Elephants in da house

I didn't have room for the elephant.

We're going through the housekeeping like there's no tomorrow, borrowing ourselves into the middle of next week, whilst the tabloids bark nonsense. Oh well, what's the worst that can happen?

Some interesting background to the swine flu pandemic, from Craig Mackintosh

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Creative Differences

Shock-horror. It seems that the big polluters actually suppressed evidence and denied the conclusions of their own scientific advisors! Who'd have thought it. Shocking and wholly unexpected. I, for one, am shaken to the core that such paragons of civic and environmental virtue would stoop to such shit-splattering levels of sociopathic deceit.

Meanwhile, our fellow creatures continue to vacate history apace, whilst the diverse inheritance of evolution gets reduced cut by cut to what biologists refer to as "fuck-all".

More shock horror as humungous hive-building is seen as potentially risky strategy

The text of Al Gore's statement to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environmnent, (courtesy of Climate Progress)

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EUROFLASHMOB : 6 Airports Across Europe!

The day of the Eurovision song contest: 12 noon, Saturday 16th May 2009

12 noon - on the dot! - flash your red t-shirt in the departures section of Heathrow Terminal 1

Flash Heathrow! Flash Paris! Flash Frankfurt! Flash Amsterdam! Flash Brussels! Flash Dublin!

Each airport will sing Eurovision classics from the past (song-sheets provided!)

Join us! Bring your friends, wear a red t-shirt, bring instruments, download your favourite eurovision song onto your ipod or phone, wear a silly hat or wig, dust off your dancing shoes! Let's party!

Now for the serious bit: airport expansion is seriously bad for local people, increased noise, air pollution, and especially the climate. The aviation industry want to expand airports across the UK and Europe, but opposition is huge, and the scientists are telling us we have to drastically cut emissions if we are to beat climate change. Flashmobs are a fun way to highlight the real opposition there is to expansion at airports across Europe. Here's another big chance to show our opposition to a 3rd runway at Heathrow.

See you in Departures at Terminal 1 at 12 noon on the dot!

All over by one o'clock.

Tell BAA to get in tune! No Third Runway!

www.euroflashmob.eu

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100% Renewables? You will need a smart grid.

CCS is more expensive than normal coal. In the UK we have wind power which is likely cheaper than wind and a hell of a lot easier to plan for. Can we develop a 100% renewable power generation sector? If so, we are going to deal with intermitancy. There are many ways to do this but a basic preo-requisite is a far more intelligent grid technology. What sort of novel developments are there in this area?

> Selection of really good videos.

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Climate Camp In the City (2009 G20) Policing Report

The Climate Camp Legal Team (who are awesome!) have just released a report and associated video covering the latest climate camp--which took place in the city of london during the G20.

Full Report (PDF)

The associated video is already clocking up views thanks to it's publication by the Daily Mail, Times and the Guardian.

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Policing of the Kingsnorth Climate Camp: Preventing Disorder or Preventing Protest?

H/T to BRITCIT

This was released a little while back, so sorry for the delay!

Lib Dem MP David Howarth held a meeting in Westminster to present a highly disturbing and potentially explosive report on the way police in the UK are criminalising legitimate protest. The report, produced by the Climate Camp's legal support team and entitled Policing of the Kingsnorth Climate Camp: Preventing Disorder or Preventing Protest?, is devastating for the police.

It documents a concerted campaign by police to deter, smear, intimidate, harass, and criminalise UK citizens who did nothing more than attempt to exercise their right to peaceful protest in the name of an important cause.

Full Report (PDF)

There is a video associated with this report.

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Industry Exhales

Ern is, perhaps, identifying a little too closely with his industry interests. He's not alone.
The US EPA paves the way for significant legislation by deciding that CO2 is hazardous to human health and well being, whilst The Uk gov't promises a massive investment in CCS infrastructure, whether it exists or not.

Ice and water continue to make the news

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Guardian Climate Summit 2008: Climate Destroyer as Major Sponsor

The Guardian has generally been very sympathetic to the Climate Camp. The Guardian has always had a strong editorial line on climate change and many readers sypathise with our activities. One of our main activities has been an ongoing campaign against eon. As eon are planning the first new coal plant in 30 years at Kingsnorth in Kent I think that our motivation is quite transparent; allowing new coal development in the developed world is not only damaging on our own climate targets but also on our credibility and on the climate negotiations as a whole. eon try to distract from this hugely distructive role that they are playing by--i kid you not--putting a few solar pannels on a coal plant! The Guardian recently ripped this to shreads.

Given the sympathy towards us, and the antipathy towards our targets it is somewhat baffling to see that rather than inviting Climate Campers along to there climate change summit for our take on the challenge ahead, they invite eon to become a major sponsor!

Finally it may be worth noting that eon's head office has been visited and protested by: Climate Camp, People and Planet, Christian Aid...and possibly a few others. Civil society in the UK is united against this company but The Guardian feels able to sell them some much needed credibility.

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Rampart Collective, "Life After the G20"

On the Thursday following the G20 protests, two squatted social centres in East London were raided by riot police, apparently looking for instigators of the attacks on the Royal Bank of Scotland. RampART Social Centre, which has existed for more than four years, and a newly opened Convergence Centre in Earl Street were both being used to house and feed protesters throughout the period of the G20 summit. In both cases, the police acted illegally but, other than a brief report in the Independent which referred to unwarranted violence, the raids remained largely unreported.

In both buildings, people were subjected to physical violence and verbal abuse and those that were arrested were later 'de-arrested' for lack of any supporting evidence. Our only 'crime', it seems, is that we are political activists and squatters and thus deemed to be suitable targets. If only we had kept our heads down and stayed away from these kinds of activities, the logic goes, we would not deserve what we had coming.

It is right and proper that the events leading up to the death of Ian Tomlinson should be the subject of a criminal investigation but the danger, as we see it, is that it will be seen as an isolated incident and will be dealt with simply by disciplining individual officers, only serving to further obscure the role of the police in perpetuating a climate of fear. Under the terms of the global surveillance state, citizenship has become an exercise in evading a charge of deviance. In fact, the proliferation of forms of deviance is the flip side of the supposed 'lifestyle choices' available under the terms of consumer citizenship. You can 'choose' to spend your money on home improvements, high fashion and high-tech gadgets and are applauded for making the 'right' choices. But if you choose to occupy an unused building for the purposes of providing space for political discussion, self-education and creative activities without the intrusion of CCTV cameras, health and safety monitoring or access restrictions, and particularly if you refuse to levy a charge which situates these activities in terms of market forces, then you effectively become outlaw.. And, if you choose to express your outrage at a system that produces inequalities and then condemns those that become unemployed and homeless, you become a target for repression. The differences between Tomlinson and the people who went to the Bank of England to demonstrate against the iniquitous excesses of neoliberal capitalism are marginal, despite attempts to distinguish between 'innocent' bystanders and 'guilty' protesters. Tomlinson was on his way home from work. The demonstrators were exercising their lawful right to protest. Both were exercising their right to the city as citizens of a supposed democracy

When RampART social centre was raided on the Thursday, members of the volunteer collective were sitting down to a cup of coffee and biscuits. Other members were elsewhere in the building speaking to some guests who had come to stay for the duration of the protests. We were aware of the massing of officers outside the building but were used to the presence of a Forward Intelligence Team, the police paparazzi,who had been frequent visitors to Rampart Street in the weeks leading up to the G20, photographing and scrutinising anyone entering the building. And so, for us, it was business as usual.

At the Convergence Centre, the police seemed to be employing a new tactic whereby people being searched before entering the building had their mobile phones confiscated and were threatened with arrest unless they could 'prove ownership'. Essentially, this amounted to an attempt to illegally secure personal details.

The raid itself was surreal. Or rather, it was hyperreal, in the sense that, as some of us commented later, it was like being on the wrong side of a 'first person shooter' video game. Some of us thought the men and women in balaclavas, padded uniforms, helmets and carrying riot shields were pointing toy guns at us. In fact, as we discovered later, they were tasers, which are designed to stun but are occasionally known to kill.

It's tempting to say that the violence that we experienced was out of all proportion to the level of resistance which was, in fact, zero. But to even speak of proportionality is a mistake, because it implies that there is something in our actions that warrants a violent response. One member of the collective was punched in the face, another was pushed downstairs, had his head smashed against the wall and was met with looks of disbelief when he pleaded with officers to protect his glasses. One of the residents of the building was punched and kicked, narrowly avoided taser fire and was arrested in his pyjamas.

We would stress again that this happened to people who, like Ian Tomlinson, were simply exercising their most basic civil rights: to congregate peacefully with friends and to walk the streets unmolested. Some might think that we are opportunistically linking what happened to us with Tomlinson, and would want to make a clear distinction. After all, he was a regular bloke in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we were deliberately taking part in political activism. But to continue in this vein is lose all semblance of what it means to live with even a modicum of freedom and self-respect.

The press reported that four (and, in some reports, six) arrests had been made during the raids on RampART and the Convergence Space. Two known to us personally were held in police cells for up to ten hours, had their clothes confiscated and were sent home in Guantanamo Bay style boiler suits. News of arrests functions to assuage anxiety and to justify the cost of police operations that amount to little more than exercises in public relations. The public can rest assured that the dangerous anarchists have been infiltrated and detained and that 'scroungers' and 'cheats' have been brought to book.

Comparisons have inevitably been made between Tomlinson's death and the death of Blair Peach during an Anti-Nazi League demonstration in April, 1979, widely speculated to be as a result of assault by the police. Although Peach's brother reached an out-of-court settlement with the Metropolitan Police in 1989, no officer was ever charged in connection with the death. Thirty years later, the same police force has been granted unprecedented powers in the name of 'security' and justified on the basis that London is under threat from elements in the population that threaten 'our' way of life. The result is the proliferation of deviant identities which function as a focus for collective anxiety and paranoia ('terrorists', 'anarchists', 'squatters', 'foreign workers' etc.).

Since the incidents on the 1st and 2nd of April, voices have been raised in condemnation of police actions, particularly the tactic of “kettling” which herds protesters like cattle and allows the police to punish those who attempt to escape. Back at RampART on the Wednesday evening we saw the resulting head injuries and beaten bodies If we are to avoid more deaths and injury, then we need to think seriously, not only about the powers granted to a police force that seems dangerously out of control but about the ideology that sanctions violence in the name of respectability. We need to think about what it means to be a citizen in 21st century global culture and about the treatment of those that effectively have their human rights revoked because they refuse, or are unable to conform to the dictates of consumer citizenship. We need, in short, to be aware that, as the global downturn deprives people of their homes and livelihoods, any one of us could end up on the wrong side of the divide that separates 'us' from 'them'. Any one of us could become a scapegoat for the unfocused anger which results when people relinquish responsibility for their own lives and then find themselves deprived of their freedom and dignity. Places like RampART exist because some of us believe that we can reclaim our freedoms but only if we work together in a spirit of mutual respect and toleration.

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Quite cool really...climate camp interviewed about that thing that never happened.

Tonight members of the camp for climate action where on...

• C4 news
• BBC news at 10
• Newsnight

Talking about the issues surrounding eon and its plans for new coal power - not the alleged action in nottingham.

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EON's Dirty Coal Plans Continue to Focus Attention of Activists

EON's plans top build the first new coal plant in over 30 years continue to focus the minds of climate change activists throughout the country.

The latest from Indymedia on a protest (with a suspected direct action element)


"114 activists were arrested in a 2am raid on a community centre in Sneinton Dale, Nottingham early on Easter Monday, 13th April 2009. It is believed that a protest was planned at the Eon powerstation at Ratcliffe-on-Soar and Eon has released a statement confirming this. The Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station is the 3rd largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK and has been previously targeted by activists. Similar to past police actions, some of the homes of those arrested have been raided while they were held in custody. It has been confirmed that 5 properties have already been raided in Nottingham and the SUMAC Centre and personal paperwork and computers have been seized. Activists are now being released on bail, to appear in court on 14th July, with no other conditions. More raids are expected.

This police action is reminiscent of the arrests of climate change activists in April 2007 when they were on their way to protest against the M1 widening. While the protestors were held in custody their homes were raided and computers were taken. A year after the arrests the M1 case was thrown out of court."

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Aggravated Protest

Just a quickie. Details are still a bit sketchy as I post, but it seems a mass protest now constitutes a conspiracy. Well, at least there were no fatalities. Small mercies, I suppose.

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Elective Deafness

This weekend many of you will be celebrating the annual festival of Easter - when we commemorate the point at which our nation traditionally goes into ecological debt - consuming beyond our means and damning us and the rest of the planet to a joyful future of instability, expensively shagged soils and dry taps. We celebrate this with over-packaged chocolate eggs to demonstrate that we are blessed with the requisite amount of kiddy-friendly blind faith, and that we really couldn't give a toss.

The prognosis is poor, and we don't have time to "rinky-dink" with half-arsed, poorly financed quarter-measures.

Some folk would have us believe that what we need is to wait for the same people who got us into this mess - respectable, wealthy folks in nice suits - to come up with a new visionary realism that supersedes the green agenda and saves us at the last minute without upsetting anybody. And if they fail? Well, after 3 days we shall rise again....

We are steeped in messianic, exceptionalist thinking.

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Wheels Within Wheels

Gordon Brown and sheep-dog Boris both make extravagant claims about the greening of their budgets and the blissful cornucopia of fairy dust technology that will miraculously trump the ugly realities of a finite planet. Should be worth a few votes.

It's a shameless re-tread of this early Frank strip.



Meanwhile the Lords of Saudi Arabia make a surreal plea for special consideration, and plans are laid at the Doc Fiendish Institute

It seems to be very deep in our genes, this buying and selling lark

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Choice and Prosperity

It's a conundrum, isn't it? Development and climate change. Such a dilemma -convoluted and labyrinthine, loaded and provocative. Whilst India pushes for escape from endemic poverty by pursuing a Nano for everyone, its' islands start to disappear, as do its' neighbours. The result of success will be failure. Hmm. Tricky. Plenty of arguments to be had there. Good job we're all totally focused on it and not distracted by beer and football.

Elsewhere the Murray dries up, as do the Cedars of Lebanon. Bankruptcy beckons.

The poles are not so far apart after all.

When even the CBI say we're not doing enough, we know we're in trouble.

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Climate Camp in The City

A really great event. The whole day would have been like this--peaceful, musical and educational--if the violent thugs (guardian/times) hadn't been out in force.

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More nails in Satire's coffin

Truth is far stranger and dumber than fiction.

Noel Lynch brought the Tesco idiocy to my attention thus;

"Today's Guardian has a half page advert for TESCO. It is headed 'Turn lights into flights'. It shows a low energy light bulb and says that if you buy it you can get a clubcard voucher that you can turn into 60 Airmiles. So that's save a small amount of energy by buying a low energy light bulb and then consume a large amount of energy by flying an extra 60 miles. Doh!"

Quite so.

The Earth Hour folk drop a bollock with Alanis -really quite breath-takingly numb of them.

The Masters of the Universe would rather not be regulated, thankyouverymuch

We're probably all fucked now.

OPEC denies any part in Climate Change


An excellent cartoon from Martin Rowson in the Grauniad

Not a good week, on the whole. A lot of Obama-fueled Gordon Brown-nosing, coupled with a handful of pseudo-anarchist wankers playing to a phallanx of pseudo-journalistic cameras made for a poor display. Too much kettling and containment and predictably OTT PCs. A couple of non-committal half-statements at the end of an economists communique may quickly fade away.

Here's an excellent lecture by Dieter Helm. Succinct and informed and inarguably respectable.
(thanks to Richard Douglas via Marc Hudson)

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Response to Policing of Climate Camp

A few interesting pieces of writing about the the way the police dealt with the climate camp:

1. A letter to The Times

Sir, Last week a parliamentary report recognised that police tactics against dissent have become “heavy-handed in recent years”. This week the police provide another example of an approach towards protest that is primarily about repression and not about public order (report, April 3).

The Joint Committee on Human Rights suggests that “the deployment of riot police can unnecessarily raise the temperature at protests”. On Wednesday riot police were sent into peaceful crowds, hitting people with truncheons and riot shields. Aggressive dogs were used to intimidate. The report is concerned about the “improper use” of Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act 2008 to prevent photographing or filming police. When the police broke up the climate camp, people were forced to delete images and film that showed the police in action.

The report states that “inconvenience or disruption alone are not sufficient reasons for preventing a protest from taking place”, and that the police need more human rights training. Claiming that indiscriminate tactics, such as “kettles” to contain and break up protests, were employed in order to deal with “a small number of people” is an admission that the rights of others to protest can go to the wall. Parliamentarians have yet to address the legality of the police database in which information on thousands of protestors is held. On April 1 climate campers were unable to leave unless they gave names and addresses and had their photos taken. The database has just got much bigger.

Emma Sangster

London E5

2. A piece in the Independant

The (very) heavy hand of the law

It was clear from early on, in the City of London on Wednesday, that two very different protests were being staged. One, centred on the Bank of England, sheltered masked agents provocateurs, who were intent on clashing with the police. They succeeded in their aims.

But the other, the Climate Camp on Bishopsgate, harboured no such elements, and continued peacefully all day. Yet the 800 people at this street party were still attacked by riot police very suddenly in the evening. Footage has been posted on the internet showing officers repeatedly hitting unarmed civilians

The attack on the camp by the police is being described as "unprovoked" by protesters. This is not, strictly speaking, the case. It is provocative, of course, to block a road without permission, and the aim of the protest was to block that section of Bishopsgate for 24 hours.

What is downright sinister, however, is that all those who were visiting the Climate Camp at that time were violently attacked and then trapped for many hours by the police. They were not allowed to leave between 7pm and midnight, even if they had been injured. Even a woman in a wheelchair was held.

If the concern of the police was to clear the road for traffic, then their action was certainly counterproductive. They succeeded, after all, in blocking the road to pedestrians as well as vehicles for five hours. The tactics of the police smack of collective punishment for everyone.

It is possible that had a warning of an impending shutdown been given to the campers, the news may have attracted more aggressive visitors. It's true also that had the police put in place a policy whereby people were allowed to leave but not to enter, there was no guarantee that those leaving would quietly disperse.

Yet these factors only make it difficult to understand why the police became so confrontational so early. Why could the police not just keep the protest under observation, while they concentrated on quelling the violent skirmishes in other parts of town?

Their claim is that they corral groups of protesters so that they can isolate the anti-social elements. But by the time they mounted their attacks, the police had had nearly seven hours to assess whether any such element had ever been present. The fact that the Climate Camp protesters mounted no violence in response to that meted out to them suggests that their intentions of mounting a peaceful protest had been successful.

Most worrying of all, when legal observers advised people who had been hit by the police, or who had been witnesses to it, to take down the numbers of their assailants, the line of police all covered their badges. It is much more terrifying that the police are hiding their identities as they take part in violence, than that the self-styled "anarchists" we have heard so much about are doing so.

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States create the violence used to justify there existance.

It seems that that old Anarchist saying still holds true.

Quote from David Howarth MP (LD) who attended Climate Camp in the City:

"How did the police end up in a situation where they used the same degree of force on the most peaceful demonstration as they did for a violent protest at the Bank of England? They seem to only have one trick."

The Guardian has this quote in a story called "Baton charges and kettling: police's G20 crowd control tactics under fire". It's somewhat ironic that the Guardian is reporting on this now, when it had absolutely no issue with talking up planned protests as some sort of mass riot in the run-up to the g20. I think they should take a close look at there role in allowing this to happen. it's easy to police asif there is a riot if all the public are expecting one!

Nasty policing in action after people have already been kettled (illigally?) for hours.


Climate Camp in the City from Tina Tunning on Vimeo.

UPDATE: WHITNESSES MAKE STATEMENTS IMPLICATING POLICE IN DEATH OF BYSTANDER (STORY)

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Climate Camp in The City

Climate Camp in the City was a huge success despite police violence against peaceful protestors bringing the event to a premature end.

There are many beautiful photos, and interesting videos on the events of April 1st.

My first contribution to the currently available collection is a video of Danny Chivers telling an ass kicking poem about fighting for a better future.



More video to come shortly.

Related:

• Climate Camp website with photos.
• Climate Camp was targeting carbon trading, why?
• Climate Camp on Indymedia.

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