Things can only get wetter!
If you fancy some thought-provoking and imaginative action against the companies who are fuelling climate change, join activists from Rising Tide UK at Liverpool Street station concourse, London on Monday 13 November at 11.30 am. Please bring banners, drums, other musical instruments and general carnivalesque business, as well as your imagination, a sense of fun and a friend. (People with a knowledge of samba are especially welcome.) This is planned to be a chilled out, arrest-free action taking a couple of hours to bring rhythm and sanity to the Square Mile, even if it's only for this Monday lunchtime.
The plan is to fix blue commemorative plaques to corporations and financial institutions causing climate chaos. The plaques are inscribed: 'For services to profit-driven destruction, until..?' and the 'ceremony' will be accompanied by music, dancing and drumming to celebrate the many positive alternatives to the current system and our own resistance to it.
Details: info@risingtide.org.uk or rts@gn.apc.org Tel: 020 7281 4621
Some 'work-in-progress' thinking behind the action:
IT'S HERE As swollen rivers burst their banks and regions of Britain disappear underwater, and as extreme weather events increase globally, it's clear that human-triggered climate chaos is here. Even if we drastically cut emissions tomorrow, our children will be unlikely to see the back of it. We need to face up to the problem, and soon.
WHY NOVEMBER 13TH? Not only is this the date nominated by fuel protesters as the end of their ultimatum to government to reduce fuel duty, but it is also the first day of the COP6 climate change conference in The Hague, Holland. Rather than being a chance to address the problem, COP6 will be nothing more than a glorified trade fair as a new market to trade carbon emissions is conjured into existence. This will amount to the wholesale privatisation of the atmosphere, and it's a market that many London companies are gagging to get a piece of. But the truth is that market-based solutions to a market-induced problem will produce plenty of profit but no meaningful reductions in emissions and no climate justice.
Even though the point is rarely made by the media, environmental NGO's, governments or fuel protesters, these events are intimately linked by that one simple word: profit.
When you consider that climate change is caused by the over-consumption of fossil fuels by the rich, and that the first people to feel the effects of climate change are the poor, because only the rich can pay for expensive adaptation measures; when you consider that the process to prevent climate change is dominated by the rich, who come up with solutions that impose upon the poor...then you must stop seeing climate change as a problem of atmospheres and gases and start seeing it as a problem of social and ecological justice.
If we are going to avoid economic, social and ecological meltdown then we must challenge the structures that maintain this growth-at-all-costs economic system. This means changes at all levels, from adapting personal consumption to a revolutionary transformation of the way we run the economy and live our lives.
BEYOND PETROLEUM, OR BEYOND BELIEF? It's oil that has fuelled economic growth for over a century, while the oil industry and the financial structures it supports has torn apart communities, trashed ecosystems and helped trigger climate chaos. Not to mention exploiting and laying off its own workforce in the ceaseless shabby hustle for 'shareholder value'. It's the same company bringing you its rebranding as a company 'beyond petroleum' that got rid of half its workforce in the 1990's, whose employee safety record at its Grangemouth refinery is appalling and yet which still manages to pay its Chief Executive almost £20,000 a week. This is an industry that expects us to believe that it instructed its tanker drivers not to cross picket lines out of fear for their safety but which is quite happy to sponsor the military of countries like Colombia and Nigeria to protect its installations with great brutality.
It's the same social system profiting from the poor working conditions and high taxes of farmers and hauliers as from fossil fuel emissions and the entirely dodgy free trade solutions to climate change itself that are up for grabs this month in The Hague. We hope to make these connections more apparent, by visiting not only the oil companies, but also parts of the whole support structure that makes a killing from the exploitation of people and the planet.
ON JUNE 18TH 1999, many actions in the City - including a Carnival Against Capitalism - sought to make these connections, as did many other people in financial centres all over the world. The situation in November 2000 has changed just a little: we can now see better the seeds of a global movement of resistance to this rampant exploitation (see www.agp.org) We can also see climate change starting to knock on our own doors (instead of the doors of the apparently dispensable third world.) And lastly, we can see the endlessly squeezed people at the bottom of the economic heap realise a little of their own power, (albeit with a little help from oil companies flexing their muscles to avoid any taxation on their North Sea profits).
SEA-CHANGE NOT SEA-LEVEL RISE The Hague conference will be a sea change in public perceptions of climate change and those who seek to exploit the atmosphere for financial gain. It's inevitable that the struggle for climate justice - the right of the majority of the world's people not to be washed away by the profits of a very few - will soon eclipse the attempts of fuel protesters to lower fuel duty. But we shouldn't forget that it's possible (and crucial) for those seeking decent livelihoods to forge alliances with those trying to save the planet. After all, it's only those sorts of alliances that can pose any real threat to the vested interests we plan to 'commemorate' on Monday 13th.