The corporate takeover of ?reason? and ?science?
8 Aug 2008
Those who say that they favour science and rationality can end up supporting the opposite. Science and rationality retain a very significant force in public debate and is thus worth exploiting by vested interests. The strategic use of science is a well used part of the armoury of the public relations industry. Indeed it is true to say that the founding of the PR and lobbying industries were based on attempts to pervert rationality and science in the interests of vested interests. The very earliest PR practitioners such as Freud?s nephew Edward Bernays, were adept at this. Bernays use of psychology was famously put to use in promoting cigarette smoking among women by styling them ?torches of freedom? and associating them with women?s equality and liberation. Bernays was amongst the first to make a profession out of what he called the ?conscious? and intelligent manipulation? of the beliefs and behaviour of the public. Those who ?manipulate this unseen mechanism? of society were, he wrote, an ?invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.? [1] Today the PR industry is still based on the same philosophy. The promotion of ?science-i-ness? is an ever present talisman. It has two cardinal principles. The first – seen increasingly following the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s ? is that where science or truth will undermine corporate interests, the science or truth must be changed. The second principle is to disguise the source of information where useful. When a message is likely to be disbelieved or treated with scepticism when said openly by a corporation or politician, the words must be put in the mouth of someone more believable and apparently disinterested. This is the famous third party technique and has led to a whole swathe of scientists taking corporate money to promote corporate friendly science. Because science is still such a resource it is imperative for powerful interests to try and co-opt, undermine, distort, influence or buy ?science?. This is now so widespread that the issue is openly debated in the scientific journals and there is a small but growing number of studies examining the question of the potential bias introduced by corporate funding.[2] From the 50 year battle to protect the tobacco industry to today?s strategic use of science in climate change denial, and to muddy the waters as obesity and binge drinking become crisis issues, scientists have been recruited as a resource. For example they receive research grants, are paid as consultants or have their names added to academic journal articles ghost written by PR operatives. Some scientists are even kept on retainers by corporations or lobby groups and can be wheeled out to order. The third party technique fits nicely into the co-option strategy. Scientists whose research budgets are nicely swelled by corporate money can often be surprisingly willing recruits to speak on behalf of industry. A study of toxic industrial contaminants in farmed Salmon published in Science in 2004, was greeted with a chorus of condemnation in the press. Many of the voices were described as academic scientists. In fact almost all had financial links to the industry undisclosed in the press. The study itself was well grounded.[3] Nonetheless the industry campaign to remove the stain of poisoned Salmon from the public mind was largely successful. In the US and UK the creation of ?front groups? is common. These are organisations usually including a science-like term in their title such as ?foundation? ?institute? or ?research?. In the UK the food industry has been able to sabotage healthy eating initiatives since the 1970s by ? among other things – funding the apparently independent British Nutrition Foundation which is able to place representatives on a myriad of government committees.[4] The International Life Science Institute sounds a bit scientific. In fact it is a food industry lobby group funded by hundreds of the biggest food, pharma and chemical companies and was for years more or less directed by the Coca Cola company. It was able to infiltrate the WHO process on dietary sugars by covertly funding some of the scientists involved.[5] In January 2006 the WHO decided that ILSI ?can no longer take part in WHO activities setting microbiological or chemical standards for food and water?, as a result of complaints about its lobbying tactics.[6] The PR industry is at the forefront of creating and managing front groups today. The Scientific Alliance turned out to be run from the offices of Foresight Communications a PR firm in central London and to be funded by Scottish quarry owner Robert Durward. The Social Issues Research Centre ‘fosters the image of an ultraconcerned public spirited group’ and of ‘a heavy-weight research body’.[7] It is also run by a PR/marketing company from the same address. That company – MCM Research – used to announce on its website its approach to open and truthful communications: ?Do your PR initiatives sometimes look too much like PR initiatives? MCM conducts social/psychological research on the positive aspects of your business… The results do not read like PR literature?.[8] Of course the corporations can do little else than lie and attempt to co-opt science. They require to extract maximum surplus from both labour and natural resources to be part of the global market. Their problem is that these qualities of corporate operations are not very attractive to the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. As a result corporations and their PR agents must try to undermine or co-opt science. The only defence is transparency, enhanced ethics standards and public funding of research. NOTES 1. Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928, New York: Horace Liverwright. 2. Kassirer, J.P. On the take: How medicine’s complicity with big business can endanger your health. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 2005.; Lesser et al. ?Relationship between funding source and conclusion among nutrition-related scientific articles?. PLoS Medicine 2007.; Jorgensen AW, Hilden J, Gotzsche PC. Cochrane reviews compared with industry supported meta-analyses and other meta-analyses of the same drugs: systematic review. BMJ 2006;333:782-5.;Veronica Yank, Drummond Rennie, Lisa A Bero, Financial ties and concordance between results and conclusions in meta-analyses: retrospective cohort study BMJ 2007;335:1202-1205 (8 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.39376.447211.BE (published 16 November 2007); Jim Giles, Industry money skews drug overviews Nature 437, 458-459 (22 September 2005); DeAngelis, C. Comment on ?Conflict of interest in medical research: facts and friction? in meeting proceedings, call to action: Managing financial relationships between academia and industry in biomedical research 2007; 15-16.;Peppercorn, J, Blood, E., Winer, E, Partridge, A. Association between pharmaceutical involvement and outcomes in breast cancer clinical trials. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology 2005. 3. David Miller ?Spinning Farmed Salmon (part 2 of 3)?, Spinwatch, 28 May 2008 http://www.spinwatch.org/content/view/4953/8/ 4. Geoffrey Cannon The Politics of Food Century Hutchinson, London, UK, 1987. John Yudkin, Pure, White and Deadly, Penguin, 1988. 5. Sarah Boseley ‘WHO “infiltrated by food industry”’ The Guardian Thursday January 9, 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/jan/09/foodanddrink; Sarah Boseley ‘Sugar industry threatens to scupper WHO’ The Guardian Monday April 21, 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/apr/21/usnews.food; Sarah Boseley ‘WHO ‘buried’ report to please food industry’ The Guardian Wednesday November 3, 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/nov/03/media.advertising 6. John Heilperin, ?WHO to Rely Less on U.S. Research?, Associated Press, January 27, 2006. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/01/27/national/w15… 7. Annabel Ferriman ?An end to health scares?? BMJ 1999;319:716- ( 11 September ) http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/319/7211/716 8. Ibid.

Pensioners and postal workers rally to the People Before Profit charter
8 Aug 2008
The scale of the economic crisis, which has seen rising prices and attacks on workers? living standards, is leading to increased support for the People Before Profit Charter. The charter puts forward ten demands to improve the lives of working people. Supporters of the charter protested outside the building where Centrica, the owner of British Gas, announced 992 million profits last week. They demanded a windfall tax on the company. The protest received widespread media coverage, with pictures of it on the front page of the London Paper, and the Morning Star. It even appeared in the Sun. A number of postal workers signed the charter at a protest on Monday of this week (see page 14) to support of three Bristol CWU trade union activists who are facing victimisation. Signatories included: Dave Ward, the deputy general secretary (postal) of the CWU communications union; David Wilshire, branch secretary of Bristol CWU; and Paula Franklin, one of three victimised activists. With the energy giants hiking their fuel prices massively, these are also worrying times for old age pensioners. There are currently 2.1 million pensioners living in poverty, up from 1.8 million last year. The increasing pressure on their pension will throw many more into poverty. The plight of pensioners has got increasingly worse since Margaret Thatcher cut the link between pensions and wages in 1980. This means the basic state pension is just 90.70 a week. Trade unions and campaigners are demanding that the basic pension rate be increased to 124.05 a week. The charter?s calls for the abolition of taxes on fuel and energy for old people and the poor, and for the link between wages and pensions to be re-established. This demand is winning support for the charter among pensioners, such as Gordon McLennan, a pensioner activist in Lambeth, south London, and former general secretary of the Communist Party. Gordon told Socialist Worker, ?I agree with the general proposals of the charter, but I am particularly interested in the point about the fight for higher pensions and the abolition of tax on fuel and energy for old people and the poor. ?There are plenty of reasons for pensioners to back the charter. We have the scandal where electricity and gas prices are going up, sometimes at the rate of 40 percent. ?We have a situation where pensioners are being increasingly forced into a corner, both in society and economically. ?There is no response to this from present day politicians. We are being ignored. The local council?s newspaper doesn?t have a word about elderly people in it. ?The government is increasing our winter fuel allowance by 100 when gas and electricity bills are going up by a lot more. Some 300,000 pensioners have dropped into poverty in the last year. ?The kind of feeling that pensioners have about all this must be built up to have a massive impact on 22 October. ?That?s when we will lobby parliament to demand a decent state pension and to celebrate 100 years of the state pension.?

Fixation on the market
8 Aug 2008
This was a decision that hit hard the struggling mortgage payers in the interests of controlling inflation which, it should be pointed out, is none of the mortgage-payers’ fault but can be attributed largely to fuel profiteering, speculation, oil and gas company super-profits and the resulting transport cost rises which affect almost every commodity. It also brings into sharp focus the Financial Services Authority warning to lenders earlier this week that specialist mortgage firms are “too ready” to take court action against borrowers. But these are not the only factors which have affected and damaged the 18,900 families who have lost their homes in the first six months of this year or the 45,000 whom the Council of Mortgage Lenders forecast will fall victim throughout the full year. The real elephant in the room is, as seems to be increasingly the case, the policies of a government which point-blank refuses to abandon its fixation with the market and take real measures to solve a housing crisis which is totally of its own making. Throughout the life of this Labour government, it has steadfastly refused to reverse its disastrous policies on council housing, attempting to drive a wedge between councils and their tenants with so-called arm’s-length management organisations, bribes to force occupants to relinquish their status as council tenants in favour of housing associations, reinforcing the ring-fencing of councils’ housing revenue accounts and blocking any attempt by councils to pick up their former role as the premier suppliers of social housing in this country. This has led to a dearth of affordable housing at the lower end of the housing market, driving hard-up families into mortgage deals that they cannot afford, simply because there is little or no alternative except an over-priced and insecure private rented sector. This, in turn, increases the scarcity of houses for sale at the bottom end of the market yet again and thus drives up the prices, overheating the housing market and making housing ever more expensive and ever less affordable, until such time as lenders get panicky as they see their borrowers becoming over-extended and start pulling in credit availability, causing the so-called credit crunch which then makes mortgages even more expensive. Yes, of course, greedy mortgage lenders carry a portion of blame, lending even to those who clearly can’t afford it on the basis of trousering their commission and moving onto the next victim, leaving the families in their wake with a headache which gets worse as the bank tries to halt inflation by hitting those on the bottom of the heap. But the majority of the blame must rest with a government which, for purely right-wing ideological reasons, will not countenance the public supply of anything be it health, housing or transport. And it is the same government which handed over interest-rate setting to the bankers, in the certain knowledge that bankers’ solutions rarely benefit the low-paid. This government should be squeezing the profiteers in the oil and power supply industry until the pips squeak. Instead, it chooses to be an audience on the spectacle of bankers squeezing the poor, while it does its best to make the problems worse by ensuring that the low-paid remain exactly that.

The end of the world as we know it
7 Aug 2008
As fuel prices rocket, a new world energy order is emerging. It will bring with it a fierce international competition for dwindling stocks of oil, natural gas, coal and uranium, and also an epochal shift in power and wealth from energy-deficit states such as the US, Japan and the newly-industrialising China to energy-surplus states such as Russia, Venezuela and the oil producers of the Middle East. Michael Klare examines the likely consequences of the growing competition for the soon-to-be diminishing supply of energy Oil at $150 a barrel, up sevenfold in six years. Unleaded touching 1.20 per gallon, diesel at more than 1.30 at even the cheapest UK pumps. Gasoline at $4.50-plus ? an undreamt-of height ? in the US, with diesel topping $5, forcing many truckers off the road. Home heating oil at prices that many cannot afford. Jet fuel so expensive that the major carriers have cut back on routes and some low-cost airlines have ceased flying altogether. This is just a taste of the latest energy-related news, signalling a profound change in how all of us, in the United Kingdom, the United States and around the world, are going to live ? trends that, so far as anyone can predict, will become more pronounced as energy supplies dwindle and the struggle over their allocation intensifies. Energy of all sorts was once abundant, making possible the worldwide economic expansion of the past six decades. This expansion benefited the US most of all, along with its ?first world? allies in Europe and the Pacific. Recently, however, a select group of former ?third world? countries ? China and India in particular ? have sought to participate in this energy bonanza by industrialising their economies and selling a wide range of goods to international markets. This, in turn, has created an unprecedented spurt in global energy consumption ? an increase of 47 per cent in the past 20 years alone, according to the US Department of Energy. A new world energy order An increase this huge would not be a matter of deep anxiety if the world?s energy suppliers were capable of producing all the additional fuels needed. Instead, we face the frightening reality of a marked slowdown in the development of global energy supplies just as demand is rising precipitously. These supplies are not actually running out ? although that will occur sooner or later ? but they are not growing fast enough to satisfy soaring demand. The combination of rising demand, powerful new consumers and the contraction of supply is demolishing the energy-abundant world most of us are familiar with and in its place creating a new world energy order. This new order will be characterised not only by fierce competition for dwindling stocks of oil, natural gas, coal and uranium, but also by a tidal shift in power and wealth from energy-deficit states such as China, Japan, and the United States to energy-surplus states such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In the process, the lives of everyone on the planet will be affected in one way or another ? with poor and middle-class consumers in the energy-deficit states experiencing the harshest effects. There are five key trends in this new world order that will alter life on this planet. 1. Intense competition between older and newer economic powers for the available supplies of energy Until very recently, the mature industrial powers of Europe, Asia and North America consumed the lion?s share of world energy supply, leaving the dregs for the developing world. As recently as 1990, the members of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the club of the world?s richest nations, consumed approximately 57 per cent of world energy, and the Soviet bloc 14 per cent. Only 29 per cent was left for the entire developing world, which has about three-quarters of the world?s population. But that ratio is now changing. With strong economic growth in the developing countries, they are consuming a greater proportion of the world?s energy output. By 2010, the developing nations? share of global energy use is expected to reach 40 per cent; and if current trends persist their share will reach 47 per cent by 2030. China, where a quarter of the world?s population lives, plays a critical role in all this. Although China accounted for only 8 per cent of world energy consumption in 1990, its rate of demand is rising so rapidly that it is expected to consume 17 per cent of world energy by 2015 and 20 per cent by 2025 ? by which time, if current trends continue, it will have overtaken the US as the world?s leading consumer. India, which in 2004 accounted for 3.4 per cent of world energy use, is projected to reach 4.4 per cent by 2025. Consumption in other rapidly industrialising nations, such as Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Turkey, is expected to climb as well. To satisfy their growing requirements, these rising economic dynamos will have to compete with the mature powers for access to the world?s remaining untapped reserves of exportable energy. In many cases, these were acquired long ago by the private energy firms of the mature powers ? companies such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Total and Royal Dutch Shell ? and are now controlled by the national oil companies (NOCs) of the major supplying nations. Of necessity, the new contenders for energy have developed a potent strategy for competing with the western ?majors?: they have created state-owned companies of their own and made strategic alliances with the NOCs that now control vast oil and gas reserves in key producing nations. China?s Sinopec, for example, has established a strategic alliance with Saudi Aramco, the nationalised giant that was once owned by Chevron and Exxon Mobil, to explore for natural gas in eastern Saudi Arabia and market Saudi crude oil in China. Likewise, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) will collaborate with Gazprom, the mammoth Russian state-controlled natural gas behemoth, to build pipelines and deliver Russian gas to China. Several of these state-owned firms, including CNPC and India?s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, will collaborate with Petrleos de Venezuela SA (PdVSA) to develop the extra-heavy crude of the Orinoco belt that was once produced by Chevron. Many other such alliances have been formed or are under discussion, suggesting a new stage of energy competition in which the advantage long enjoyed by the western majors has been eroded by vigorous, state-backed upstarts from the developing world. 2. The insufficiency of primary energy supplies The capacity of the global energy industry to satisfy demand is shrinking. By all accounts, the global supply of oil will expand for another half-decade before reaching a peak level of output and beginning to decline, while supplies of natural gas, coal and uranium will probably continue to grow for another decade or two before reaching their peak and commencing their own inevitable declines. In the meantime, global supplies will prove incapable of reaching the levels needed to meet demand. Take oil. The US Department of Energy claims that world oil demand, expected to reach 117.6 million barrels per day in 2030, will be matched by a global supply that ? miracle of miracles ? will hit exactly 117.7 million barrels (including liquids derived from allied substances such as natural gas and Canadian tar sands) at the same time. Most energy professionals, however, consider this supply estimate highly unrealistic. ?One hundred million barrels [per day] is now in my view an optimistic case,? the CEO of Total, Christophe de Margerie, told a London oil conference in October 2007. ?It is not my view; it is the industry view, or the view of those who like to speak clearly, honestly, and [are] not just trying to please people.? Similarly, the authors of the Medium-Term Oil Market Report for 2008-2012, published in July 2007 by the International Energy Agency, an affiliate of the OECD, concluded that world oil output might rise as high as 96 million barrels per day by 2012, but was unlikely to go much beyond that level as older fields went into decline and a dearth of new discoveries made future growth impossible. Daily business-page headlines point to a matrix of clashing trends: demand will continue to grow as hundred of millions of newly-affluent Chinese and Indian consumers line up to purchase their first automobiles; key older fields such as Ghawar in Saudi Arabia and Canterell in Mexico are in decline or expected to be so soon; the rate of new oilfield discoveries proves disappointing year after year. We can expect that oil shortages and high prices will prove a constant source of economic hardship. The picture for other fuels is slightly better ? but only just. Even if global output of natural gas, coal and uranium will continue to grow after the peaking of oil, the inevitable contraction of petroleum supplies will produce a corresponding increase in demand for these fuels, and so they will be depleted at an ever-increasing rate ? moving their own peak closer and increasing their cost. 3. The painfully slow development of alternatives It has long been evident that new sources of energy are needed to compensate for the disappearance of existing fuels, and to slow the buildup of climate-changing ?greenhouse gases?. Wind and solar power have gained a foothold in some areas and ethanol provides a small but growing percentage of the world?s transportation fuel. Moreover, a number of other innovative energy solutions have been developed and tested in university and corporate laboratories. But these alternatives, which contribute only a tiny proportion of the world?s fuel supply, are simply not being developed fast enough to avert the multifaceted global energy catastrophe that lies ahead. According to the US Department of Energy, renewable fuels, including wind, solar, biofuels, and hydropower, along with ?traditional? fuels such as firewood and animal dung, accounted for just 7.4 per cent of world energy use in 2004; biofuels added another 0.3 per cent. Meanwhile, fossil fuels ? oil, coal, and natural gas ? supplied 86 per cent of world energy, nuclear power another 6 per cent. Based on current rates of development and investment, the department offers the dismal projection that fossil fuels will still account for exactly the same share of world energy in 2030 as in 2004: 86 per cent. The expected increase in the share claimed by renewables and biofuels is so tiny as to be meaningless. For global warming, the implications are nothing short of catastrophic. Increasing reliance on coal (especially in China, India and the US) means that global emissions of carbon dioxide are projected to rise by 59 per cent over the next quarter-century, from 26.9 billion metric tons in 2004 to 42.9 billion in 2030. The meaning of this is simple: if these figures hold, there is no hope of averting the worst effects of climate change. When it comes to global energy supplies, the implications are nearly as dire. To meet soaring energy demand, we would need a massive influx of alternative fuels, which in turn would require investment in the trillions of dollars to ensure that the most promising options move from the laboratory to full-scale commercial production. But that is not on the cards. Instead, the major energy firms (backed by lavish US government subsidies and tax breaks) are putting most of their profits from rising energy prices into share buy-back schemes and vastly expensive (and environmentally questionable) schemes to drill for oil and gas in Alaska and the deep, dangerous waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic and the Atlantic. The result? A little more oil and gas at exorbitant prices ? with accompanying ecological damage ? while non-petroleum alternatives limp along at a snail?s pace. 4. A steady migration of power and wealth from the energy-deficit to the energy-surplus nations There are a few countries ? perhaps a dozen altogether ? that possess enough oil, gas, coal and uranium (or some combination thereof) to meet their own energy needs and provide a significant surplus for export. These few privileged states will be able to extract increasingly beneficial terms from the much wider pool of energy-deficit nations dependent on them for vital supplies of energy. This will result in growing mountains of petrodollars being accumulated by the leading oil producers, and increasingly it will mean political and military concessions. In the case of oil and natural gas, the number of major energy-surplus states can be counted on two hands. Ten states possess 82.2 per cent of the world?s proven oil reserves. In order of importance, they are: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Venezuela, Russia, Libya, Kazakhstan and Nigeria. The possession of natural gas is even more concentrated. Three countries ? Russia, Iran, and Qatar ? harbour an astonishing 55.8 per cent of the world supply. All of these countries export more oil and gas than they consume, and so are in the enviable position of being able to cash in on the dramatic rise in energy prices and extract from potential customers whatever political concessions they deem essential. The transfer of wealth is already mind-boggling. The oil-exporting countries collected an estimated $970 billion from the importing countries in 2006; the take for 2007, when finally calculated, is expected to be far greater. A substantial fraction of these dollars, yen and euros have been deposited in sovereign-wealth funds (SWFs), the giant investment accounts established by the oil states and deployed for the acquisition of valuable assets around the world. In recent months, the Persian Gulf SWFs have been taking advantage of the financial crisis in the US to purchase large stakes in strategic sectors of its economy. In November 2007, for example, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) acquired a $7.5 billion stake in Citigroup, America?s largest bank holding company. In January 2008, Citigroup sold an even larger share, worth $12.5 billion, to the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) and several other Middle Eastern investors, including Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. The managers of ADIA and KIA insist that they do not intend to use their newly-acquired stakes in Citigroup and other US banks and corporations to influence US economic or foreign policy, but it is hard to imagine that a shift of this magnitude ? which can only gain momentum in the years ahead ? will not translate into political leverage. In the case of Russia ? which has risen from the ashes of the former Soviet Union as the world?s first energy superpower ? it already has. Russia is now the world?s leading supplier of natural gas, its second largest supplier of oil and is a major producer of coal and uranium. Though many of these assets were briefly privatised during the reign of Boris Yeltsin, most were brought back under state control during the presidency of Vladimir Putin (in some cases, by questionable legal means). Putin then used these assets in efforts to extract political and economic concessions from former Soviet republics that were reliant on Russia for the bulk of their oil and gas supplies. The EU countries sometimes expressed dismay at these tactics ? but they, too, are significantly dependent on Russian oil and gas, and so have learned to mute their protests and otherwise accommodate to growing Russian control over Eurasian energy flows. In extending Russia?s energy power throughout Eurasia, Putin usually relied on Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas behemoth that provides about a quarter of OECD Europe?s gas supply. Gazprom is also Russia?s leading source of foreign earnings and its top source of government income. For years, the chairman of Gazprom was a close political ally of Putin?s from St Petersburg, Dmitri Medvedev. When obliged to step down as president under a constitutional ban on serving more than two consecutive terms, Putin picked Medvedev to succeed him. In a sense, Gazprom and the Russian state have become one and the same, and Russia itself has emerged as a model for the new energy world order. 5. A growing risk of conflict Throughout human history, major shifts in economic and political power on this scale have normally been accompanied by violence ? in some cases, protracted violent upheavals. Either the states at the pinnacle of power have fought to prevent the loss of their privileged status to others, or challengers have fought to topple those at the top of the heap. Will this happen now? Will energy-deficit nations launch campaigns to wrest the oil and gas reserves of the surplus states from their control ? the Bush administration?s war in Iraq might already be thought of one such attempt ? or to eliminate competitors among their deficit-state rivals? Certainly there are many reasons to argue against such scenarios. The high costs and risks of modern warfare are well known, and there is a widespread perception that energy problems can best be solved through economic means. Nevertheless, the major powers are employing military means in their efforts to gain advantage in the global struggle over energy, and no one should be deluded on the subject. These endeavours could easily lead to unintended escalation and conflict. One conspicuous use of military means in the pursuit of energy is the regular transfer of arms and military support services by the major energy-importing states to their principal suppliers. Both the US and China, for example, have stepped up their deliveries of arms and equipment to oil-producing states such as Angola, Nigeria and Sudan, and, in the Caspian Sea basin, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The US has placed particular emphasis on suppressing the armed insurgency in the vital Niger Delta region of Nigeria, where most of the country?s onshore oil is produced. Beijing has emphasised arms aid to Sudan, where Chinese-led oil operations are threatened by insurgencies in both the south and Darfur. Russia is also using arms transfers as a instrument in its efforts to gain influence in the major oil and gas producing regions, especially the Caspian Sea basin and the Persian Gulf. Its urge is not is not to procure energy for its own domestic use, but rather to dominate the flow of energy to others. In particular, Moscow seeks a monopoly on the transportation of central Asian gas to Europe via Gazprom?s vast pipeline network; it also wants to tap into Iran?s mammoth gas fields, further cementing Russia?s control over the trade in natural gas. The danger, of course, is that such endeavours, multiplied over time, will provoke local arms races in these areas, exacerbate regional tensions, and increase the danger of great-power involvement in any local conflicts that do erupt. History has all too many examples of such miscalculations leading to wars that spiral out of control: think of the years leading up to the first world war. What this adds up to is simple and sobering: the end of the world as we?ve known it. In the new, energy-centric world we have all now entered, the price of oil will dominate our lives and power will reside in the hands of those who control its global distribution. In this new world, energy will govern our lives on a daily basis. It will determine when, and for what purposes, we use our cars; how high (or low) to turn our thermostats; when, where, or even if, to travel; what foods to eat (given that the price of producing and distributing many meats and vegetables is profoundly affected by the cost of oil and the allure of growing crops for ethanol); for some, where to live; for others, what business to engage in; and, for all of us, when and under what circumstances to go to war or to avoid foreign entanglements that could end in war. This leads to a final observation: The most pressing decision facing the next president of the United States (along with the leaders of other major energy-consuming nations) may be how best to accelerate the transition from a fossil-fuel-based energy system to a system based on climate-friendly energy alternatives.

Climate change catastrophe by degrees
7 Aug 2008
Unfortunately, Professor Bob Watson is not speaking out of turn in telling the world to prepare for four degrees of global warming. “Mitigate for two degrees; adapt for four” has long been the catchphrase among climate negotiators and campaigners. Translated, that means: try to reduce emissions to stay below two degrees of warming, but also prepare for the worst. And Bob Watson should know ? he is the former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but was kicked out at the behest of the Bush administration for being too vocal about the threat presented by global warming. (Any sceptic reading who thinks that the IPCC is a conspiracy of environmentalists take note: it is a creature of government as well as of science.) He has long made clear his own personal passion and commitment to tackling the issue ? often without mincing his words. He is also someone with a very wide-ranging perspective: after leaving the IPCC, Watson chaired the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a landmark UN study published in 2005 looking at the totality of human impact on the planet’s natural systems. (The news wasn’t good.) The problem with the “mitigate for two degrees; adapt for four” strategy is that it is doomed to fail. Yes, we should certainly prepare for the worst as far as possible ? with flood defences, drought-resistant crops and strategies to ameliorate the loss of wildlife, at the very least ? but a look at the likely impact of a four-degrees temperature rise suggests that such a dramatic change would probably stretch society’s capacity for adaptation to the limit, not to mention having a disastrous effect on the natural ecosystems that support humanity as a whole. By the time global temperatures reach four degrees, much of humanity will be short of water for drinking and irrigation: glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas, which feed river systems on which tens of millions depend, will have melted, and their rivers will be seasonally running dry. Whole weather systems like the Asian monsoon (which supports 2 billion people) may alter irrevocably. Deserts will have spread into Mediterranean Europe, across most of southern Africa and the western half of the United States. Higher northern latitudes will be plagued with regular flooding. Heatwaves of unimaginable ferocity will sear continental landscapes: the UK would face the kind of summer temperatures found in northern Morocco today. The planet would be in the throes of a mass extinction of natural life approaching in magnitude that at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65m years ago, when more than half of global biodiversity was wiped out. Four degrees of warming would also cross many of the “tipping points” which so concern climate scientists: the Amazon rainforest would likely collapse and burn, as part of a massive further release of carbon from terrestrial ecosystems ? the reverse of the current situation, where trees and soils absorb and store a good portion of our annual emissions. Most of the Arctic permafrost will lie in the melt zone, and will be steadily releasing methane, accelerating warming still further. The northern polar ice cap will be a distant memory, and Greenland will be melting so rapidly that sea level rise by the end of the century will be measured in metres rather than centimetres. Hence the current effort ? led by scientists, in the main ? to drop the two degrees target and talk instead about getting carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere back down to less dangerous levels. This year’s CO2 concentration is 385 parts per million (ppm) ? now a campaign is forming to get them back down to 350ppm, about the level they were at in the mid 1980s. This isn’t just about reducing emissions, it is about getting emissions quickly down to zero (by 2050 or earlier), and then removing some of the excess carbon that humanity has already dumped into the atmosphere. The planet will still get warmer, but on nothing like the scale currently predicted. The harsh truth is that the latest science shows that even two degrees is not good enough, never mind four. And since four degrees would be a catastrophe that many of us, or our children, would not survive, it is surely our absolute duty to do everything in our power to avoid it.

Police bullying at Camp Kingsnorth
7 Aug 2008
I’ve just returned from a 2-3 day sojourn at the Climate Camp at Kingsnorth—site of a proposed new coal-fired power station ? which is now gearing up towards its climax. As usual the headlines focus upon policing and the inevitable ‘discovery’ of a weapons cache, more on which below. But once you make the effort ? a word I use advisedly—to get through police lines and into the camp itself the overwhelming impression is of a D.I.Y. heaven: solar panels and a wind turbine being erected, water pipes connected, sanitation systems constructed, media and cinema tents put up, impromptu kitchens, cleaning zones ? an al fresco and non-commercial soukh catering to the pleasures and necessities of daily life. The Camp’s great strength is that theory and practice share a space for a week. Having kicked off with marches and due to finish on Saturday with direct action, in the days between there are workshops galore ? a hundred or more ? covering the usual themes as well as not a few tailored to specialist tastes: “the world lawn tango championships,” “five-finger direct action training,” and ? one cannot but wonder whether practice and theory were united here—“safe sex for activists.” That Arthur Scargill made an appearance was welcome, although it was disappointing to see that he has not yet got it. (In the USA at the outset of World War Two it was union leaders who, against bitter resistance from big business, championed the conversion of auto plants to make planes. In the war upon climate change, just think: the skills of power station engineers; solar, wave and wind; surely a no-brainer.) The high-point was a session (pictured below) at which George Monbiot spoke on the role of the state in mitigating climate chaos—although it was marred when that organ itself, in the shape of riot police, threatened to enter the camp, prompting most of the 250-strong audience to exit theory in a headlong rush to practice. A degree of division arose with regard to the appropriate tactics for countering the police, but it was a no-win situation. Agreement to allow the police onto site ? with their batons and video cameras, their bullying, snooping, sniffing and otherwise canine ways ? would have necessitated constant surveillance of the surveillers, a continuous and enervating tug-of-war. The other option, the one taken, was to concentrate forces at the gates, to keep them at bay. With this, the boys in blue-and-dayglow-yellow needed only to build up forces at one gate, deploy riot police to the fore, or engage in any minor feint, in order to panic and disrupt the Camp. Which of course they did. In afternoons, during workshops. At two a.m.—waking all with a cacophony of sirens that sparked a mass exit from tents, followed by the thuds of sleepy running bodies tripping over guy ropes. And then again, after adrenaline levels had subsided and campers had returned to sleep, at the break of dawn. The question is, why have Her Majesty’s police force decided to subject a crew of campers to such astonishing levels of harassment? What tactics are involved, and at what level were they authorised? On harassment and intimidation the litany is endless. We observed their tactics, aghast. They must’ve looked up and memorised every petty by-law they could find, in addition to compendia of recent legislation. (Thanks to the cop who dropped his copy of the ‘Pocket Legislation Guide on Policing Protest,’ which gives an overview of legislation that can be used to stifle any form of legitimate protest, we know a bit more about an organisation, the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit, that assisted them in this.) They terminated our shuttlebus service (for ferrying participants from rail station to campsite) and arrested the driver on the grounds that one copper, claiming to have witnessed a passenger give a driver a donation, deemed it to be an unlicensed taxi. They filmed everyone. There were interminable and repeated searches of anyone entering or exiting camp—and these were not the usual cursory pat down. In my case (not an extreme one): in addition to searching all bags and pockets they were uncommonly interested in the linings of my trousers; and they dismantled my mobile phone and took the battery out (“in case there’s a razor blade concealed inside”). From me they took nothing but others were less fortunate. The innumerable items confiscated included: plywood, wheelie bins, a track for wheelchair access, a puncture repair kit, carpet, a board game and part of a windmill. And, of course, childrens’ crayons. (They’re a graffiti hazard, don’t you know?) Arguably the most visible and unarguably the most audible police presence is the helicopter. Upon arrival, I asked the copper who was searching me ? time for such conversations was not rationed—why the chopper was in the air. “It’s because an incident is going on. Don’t worry, it costs a fortune to keep it up there, it’ll only be sent up when there’s something going on.” In fact, it was airborne about one minute in every three; deafening, menacing, watching. Even at night it hovered above us, and would sometimes swoop low ? perhaps in case its clatter at normal altitude hadn’t yet woken a few of those below. So we may return to the question: why apply these tactics? The resources involved, in terms of manpower, equipment and fuel, are colossal. In conversation with a senior police officer, I listened to his point of view. “Don’t get us wrong: we know very well that 99% of the people in the camp are completely non-violent. It’s the other 1% we’re concerned about.” A machete, he claimed, had been found in nearby undergrowth. During my days there, I saw nothing to suggest a potentially violent “1%” ? and, unlike the officer, I was observing campers up close. The machete story is a smear. Chances are it is a fiction, or planted, or belonged to a nearby villager. Activists, being ecologically aware, know full well that to approach Kingsnorth does not require hacking paths through jungle. But let’s assume for a moment that he is right. There are around 1,000 people at the Camp. If that same officer were responsible for policing a village of 1,000 people, and was informed that 10 were potentially violent, would he call up a fleet of fully-manned vans from the North Wales Heddlu, alongside similar convoys from the West Mids, South Yorks, the Met, Essex, Kent and all? Rumour has it that 27 forces were involved! Would he call in a helicopter, and riot police? Or would he think “me oh my what an English idyll ? a pity, perhaps, about one or two delinquents at closing time on a Friday night, but a token presence should deal with that”? Perhaps there is a better reason: the police tactic is all about defending Kingsnorth. After all, the Camp’s clearly and openly stated aim is to shut it down. But this explanation has no more traction than does the “violent 1%.” Participants show no sign of going anywhere near Kingsnorth until Saturday, so why police the Camp, which is situated many miles away, all week long? To the possible rejoinder that an absence of police attention would encourage activists to approach the power station sooner than declared, there is an obvious reply. With the same police numbers deployed to harass the Camp, the power station could be thrice encircled: it could be sealed off by land, sea, air and any other conceivable avenue of approach, and with enough spare policepower to boot (no pun intended) that the Heddlu and the Brummies could be sent back home. Just think of all the trouble and tension that could be spared, not to mention police overspend. The only possible reason for this level of intimidation ? apart, perhaps, from an interest in giving riot cops some live training—is that the police force is hell bent on hounding and intimidating the movement against climate chaos. This does not represent a departure from recent trends in policing ? as witnessed in London at the anti-Bush protest (with its use of agent provocateurs) and the ‘Circle Line Party.’ Yet it is an escalation. The question that remains is: who authorised this strategy? Downing Street, one would suppose, but we should be told.

Truth truck or lie lorry?
6 Aug 2008
?After months of research, we have come up with a better way of spreading the ?Nationalist Message? right across this country,? says the message that the British National Party has been sending out to its supporters for several weeks. ?Our very own personal advertising lorry, a ?Truth Truck? ? brand new and custom-built, complete with a high definition special lighting system for night-time use, and a massive audio system for addressing the public. Can you imagine it?? continues the appeal in terms designed to pull hard at the purse strings of ?nationalists?. There have been personalised letters from Nick Griffin, the party chairman, headed and ?last chance to help ?Operation Truth Truck??, imploring in underlined type: ?Just imagine how you will feel, being part owner of our very own British National Party advertising lorry ??. The party website has carried a picture and online donation form for several weeks. But behind all the excitement lurks yet another dodgy deal by the BNP to hoodwink its own members. One appeal letter puts a figure on the cost of buying and equipping the ?truth truck? of 39,550, arrived at after Griffin personally ?worked very hard researching this project?. It then suggests that ?we can knock 13,000 off the amount needed? by opting for a ?used lorry in first class condition?. Yet there is no indication on the website appeal that the lorry will be anything other than ?brand new and custom built?. Such a compromise could be explained away as a better use of members? hard-earned and generously given donations, though that is no excuse for pulling the wool over potential donors? eyes long after the decision to go for a second-hand vehicle has already been taken. But the lies go further than this. At first the excitement rubbed off onto BNP members. Posting on the members? internet forum, one person, who claimed to have ?surprised myself by not even hesitating to donate 100 towards the campaign?, said the truck would also ?counter commie smear leaflets?. One discerning poster was more cautious. ?Just one thing What happened to Bodicea [sic]?? asked ?the benwell hopper?. ?Boudica?, as ?Captain Black? was quick to correct, was a second-hand ?battle bus? and the target of an appeal in 2006 for money to put it on the road. Agreeing that ?a few people will be very miffed that it has never been seen by the rank and file?, Captain Black could only plead that ?the failings of the Boudica hobby horse should not detract from the ambitions of this new venture?. Others smelt a rat. Despite Griffin?s claims to have carried out ?months of research? before coming up with this ?new, innovative? idea, if it comes to fruition the BNP will not be the first organisation in the UK to pin its hopes on a ?truth truck?. Two years ago the anti-abortion UK LifeLeague boldly announced the ?Launch of Britain?s first ever ?Truth Truck??. A press release on 21 April 2006 thanked supporters who ?donated generously to make this project possible? and claimed this would be: ?the most innovative and what will possibly be the most effective campaign in UK Pro-life history?. ?Operation Truth Truck? would: ?enable the pro-life message to reach the unreached across the towns and cities of Britain. These vehicles are wholly owned and operated by LifeLeague activists,? it continued. There was a picture. And it was no coincidence that the only difference between the LifeLeague?s ?truth truck? and the BNP?s one was the particular lie on the billboard, because it was the same vehicle. The UK LifeLeague and the BNP had milked their gullible supporters twice over for the same truck. This is not the first time the BNP has had dealings with the UK LifeLeague, and more particularly its founder and national coordinator, James Dowson. Earlier this year many BNP members were angry when they found out that the party was sending key BNP officers on management training courses in Spain. Why could the training not be held in the UK, asked irate, xenophobic party members on a popular nazi internet forum until the site administrators pulled the discussion thread. The courses were organised by Dowson?s Belfast-based fundraising and management training business, the Midas Consultancy, which has signed a three-year consultancy contract with the BNP. Whether it was because of the BNP?s growing financial difficulties or because Griffin was reacting to criticism of his poor administrative skills, the party has handed over key organisational functions to the self-styled vicar and militant anti-abortion campaigner. It was Dowson who wrote the ?truth truck? appeal letters in professional fundraising style. The Building to Grow appeal at the end of last year was also his work. The BNP claimed that appeal had raised 70,000, which paid for the party to move into the new Excalibur warehouse and buy ?a vast array of new equipment? including ?an envelope stuffing machine?, which by June had mysteriously disappeared when Simon Darby, the BNP?s deputy leader, appealed for volunteers to stuff election leaflets into envelopes by hand. The involvement of Dowson has already upset some BNP members who do not share his extreme anti-abortion views and think he is a Catholic, which is anathema to many in the nationalist party who view the Battle of the Boyne as one of England?s greatest historical triumphs. In fact Dowson is a Protestant but has been linked to far-right Catholics in Ireland, including Justin Barrett, an anti-EU campaigner and vocal opponent of immigration, which he describes as a ?genetic? problem. Back in 2001, when Searchlight first exposed Dowson, Barrett had donated 50,000 so that Dowson?s outfit could produce anti-abortion hate CDs and videos to distribute in schools and churches in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Dowson is a former member of the Orange Lodge in Northern Ireland and has admitted involvement with hardline loyalist groups in the West of Scotland. His tattooed arms are evidence of his extremist hate connections. The LifeLeague, which is secretive about its finances, uses highly provocative tactics, such as publishing the home addresses of abortion clinic staff. Similar actions by anti-abortion groups in the US have resulted in the murder of doctors. Dowson?s professional ?begging letters?, as one disillusioned party member described them, have not been universally welcomed in the BNP. Some see their ?tone of desperation? as indicative of the BNP?s ?very serious financial trouble?, according to the blogsite set up in support of Colin Auty?s failed attempt to challenge Griffin for the party leadership. One member is quoted saying: ?These bloody letters are an embarrassment, I?ll not pay another penny so he can go and waste it or lose another blimp?, in a reference to the BNP?s helium balloon that slipped its moorings in June because, Darby suggested, David Shapcote failed to secure it properly. The BNP later blamed the loss on a faulty rope. The letters themselves may have been professional, but Dowson fell down in compiling the mailing lists. Naturally he needed to dispatch the letters to a much wider audience than the BNP?s members, who have little left to give after constant appeals at branch meetings and to support election campaigns. However Searchlight has received a stream of complaints from anti-fascist trade unionists and members of the Jewish community who have received them. The website appeal for the ?truth truck? shows it adorned with the BNP?s ubiquitous election picture of Nick Cass and his family alongside the slogan ?Decent people vote British National Party?. The picture, which adorned election leaflets and newspaper advertisements all over the country in this year?s May elections and several by-elections, concealed Cass?s less than decent ?tree of life? tattoo. The symbol, also known as the life rune, is a favourite among nazi groups worldwide and, under Hitler, was used to represent a project that encouraged SS troopers to have children out of wedlock with ?Aryan? mothers and kidnapped children of Aryan appearance from the countries of occupied Europe to raise as Germans. A lying picture for a lying appeal. How appropriate.

I’d rather be a hypocrite than a cynic like Julie Burchill
6 Aug 2008
In her new book, Not In My Name, Julie Burchill reserves her grandest fury about hypocrites for environmentalists. We are, she (and her co-author, Chas Newkey-Burden) say, pious, sexless and contemptuous of humankind. We are all are posh and rich, and have found in environmentalism a new excuse for lecturing the poor. We tell other people to live by rules we don’t apply to ourselves. Like all stereotypes, these claims are lazy, familiar and sometimes true. Burchill knows nothing about environmentalism, and, almost as a point of pride, hasn’t bothered to find out, but when you use grapeshot you are bound to hit someone. Yes, many prominent greens are posh gits like me. The same can be said of journalists, politicians, artists, academics, business leaders ? in fact, of just about anyone in public life. But it is always the greens who are singled out. In truth, while the upper middle classes are, as always, over-represented in the media, the movement cuts across the classes. A recent ICM poll found that more people in social classes D and E thought the government should prioritise the environment over the economy (56%) than in classes A and B (47%). Environmentalism is the most politically diverse movement in history. Here in the Kingsnorth climate camp, I have met anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, conservatives and, mostly, pragmatists. I remember sitting in a campaign meeting during the Newbury bypass protests and marvelling at the weirdness of our coalition. In the front row sat the local squirearchy: brigadiers in tweeds and enormous moustaches, titled women in twin sets and headscarves. In the middle were local burghers of all shapes and sizes. At the back sat the scuzziest collection of grunge-skunks I have ever laid eyes on. The audience disagreed about every other subject under the sun ? if someone had asked us to decide what day of the week it was, the meeting would had descended into fisticuffs ? but everyone there recognised that our quality of life depends on the quality of our surroundings. The environment is inseparable from social justice. Climate change, for example, is primarily about food and water. It threatens the fresh water supplies required to support human life. As continental interiors dry out and the glaciers feeding many of the rivers used for irrigation disappear, climate change presents the greatest of all threats to the future prospects of the poor. The rich will survive for a few decades at least, as they can use their money to insulate themselves from the effects. The poor are being hammered already. In reality, it is people like Julie Burchill ? who is, incidentally, far richer than almost any green I have met ? who treats the poor with contempt. So that she can revel in what she calls “reckless romantic modernism”, other people must die. But at least you can’t accuse her of hypocrisy: she cannot fail to live by her moral code, for the simple reason that she doesn’t have one. Sure, we are hypocrites. Every one of us, almost by definition. Hypocrisy is the gap between your aspirations and your actions. Greens have high aspirations ? they want to live more ethically ? and they will always fall short. But the alternative to hypocrisy isn’t moral purity (no one manages that), but cynicism. Give me hypocrisy any day.

Tasers: less lethal, but still potentially deadly
6 Aug 2008
The recent Home Office figures revealed that Tasers have been used more frequently over the last 12 months. While this report gives us cause for concern, essentially it is inevitable. Since September last year, more officers have had these potentially lethal electro shock weapons at their disposal. The Home Office piloted a 12-month trial across 10 police authorities, enabling some non-specialist firearms officers to use Tasers, and allowing the weapon to be used in what was nebulously described as a “wider set of circumstances”. It’s exactly this lack of clarity and the easing of restrictions that is causing Amnesty International real concern about the usage of these weapons. Let me be clear: Amnesty International is not opposed to the use of Tasers by the UK police force. In fact, we recognise that there are circumstances when Tasers should be deployed, in response to life-threatening situations. But the level of training should be rigorous and to the highest standards before they are widely deployed. Tasers are potentially lethal and highly dangerous weapons. People have died after being shocked by a Taser. Many may recall the video footage posted on YouTube of a Polish man who died after being stunned with a Taser by Canadian police in Vancouver airport. According to Amnesty’s latest figures, more than 300 people have died after being shocked by a Taser in the US and Canada since 2001. Just last year, the UN committee against torture described the impact of the Taser weapon as “provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture and that in certain cases it could also cause death.” Clearly the UK government has to ensure that the most stringent safeguards are in place when this weapon is being used. The Home Office minister Tony McNulty said yesterday that police should be equipped with the necessary tools required to carry out their duties. I completely agree with that. I also appreciate that police officers have a duty to protect themselves and the community at large from violent situations across Britain. But I refute the claim that arming officers with Tasers without the necessary safeguards and appropriate training is the answer. Any officer carrying a Taser should be trained to the same high standard as they are for using a firearm. This means that their training should be intensive, ongoing and rigorous to ensure that these dangerous weapons are only used in the appropriate situations. And even in those circumstances, roll out of Tasers should be highly restricted. We do not want to have the same situation as in the US where police officers are routinely armed with Tasers. Amnesty has always feared that the wider deployment of Tasers could be the start of a slippery slope towards arming all UK police officers. With the latest Home Office figures suggesting a clear increase, it is highly possible that our fears may yet be realised.

UK government spends 2 million on TV documentaries promoting their policies
5 Aug 2008
The government?s Orwellian-named ?Central Office of Information? has been funding a series of ITV documentaries which paint their policies in a positive light. The programmes were made to look like regular documentaries, and most viewers would not have known that they were government-funded. Back in 2006, the Times was reporting that the government were ploughing an estimated 200,000 pounds into a fly-on-the-wall ITV documentary, ?Beat?, which painted a decidedly rosy picture of the controversial ?plastic bobbies?, the Police Community Support Officers. The department in charge was the creepily-named ?Central Office of Information?, a government department with a strikingly low profile. The COI describes itself as ?the centre of marketing excellence for government. It provides strategic advice, consultancy, procurement and project management for public information campaigns?. The department is run by the former Chair of advertising giant Saatchi and Saatchi, Alan Bishop. Now the BBC reports that the broadcasting regulator Ofcom has launched an investigation into the programme – which is now revealed to have cost more than 800,000 pounds. Ofcom will be looking into a breach of broadcasting rules that ?show sponsors must be clearly identified and not allowed to influence the content of programmes?. Home Office staff were reportedly closely involved – and the fact that the government had been funding the programme was not made clear to viewers. At least eight other documentaries have reportedly been funded by the government in the last five years, to the tune of nearly 2 million pounds. http://richardwilsonauthor.wordpress.com

Diego Garcia: the UK’s shame
5 Aug 2008
The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote: “In war, truth is the first casualty.” These words are particularly apt in relation to the British Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia, leased to the United States in 1971, where the truth ? that a secret “War on Terror” prison existed from 2002 until as recently as 2006 ? has been persistently denied by both the British and American governments. Yesterday, Time magazine reported that a “senior American official” (now retired), who was “a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings” after the 9/11 attacks, stated that “a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on the island” in 2002, and possibly 2003. This is the highest-level admission to date that a secret prison existed on Diego Garcia, but it is by no means the first time that the prison’s existence has been revealed. In 2003, Time reported that Hambali, an Indonesian “high-value detainee”, who was transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006, was being held on Diego Garcia, and in May this year, El Pais [in Spanish] reported that Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a joint Syrian-Spanish national who was seized in Pakistan in October 2005, was held on the island in the months after his capture. Unlike Hambali, Nasar’s current whereabouts are completely unknown; he is, in effect, one of “America’s disappeared.” The reality of Diego Garcia’s secret prison has also been confirmed by retired US general Barry McCaffrey in 2004 and 2006, in a report by Swiss Senator Dick Marty for the Council of Europe and in a statement made to the Observer in March this year by Manfred Novak, the UN’s special rapporteur on torture. In contrast, the position taken by both the British and American governments occupies a parallel universe, in which the timeless resonance of Aeschylus’ words is confirmed. For five years, since questions were first asked about the secret prison by Lord Wallace of Saltaire in January 2003, the British government refused to acknowledge its existence, and its first denial was indicative of what was to come. “The United States Government,” Baroness Amos explained, “would need to ask for our permission to bring any suspects to Diego Garcia. They have not done so and no suspected terrorists are being held on Diego Garcia.” The blanket denials finally came to an end this February, when David Miliband announced that his US counterparts had checked their records and had discovered that two rendition flights, each carrying one prisoner, had passed through Diego Garcia in 2002. He maintained, however, that he had been assured that the planes had only landed for refuelling, and that no prisoner had ever set foot on the island. Mr. Miliband repeated these claims just four weeks ago, after apparently receiving further confirmation from his US counterparts that no other rendition flights had passed through British territory. The latest revelations about Diego Garcia make it abundantly clear that the British government can no longer accept any kind of “assurances” from its US counterparts regarding the use of the island. Ignoring Aeschylus’ sage advice, Ministers have, to put it bluntly, fooled themselves into thinking that ignorance is a substitute for accountability. The truth, of course, is that they are both morally and legally responsible for what takes place on Diego Garcia, and have a duty to address crimes committed on British territory. As these crimes include kidnapping, “extraordinary rendition” and illegal imprisonment, which are prohibited under domestic UK and international law, and quite possibly torture, which is prohibited under the terms of the UN Convention Against Torture, the British government must immediately initiate a full and open public inquiry into Diego Garcia’s true role in the “War on Terror”.

The final countdown
5 Aug 2008
If you shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, when there is none, you understand that you might be arrested for irresponsible behaviour and breach of the peace. But from today, I smell smoke, I see flames and I think it is time to shout. I don’t want you to panic, but I do think it would be a good idea to form an orderly queue to leave the building. Because in just 100 months’ time, if we are lucky, and based on a quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change. That said, among people working on global warming, there are countless models, scenarios, and different iterations of all those models and scenarios. So, let us be clear from the outset about exactly what we mean. The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere today, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, is the highest it has been for the past 650,000 years. In the space of just 250 years, as a result of the coal-fired Industrial Revolution, and changes to land use such as the growth of cities and the felling of forests, we have released, cumulatively, more than 1,800bn tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Currently, approximately 1,000 tonnes of CO2 are released into the Earth’s atmosphere every second, due to human activity. Greenhouse gases trap incoming solar radiation, warming the atmosphere. When these gases accumulate beyond a certain level – often termed a “tipping point” – global warming will accelerate, potentially beyond control. Faced with circumstances that clearly threaten human civilisation, scientists at least have the sense of humour to term what drives this process as “positive feedback”. But if translated into an office workplace environment, it’s the sort of “positive feedback” from a manager that would run along the lines of: “You’re fired, you were rubbish anyway, you have no future, your home has been demolished and I’ve killed your dog.” In climate change, a number of feedback loops amplify warming through physical processes that are either triggered by the initial warming itself, or the increase in greenhouse gases. One example is the melting of ice sheets. The loss of ice cover reduces the ability of the Earth’s surface to reflect heat and, by revealing darker surfaces, increases the amount of heat absorbed. Other dynamics include the decreasing ability of oceans to absorb CO2 due to higher wind strengths linked to climate change. This has already been observed in the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic, increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and adding to climate change. Because of such self-reinforcing positive feedbacks (which, because of the accidental humour of science, we must remind ourselves are, in fact, negative), once a critical greenhouse concentration threshold is passed, global warming will continue even if we stop releasing additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If that happens, the Earth’s climate will shift into another, more volatile state, with different ocean circulation, wind and rainfall patterns. The implications of which, according to a growing litany of research, are potentially catastrophic for life on Earth. Such a change in the state of the climate system is often referred to as irreversible climate change. So, how exactly do we arrive at the ticking clock of 100 months? It’s possible to estimate the length of time it will take to reach a tipping point. To do so you combine current greenhouse gas concentrations with the best estimates for the rates at which emissions are growing, the maximum concentration of greenhouse gases allowable to forestall potentially irreversible changes to the climate system, and the effect of those environmental feedbacks. We followed the latest data and trends for carbon dioxide, then made allowances for all human interferences that influence temperatures, both those with warming and cooling effects. We followed the judgments of the mainstream climate science community, represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on what it will take to retain a good chance of not crossing the critical threshold of the Earth’s average surface temperature rising by 2C above pre-industrial levels. We were cautious in several ways, optimistic even, and perhaps too much so. A rise of 2C may mask big problems that begin at a lower level of warming. For example, collapse of the Greenland ice sheet is more than likely to be triggered by a local warming of 2.7C, which could correspond to a global mean temperature increase of 2C or less. The disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet could correspond to a sea-level rise of up to 7 metres. In arriving at our timescale, we also used the lower end of threats in assessing the impact of vanishing ice cover and other carbon-cycle feedbacks (those wanting more can download a note on method from onehundredmonths.org). But the result is worrying enough. We found that, given all of the above, 100 months from today we will reach a concentration of greenhouse gases at which it is no longer “likely” that we will stay below the 2C temperature rise threshold. “Likely” in this context refers to the definition of risk used by the IPCC. But, even just before that point, there is still a one third chance of crossing the line. Today is just another Friday in August. Drowsy and close. Office workers’ minds are fixed on the weekend, clock-watching, waiting perhaps for a holiday if your finances have escaped the credit crunch and rising food and fuel prices. In the evening, trains will be littered with abandoned newspaper sports pages, all pretending interest in the football transfers. For once it seems justified to repeat TS Eliot’s famous lines: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.” But does it have to be this way? Must we curdle in our complacency and allow our cynicism about politicians to give them an easy ride as they fail to act in our, the national and the planet’s best interest? There is now a different clock to watch than the one on the office wall. Contrary to being a counsel of despair, it tells us that everything we do from now matters. And, possibly more so than at any other time in recent history. It tells us, for example, that only a government that was sleepwalking or in a chemically induced coma would countenance building a third runway at Heathrow, or a new generation of coal-fired power stations such as the proposed new plant at Kingsnorth in Kent. Infrastructure that is fossil-fuel-dependent locks in patterns of future greenhouse gas emissions, radically reducing our ability to make the short- to medium-term cuts that are necessary. Deflecting blame and responsibility is a great skill of officialdom. The most common strategies used by government recently have been wringing their hands and blaming China’s rising emissions, and telling individuals to, well, be a bit more careful. On the first get-out, it is delusory to think that countries such as China, India and Brazil will fundamentally change until wealthy countries such as Britain take a lead. And it is wildly unrealistic to think that individuals alone can effect a comprehensive re-engineering of the nation’s fossil-fuel-dependent energy, food and transport systems. The government must lead. In their inability to take action commensurate with the scale and timeframe of the climate problem, the government is mocked both by Britain’s own history, and by countries much smaller, poorer and more economically isolated than we are. The challenge is rapid transition of the economy in order to live within our environmental means, while preserving and enhancing our general wellbeing. In some important ways, we’ve been here before, and can learn lessons from history. Under different circumstances, Britain achieved astonishing things while preparing for, fighting and recovering from the second world war. In the six years between 1938 and 1944, the economy was re-engineered and there were dramatic cuts in resource use and household consumption. These coincided with rising life expectancy and falling infant mortality. We consumed less of almost everything, but ate more healthily and used our disposable income on what, today, we might call “low-carbon good times”. A National Savings Movement held marches, processions and displays in every city, town and village in the country. There were campaigns to Holiday at Home and endless festivities such as dances, concerts, boxing displays, swimming galas, and open-air theatre – all organised by local authorities with the express purpose of saving fuel by discouraging unnecessary travel. To lead by example, very public energy restrictions were introduced in government and local authority buildings, shops and railway stations. This was so successful that the results beat cuts previously planned in an over-complex rationing scheme. The public largely assented to measures to curb consumption because they understood that they were to ensure “the fairest possible distribution of the necessities and comforts of daily life”. Now, 2008, we face the fallout from the credit crisis, high oil and rising food prices, and the massive added challenge of having to avert climate change. Does a war comparison sound dramatic? In April 2007, Margaret Beckett, then foreign secretary, gave a largely overlooked lecture called Climate Change: The Gathering Storm. “It was a time when Churchill, perceiving the dangers that lay ahead, struggled to mobilise the political will and industrial energy of the British Empire to meet those dangers. He did so often in the face of strong opposition,” she said. “Climate change is the gathering storm of our generation. And the implications – should we fail to act – could be no less dire: and perhaps even more so.” In terms of what is possible in times of economic stress and isolation, Cuba provides an even more embarrassing example to show up our national tardiness. In a single year in 2006 Cuba rolled-out a nationwide scheme replacing inefficient incandescent lightbulbs with low-energy alternatives. Prior to that, at the end of the cold war, after losing access to cheap Soviet oil, it switched over to growing most of its food for domestic consumption on small scale, often urban plots, using mostly low-fossil-fuel organic techniques. Half the food consumed in the capital, Havana, was grown in the city’s own gardens. Cuba echoed and surpassed what America achieved in its push for “Victory Gardening” during the second world war. Back then, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, between 30-40% of vegetables for domestic consumption were produced by the Victory Gardening movement. So what can our own government do to turn things around today? Over the next 100 months, they could launch a Green New Deal, taking inspiration from President Roosevelt’s famous 100-day programme implementing his New Deal in the face of the dust bowls and depression. Last week, a group of finance, energy and environmental specialists produced just such a plan. Addressed at the triple crunch of the credit crisis, high oil prices and global warming, the plan is to rein in reckless financial institutions and use a range of fiscal tools, new measures and reforms to the tax system, such as a windfall tax on oil companies. The resources raised can then be invested in a massive environmental transformation programme that could insulate the economy from recession, create countless new jobs and allow Britain to play its part in meeting the climate challenge. Goodbye new airport runways, goodbye new coal-fired power stations. Next, as a precursor to enabling and building more sustainable systems for transport, energy, food and overhauling the nation’s building stock, the government needs to brace itself to tackle the City. Currently, financial institutions are giving us the worst of all worlds. We have woken to find the foundations of our economy made up of unstable, exotic financial instruments. At the same time, and perversely, as awareness of climate change goes up, ever more money pours through the City into the oil companies. These companies list their fossil-fuel reserves as “proven” or “probable”. A new category of “unburnable” should be introduced, to fundamentally change the balance of power in the City. Instead of using vast sums of public money to bail out banks because they are considered “too big to fail”, they should be reduced in size until they are small enough to fail without hurting anyone. It is only a climate system capable of supporting human civilisation that is too big to fail. Oil companies made profits when oil was $10 a barrel. With the price now wobbling around $130, there is a huge amount of unearned profit waiting for a windfall tax. Money raised – in this way and through other changes in taxation, new priorities for pension funds and innovatory types of bonds – would go towards a long-overdue massive decarbonisation of our energy system. Decentralisation, renewables, efficiency, conservation and demand management will all play a part. Next comes a rolling programme to overhaul the nation’s heat-leaking building stock. This will have the benefit of massively cutting emissions and at the same time tackling the sore of fuel poverty by creating better insulated and designed homes. A transition from “one person, one car” on the roads, to a variety of clean reliable forms of public transport should be visible by the middle of our 100 months. Similarly, weaning agriculture off fossil-fuel dependency will be a phased process. The end result will be real international leadership, removing the excuses of other nations not to act. But it will also leave the people of Britain more secure in terms of the food and energy supplies, and with a more resilient economy capable of weathering whatever economic and environmental shocks the world has to throw at us. Each of these challenges will draw on things that we already know how to do, but have missed the political will for. So, there, I have said “Fire”, and pointed to the nearest emergency exit. Now it is time for the government to lead, and do its best to make sure that neither a bang, nor a whimper ends the show. www.onehundredmonths.org www.greennewdealgroup.org

Carbon Trade-off
5 Aug 2008
There?s a global gold rush taking place, with a stampede of investment galloping towards the various forms of carbon trading and offsetting that have been rolled out to supposedly deliver global emissions reductions in the most cost-effective way. Advocates of the booming carbon market say that, in today?s world, it?s green, not greed, that?s good. In Asia, the biggest involvement in the carbon market has been through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This is a regulated market under the Kyoto Protocol by which countries and companies in the developed world can meet their emissions reduction targets by buying carbon credits that have been generated through projects that bring about reduced or avoided emissions in developing countries. In 2007 this market was worth US$17.5 billion, an enormous 200 per cent increase in market value since 2006. Asia has so far been the global leader in generating CDM credits ? in 2007, China alone provided an enormous 62 per cent of the credits on the market, while Indonesia was responsible for 10 per cent and India 5 per cent. Increasing numbers of critics are challenging the rosy win-win portrait of the CDM market that has been painted. Some commentators in the countries in which the projects are being undertaken, have seen it as creating a new colonial commodity in which the ability to make cheaper reductions in the developing world is being treated as a new resource to be extracted and profitably used for the benefit of Western countries. Aside from this more politicised perspective of the market, the CDM appears to be failing by the standards it has set itself, with many people asking what happened to the ?D? in CDM? The market has been draped in benevolent rhetoric of sustainable development, so that projects are only supposed to qualify for carbon financing if they have some sort of development benefits. In practice, host governments need only rubber stamp their approval to this condition, and genuine developmental benefits on the ground have proven to be elusive to the point of non-existence. An article in the September 2007 academic journal, Climatic Change, stated that, ?Close to 200 studies on the CDM have been carried out since its birth in 1997? The main finding… is that, left to market forces, the CDM does not significantly contribute to sustainable development.? Critics of the CDM have pointed out that, not only do the projects not contribute to development, but, in many cases, the recipients of the money are large, polluting industries that are responsible for all kinds of adverse environmental impacts to the communities who have to endure them. Many thousands of residents of the state of Chhattisgarh, India, have mobilised against the expansion of Jindal Steel and Power Limited?s notoriously polluting sponge-iron factories. Yet the biggest of these factories in the world, which is currently threatening to wipe out three neighbouring villages in a proposed expansion, is currently earning enormous amounts of money and some degree of environmental credibility for having four separate CDM projects on the go. CDM money is also being used to support the palm oil biofuel industry in Indonesia, which has recently been the subject of a great deal of global concern over its social and environmental impact. In Riau, Indonesia, PT Murini Samsam, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Wilmar Group, received US$8 million in DM funding to expand its crude palm oil refinery. Leaving aside the issues of sustainable development and the impact on communities, the question that needs to be asked is if the CDM is genuinely providing climatic benefits. One of the thorniest problems with this is ?additionality.? The carbon financing through the CDM is supposed to provide emissions reductions above and beyond what would have happened if the money hadn?t been available ? i.e in addition to business as usual. If this is not the case and a project that was going to happen anyway is used to justify emissions elsewhere, it can result in a net increase in atmospheric carbon. Despite the regulatory procedure that is supposed stringently to guarantee that emissions reductions under the CDM are all additional, the market seems to be riddled with examples to the contrary. An adviser to the executive board of the CDM in 2006 conducted an investigation into CDM projects in India and concluded that one third of them were non-additional. China is home to the lion?s share of hydro-electricity projects registered under the CDM ? at the end of 2007, 402 of the 654 hydropower projects in the CDM pipeline were to be found in China, generating 71 per cent of the global annual carbon credits expected from this project category. Given that the Chinese government has been promoting such hydropower development for many years, there are grounds for being suspicious that these projects were happening anyway, and that the government had simply applied for additional funding through the carbon market. The pressure group International Rivers conducted a study that showed that the rate of construction of new hydropower projects in China has been constant for some time. The fact that there has been no significant increase since such carbon financing became available strongly suggests that these projects are simply generating hot air. Commentators are starting to draw attention to the parallels between the recent sub-prime mortgage credit crunch and the carbon market. In both financial spheres, there is enormous pressure to push through large numbers of transactions regardless of the quality of the deals being done. The UN body administering the CDM has admitted that there is ?a clear and perceived risk of collusion? between the project developers and the private, third-party auditors, who are supposed to be verifying the quality of the credits. If in five or 10 years? time, it becomes even more widely apparent that the majority of CDM credits that have been profitably generated and sold were based on dubious methodologies or even outright deceit, then the impact could be even more catastrophic than the recent financial instabilities caused by the credit crunch. And unlike the global credit crisis, no injection of capital will be able to turn the clock back on an ever-decreasing window of opportunity to meaningfully address the climate crisis.

The stakes could not be higher. Everything hinges on stopping coal
5 Aug 2008
As soon as I have finished this column I will jump on the train to Kent. Last year Al Gore remarked ?I can?t understand why there aren?t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.?(1) Like hundreds of honorary young people, I am casting my Zimmer frame aside to answer the call. Everything now hinges on stopping coal. Whether we prevent runaway climate change largely depends on whether we keep using the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Unless we either leave it in the ground or leave the carbon dioxide it produces in the ground, human development will start spiralling backwards. The more coal is burnt, the smaller are our chances of future comfort and prosperity. The industrial revolution has gone into reverse. It is not because of polar bears that I will be joining the climate camp outside the coal plant at Kingsnorth. It is not because of butterflies or frogs or penguins or rainforests, much as I love them all. It is because everything I have fought for and that all campaigners for social justice have ever fought for ? food, clean water, shelter, security ? is jeopardised by climate change. Those who claim to identify a conflict between environmentalism and humanitarianism have either failed to read the science or have refused to understand it. Our government could lead the world in one of two directions. Roughly one third of our power stations will come to the end of their lives by 2020. It could replace them with low-carbon plants or it could repeat ? this time in full knowledge of the consequences ? the disastrous decisions of the past. E.on?s application to build a new coal-burning power station at Kingsnorth is the first for many years. At least five other such proposals hang on the outcome(2). Between them they would account for 54 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year(3): as much as the entire economy would produce if the UK, in line with current science, were to cut its emissions by 90%(4). The government seems determined to make the wrong decision. It has inherited the party?s traditional love for coal, but, being New Labour, now supports the bosses not the workers, and has colluded with them to make the case for a new generation of power stations. It has one justification for this policy: that one day dirty coal will be transformed into clean coal by means of carbon capture and storage (CCS). All that is needed to effect this transformation is a sprinkling of alchemical dust, in the form of the future price of carbon. The market, it claims, will automatically ensure that coal plants bury their carbon dioxide, as this will be cheaper than buying pollution permits. Last month the House of Commons environmental audit committee examined this proposition and found that it was nonsense(5). It cited studies by the UK Energy Research Centre and Climate Change Capital which estimate that capturing carbon emissions from existing coal plants will cost 70-100 or 90-155 euros per tonne of CO2. Yet the government predicts that the likely price of carbon between 2013 to 2020 will be around 39 euros per tonne. Even E.on believes that it won?t rise above 50 euros. ?The gap between the carbon price and the cost of CCS?, the committee finds, ?is enormous.? The energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, confessed to the MPs ?I hope that the strengthening of carbon markets ? will bring forward a sufficiently good price for carbon that it will provide some of the financial incentive for CCS. Will it be enough? I do not know.? This is the sum of government policy: to cross its fingers and hope the market delivers. If it approves a new coal plant at Kingsnorth, it will do so on the grounds that the power station will be ?CCS-ready?. CCS-ready seems to mean nothing more than this: that there?s enough space on the site for a carbon capture plant, should the developer deign one day to build it. The committee warns that this meaningless promise could be used ?as a fig leaf to give unabated coal-fired power stations an appearance of environmental acceptability.?(6) The government has already shown us what it wants to do. In January, Gary Mohammed, a civil servant at the business department, emailed E.on to ask whether he should include CCS as a condition for approving its new coal plant. (This gives a fascinating insight into how government works: companies are asked to write their own rules). E.on replied that the government ?has no right to withhold approval for conventional plant?. Six minutes later Mr Mohammed answered thus: ?Thanks. I won?t include. Hope to get the set of draft conditions out today or tomorrow.?(7) There is a simple means by which the government could ensure that our future electricity supplies would not commit the UK to stoking runaway climate change. It would do as California has done, and set, by a certain date, a maximum level for carbon pollution per megawatt-hour of electricity production. This would have to be a low one: perhaps 80kg of CO2. Then, in line with the government?s precious principles (or absence thereof), it could leave the rest to the market. I have now reached the point at which I no longer care whether or not the answer is nuclear. Let it happen, as long as its total emissions are taken into account, we know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried, how much this will cost and who will pay, and there is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be used by the military. We can no longer afford any rigid principle but one: that the harm done to people living now and in the future must be minimised by the most effective means, whatever they might be. But I believe the likely response would be more interesting than this. Several recent studies have shown how, through maximising the diversity of renewable generators and by spreading them as far apart as possible, by using new techniques for balancing demand with supply and clever schemes for storing energy, between 80 and 100% of our electricity could be produced by renewables, without any loss in the reliability of power supplies(8,9,10). Unlike CCS, wind, wave, tidal, solar, hydro and geothermal power are proven technologies. Unlike nuclear power, they can be safely decommissioned as soon as they become redundant. A policy like this requires both courage and vision. So look at the current cabinet ? Brown, Straw, Darling, Hutton, Blears, Kelly, Hoon – and weep. Every man and woman with backbone was purged from this government years ago, leaving those who know how to appease the interests that might threaten them. These people won?t stand up to business, even when the future prospects of mankind are at stake. If fear is the only thing that moves them, we must present them with a greater threat than the companies planning new coal plants. We must show that this issue has become a political flashpoint; that the public revulsion towards new coal could help to eject them from office. You could do no better than joining us at Kingsnorth this week. References: 1. Quoted by Nicholas Kristof, 16th August 2007. The Big Melt. New York Times. 2. Longannet & Cockenzie (Scottish Power); Ferrybridge (Scottish and Southern Energy); Fiddler?s Ferry (Scottish and Southern Energy); Tilbury (RWE npower); Blyth (RWE npower). 3. Greenpeace makes this calculation as follows: ?10.6 GW [the generation capacity of the six plants] x 7884 hours of generation per year, assuming 90% operational = 83.57 TWH/y. 83.57 TWH/y x 0.65 = 54 mt/CO2/y?. See footnote 23: http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200708/cmselect/c… 4. The provisional government estimate for the UK?s CO2 emissions in 2007 is 543.7 million tonnes. Defra, July 2008. UK Climate Change Programme. Annual Report to Parliament, July 2008, p9. http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/ukccp/pdf/ukccp-ann… 5. House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, 22nd July 2008 . Carbon capture and storage. Ninth Report of Session 2007?08. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmselect/cmenvaud/654/... 6. ibid. 7. You can open the emails on this page: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/government-climate-pol… 8. German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Technical Thermodynamics Section Systems Analysis and Technology Assessment, June 2006. Trans-Mediterranean Interconnection for Concentrating Solar Power. Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Germany. http://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/institut/system/p… 9. Mark Barrett, April 2006. A Renewable Electricity System for the UK: A Response to the 2006 Energy Review. UCL Bartlett School Of Graduate Studies – Complex Built Environment Systems Group. http://www.cbes.ucl.ac.uk/projects/energyreview/Bartlett%20Response%20to… 10. Centre for Alternative Technology, 10th July 2007. ZeroCarbonBritain: an alternative energy strategy. This will be made available at www.zerocarbonbritain.com.

Binyam Mohamed?s judicial review
4 Aug 2008
On Monday July 28, just four days after his 30th birthday, British resident and Guantnamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed was finally granted the opportunity to have his case heard, albeit in front of a British judge, rather then his American captors, and even though he was unable to attend the hearing, because he remains imprisoned in Guantnamo. There he waits in isolation to discover whether the US administration, which put him forward for trial by Military Commission at the start of June, will formally arraign him on charges of ?conspiracy? and ?providing material support for terrorism? over the coming weeks. Binyam has been imprisoned without trial for six years and four months ? first in Pakistan, then in Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months on behalf of the US authorities, then for nine months, in the ?Dark Prison? near Kabul, a secret prison run by the CIA and at a US military prison in Bagram airbase, and finally, since September 2004, at Guantnamo. The judicial review that took place last week came about after Binyam?s lawyers ? at Leigh Day & Co. and Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents 30 Guantnamo prisoners ? requested, in April, that the British government hand over any evidence in its possession regarding its knowledge of Binyam?s long ordeal, which might provide invaluable exculpatory evidence to assist Binyam in his anticipated trial. The lawyers were specifically seeking information relating to Binyam?s rendition from Pakistan to Morocco, which was known about in advance by British agents, who visited him in Pakistani custody and offered him a heavily-sugared cup of tea, telling him, ?Where you?re going, you need a lot of sugar.? They were also concerned to establish the extent of British involvement in his subsequent torture in Morocco, where, as he told Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve?s Director, during a visit at Guantnamo, his lowest point came not as the result of his frequent physical torture (which included having his genitals regularly cut with a razor blade), but when his captors asked him questions about his life in London, which could only have come from the British intelligence services, and he realized that he had been betrayed by the country in which he had sought asylum as a teenager. The trigger for the judicial review was the cold-hearted response of the British government?s lawyers to the request filed by Binyam?s lawyers. The government?s legal advisers claimed that ?the UK is under no obligation under international law to assist foreign courts and tribunals in assuring that torture evidence is not admitted? and that ?it is HM Government?s position that ? evidence held by the UK Government that US and Moroccan authorities engaged in torture or rendition cannot be obtained? by his British lawyers. Approving an ?expedited? judicial review at the start of June (meaning, it would appear, that he understood the urgency of the case), Mr. Justice Saunders explained, ?If it is correct that in the course of an interrogation, in which material supplied by the Defendant [HM Government] was employed, the Claimant [Binyam Mohamed] was tortured, then it is arguable that there is an obligation to disclose material which may assist Claimant in establishing before the American Military Court that he was tortured. Whether the Court should exercise its discretion not to order disclosure can only be determined at a full hearing.? With that final caveat, it was by no means certain that the judicial review would go Binyam?s way, but on Monday the sparks began to fly almost immediately. Dinah Rose QC, Binyam?s counsel, wasted no time in telling Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones, as the Guardian described it, that ?the security and intelligence agencies were ?mixed up in wrongdoing? in cooperating with the US in the unlawful treatment? of Mr. Mohamed, and added that, in return for information provided by the British intelligence services to their US counterparts, the US ?provided the UK with the fruits of his interrogation.? Rose explained to the judges that a British agent, identified only as ?witness B,? made a ?veiled threat? to Binyam, while he was in Pakistani custody, to encourage him to ?cooperate with his interrogators when the officer saw him after he was first captured in Pakistan.? The implication, she noted, was ?we won?t help you unless you confess.? She added that MI5 then ?repeatedly? supplied the US authorities with detailed information about Mr. Mohamed?s life in London for US officials to use in his interrogation, even though, as she pointed out, the British officials ?did not press the US to tell them where Mohamed was being held after he was transferred from Pakistan, and in what conditions.? Rose also declared that the government ?must have known the treatment Mohamed was likely to face [in Pakistan], ?given the history of the Pakistan authorities.?? This provoked a response from the government?s representatives, who, rather feebly, perhaps, in light of recent revelations that the British government has colluded with the Pakistani authorities in anti-terror operations to a shocking extent, ?did not dispute that Mohamed was held incommunicado for three months in Pakistan but did not accept the conditions in which he was held there were unlawful.? After this promising start, Tuesday?s session was even more explosive. Although the hearing was only scheduled for two days, it was extended after the first half of the day was taken up in a closed court cross-examination of ?witness B,? which observers interpreted as meaning that the judges were drilling mercilessly for the truth. The second half of the day involved a similarly extraordinary scenario. This time the judges, having asked the government to vouch for the independence of Susan Crawford, the Military Commissions? Convening Authority, who is responsible for overseeing the Commission process, brandished a letterhead which revealed that Ms. Crawford actually works for the US Department of Defense, and declared that, in light of this seemingly clear evidence of political interference in what is supposed to be an impartial trial system, they would be devoting time in their deliberations to examining whether or not the Military Commissions can be regarded as a fair process. To everyone?s surprise, almost the whole of the rest of the week?s sessions were taken up with the continued closed court cross-examination of ?witness B.? Considering that observers had indicated at the start of the judicial review that the cross-examination would probably only last for half an hour, the only rational conclusion that could be drawn was that the allegations of ?wrongdoing? mentioned by Dinah Rose QC were being fully explored by the judges ? possibly in a criminal context ? and this undoubtedly explains why, on arriving at the court earlier in the week, ?witness B? had brought his own lawyer with him. Summing up on Friday, Ben Jaffey, another of Binyam?s lawyers, revisited the complaints made by Dinah Rose in light of the week?s developments. As the Guardian explained, Jaffey highlighted disturbing contradictions in MI5?s statements, telling the court that in his witness statement an MI5 officer had said that Britain?s security and intelligence agencies ?did not know? where Mr. Mohamed was after he was flown out of Pakistan in 2002, even though MI5 had explicitly told the Intelligence and Security Committee that it believed that he was in US custody. It was as a result of this statement, Jaffey said, that the committee concluded, in its report on Mr. Mohamed?s case last year, that it was ?understandable? that MI5 did not seek assurances about his treatment. Jaffey added that the committee was ?not given the full picture,? and delivered a final criticism of MI5, pointing out that, although the intelligence service had indicated at the time that he was in US custody, ?it now conceded that he was in a ?location unknown.?? Although the US authorities are still maintaining a wall of silence over Binyam?s treatment ? with the Associated Press reporting that, on Friday, the Pentagon ?refused to say ? whether Mohamed was ever taken to Morocco? ? the British judges are clearly unimpressed with a situation in which, even after six years, denials and evasion remain the norm. As the judicial review came to an end, Lord Justice Thomas said that Binyam?s case raised ?many and very troublesome issues.? The judges are expected to deliver their ruling in two weeks? time. Andy is the author of The Guantnamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America?s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

Coal in a hole
4 Aug 2008
A smiling child gazes up into lush green foliage ; boats float in a tranquil harbour ; a couple stand by a gate in a misty, magical landscape. These are some of the images that greet you when you visit the website of E On UK, ?Britain?s leading energy company?. The gentle giant provides energy for homes and schools, and more ? scroll down and the issues covered range from community volunteering to E On?s investment in renewable energy. Moreover, E On is taking the threat of climate change seriously, as the main sponsor of the Guardian?s ?climate change summit?, where it will convene a session examining ?the role of energy companies in finding effective ways to deliver the transition to secure, affordable and low-carbon energy?. More specifically, the website describes E On?s new ?clean coal? power station at Kingsnorth in Kent, which will replace existing plant and employ ?supercritical technology? to make it 20 per cent more efficient. To top it all, it will be built with the capacity to retrofit carbon capture and storage (CCS), a new technology designed to reduce emissions still further. E On, it seems, is trying very hard. So hard that it has recently hired Edelman, a world leader in the public relations field and the self-proclaimed inventor of ?environmental PR?. The threat ? The Camp for Climate Action, which will be coming to Kingsnorth this August. E On says it respects the right to protest, and just wants to be able to operate and provide power for its customers? homes and businesses. Seems reasonable enough ? Let?s look beyond the greenwash. Kingsnorth is a coal-fired power station. Coal may pose ?the greatest threat to the climate?, according to James Hansen, NASA scientist, but as a source of power generation it is very cheap. And there?s plenty of it, at least for the time being. So, as E On is firmly committed to maximising profits for its shareholders, it is firmly committed to coal. Which doesn?t really square with a ?low-carbon? goal. E On UK is part of the German-based E On group, which has at least eight new coal-fired power stations planned in Europe and one in the US in the next five years. This energy giant prides itself on working towards ?vertical integration? ? gaining control of the entire supply chain ? and its portfolio covers coal, oil, gas, nuclear and renewable energy. E On generates around 10 per cent of our electricity in the UK. Of that, for all the talk, renewables weigh in at a paltry 2 per cent, while coal accounts for a massive 61 per cent. E On has three coal-fired power stations including Kingsnorth, and their combined generation is greater than any other UK company?s. Since the winding down of the UK coal industry in the 1980s, the coal-fired stations built in the 1960s and 1970s have been ticking over. However, EU legislation limiting emissions means that most will have to close. It is this, rather than any aspiration to be environmentally responsible, that is driving the wave of seven proposed new coal-fired power stations in the UK. These will ensure that coal is burned for the next 50 years at least. The new plant at Kingsnorth will produce eight million tonnes of CO2 per year. ?Clean coal? is a contradiction in terms. Then we come to the big red herring that is CCS ? an as yet unproven technology whereby CO2 is sequestered and stored away. Even if it turns out to be technically feasible, it will be costly and, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is unlikely to be commercially viable for decades ? far too late to have any impact on climate change. But this hasn?t stopped E On and companies like it from using CCS as a justification for new coal-fired power power stations such as at Kingsnorth. The alternatives are clear. If, as the government states, the UK is set to become a world-leader in technologies such as wind and wave power, the coal industry is ripe for what is known as a ?just transition? to green-collar jobs. The German environmental engineering sector has generated some 250,000 jobs in the past four years, a figure that dwarfs the 5,600 in UK coal. The revitalisation of the coal industry is a path the government and energy companies shouldn?t even be thinking of treading in the face of climate change. It is up to us to stand squarely in the way.

Ombudsman demands government fund for Equitable Life insurance and pension victims
4 Aug 2008
A report by the parliamentary ombudsman, Ann Abraham, into the failed insurance and pension society, Equitable Life, took four years to compile. Published recently, it states that more than a million policyholders left with lower-than-expected retirement income were the victims of ?a decade of regulatory failure? by government departments and regulatory authorities. It identified 10 instances of maladministration by public authorities. The ombudsman called on the government to apologise and to set up a fund to compensate policyholders for losses. While the report does not give a figure for compensation, the Equitable Members Action Group (EMAG) says that assuming about 70 percent of policyholders can show that they have suffered a loss, this would amount to about 4.5 billion. Paul Braithwaite from EMAG welcomed the report, saying it was a ?devastating indictment? of the performance of regulators over many years. ?The UK regulators were fully aware for a decade that Equitable Life was effectively insolvent, yet they allowed the society to suck in another 20 billion in pension contributions from more than one million new investors.? The report is another political and financial crisis for Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Labour government, which, with the Financial Services Authority, had sought to delay and rebut the original draft report with a 500-page rejoinder. Yet another of Brown?s measures?the financial services regulatory regime of which he was the architect during his 10-year stint at the Treasury?has come unstuck. Not one of the institutions involved in the regulation of the insurance industry over an 11-year period?the Treasury, the Government Actuary Department (GAD), the Department of Trade and Industry, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and its predecessors, the auditors, Ernst & Young, and accountancy body, the Institute of Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW)?comes out unscathed. The report reveals and confirms that the government?s real relationship with the City is one of complete subservience to the dictates of finance capital. The 246-year-old Equitable Life, the world?s oldest mutual life insurer and a venerable City institution, was a major pension provider, responsible for more than 26 billion of investors? cash. It announced in December 2000 that it would not be selling any new policies and was on the verge of collapse. This was the biggest crisis in the pensions industry. Its failure was not the result of a stock market collapse, but of its own practices. It followed a House of Lords ruling one year earlier that the society?s payment of a differential bonus to policyholders, and thus its refusal to honour promises to make minimum payments to 90,000 people who had invested in the ?guaranteed annuity rate? (GAR) pension policies, was illegal. Without the cash reserves of 1.5 billion needed to honour the agreement made when selling the policies between 1958 and1988, it was unable to find a buyer for the business. Since then, it has wound down its activities and sold off most of its operations, transferring its sales force and non-profits policies to the Halifax Building society for 1 billion in February 2001, its subsidiary University Life to Reliance Mutual in December 2006, its 1.7 billion worth of with-profits annuities to Prudential in December 2007 and 4.6 billion of its fixed pensions to Canada Life in February 2007. Its new management decided in 2001 to impose an across-the-board cut in policy values to the tune of 4 billion. The 1.5 million savers still with the society by 2001 faced low returns on their investment or a fall in the value of their policies if they moved them elsewhere. Those who continued to invest in Equitable Life?s with-profits policies saw the value of their savings slashed anyway, by more than 30 percent in three years, because there was not enough money to go around. This was also the case for some who were already receiving pension payments. About 500,000 people are still saving for their pensions in the society?s 7 billion with-profits fund, either as individuals or via group pension schemes. But some 30,000 of them have died over the last eight years. Many of them were forced to live their last years in very reduced circumstances. Fifteen more die every day. The parliamentary ombudsman?s report follows 12 other reports into different aspects of the Equitable Life fiasco commissioned by the government. One of these earlier reports commissioned by the Treasury, an interested party in the affair, by Lord Penrose, attributed most of the blame to the society. ?Principally, the society was the author of its own misfortunes. Regulatory failures were secondary factors,? Penrose wrote. His report said that serious failings among senior management went back to the 1980s, when the company had failed to set aside sufficient reserves for the guaranteed annual annuities. These were no longer sold after 1988 when the investment climate changed, making them too expensive to operate. There was ?a culture of manipulation and concealment,? and the society did not communicate details of its finances to either its policyholders or regulators. During the 1980s and 1990s, Equitable, as a mutual society without shareholders, had been paying out bonuses to its members?the policyholders?and concealing the fact that it had not built up sufficient reserves and was in effect running the guaranteed annuities on the back of new policyholders enticed by the bonuses and loans. Penrose particularly criticised the chief executive between 1991 and 1997, Roy Ranson, for failing to provide pertinent financial information. He wrote that non-executive directors were ?ill-equipped,? ?ill-prepared? and ?incompetent,? as regards the particular difficulties of supervising a complex life assurance firm. Ranson, in addition to being CEO, was appointed actuary at the firm from 1982 to 1997. This overlap of regulatory and executive functions led to confusion and conflicts of interest. Penrose could not avoid the glaringly obvious and, going beyond his remit, criticised the supervision of Equitable Life. His report found that the system of regulation, which handled Equitable with a light touch, was ?inappropriate.? The Department for Trade and Industry, in particular, had insufficient understanding of how to measure the solvency of a firm like Equitable, thereby allowing the society to get away with not putting aside sufficient reserves. The Government Actuary?s Department (GAD) was insufficiently tough on the society, failing to respond to changes in bonus policy and failing to demand disclosure from management. However, he argued that there was no evidence of ?maladministration or negligence? among regulators and said?letting the government off the hook?that as a general principle, ?building false expectations of regulators can lead to a destruction of public confidence,? and he stressed that regulators themselves must inform consumers about the realities of the financial system. ?Effective consumer education is essential.? EMAG, Equitable?s policyholders, were not satisfied with this and asked the parliamentary ombudsman to review its supervision. But her first report in 2003 cleared the Financial Services Authority (FSA), one of the society?s regulators, of any failure of supervision in the run-up to its collapse. EMAG pressed for another and fuller investigation. In 2005, the European parliament?s commission of inquiry?set up because the society had sold policies not just to UK citizens but to citizens in the EU?blamed the UK government for failing to ensure that EU legislation had been implemented properly. It also argued that the system of regulation was ?excessively lenient? in failing to ensure that Equitable was solvent. It pointed out that there was no real prospect of policyholders gaining any redress under the UK?s legal and regulatory system. Consequently, the government had an obligation to assume responsibility and establish a compensation scheme. The FSA tried to prevent the ombudsman from carrying out a second and more thorough investigation?and with good reason. Ms Abraham, whose remit by virtue of her statutory position was the effectiveness of the society?s regulation, reversed her original findings. Her report excoriated the government and regulatory authorities and accused it of maladministration for its role in the society?s collapse in 2000. She argued that ?those responsible for undertaking financial regulation should act in a way that is compatible with the duties and powers which Parliament has conferred upon them. Those responsible for the prudential regulation of Equitable Life failed to do so throughout the period covered in my report.? Her report revealed a catalogue of failings and maladministration. The Department for Trade and Industry and the Government Actuary?s Department (GAD) had regulated in a ?passive, reactive and complacent manner.? GAD had let one person hold the role of both CEO and appointed actuary for more than six years, which meant that there was no potential whistleblower to protect investors. GAD had failed to question or resolve any of the issues that were apparent in the insurer?s annual regulatory returns, GAD had allowed the introduction of a different terminal bonus to policy holders that was the subject of the legal case brought against the society and ultimately led to its collapse, but failed to tell the regulators and raise the matter with the society. While GAD and the FSA, which took over prudential regulatory responsibility in the last two-and-half years of the society?s life, ?often initiated discussions appropriately with equitable,? they still allowed Equitable to get away with non-compliance. For example, they let it take credit on their books for reinsurance contracts that had not been concluded and did not cover the issue at the heart of the House of Lords ruling. They failed to question the lack of crucial information on the society?s returns that gave an inaccurate picture of its financial situation, even though they knew that the ratings agencies were ?misconstruing the company?s financial strength,? thereby enabling it to declare a bonus in 1999. The net result was that investors were making decisions based on false information. In the words of the ombudsman, investors ?were thus actively misled.? Furthermore, the FSA failed to ensure that Equitable Life warned new policyholders of the serious implications of losing the legal case that was then under way. Even after losing the case, the regulators sill allowed the society to stay open for new business despite the fact that it was then unsound. Finally, after the society closed for new business, the FSA provided information that was ?misleading and unbalanced, with assurances being provided that the society was solvent, when that was in considerable doubt and was not the view of always held within the FSA.? Despite the ombudsman?s trenchant and very valid criticisms of the regulatory authorities, she never deals with the more fundamental question. Regulation was and can never be more than a cosmetic device to licence the essentially fraudulent nature of the pensions and insurance-selling industry. It doubles when the need arises as the industry?s public relations arm. In practice, ?regulation? consisted of asking questions but being satisfied with bland assurances; allowing the society to continue selling new policies when it was essentially insolvent and give out misleading information; giving ?advice? and not instructions; backing down when Equitable Life threatened a Judicial Review or ministerial intervention for going beyond its powers; and being fobbed off with reassurances about future profits, re-insurance arrangements and selling costs. While the society?s policyholders have welcomed the thoroughness of the report, it is far from clear that the government will establish and fund a compensation scheme for the policyholders, as the report recommends. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling is likely to argue that the government cannot be held liable for all the losses suffered by investors. An earlier ombudsman?s report in 2006 that also found the government guilty of maladministration over advice given on occupational pension schemes that led to 125,000 people losing all or some of their occupational pension savings had recommended full compensation. The government immediately rejected her findings and the case went to the High Court, which ruled earlier this year against the government. One of its accusations was that the government had rejected the findings too quickly, which suggests that at the very least the government will drag its feet for as long as possible before making any announcement. Though the government stepped in to rescue Northern Rock and shore up the banks via a ?liquidity scheme? with hundreds of billions of taxpayers? money, it is reluctant to compensate policyholders when its own official bodies are found guilty of maladministration. EMAG has said it is ?digging in for a long fight? and getting its members to write to MPs and candidates in marginal constituencies. Some lawyers have argued that policyholders could have a claim for ?misfeasance in public office,? similar to the failed case brought by Railtrack?s shareholders. The Financial Times, the City?s mouthpiece, provides an insight into the thinking of the financial elite. It called in a self-serving editorial for the government to fund limited redress, arguing that it is not the job of the taxpayer to bail out completely investors who put their money into an institution that gets into financial trouble. This would remove responsibility from the institutions, their advisors and investors. But more importantly, it would also lead the financial regulators to behave too cautiously or to regulate strictly. That of course would never do. But there are, it argues, two strong reasons for partial compensation. Firstly, the moral case, since the authorities allowed Equitable to present misleading information to the public. ?Secondly, there is a public interest in encouraging people to make long term financial provision for themselves so that an aging population looks less to the state for its pensions.? As well as encouraging private pensions to slash welfare spending, the Financial Times is also concerned that nothing will disrupt the implementation of the government?s new national pension savings scheme, which would invest the public?s and employers? compulsory contributions in the Stock Market. Equitable Life is by no means the worst case in terms of the outcomes on guaranteed annuities. Patrick Collision of the Guardian newspaper noted that millions of pensions companies? customers have received payouts that are worse than those of Equitable Life. He went on to use this, plus the fact that most of Equitable?s victims were doctors, dentists and lawyers, as arguments to support the government?s expected refusal to provide compensation at the taxpayers? expense. He also pointed out that ?by mid-2003 virtually every insurance company in the UK was technically bankrupt and receiving ?waivers? from the FSA.? What he, like all the rest of the financial commentators will not say was that the case of Equitable Life and the failure of regulation to rein in the financial services industry demonstrate the absolute necessity for pensions to be publicly funded and provided.

Where there’s brass there’s muck
3 Aug 2008
The environmental crisis that currently faces our planet is a matter of life or death. The potential for human suffering through environmental devastation over the coming decades is truly staggering. It is unquestionable that the time to act is now. The state and corporations would have us believe that environmentalism is a matter of personal choice. That buying energy-saving light bulbs, carbon-neutral flights or so called ?biofuels? have the potential to stall (or even stop) the coming crisis. Even those within the environmental movement will preach the virtues of ?ethical? lifestyle. They argue that it is only a matter of persuading enough consumers to ?buy into? environmentalism (with a price-tag far beyond the budget of most working people). While some of these efforts have some impact as shortterm solutions, they fail to address the very system that drives and sustains the destruction of our environment ? capitalism. Calling for increased state intervention to meet environmental targets is equally counterproductive. The state exists for the maintenance and protection of capitalism. Since targets and promises were set there has been no government that has ever reached a target it set to tackle on climate change. Creating a sustainable future for our planet is not in the interests of profit. Ecology IS a class issue. How many working class people do you know with a private jet? The ruling classes have used the corporate mass media to fight environmentalism at every turn. We live in a truly crazy world where despite scientific proof that humanity is responsible for climate change you are still able with enough money, influence and power to deny this is the case. And why? Because the bottom line is that environmental destruction equals profit. And who suffers? We already know that those countries in the developing world are likely to suffer the worst affects of Climate Change. Droughts, floods and food shortages affect millions when there is no infrastructure to protect impoverished populations. We have seen in the catastrophic events that followed hurricane Katrina the people who suffer the worst in the face of environmental destruction? the urban working poor. Last year throughout the UK there was a great deal of hardship following the floods as those in the poorest and worst affected areas lost everything when insurance companies refused to pay out. Across the world working people are poisoned by pesticides, power plants and industrial by-products. Our message is simple. If we want to great a truly free society, a truly sustainable society then it has to be one which is free from capitalism. Working people across the world have to rise up and fight the system that oppresses and alienates them every day. It?s about time we gave bosses and politicians the boot and built a better future for everyone. Camp For Climate Action Despite coal representing the most polluting of fossil fuels, the government plans to build six more atmospherecrunching power stations. Collectively these will emit around 50 million tons of C02 a year! The camp for climate action represents a radical attempt to build a mass movement against climate change through self-organisation and collective effort. The Camp for Climate Action will be taking place at Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, Kent, 3rd to 11th August. www.climatecamp.org.uk

Why David Cameron Blames the Poor
3 Aug 2008
David Cameron’s ?blaming the poor’ speech in Glasgow may be more than just an attempt to placate the unreconstructed right of the Conservative party. It is not often recognised how far British public opinion has shifted towards a liberal individualist stance on social issues in recent years. In some ways we are more Thatcherite under New Labour than we ever were under the Conservatives. Evidence from a range of attitude surveys points in the same direction. Sympathy for the poor, growing steadily stronger through the 1980s and early 1990s, has collapsed. By 2006 the situation was almost exactly reversed. The public is roughly twice as likely to attribute poverty to laziness or lack of will power now compared with a decade ago. The numbers thinking the government should spend more on the poor has steadily declined. People are also much readier to accept the inequalities of the market. In 1997, slightly more people thought it unfair that those on high incomes could buy better health care or education than the rest of the population than took the opposite view. Now nearly twice as many think buying better health care or schooling is perfectly acceptable as don’t. Various factors contribute to explaining the shift to the right in social attitudes. Our recent qualitative work examined how people discuss fairness and government services. A strong theme across our interviews was the acceptance of inequalities. While the better off should be expected to contribute in the same way as everyone else does (and tax avoidance by the super-rich was seen as just as outrageous as benefit cheating by the poor), there was little support for redistributive taxation. Such attitudes are buttressed by a strong and widespread belief that opportunities to succeed, while not entirely equal, are open to those prepared to make the effort across society. Why fleece the better off when they pay in just as much as anyone else, and anyway we all stand a reasonable chance of getting there if only we try hard enough? Opportunity for all and tolerance of income inequalities are strong themes in political discussions and in public opinion. Turning that round, sharply progressive tax and direct interventions to help the most vulnerable become unacceptable. When it pursues such policies, the government is careful to do so by stealth. Perhaps the success of those ideas is reflected in the lurch to the right of public opinion. Cameron’s claim that ?social problems are often the consequences of the choices people make’ is the logical extension of this view.

A surprise to no-one
3 Aug 2008
What a surprise it was to all concerned for a memo drawn up by Tony Blair last September to suddenly see the light of day during David Miliband’s leadership campaign that dares not speak its name, wasn’t it? Only to those who still believe in fairies living in their back garden is the answer. It surely beggars belief that many people prominent in the Labour Party, including a number dumped from office earlier for not being up to scratch, are engaged in a media-encouraged game to mount a palace coup. And on what basis? Nothing but image. A smiling, youthful, confident new Labourite rather than a brooding, stale, indecisive new Labourite. The major problem with this unimaginative formulation is that it ignores the real basis for the government’s inexorable electoral decline, which is the label that both men hold in common – new Labour. The label’s promise of novelty, honesty and modernisation took the day in 1997, but it is now tainted and despised. Labour jettisoned 2 million votes in 2001 and 2 million more in 2005. It lost ground in the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, English local and London mayor elections and its by-election record is dismal. Labour Party membership, which stood at over 400,000 in 1997, is now just over 150,000, with many local organisations utterly moribund. Neither electoral decline nor popular discontent set in with the coronation of Gordon Brown last summer. They were in full swing already, which is why voters and party members wanted Tony Blair out. Mr Blair’s suddenly revealed memo rewrites history by claiming that his once loved but now despised new Labour twin had “dissed our own record” – how so very roots – and “junked” the Blair government policy agenda. In reality, the new leader’s failure was to have suggested criticism and hinted at change before falling back in line and carrying out the same old tired and unpopular war and privatisation policies. The initial suggestion of an expansion of council housebuilding was dumped. The hint of withdrawal from Iraq likewise. And, in the absence of any positive policies to put before the people, the Prime Minister lost his nerve over calling the election that he had already told the trade union movement to prepare for and has since evoked the image of a dead man walking. And what is the political answer of the Miliband camp to this spectacle? Shoe-horn in Tony Blair Mark 2 and give long-time council tenants a lump sum to use as a deposit to buy private accommodation. Such poverty of imagination belittles the severity of Britain’s housing shortage and confirms new Labour’s inability to think outside the straitjacket of private-sector solutions. New Labour’s dead-end private-is-best policies ought to have been debated last year against the labour movement priorities offered by John McDonnell, whose campaign was stifled by trade union concerns to avoid a leadership contest. The fruits of that conservative approach are readily apparent now – a government that remains unpopular and refuses to consider another political direction. That remains the key. Without a new direction, Labour is sunk and deserves to be. The question is, are the unions prepared to take remedial action?

DNA database ?criminalises? the innocent
2 Aug 2008
The Citizens? Inquiry report, overseen by the Human Genetics Commission (HGC), also said that the length of time that the DNA of people who have committed an offence should remain on the database ?should be proportionate to their offence?; however, for children aged between 7 and 17 years old, the maximum should be five years, it concluded. The HGC said: ?Currently no distinction is made between someone who has been arrested for breach of the peace and someone who has murdered somebody.? During the four-month inquiry the HGC found that the database contained the details of four million people. However, it is believed that up to a million of these have never committed a crime; this includes the profiles of 100,000 children. The HGC said this ?criminalised? people. It also urged ministers to take control of the database away from the police and the Home Office. Before 2001, the police could take DNA samples during criminal investigations, but had to destroy the records if the person was acquitted or charges were not brought. But the law was changed in 2001 to remove this requirement, and then again in 2004 so that DNA samples could be taken from anyone arrested for a recordable offence and detained in a police station. Innocent people who volunteer to give a DNA sample during a police inquiry also have their details kept on record. The HGC now wants an independent body set up to control the information claiming, ?past actions and hidden agendas have shown that the Government cannot be trusted?. Genewatch UK, an independent not-for-profit group that monitors developments in genetic technologies, agreed with the recommendations. It warned that as the DNA database got bigger, the number of false matches was expected to increase. Dr Helen Wallace, director for the charity, said: ?Keeping people?s DNA indefinitely allows the Government unprecedented powers to implement surveillance on ordinary citizens and their relatives.? However, the Home Office described the database as a ?key police intelligence tool? and said that there were ?obvious reasons for detaining the samples?. A representative for the department said: ?The benefits of NDNAD lie not only in detecting the guilty but also in eliminating the innocent.? She said that, in 2006 to 2007, 41,717 crimes were solved using NDNAD sample matches. These included 452 homicides, 644 rapes, 222 other sex offences, nearly 1,900 violent crimes and more than 8,500 domestic burglaries. ?The database will also build public confidence as elusive offenders will be more easily detected and brought to justice,? she added. Genewatch said this was not the case. ?DNA evidence is not foolproof,? said Dr Wallace.

A Dangerous Untruth
2 Aug 2008
Imagine the impact of the second world war. This, according to former World Bank chief economist Nicolas Stern, captures the scale of the economic impact of climate change, left unchecked. The social and environmental effects are predicted to be similarly catastrophic. Given the widely accepted need for rapid and deep cuts in CO2 emissions, the response to E.ON’s application to build the UK’s first coal-fired power station in 30 years, at Kingsnorth in Kent, and news that business secretary John Hutton seems minded to give it the go-ahead, has been bewilderment and anger. A new high point of opposition starts this weekend as the Camp for Climate Action embarks on an eight-day protest to press the government and E.ON to abandon the scheme. This is no fringe issue: they will be taking action to stop a proposal potentially so destructive that increasing numbers of scientists are speaking out against it. Over recent years scientists have become increasingly vocal about the need to take action to cut CO2 emissions. In 2005, the science academies of the G8 countries along with Brazil, China and India – three of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the developing world – signed a joint statement to push political leaders to tackle climate change as an urgent priority. By 2008, this group was calling for a rapid, planned transition to a low-carbon economy. Opposing plans for new coal-fired power plants in developed countries has become an international frontline of climate change politics. Jim Hanson, senior climate change scientist at Nasa, wrote to Gordon Brown last year calling for a ban on new coal, stating that Brown’s decision on Kingsnorth has “the potential to influence the future of the planet”. This is because coal is one of the most polluting and carbon-intensive forms of fossil fuels – producing twice the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as gas. Coal is the cause of fully half of the fossil fuel-caused increase of CO2 in the air today, and there is plenty left to burn. If we don’t limit the use of coal, avoiding catastrophic climate change will become impossible. However, Paul Golby of E.ON, in these pages yesterday, dismissed anyone opposed to his company’s plans to annually emit at least 6m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere – more than the total emissions of Costa Rica or Cameroon – as naively ignorant of power generation realities. He has tried to scare the public into thinking that new coal is necessary to keep the lights on. Yet the independent energy consultancy Pyry, in a report out today (ilexenergy.com), gives the hard numbers showing projected demand can be met, while respecting strict emissions limits and energy security concerns, using renewables and not resorting to new coal. Meanwhile Cambridge professor of physics David MacKay’s book Without Hot Air presents five different plans of how we can meet the UK’s energy needs and radically reduce emissions. Of course there are no easy answers, but for Golby to deny that there are no answers other than business as usual is dangerously untrue. Let’s be clear. Either coal usage must stop, or the CO2 released from any coal burned must be kept out of the atmosphere, by burying it under the sea, using an unproven technique known as carbon capture and storage. The Royal Society has made a clear proposal that all new coal plants must capture 90% of their CO2 emissions by 2020, or have their operating permits revoked. If agreed, this would send a clear signal that if carbon capture and storage works, coal use is acceptable, otherwise it is not. However, last month, when E.ON and energy minister Malcolm Wicks were before parliament’s environmental audit committee, both evaded accepting the Royal Society proposals’ impeccable logic. E.ON’s preference is to use the carbon market to reduce emissions. This won’t deliver real cuts, as its own business case shows: Golby believes E.ON can participate in the European scheme, provide competitively priced electricity and turn in a good profit for 20-40 years by burning the dirtiest fuel. Such delusions must be exposed: it is not possible to keep releasing large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere and avoid the social, environmental and economic consequences of climate change. The Climate Camp is creating space for serious debate about the kind of world we want to live in. More than that, the campers give shape to a force that can perhaps override the profits-now catastrophe-later logic of the government and E.ON: they form a broad-based movement of people committed to a socially just transition to a low-carbon society. I certainly don’t want to live in E.ON’s world, where business as usual trumps avoiding dangerous climate change. So I’ll be joining the campers in Kent. Anyone else with concerns about the future should do the same. Simon Lewis is a Royal Society research fellow at the Earth & Biosphere Institute, University of Leeds s.l.lewis@leeds.ac.uk

Caroline Lucas at Climate Camp
2 Aug 2008
South East MEP and Green activist Dr Caroline Lucas will be joining protesters at Climate Camp 2008 this weekend at Kingsnorth in Kent to rally against the Government?s continued commitment to unsustainable fossil fuels and its failure to adapt to tough environmental and economic conditions. Speaking ahead of the Camp, which was held last year at Heathrow and attracted in excess of 1500 people, Dr Lucas said: ?I am delighted to be taking part in Climate Camp this year, and where better to highlight the Government?s failure to provide leadership on climate change than Kingsnorth, the proposed location for the first coal fired power station in Britain for 30 years. ?A new coal facility at Kingsnorth would emit up to 8 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year ? and potentially keep doing so for 50 years. That annual emissions figure is as much C02 as the world?s 24 lowest emitting countries combined. ?Despite all its climate rhetoric, greenhouse gas emissions have risen under this Labour adminstration. Any government which commits to more coal fired power stations ? and Kingsnorth is only the start ? then claims to be aiming for a massive reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 is quite simply living in a fantasy land.? On Sunday (3 August), Dr Lucas will take part in a rally on incineration and climate change. Then on Monday (4 August), she will address fellow Climate Campers on the triple crisis of food price rises, economic downturn and climate change facing governments the world over, and what lies ahead for conventional capitalist economics. She continued: ?Our political leaders seem unable to grasp a more radical social and environmental agenda. They can no longer commit to endless free market economic growth, which has played a huge part in the rapid generation of damaging climate emissions, and then wring their hands about climate change. ?The Government should be showing real leadership in this debate, with measures to tackle rising energy costs and fuel poverty, as well as initiating major investment in energy efficiency, renewables and decentralised energy. According to its own figures, we could achieve a 30% reduction in energy use in the UK through existing efficiency measures alone. ?Instead, ministers stick with their business-as-usual approach, further enabling the fossil fuel industry to profit and pollute, while paying scant regard to the average citizen or the environment.?

Merchants of death
2 Aug 2008
BAE Systems shareholders will be delighted by the company’s 14 per cent rise in net profits – a cool 586 million – in the first six months of this year. As the company itself puts it so poetically, its Land and Armaments unit “continues to benefit from operational requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Well, bully for the company and its shareholders who can sit back and wait for the profits from war to land in their laps, while British troops and the civilian populations of both Iraq and Afghanistan count the cost in death, destruction and injury. All in all, it’s not been a bad week for the merchants of death, with the Law Lords having ruled on Wednesday that normal rules on investigating bribery and corruption do not apply to the arms industry or to its partners in the venal autocracy of Saudi Arabia. Britain’s arms-trafficking industry already enjoys a privileged position over the rest of our country’s manufacturing sector. The government guarantees, through its export credit and guarantee department, payment for contracts tied up with some of the most dictatorial and unstable regimes in the world. And when criticism erupts from either peace campaigners or civil libertarians, Cabinet ministers launch into a long diatribe about the contribution that arms sales make to the economy and to employment in the vital export-oriented engineering sector. What they do not explain is why this industry needs feather-bedding rather than, say, cars, shipbuilding, rail rolling stock, motor bikes, steel or a raft of other sectors that have been allowed to decline, become extinct or be bought up at knockdown prices by competitors in other countries. In each case, government – it doesn’t really matter of what stripe since their responses have been uniform – has simply cited the inexorable power of market forces. But market forces do not seem to apply to an industry that is geared to annihilation rather than peaceful development. Trade unions will, of course, welcome the ongoing employment of their members, even though the numbers in the arms industry are in steady decline. Unions are also correct to insist on the preservation of collectives of highly skilled engineering workers and the maintenance of existing research and development teams. But it is a perversion of their skills and training that they should be restricted to production in the cause of death rather than life. We do not have to go back to the example of the Lucas shop stewards committee three decades ago to understand that the skills of arms industry engineers can be put to better civil use. The Scottish TUC and Scottish CND have done excellent work together in identifying alternative projects relating to tidal power and other renewable energy possibilities to take the place of the ridiculously expensive and dangerous Trident submarine white elephant. There is no reason why the government could not give its blessing to similar initiatives across Britain. The main reason that it does not do so is its servile attitude to the US, which demands backing for its various criminal overseas wars and insists on a war-based economic model. Reversing that militaristic approach would help the cause of international peace and Britain’s economic position.

Tommy Sheridan pitches to the Scottish National Party
2 Aug 2008
One question posed by the recent by-election in Glasgow East is just how long it will be before Tommy Sheridan joins the Scottish Nationalist Party? Sheridan is the former leader the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and now heads the breakaway Solidarity, Scotland?s Socialist Movement. The two parties split in September 2006, after Sheridan took out an ultimately successful defamation case against Rupert Murdoch?s News of the World, over allegations that he attended a swingers club, which the SSP leadership refused to back. Both parties stood candidates in Glasgow East, which saw a humiliating defeat for Labour by the SNP with a 26.1 percent swing in what was Labour?s 26th safest seat. Solidarity was formed by Sheridan?s closest allies within the SSP and backed by Scottish members of the Socialist Workers Party and the rival Committee for a Workers? International (CWI). With no programmatic differences between the two parties, support for Sheridan was based largely on the belief that his high profile would provide the best means of maintaining the influence won under his leadership by the SSP in the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, where it had six MSPs. In the event, neither party won enough votes in the 2007 May elections to gain a seat, and most of their support collapsed and went over to the SNP. Sheridan even then made clear that he was in favour of an SNP victory. But the most striking feature of the Glasgow East by-election campaign waged by Sheridan is how he took every opportunity to make what amounted to a sales pitch on his own behalf, to the SNP. During a BBC ?Newsnight Scotland? roundtable interview of representatives of the smaller parties in the early stages of the campaign, Sheridan, speaking for Solidarity, opened his remarks by stating baldly, ?If I am being absolutely honest, I hope the SNP would win rather than Labour. If we are honest, we are fighting for third place….? Later, he returned to his theme, stating, ?We?re not going to win the election, we want to take third…but if you put me on the spot and say who would you rather win, I would rather Gordon Brown got a political kicking….? Sheridan made no mention of his party?s candidate, Tricia McLeish. While he made references to ?big business parties,? at no time did he make any explicit criticism of the SNP. Sheridan?s proposal that voters could give Gordon Brown ?a kicking? by voting SNP dovetailed with the campaign of the SNP, which played down its demand for Scottish independence due to the unpopularity of the idea of independence with the working class. Solidarity literature distributed during the campaign portrayed the party as left advisers to the SNP. A two-page article, ?SNP in Power?One Year On,? took up half of its free news sheet. In this article, Phil Stott and Steve Arnott pledged that ?Solidarity will continue to welcome positive reforms from the SNP and say why and when we don?t think they go far enough; we will criticise the SNP when they put the interest of business and the wealthy before the interests of the majority of society, and we will point out consistently that it is the left leaning measures of the SNP that have so far also proved the most popular.? Arnott and Stott explicitly aim to build Solidarity as a left cover to the SNP, but Sheridan?s uncritical praise for the SNP seems to be generating tensions within Solidarity. At a Solidarity eve of poll meeting, in response to a question posed by myself, Sheridan made clear just how far removed he is from socialist politics. In his speech, Sheridan noted that ?the SNP is now the party of protest. SNP is to the left of Labour, so is Glasgow East.? Voters, Sheridan went on, should seek to pressure the SNP. They should ask the SNP, ?...are you supporting public ownership of oil?? Speaking from the audience, this writer noted that Sheridan had ?highlighted bad social conditions in Glasgow. The same conditions hold in London, Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle, and Hartlepool. A unified struggle by working class in Britain against poverty, inequality, the consequences of war in Iraq, the attack on democratic rights, and all the policies of the social elite for whom Labour and the Tories speak, is needed. In what sense does your proposal of Scottish independence advance this?? Sheridan replied with a forthright call for Scottish ?nationhood? on the basis of capitalism. Echoing the SNP?s long-standing perspective of ?an independent Scotland in Europe,? he stated that the European Union ?has recently expanded to incorporate 10 new nations with a lower population than Scotland. Scotland has the economic strength to survive.? ?Internationalism,? he added, ?is ?inter? and ?nationalism?...a collective of nationalisms?. Thus, rather than expressing the strivings of the working class to overcome national divisions and to take forward a world struggle for the replacement of the profit system, Sheridan?s conception of ?internationalism? is simply an alliance between the bourgeoisie of smaller regions and powers. This outlook defines his indifference towards the working class in the rest of Britain. His outlook is entirely nationalist. He concluded his reply by declaring, ?I don?t feel British or part of British imperialism…. Labour is a British party.? Sheridan has no similar reservations when identifying with a smaller imperialist nation, Scotland, and with the governing Scottish party, the SNP. Commenting on the result in Glasgow East, Sheridan proclaimed, ?This is a historic victory in Glasgow East for the SNP and I congratulate John Mason. Let us be clear it is a victory for a left of centre party which carries on Glasgow?s radical tradition….? Sheridan is a man with an eye on the main chance. He is someone who won the admiration of sections of the Scottish establishment during his years in the Scottish parliament for his tireless promotion of Holyrood. He clearly has aspirations to revive his parliamentary career. Initially, he is attempting to do that by aligning Solidarity as close as possible with the SNP and, should circumstances allow, by joining it and acting as its left face. Sheridan is still facing perjury charges as part of the fallout from the libel case he pursued against Rupert Murdoch?s News of the World. A major legal and police operation has subsequently been mounted against him for his humiliating defeat of the media giant for securing $200,000 compensation. Sheridan?s insistence on fighting the case, against his own party?s advice, split the SSP in two and saw SSP members giving evidence against him. Defending the good name of ?family man? Sheridan from lurid allegations was, clearly, more important to him than the very existence of his own party. For this was a question of maintaining ?Brand Sheridan? and safeguarding his own future career. The SSP, however, still has no differences of principle with Sheridan and Solidarity. Like Solidarity, the SSP proposes a ?Scottish socialist republic? as a means to provide a platform for the social reforms once proposed by the Labour Party. Both parties support Scottish independence as proposed by the SNP as a necessary stage towards this goal. Like Solidarity, the SSP bears full responsibility for the ability of the SNP to benefit from the collapse of the Labour Party, as expressed most dramatically in Labour?s latest by-election disaster. They always refer to the split with him as ?a tragedy,? which prevented a more effective struggle for their own nationalist and reformist politics. Their struggle is reduced to which is the bigger and more viable vehicle for championing independence. The SSP?s analysis of the campaign, authored by Richie Venton, focused heavily on the fact that its candidate and former MSP Frances Curran polled a few more votes than Solidarity in Glasgow East?555 compared to 512. This was most important for them in reversing the relative position of the two parties last year. However, their line was exactly the same as that of Solidarity. Venton sought to misrepresent the huge swing against the Labour Party as representing support for independence. He admitted that ?There was not widespread, overt, explicit talk on the streets of this being a vote on independence.? But then, echoing Sheridan and the SNP, he went on to assert that ?it clearly is a clash of contrasting opinions on the Westminster Labour government compared to the Holyrood SNP government?and is a massive impetus towards independence.? The SSP will continue to make its occasional denunciations of Sheridan and decry the SNP as a capitalist party. But it cannot distance itself from that fact that he was the party?s leader and public face for close to two decades. And it is within the opportunist and saltire waving milieu of the SSP that Sheridan?s politics germinated and bore fruit. As to his current allies in the SWP, they will find their alliance with the ?best known and greatly respected? Sheridan to be a perhaps greater political embarrassment than their disastrous relationship with George Galloway.