lanes on the motorways, given priority at traffic lights. They would actually be moving faster than the cars on the motorway.

"I accept that there are many things that people enjoy about driving their car. But I think that when they see coaches whizzing past them on the inside lane when they're stuck in a traffic jam, they're going to wonder if it's worth it. When they see that people in coaches will be able to watch films, work on their laptops, sleep, eat and drink, a lot of people are going to see that travelling by coach is a superior option."

Monbiot admits that he has been less successful in proposing a substitute for the fastest growing source of emissions - aviation. "I became so desperate that I even contemplated airships," he laughs. "Of all the possible solutions, that might be the best one if we're to keep flying, however improbable it sounds.

"There are no good technological substitutes. Richard Branson is now saying that he's investing £1.6 billion in alternative fuels and technologies for aviation. Well, if indeed that's what he thinks he's doing, he's wasting his money. Those alternatives do not exist. There are a very narrow range of conditions which allow flight. There's no foreseeable alternative to the jet engine at the moment; there's no foreseeable alternative to kerosene as jet fuel. I'm not saying that will always be the case, but we have to deal with the problem of aviation right now. The only way of dealing with it is by grounding most of the planes which are flying today."

One proposed method for achieving this is to levy aviation fuel tax. Some campaigners argue that such green taxes would drive up the cost of flying and so reduce its frequency. Monbiot resists this argument: "I'm not too keen on taxation as a method anyway, because I think that carbon rationing is much fairer, and it's much less punitive for the poor. But in particular, aviation fuel tax is just a non-starter. You'd have to unpick 4,000 bilateral trade agreements linked to the 1944 Chicago Convention, and that's simply impossible in the kind of timescale that we're talking about."

A tax on aviation profits would probably be preferable, but I am disturbed by the second part of Monbiot's explanation. For the kind of economic restructuring climate change requires we are going to have to tear up some rule books. Monbiot is one of the foremost critics of world trade rules, and their devastating effect on the world's poor. But his logic of creating a carbon economy inside the existing one risks accommodating the latter for the sake of the former.

Even the best metaphor will only illuminate some features for comparison. Seen as a cautionary tale for humanity personified, the Faust metaphor works. But it cannot encompass the contradictions within humanity - between the tiny minority who direct the world's economy and the rest of us. But when I ask Monbiot about the corporate disinformation campaign of the "climate sceptics", you would think we were all equally culpable for climate change:

"One of the reasons why companies like Exxon have been so successful at persuading us that climate change isn't happening is that we want to be persuaded - we don't want to believe it. Just like Faust, who said, 'Thinketh thou... that, after this life, there is any pain? Tush, these are trifles and mere old wives' tales.' We are exactly the same. We want to be fooled."

While Heat is principally a demonstration of what is possible, it does conclude with an appeal to campaign. Disappointingly, its point of reference is the small environmental protests of the 1990s rather than the anti-war movement. Still, Monbiot is clear that "we need to launch the biggest popular campaign that the world has ever seen". Unfortunately, his emphasis on our psychological denial persists. "We need to persuade governments that if they opt for controlling climate change they will not be unpopular as a result - in fact the people are behind them. At the moment governments can be quite complacent about this, because they know that we want them to pretend to act. We don't want them to actually do what needs to be done - we want them to pretend to do what needs to be done."

It will require austerity, says Monbiot. "It hasn't happened very often in the past," he laughs, and thinks of a chant: "What do we want? Less bread!"

Capitalists need to constantly create new markets, for which they have to create new needs and desires. Monbiot argues that "this constant growth of the amount of goods and services available is just totally unnecessary for our quality of life. And it begins to reduce our quality of life as well. As more and more roads are built, as more and more airports are built, life becomes less and less peaceful and pleasant. In the rich countries we've got quite enough of everything already, if only we distributed it properly."

That prize, of ridding ourselves of atomised communities and alienated working lives, is a worthy one we will need to combine with the fight to save the planet. But I think we need to work on the chants.

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9843

CLIMATE CHANGE FRONTPAGE NEWS IN NZ MSM

2006-10-30T18:31:00.000-08:00

NZ's MAIN STREAM MEDIA takes notice at last of CLimate Change!

Below are three articles from today's media on how climate change is starting to intersect with New Zealand politics and business.

The "turn" by Helen Clark & Labour towards making climate change a political priority will open up more space for mass debate and action on this issue. ClimAction has been set up none too soon.

However, Labour's current raft of climate change policies seem laughably far off Clark's stated goal of making New Zealand "carbon neutral".

And big business is already warning the government that its climate change policies must not get out of step with New Zealand's "main trading partners" - that is, the global market must continue to rule, despite being the driver of the climate change crisis in the first place.

Grant M

NZ clean and green - or poor

TUESDAY , 31 OCTOBER 2006

New Zealand's economic future could be under threat from mounting global warming fears and it must convince the world it is a clean, sustainable producer, Prime Minister Helen Clark has warned.

Dire forecasts about the impact of climate change could trigger a new round of trade protectionism based on environmental barriers and tariffs damaging this country's ability to sell goods to lucrative markets.

A key risk was consumers opting to buy local products in an effort to cut carbon emissions from transporting goods, known as "food miles".

"Unless we're seen to be going the extra mile on sustainability, we run the risk of being labelled as simply unsustainable producers, major carbon emitters even trying to get our produce to market," Miss Clark said.

There had even been talk of "global warming premiums" that could harm exports of fruit, vegetables and flowers. Fruit and vegetable exports earned more than $1.5 billion in the first nine months of this year.

"We really do have to take these issues extremely seriously and be mindful of our reputation as an economy," she said.

Often the perception was ill-founded. Carbon emissions from producing and shipping New Zealand's dairy products worldwide were less than emissions from producing the same products in Europe.

New Zealand kiwifruit had been singled out, one report claiming a kilogram of air-freighted fruit caused 5kg of carbon emissions.

Kiwifruit is not usually air-freighted, however.

Miss Clark's concerns follow the release of a report by chief British Government economist Nicholas Stern warning of economic upheavals if climate change is not addressed.

A call for bold action on climate change was a key part of Miss Clark's speech to the Labour Party conference in Rotorua on Saturday.

The Government would assess how the data in the Stern report affected New Zealand, she said, and could seek its own study to analyse the specific economic impact.

"I think we are broadly aware of what rising sea levels and much more volatile climate would do to our agricultural- based economy but it may be that we need to be taking a rather broader look than that."

Miss Clark's speech at the opening of Parliament in February would include more details of the Government's plans.

"We need to take a majority of Parliament with us if there are to be sticks. Everyone will vote for carrots, but there need to be some balance of incentives and disincentives around some of these issues."

Measures could include limits on the age of imported cars, sustainable land use and management, and a higher percentage of biofuels in petrol.

The Government failed to win public support for the "fart tax" aimed at reducing agricultural emissions, or a 4-cent carbon tax on petrol.

Miss Clark said high fuel prices had already boosted the use of public transport in Auckland and Wellington, and the Government was "running to catch up with the demand". Spending on public transport would need to increase further.

The Stern report warns the world has 10 years to tackle climate change, or face a global recession costing about $10 trillion.

The United Nations reported yesterday that the industrial world's emissions of greenhouse gases are growing again.

Kiwifruit caught in a global warming storm

TUESDAY , 31 OCTOBER 2006

The humble New Zealand kiwifruit has been caught at the centre of growing alarm in Britain over the effects of global warming.

A major report released says the global cost of climate change could top NZ$10 trillion and a former UK cabinet minister called for a tax on exotic fruit to be considered amongst measures to change consumer behaviour.

In an article titled "five ways to make a difference" The Guardian newspaper said readers should avoid foods that had travelled long distances between production and consumption.

"One kiwifruit flown from New Zealand, for instance, emits five times its own weight in carbon dioxide emissions . . . and the average shopping basket of food has clocked up the same miles as flying to the moon" the article said.

But just a few trays of the 100,000 tonnes of NZ kiwifruit sent to Europe every year were air-freighted, said Zespri general manager marketing services Peter Luxton.

Zespri produce was shipped because air freight was too expensive.

"The trade shouldn't be threatened but people could get the wrong impression," said Mr Luxton.

Prime Minister Helen Clark said that though kiwifruit was not generally air freighted, New Zealand was a long way from high value markets and needed to get its produce to there somehow.

"We really do have to take these issues extremely seriously and be mindful of our reputation as an economy."

A Lincoln University study found New Zealand produce, such as dairy products or fruit, was produced efficiently by world standards and if it was shipped rather than flown, still had lower emissions than UK produce.

Business cautious on green policies

TUESDAY , 31 OCTOBER 2006

The Labour Government's green policies could have a "phenomenal" cost if it tries to implement them quickly, businesses say.

Greenhouse Policy Coalition executive director Catherine Beard said yesterday the impact of a radical greening of Labour's policies signalled by Prime Minister Helen Clark at the party's annual conference depended on their time frame.

Mrs Beard said the prime minister's suggestion New Zealand could become "carbon neutral" was a big ask when 50 per cent of our emissions came from agriculture and 20 per cent from transport where there were no near term answers to reduce those types of emissions.

The coalition represents the view of large industries and businesses on greenhouse policies.

Carbon neutrality would require other measures to offset carbon emissions, such as tree planting and carbon capture by a coal-fired power plant.

"The question is how quickly can you move to that sort of goal. And is it realistic when you've got such a big chunk of your emissions coming from an area which no one has a solution for in the medium term?" The cost of going carbon neutral would depend on the time frame.

"If you tried to do it in the short term I think the cost would be phenomenal because we don't have low carbon options that are technologically ready and competitive."

New Zealand needed to be careful to keep in step with its main trading partners on climate change policies.

Otherwise, it risked "leakage" where large companies relocated to another country where there were fewer or no penalties for carbon emissions.

"I think if we were trying to lead the world there would be considerable concern given that we (New Zealand) produce 0.2 per cent of emissions (globally). The big question mark there is can we afford to and what would happen to our industry."

Business New Zealand chief executive Phil O'Reilly said the greening of Labour's policies had come as a surprise.

The business community was pleased the prime minister clearly said New Zealand did not want to trade off living standards to be green but wanted to have both.

"That's an implicit acceptance, it seems to me, and a good one, and we support this, that living standards should remain high. That means you have to have successful business." The challenge was to engage with the Government on the practicality and timing of climate change policies.

"How do we do that in a way that retains competitiveness and does that mean New Zealand has an opportunity not only to sustain its living standards but to grow them as a result."

There was a wide range of views in the business community on climate change but also an increasing acceptance it needed to engage and take a leadership role on climate change issues.

Electricity commentator Brian Leyland, spokesman for New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, said achieving carbon neutrality was impossible because all the renewable energy sources being talked would not be enough to replace fossil-fuel based sources. The group believes there is no proof global warming is occurring and man-made.

Mr Leyland said he also believed energy efficiency measures would not reduce electricity consumption. If more households put in heat pumps, for instance, to replace gas heating, then more electricity would be consumed.

It would take more energy to produce crops for biofuels in New Zealand than it did to produce milk.

He believed Miss Clark was softening the country up to "weasel out" of the Kyoto protocol and join another grouping which included Australia, the United States, Japan and China.

These nations believe technology will eventually provide the solutions to emissions.

Queen Street to be shut down for carnival

2006-10-28T18:08:00.001-07:00

ClimAction media statement 28.10.06

Queen Street to be shut down for carnival

Queen Street will be shut down by hundreds of people in a civil disobedience carnival to fight climate change.

Following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King, the ClimAction Coalition is using civil disobedience to raise the issue of climate change. The rally will take place on 4th November at 1pm, starting in Aotea Square.

The ClimAction Coalition demand that NZ leaders take the urgent and resolute action we need to prevent the catastrophic destabilisation of global climate.

'Climate change is an issue that needs to be tackled, government isn't doing enough,' says Gin Barker, spokesperson for the Climaction Coalition.

'ClimAction' is a global day of action that is occurring all around the world in many different city centres on November the 4th. They are being organised to coincide with the United Nations Climate Conference in Nairobi, November 6th to 17th 2006.

For further information please contact:

Gin Barker on 021 121 6011
or Jo 027 216 7611

Join ClimAction 'civil disobedience'- ARC councillor

2006-10-27T15:21:00.000-07:00

RAM media release 28.10.06

Join ClimAction 'civil disobedience',

ARC councillor urges other elected reps

On 27 October, Auckland Regional councillor Robyn Hughes sent an Open Invitation to other elected local body representatives urging them to join a ClimAction "civil disobedience" carnival and debate on climate change in the middle of Queen St. (See Open Invitation below.)

"ClimAction is adopting Martin Luther King's tactics of peaceful civil disobedience to promote public debate and action on climate change, which is the human survival issue of the 21st century," said Robyn Hughes. "Taking over a section of Queen St for a few hours will spotlight the central problem of greenhouse gas exhaust fumes.

"To those who might say an elected councillor should always obey the road rules, I would reply: 'Tackling climate change so that humanity survives into the next century is more important than breaching some road rules for a couple of hours. Anyway, if more decisive measures on global warming aren't taken, Queen St may be under water in a generation or two, and then we will be swimming, not obeying road rules.'

"By forewarning people that a section of Queen St near Aotea Square will be a no-go area for vehicles for several hours from 1pm on Saturday, 4 November, motorists can avoid holdups by choosing an alternative route.

"I was elected to the Auckland Regional Council on the RAM (Residents Action Movement) ticket," said Robyn Hughes. "Over the last few years, RAM has been campaigning for 'free and frequent buses' across our region, a call that has been meeting with growing public sympathy. So I embrace ClimAction's call for 'free and frequent public transport'.

"And RAM supports ClimAction's call for 'system change, not climate change'. We must make radical social changes if humanity and other species are to survive the unprecedented chaos of climate change."

ClimAction event details:

1pm on Saturday, 4 November

Assemble Aotea Square

For more information, contact:

ROBYN HUGHES
ARC councillor
021-273 9421
robynhughes@paradise.net.nz

O PE N I N V I T A T I O N

To the chair & my fellow councillors of the Auckland Regional Council, and to the mayors and councillors of Auckland, Manukau, Waitakere and North Shore cities

ClimAction, a recently-formed climate change action coalition, is calling a climate change carnival and debate in Auckland at 1pm on Saturday, 4 November.

ClimAction participants will convene at Aotea Square, then move into the middle of Queen St in order to promote public debate and action on climate change.

We believe that peaceful civil disobedience, in the tradition of Martin Luther King, is necessary to build the social consensus for decisive action on climate change, the human survival issue of the 21st century.

ClimAction is flagging in advance its intention to convene for a few hours in the middle of Queen St, near Aotea Square, so that motorists can avoid this section of road without hassles.

We believe that mobilising public opinion against climate change is more important than blindly obeying road rules. Anyway, if far more decisive action is not taken on climate change, Queen St looks certain to be flooded within the next century, and then we will be swimming downtown, not abiding by road rules.

The epidemic growth of cars on our roads is one of the major contributors to climate change. ClimAction is therefore pressing for "free and frequent public transport" as a positive local alternative.

I was elected to the Auckland Regional Council on the RAM (Residents Action Movement) ticket. Over the last few years, RAM has been campaigning for "free and frequent buses" across our region, a call that has been meeting with growing public sympathy. So I embrace ClimAction's call for "free and frequent public transport".

ClimAction also believes that "Kyotro is not enough", and is calling for "system change, not climate change". We must make radical social changes if humanity and other species are to survive the unprecedented chaos of climate change.

As an Auckland Regional councillor, I invite my fellow elected local body representatives to join with me and other ClimAction participants at our climate change carnival and debate in the middle of Queen St on Saturday 4 November.

I hope you will support this life-affirming temporary breach of the road rules in order to mobilise against the greatest threat to human survival in our times.

Your feedback would be most appreciated.

ROBYN HUGHES
Auckland Regional councillor
021-273 9421
robynhughes@paradise.net.nz

CLIMACTION! Carnival Against Climate Change

2006-10-24T17:16:00.000-07:00

"CLIMACTION is a broad group of activists who have come together to take action on Climate Change in Aotearoa. Inspired by the tactics of Matin Luther King's Civil Rights Movement, we believe the time has come to take to the streets to stop the destruction of our people and planet. System Change Not CLimate Change is the Civil Rights movement of our generation."

Queen Street, Auckland
CARNIVAL AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE
Civil Disobedience to protect people & planet
Aotea Sq, Saturday November 4, 1pm

4 November will see global protests demanding action to stop climate change. As an act of civil disobedience, ClimAction will hold a public debate and carnival in the middle of Queen Street. The carnival will go for several hours. Please bring banners, kids,friends, games, music, art, a picnic and your dancing shoes.

CLIMATE CHANGE- A threat to people & planet

Climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity today. The Earth’s climate is changing rapidly, because of uncontrolled economic activity. The three warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998. The Earthis warmer than it’s been in 1,000 years. Climate Change is caused by green house gasses, which trap the sun’s heating the atmosphere.Carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas are the biggest problem. Methane from farm animals is also significant.

CLIMATE SCIENTISTS PREDICT
* Rising sea levels, flooding coastal areas, including parts of most NZ cities and many
Pacific Islands.
* Extreme weather patterns: more hurricanes, storms droughts and floods. Mass extinctions of plants and animals.
* Billions displaced by floods and famine. Wars over land and water.

FREE & FREQUENT PUBLIC TRANSPORT
ClimAction calls for free and frequent public transport, this will cut CO2 emissions.

KYOTO IS NOT ENOUGH
The Kyoto Protocol calls for small reductions in emissions. After 10 years most governments (including NZ), have done little. CO2 emissions have continued to increase here and around the world. That’s why ClimAction says Kyoto is not enough.

SYSTEM CHANGE, NOT CLIMATE CHANGE
CO2 emissions must be cut by 80% just to stabilise temperatures.This will require radical change. Corporate controlled economic systems stand in the way of these changes.They put short-term profit before the future of the planet. We face a choice between system change or climate change.

CLIMACTION is a broad group of activists who have come together to take action on Climate Change in Aotearoa. Inspired by the tactics of Matin Luther King's Civil Rights Movement, we believe the time has come to take to the streets to stop the destruction of our people and planet.

System Change Not CLimate Change is the Civil Rights movement of our generation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CLIMACTION/
http://www.climaction.blogspot.com