Category: Capitalism / Globalisation

Protest against G8 climate ministerial, London

Police arrested two protesters at a noisy demonstration protesting the climate policies of G8 ministers meeting today in the City of London.

About 40 activists beat pots and pans and blew whistles to demonstrate their opposition to G8 climate policies, arguing that they served the interests of big business rather than the world’s poor likely to be most affected by global warming.

They were outnumbered by more than 50 police officers behind a metal barricade set up to defend an entrance to The Brewery on Chiswell Street, where the ministerial meeting discussing responses to the climate crisis was being held.

‘The ministerial meeting’s aim was to continue with business as usual while portraying industrialized-country governments as the saviours of the environment. We were here today to say enough is enough. We need true climate justice now,â€? said Matthew Robbins of Rising Tide, a London-based environmental group.

The protesters stressed G8 and World Bank policies of subsidizing oil exploration and extraction, which they said could only make global warming worse.

“This shows how afraid of the truth ministers are, when they have to barricade themselves out of hearing of the public” said Amy Tanner of the G8 Climate Action Group.

The arrests, on public order grounds, were made as protesters paused by another entrance to The Brewery where they had moved preparatory to dispersing.

The protest followed Monday’s Alternative Summit for Climate Justice, held at nearby Toynbee Hall.

The alternative seminar was also watched closely by more than 20 police in what one participant characterized as “the sort of attempt at intimidation that is becoming routine in Blair’s Britain”.

 

In the build-up to the G8 Summit in Scotland in July this year the Labour Government will share its future vision of market environmentalism with 20 countries (including the G8 themselves).

So will they practice what they preach or preach what they practice?

£5.5 billion road-building programme to build 200+ new roads.

Airport expansion (12 new runways across Britain); refuse to tax aviation fuel despite government promises to tax polluting industries

£500 million of public money for export guarantees to the oil and gas sector per year in the last three years via the UK Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD).

Nuclear energy classed as ‘green’ with Labour plans for more reactors

Why leave the future stability of the planet in the hands of these profit-driven megalomaniacs as ecological and social justice is pillaged worldwide.

 

 

 

Climate Change activists STOP London’s oil traders

Thirty-five Greenpeace volunteers halted trading on the global oil market by occupying the International Petroleum Exchange in London. They entered the high security building near Tower Bridge shortly before 2pm, just as the world market in Brent crude was about to switch to London.

They attached distress alarms to helium balloons, blew foghorns and handcuffed themselves to the trading pit, forcing the exchange to shut down. The International Petroleum Exchange does one thousand billion dollars of business each year and trading at the London exchange sets the price for 60 percent of the world’s oil.

The Exchange specialises in so-called ‘open outcry’ trading, where all orders have to be shouted in a clear and audible voice. But the Greenpeace volunteers with their floating alarms and foghorns have made that form of trading impossible.

An IPE spokeswoman said open outcry trading was suspended for an hour but electronic trading continued throughout.”

“I have to say we weren’t listened to by the traders. They were more interested in punching us than listening to us,” Tindale said.

“They pulled a metal bookcase down on our heads. They were trying to use that to push us back out so that was the moment we decided to retreat for everyone’s safety.”

One protester was injured. He was treated at the scene before being taken to a hospital.

“It was to send a message to the oil industry on the day Kyoto comes into force that business as usual is no longer an option,” Tindale told journalists by telephone from the central London building on Wednesday.

“The oil industry has been key to preventing progress on climate change which is why it has taken so long for Kyoto to come into force. But scientists are telling us we are getting dangerously close to the point of no return,” he added.

“To be ramping up production — which the oil industry seems to be doing — on the day Kyoto comes into force is simply irresponsible,” he added.

The Greenpeace raid was one of a number of protests staged across the globe.

Green groups marked the day with protests outside U.S. embassies and consulates, street parades in Japan and by carving fast-melting ice sculptures of kangaroos in Australia.

Today is a day for action. After a long and arduous process the Kyoto Protocol comes into force and business as usual is not an option.

The Kyoto Protocol is designed to cut emissions of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels like oil. But Kyoto targets, which are now legally binding, fall well short of what is needed to seriously fight climate change. We are rapidly approaching a point of no return. Tony Blair and other world leaders must use this year’s G8 to move the world onto a different track.

Dangerous climate change is already with us. According to the World Health Organisation 150,000 people are killed every year by climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body comprising the world’s most eminent climate scientists, predicts temperatures will rise this century by as much a five degrees Celsius.

Tony Blair has said he will put climate change at the top of the agenda for this summer’s G8 meeting in Scotland, but he has thus far failed to push for a strong European position or extract concessions from President Bush, while UK carbon dioxide emissions have not gone down since New Labour came to power.

Nanotech conference at Leeds’ Royal Armouries disrupted at lunchtime today (Friday 12th November)

At lunchtime today, a meeting of companies involved in nanotechnology industries was invaded and disrupted by a group of people opposed to technologies of social control.

The protest took 3 main parts. Firstly, an information gathering exercise to gain further details of who is involved in what, for future actions. Secondly, the hall was visited and made extremely unplesant by a well-known substance for stinking out conferences: comfrey in water left to rot for a couple of months, and fish bait. visitors to the hall an hr after said people were holding their noses and not staying, and the smell was hideous. Leaflets were also given out. The third aspect was the seizing of the tannoy and a communique being read out. This coincided with a talk on nanotech which drowned it out, and was heard in every room through the museum. Leaflets were also scattered down. Two of these people were held by security until the police arrived, took down the name and address and date of birth that the two claimed were theirs, quick check to make sure there was no warrant on the names given, and then released.

Nanotechnology is the newest weapon against diversity, rebellion, difference, autonomy and freedom. The US military is, of course, the biggest investor as it tries to ensure total domination of all life on the planet. The British government has also invested £90 million in nanotechnology and most industries and universities* are developing interests in the field.

Genetic engineering was recognised as having massive social and ecological implications and this ensured worldwide resistance against it. Nanotechnology, which has the ability to transform all matter, has far more dramatic effects and needs drastic action to confront this new assault on diversity of life.

Nanotech, and its links to biotechnological, informational and cognitive sciences, provides the state with yet more tools with which to control all dissent and iron out all life into a homogeneous, manipulable mass. Be it advances in surveillance technologies, the ability to disable neural transmitters and break apart DNA strands by remote control, artificially create ‘workaholism’ in labourers, or ‘stamp out’ physical and mental difference, nanotechnology puts mind control, body control, social control and control of the natural world more firmly in the hands of the state, the corporations and the ruling elite.

Just as biotechnology was sold to us as a green technology that would feed the world, so nanotech is being heralded. Both instinct and reason tell us to take action against these new technologies before we lose our last liberties to them.

Leeds action is a UK first!

However, we were beaten by North Americans taking their clothes off in October – Action in Chicago by THONG at nanocommerce 2004 – (Topless Humans Organised for Natural Genetics) – see
http://www.chicagothong.org/nanocommerce.php?photo=061 for amusing photos and also
http://nanobot.blogspot.com/2004/10/nano-industry-hits-bottom.html for industry reaction
and before that, a 30 Jan 2004 protest of the groundbreaking of the Molecular Foundry, a new Dept of Energy nanochemistry facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, CA USA;

and those pesky Continental-types:
actions/protest against nanotech/converging technologies in Grenoble by piecesetmaindoeuvre (anti tech activists – disrupting nano-conferences) – seewww.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com

* These are easy targets
* Get scared, then get active!

FURTHER INFO ON NANOTECH:

For those who, like many of us, have buried our heads in the sand about this new technology, but have decided it is time to learn and to act, the following information should assist:

http://www.etcgroup.org – campaigning but non-radical group with info on nanotech; see ‘The Big Down’ report
http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/NBIC_frontmatter.pdf– info from the “other side”
http://www.leedsef.org.uk/atomtech.htm – earth first! website with an 8 page nanotech article somewhere on it!