Wales – Page 12 – Earth First!

Hit the Production of Climate Chaos – get involved – 13th December call for actions

The climate catastrophe has not happened by random chance and the melting glacier is not its place. Our economic system, the way it produces goods, and the way they are transported and finally consumed is the root of climate change.

We do not believe that this COP will solve the climate crisis. The delegates, NGOs and company representatives are stuck in an ideology of never ending economic growth and universal market solutions to all human-made problems, such as ecological destruction. Social justice issues are consequently ignored.

On December 13th we call for action on this economic system. We encourage affinity groups to take action on targets in Copenhagen, and abroad. In the Morning of December 13th we will also shut down the harbour of Copenhagen through a mass action blockade. The harbour is a key symbol of the global free-market economy. Here becomes visible what is usually hidden: ecological deterioration, economic and social exploitation, and utter injustice.

Since the dawn of colonialism the global shipping industry has been characterized by violence. What was once gold pillaged from the Incas is these days profit based on cheap resources and cheap labour – usually transported by ships. Today, container shipping is one of the foundations of capitalism. There are hardly any regulations: fuel is not taxed, emissions are not subject to control and borders are seemingly non-existent for container ships. At the same time, the never ending need for more cheap goods is almost limitless. The ‘free’ global flow of goods continues to grow – with benefits for only the few.

But whereas these flows of goods can enter the EU/ rich world freely, humans cannot. As soon as people do not have the right passport or enough money when entering rich countries, they are put in prisons, deported and deprived of the most basic human rights. And the militarisation of the seas is not just happening around the EU borders. It is also used to protect international shipping, like in Somalia where international fishing fleets have robbed Somali fishermen of the fundamental elements of their existence.

Finally, international shipping is more than just a method of transport for the global economy. It is in itself a primary cause of climate change. Approximately 5% of Global Greenhouse Emissions are produced by the shipping industry. Container ship fuel is basically toxic waste left over from petrol production, containing high amounts of sulphur and mercury. And like international flights, nobody is responsible for shipping industry emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

Climate justice and real social change will not come from above. Effective change has to come from everyone – affected, responsible, and observer. True change has to be organized and realized by people all over the world – all people on the streets and in the fields. We say no to the power of governments, companies and so-called non-government organisations which are only interested in maintaining their power, influence and flows of capital.

We will try to stop this madness for a day. Fighting for climate justice means changing our economic system and this needs to happen here in the rich global north, which reaps the most benefits from the disaster. For the free flow of people and ideas, instead of flows of goods to benefit the few.

Contact htp@riseup.net to get involved with planning the action, or come to one of our next meetings: Berlin October 3-4 & Copenhagen October 18.

Activists stop work at Ffos y Fran coal mine

– FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE –

Climate activists stop work at Ffos-y-fran coal mine.

Clean Coal Dirty Joke – Keep it in the Ground

Wednesday 23rd September 2009: Climate activists have stopped work at the controversial Ffoss-y-fran opencast coalmine near Merthyr Tydfil, doing their bit to keep coal in the ground and switch to clean energy to avoid runaway climate change.

– FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE –

Climate activists stop work at Ffos-y-fran coal mine.

Clean Coal Dirty Joke – Keep it in the Ground

Today’s action is part of a growing movement of people addressing the root causes of climate change. In particular the endless pursuit of economic growth on a finite planet is the driving force behind climate change and today’s action shows how effective ordinary people can be, with just two people bringing Wales’ biggest coalmine to a standstill.

Following the inaugural Climate Camp Cymru last month, today’s action draws international attention to UK government hypocrisy on climate change and ensures the people of Wales play their part in the growing global movement of climate action. Experts agree that globally emissions must peak by 2015 or earlier if we are to avoid runaway climate chaos[i].

“Coal is nearly all carbon and must be left in the ground” said Paul Jones, from a net suspended above the site’s access road. “Ffos-y-Fran is a big black hole in the climate change policies of our governments, we must switch to clean energy to avoid climate chaos!”

“Action like this is essential to bring home the urgency to politicians in the build up to Copenhagen” Dr. Larch Maxey, from Swansea University said, “Climate change is already killing three hundred thousand people every year[ii], yet our politicians push polluting fuels like coal to chase economic growth at any cost. To stop climate chaos we must leave fossil fuels in the ground”

Footnotes

[1]The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report http://www.ipcc.ch/ proposed 2015 as the point at which emissions must peak, although this report is out of date, with the latest research indicating that emissions should peak sooner and be brought to zero by 2050. See, for example Public Interest Research Centre “Climate Safety” (2008) http://climatesafety.org/

[1] Kofi Annan’s think-tank, the Global Humanitarian Forum, recently calculated that 300,000 people a year are already being killed by climate change, which is set to increase dramatically with increasing greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. See “Human Impact Report: Climate Change – The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis” (2009) available at http://www.ghf-geneva.org/OurWork/RaisingAwareness/HumanImpactReport/tabid/180/Default.aspx

Lammas Ecovillage, Wales gets Planning Approval (finally!)

Today the Lammas group won planning permission for their ecovillage project.

Lammas is a new settlement of 9 eco-smallholdings, a campsite and a community hub building, to start construction this autumn. It will be sited on 76 acres of mixed pasture and woodland next to the village of Glandwr, Pembrokeshire. The site is on land currently belonging to Pont-y-gafel farm, next to the village of Glandwr, North Pembrokeshire. The site is currently used as farmland.

After their first application was turned down for insufficient detail, Lammas put in an amended application on March 17th 2008. The first application had filled an entire wheelbarrow (the second containuing 150 illustrations and 1200 pages of text would have requuired 2 barrows – so it was submitted electronically!) However, their second application was again turned down in September 2008. Further frustration was experienced when the Welsh Assembly refused them the right to appeal on the grounds that the application was invalid on some technicality. However, appeal they did, and the appeal into the refusal of the revised planning application was heard earlier this summer. The inspector, intrigued and unvonventionally, chose not to allow lamma’s expert witnesses to present their full cases in favour, preferring to open the debate about the application to the whole floor so that all voices in favour and against the application were heard. Insptector took a few weeks to reach his decision in considering the whole application.

Despite the launch of a pioneering low-impact policy by Pembrokeshire County Council in 2006 and years of meticulous groundwork, consciencious dedication and patient deliberation, the long exacting process sought for approval of the project has taken over 2 years since the initial application was first submitted. Emphasising the imbalance of the current planning system which doesn’t take account of climate change, Paul Wimbush of the Lammas project even suggested that it would have been easier to have applied for planning permission to build a power station! That it has succeeded is due to a tremendous drive to succeed born of an inspirational vision of low impact/low carbon living for the 21st century.

Lammas was conceived as the first large-scale low impact project that would work with the planning system, (ie: to apply for planning permission in advance of the construction and establishment of the project, or in other word, not retrospectively). The Lammas Ecovillage will be completely independent of all mains services. All water will be sourced from the site using a combination of an existing spring for drinking water and rainwater harvesting from rooftops. All electricity will be produced on site using renewables. Fortunately there is an existing water turbine system on site which Lammas plans to renovate. All organic waste will be composted on site using a combination of compost toilets, wormeries and compost heaps. Fuel, in the form of coppiced willow and elephant grass, will be grown on site.

The project will be managed by Lammas Low Impact Initiatives Ltd, a cooperative registered under the Industrial and Provident Society Act. A comprehensive management plan has been compiled which sets out how the project will be established and run.

The smallholdings will essentially be agricultural leaseholds which are conditionally tied to requirements as set out in the management plan. Thus the objectives of the project will be assured in the long term. The requirements will cover issues such as livelihood, transport, services and monitoring.

The people selected for the first phase of the project have developed well researched plans for their livelihoods. In addition to sourcing fuel, water, electricity and food from the site, the 9 households will also run small-scale farm businesses producing a wide range of quality goods including hazelnuts, smoked ham, soft fruit, woodland crafts, vegetables and cooked foods. The produce will be marketed through a variety of outlets including local shops and a Lammas market stall.

Common Land
Some areas of the project will be managed in common. There is an area of existing broadleaf woodland on site which will be conserved for its wildlife value. The existing conifer woodland will be managed and harvested as a resource for building. There will also be shared grazing and fuel crop areas as well as a millpond and village green.

In hindsight
As Larch Maxey has written: “Lammas softly-softly approach, seeking to work with the planning system, has led to huge delays while prospective residents living locally [have poured] savings into inadequate accomodation. Opportunities to harness people’s energy have been lost. Whilst it remains invaluable to have the Low-Impact Development movement broadened by projects seeking planning permission before moving on, the planning system is ill equipped for the speed and scale of the challanges we face. Until it is equipped, people must continue to take direct action towards the sustainability transition in every way they can {including} building low impact lives”.

More Info:
Ref: http://www.lammas.org.uk/ecovillage/news.htm

Climate campers stroll to Ffos-y-fran opencast mine

August 15th 2009

Climate campers reclaim Ffos-y-fran

Campers at Climate Camp Cymru near Merthyr Tydfil have upped the ante and have set off to enter Ffros-y-fran open cast coal mine, just yards from the camp.

Jill Lloyd said,

August 15th 2009

Climate campers reclaim Ffos-y-fran

Campers at Climate Camp Cymru near Merthyr Tydfil have upped the ante and have set off to enter Ffros-y-fran open cast coal mine, just yards from the camp.

Jill Lloyd said,

“We have been talking to local people at the camp, in the town and on the housing estates. The story is the same everywhere — people feel abandoned and used. Their hillside is being ripped apart, a massive incinerator is proposed and a third phase of this monstrous coal mine is now on the horizon, with plans to destroy the peaceful wooded hillside opposite.

“This action wasn’t planned at the start of the camp, but we feel it is important to show our opposition to the mine with a ‘climate stroll’ to symbolically reclaim the land for the community

“We have been hearing about people with respiratory conditions such as asthma which have started or worsened since the mine opened, people unable to put their washing out because it gets black, vegetables coated in filthy dust.”

Wales could soon be self-sufficient in clean energy but is still generating fossil fuels for England. The coal from Ffos y Fran will generate the same amount of CO2 per year as Mozambique. We have to stop climate change, not make it worse. Coal is nearly all carbon and must be left in the ground.

Angharad Jones said:

“Reclaiming the land is a symbolic act. Coming here has been a real lesson for us, and we feel privileged to be part of the resistance to this mine. We have had talks from scientists and ecologists, but the most memorable lessons came from the local residents.

History has shown that changes can be made by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The suffragettes and the civil rights movement took action that was often illegal but very necessary. As our politicians fail us, we need deeds and not words.”

Between now and the Copenhagen climate summit in December, activists will take decentralised or collective action in Wales against the root causes of climate change.

Contact

* 07780914369 or 07875 868232 for Welsh language interviews
* 07789898374 for English language interviews
* 07973298359 for video footage

Notes for editors

Climate Camp Cymru is being held in a green field near Merthyr Tydfil between 13 – 16 August. For maps and site information, go to www.climatecampcymru.org

Access for journalists is restricted to the hours of 11am – 1pm on Saturday, but there is an edge of site media area where filming can take place at any time.

—–

Stroll photo essay

Get Your Selves Down to Climate Camp

The site was taken on Wednesday.Kitchens, compost loos, wind and solar energy and kids spaces are all up and running; workshops are go and we’ll soon have a cinema. The sun’s been shining all day. Friendly locals!

We’re roughly the same distance from Ffos y Fran, the UK’s largest open-cast coal mine, as the nearest houses (36 metres!) – that’s so close the marquee pegs are hitting coal. Good to know, considering how much dust and air pollution is emitted by the mine, the coal from which will generate as much CO2 per year as the whole of Mozambique.

Come and join us for four days of sustainable living, education, movement building, and building the capacity for action.

200+ people at camp now, with lots still arriving. 2 kitchens running, 2.5 wind turbines up (possible?) & the welcome space is all go!

The Residents Against Ffos-y-fran (RAFF) workshop was very popular & went down well, no surprises! http://stopffosyfran.co.uk

Follow updates at
http://twitter.com/CampCymru09

See: http://www.climatecampcymru.org for directions etc.

Protesters seize site of Wales’ first Climate Camp

12.8.2009
At 7.30am this morning, around 60 protesters set up the site of Wales’ first Climate Camp on the edge of Merthyr Tydfil, next to the controversial Ffos-y-Fran opencast coal mine.

The Camp, which runs until 16 August, aims to highlight the hypocrisy in government policy of claiming to act on climate change while expanding coal mining. Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel, and campers argue it should be left in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Campers also aim to build a strong grassroots movement against the causes of climate change in Wales. They are inviting anyone concerned about climate change to come for several days of family-friendly discussions, workshops and sustainable living.

The protest site is only 36 metres away from the edge of the mine – the same distance as several homes. This proximity is despite continuing local opposition to the noise, dust and fumes from the 1,000 acre site. A report funded by the Welsh Assembly Government in June 2007 [1] expressed concern about the health effects of air pollution and dust particles.

Local campaign groups such as Residents Against Ffos-y-Fran (RAFF) have long been ignored by planners and government.

Camper Jill Lloyd said: “We need work that does not destroy lives or trash the planet, and we urgently need green-collar jobs for Merthyr. Wales could soon be self-sufficient in clean energy but if we keep mining fossil fuels such as coal, we will cause death and hardship for millions of people around the world. To stop devastating climate change we must leave coal in the ground.”

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[1] The 2007 Health Impact Report can be found at http://www.stopffosyfran.co.uk/files/Final%20report%20June%2007.pdf

A map to the site is available at www.climatecampcymru.org

EF! summer gathering – exact location, travel info & updated workshop programme announced; coal-blighted communities visit

Earth First! Summer Gathering, 18th-24th August 2009, Cumbria

Never has halting the destruction of our planet been so important… Learn how to make them stop!

The gathering this year will be held at Seathwaite in the beautiful Borrowdale. The site is right in the heart of the Lake District and surrounded by mountains, streams and tarns. The nearest train station is Penrith. More detailed directions, public transport, walks & cycle rides to the site

Workshop programme in a variety of formats

Earth First! Summer Gathering, 18th-24th August 2009, Cumbria

Never has halting the destruction of our planet been so important… Learn how to make them stop!

Workshop programme in a variety of formats

WHO
Earth First! is a network of people and campaigns who fight ecological destruction and the forces driving it. We believe in doing it ourselves rather than relying on governments or industry. Direct action is at the heart of what we do, whether we’re standing in front of a bulldozer, shutting down an opencast mine or ripping up a field of GM crops.

Join us for 5 days of workshops, networking and planning actions at a low impact eco-living camp organised non-hierarchically

WHAT
Planning actions and campaigns, meeting and sharing skills with others who care. Over 80 training workshops plus games and evening fun:
• Learn skills for direct action. Tree Climbing, Orienteering, Security for activists, Legal briefing, Escaping public order situations, street medics – first aid, self defence, Boat blockading using kayaks, radio procedures and rock abseiling.
• Network your campaign against ecological destruction. opencast mining, genetic engineering, agrofuels, dam-building, hunt-sabbing, climate actions, oil pipeline resistance, road stopping, anti-whaling, squatting, rainforest protection.
• Learn about ecology, ecocentric ethics and alternatives to the corporate world of exploitation.
• Practical skills for ecological restoration and sustainable living, field trips and hands-on work.

YOU
We are all crew! This is your gathering come prepared to help run the camp and contribute to the programme. Contact us in advance with ideas for workshops, help with organising the gathering, come early to help setup the site or stay on for a couple of days for takedown.
If you can help get in touch!

BRING
Bring tent and sleeping bag. You can either cook food for yourself or for £4 per day chip in with collective cooking of delicious vegan organic food. There’ll be quiet sleeping areas, toilets and running water, a children’s space and spaces for workshops and info stalls.
Veggies will provide vegan cake and snacks. Children and young adults welcome with subsidized meals.

Arrive Tues pm. Workshops from Wed am until Sun pm.

Loads of campaigns are taking to the water in defence of the planet, like at Rossport where Shell are trying to lay onshore pipelines and the Great Rebel Raft Regatta at last summers climate camp. This summer’s EF! gathering will be building on these tactics with training in water based actions.

An excursion to visit communities in the North East threatened by an expansion of coal mining on Monday 24th August. Visit beautiful valleys and strong spirited communities and make links for ongoing resistance.

We aim to make the site as accessible as we can please contact us in advance if you have special needs, questions or concerns.

WHERE
The site is near in the Lake District, Cumbria. The nearest train station is Penrith and there is a bus service to the site, there are car and living vehicle spaces outside the camp.

Dogs: We are fortunate this year to be able to accommodate well behaved owners with dogs on leads but think about whether your dog will feel comfortable in workshops. Please call beforehand so we know numbers.

Cost: £20 – £30 according to what you can afford. We are not for profit all extra cash goes to help fund next year. Under 14’s free.

For more info contact us at :
summergathering@earthfirst.org.uk
www.earthfirstgathering.org.uk

Latest EF! Action Update bursts forth

Car tyres deflate in the night, diggers halted in their tracks, buildings and MPs covered in slime…airports plagued by crazy golf, picnics, city gents and hostage-taking…eco-villages and other autonomous spaces sprout, as others are under threat…tree-sits, banks evicted, fake phone-masts and whaling ships sunk….it must be time for another Earth First! Action Update, bringing you a concentrated quarterly blast of inspiration and contacts to get out there and take direct action against the bastards threatening this planet and its inhabitants.

News from the front-lines – permanent protest camps old and new, and temporary gatherings in a field near you, all the dates and info you need for a summer of blistering action and torrential outpourings!

Successes here, across the pond and round the very other side of the world.

Successes here, across the pond and round the very other side of the world.

A report back from the Coal Caravan, plus info about the communities along its route.

Court news – what happened after protesters planned to shut a coal-fired power plant, and climbed atop a train, plus handy Security Tips for Going on Actions.

Leaving it All in the Ground – news of global fights against the mining of gold, copper, bauxite and aluminium – blockading, torching and night-time pixieing.

A View from the Trees – a story from our eco-centric cousins. And indigenous Peruvians fight on against the wholesale onslaught on our world.

And a round-up of your favourite public order situations – G20, SmashEDO and Athenian rubbish dumps!

Read, download and print it here, subscribe so you get it direct to your door, or look out for it at a climate camp near you.

If you want to be listed or get a bunch of them to distribute, please get in touch.

Share your inspirational news at EF! Action Reports, and it’ll find it’s way into your very own printed EF!AU, in good old black and white print.

Why climate camping & other protest? Ecological debt day for your city…coming soon!

Ecological debt: no way back from bankrupt

While most governments’ eyes are on the banking crisis, a much bigger issue – the environmental crisis – is passing them by, says Andrew Simms. In the Green Room this week, he argues that failure to organise a bailout for ecological debt will have dire consequences for humanity.

“Nature Doesn’t Do Bailouts!” said the banner strung across Bishopsgate in the City of London.

Civilisation’s biggest problem was outlined in five words over the entrance to the small, parallel reality of the peaceful climate camp. Their tents bloomed on the morning of 1 April faster than daisies in spring, and faster than the police could stop them.

Across the city, where the world’s most powerful people met simultaneously at the G20 summit, the same problem was almost completely ignored, meriting only a single, afterthought mention in a long communique.

World leaders dropped everything to tackle the financial debt crisis that spilled from collapsing banks.

Gripped by a panic so complete, there was no policy dogma too deeply engrained to be dug out and instantly discarded. We went from triumphant, finance-driven free market capitalism, to bank nationalisation and moving the decimal point on industry bailouts quicker than you can say sub-prime mortgage.

But the ecological debt crisis, which threatens much more than pension funds and car manufacturers, is left to languish.

It is like having a Commission on Household Renovation agonise over which expensive designer wallpaper to use for papering over plaster cracks whilst ignoring the fact that the walls themselves are collapsing on subsiding foundations.

Beyond our means

Each year, humanity’s ecological overdraft gets larger, and the day that the world as a whole goes into ecological debt – consuming more resources and producing more waste than the biosphere can provide and absorb – moves ever earlier in the year.

The same picture emerges for individual countries like the UK – which now starts living beyond its own environmental means in mid-April.

Because the global economy is still overwhelmingly fossil-fuel dependent, the accumulation of greenhouse gases and the prognosis for global warming remain our best indicators of “overshoot”.

World famous French free-climber Alain Robert, known as Spiderman, climbed the Lloyds of London building for the OneHundredMonths.org campaign as the G20 met, to demonstrate how time is slipping away.

Using thresholds for risk identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on current trends, in only 92 months – less than eight years – we will move into a new, more perilous phase of warming.

It will then no longer be “likely” that we can prevent some aspects of runaway climate change. We will begin to lose the climatic conditions which, as Nasa scientist James Hansen points out, were those under which civilisation developed.

Small dividend

As “nature doesn’t do bailouts”, how have our politicians fared who ripped open the nation’s wallet to save the banks?

Not good.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the UK spent a staggering 20% of its GDP in support of the financial sector.

Yet the amount of money that was new and additional, announced in the “green stimulus” package of the Treasury’s Pre-Budget Report, added-up to a vanishingly small 0.0083% of GDP.

Globally, the green shade of economic stimulus measures has varied enormously. For example, the shares of spending considered in research by the bank HSBC to be environmental were:

* the US – 12%
* Germany – 13%
* South Korea – 80%

The international average was around 15%. HSBC found the UK planned to invest less than 7% of its stimulus package (different from the bank bailout) in green measures.

Comparing the IMF and HSBC figures actually reveals an inverse relationship – proportionately, those who spent more on support for finance had weaker green spending.

So here we are, faced with the loss of an environment conducive to human civilisation, and we find governments prostrate before barely repentant banks, with their backs to a far worse ecological crisis.

Extreme markets

On top of low and inconsistent funding for renewable energy, the shift to a low carbon economy is being further frustrated by another market failure in the trade for carbon seen, for example, in the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme.

Bad market design, feeble carbon reduction targets and the recession have all conspired to drive down the cost of carbon emission permits, wrecking economic incentives to grow renewable energy.

Worse still, the difficulty of accounting to ensure that permits represent real emissions has led both energy companies and environmentalists to warn of an emerging “sub-prime carbon market”.

Relying on market mechanisms is attractive to governments because it means they have less to do themselves. But they will fail if carbon markets are just hot air.

There seems to be a hard-wired link between memory failure and market failure.

As the historian E J Hobsbawm observed in The Age of Extremes: “Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then so obviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period of depression in the late 1980s and 1990s”.

Perhaps the greatest failure is one of imagination.

Some people alive today lived through those past recessions and depressions. They know they can be nasty and need averting.

But the last time the Earth’s climate really flipped was at the end of the last Ice Age, more than 10,000 years ago. No one can remember what that felt like.

Lessons of history

Looking forward, the IPCC’s worst case scenario warns of a maximum 6C rise over the next century.

Looking back, however, indicates that an unstable climate system holds worse horrors.

Work by the scientist Richard Alley on abrupt climate change indicates the planet has previously experienced a 10C temperature shift in only a decade, and possibly “as quickly as in a single year”.

And, around the turn of the last Ice Age, there were “local warmings as large as 16C”.

Imagine that every day of your life you have taken a walk in the woods and the worse thing to happen was an acorn or twig falling on your head.

Then, one day, you stroll out, look up and there is a threat approaching so large, unexpected and outside your experience that can’t quite believe it, like a massive gothic cathedral falling from the sky.

In tackling climate change we need urgently to recalibrate our responses, just as governments had to when they rescued the reckless finance sector.

Then officials had to ask themselves “is what we are doing right, and is it enough?”

They must ask themselves the same questions on the ecological debt crisis and climate change.

The difference is, that if they fail this time, not even a long-term business cycle will come to our rescue. If the climate shifts to a hotter state not convivial to human society, it could be tens of thousands of years, or never, before it shifts back.

Remember; nature doesn’t do bailouts.

Andrew Simms is policy director of the New Economics Foundation (nef), and author of Ecological Debt: Global Warming and the Wealth of Nations

——

One Planet Living http://www.oneplanetliving.org

Your city’s Ecological Debt Day:

Using the latest data available WWF has calculated when residents of British cities will have consumed their fair share of natural resources for 2008 – or when their ecological debt day is.

City Ecological debt day

Winchester 10 April
St Albans 13 April
Chichester 14 April
Brighton & Hove 14 April
Canterbury 17 April
Oxford 17 April
Southampton 21 April
Durham 22 April
Cambridge 23 April
Portsmouth 23 April
Edinburgh 23 April
Chester 24 April
Aberdeen 24 April
Ely (East Cambs) 26 April
Hereford (County of Herefordshire) 28 April
Stirling 28 April
London 29 April
Lichfield 29 April
Lancaster 30 April
Newcastle upon Tyne 30 April
Wells (Bath and NE Somerset) 1 May
Bath (Bath and North East Somerset) 1 May
Ripon (Harrogate) 2 May
Manchester 2 May
Inverness (Highland) 2 May
Preston 2 May
Norwich 2 May
Peterborough 2 May
Dundee City 3 May
Leeds 3 May
York 3 May
Sheffield 3 May
Derby 4 May
Carlisle 4 May
Leicester 4 May
Worcester 4 May
Bangor (Gwynedd) 4 May
St Davids (Pembrokeshire)4 May
Nottingham 4 May
Liverpool 4 May
Bristol 5 May
Birmingham 5 May
Lincoln 5 May
Bradford 5 May
Glasgow 6 May
Cardiff 6 May
Exeter 6 May
Coventry 7 May
Swansea 8 May
Salford 8 May
Wolverhampton 8 May
Truro (Carrick) 8 May
Sunderland 8 May
Wakefield 9 May
Gloucester 9 May
Stoke on Trent 10 May
Kingston upon Hull 10 May
Salisbury 10 May
Plymouth 11 May
Newport 11 May

Fossil Fools Day 2009, 1st April – actions & resources

FFD is only five weeks away! We know of various affinity group actions around the UK but thought we’d upload some inspirational public actions you can get involved with on the April 1st and some resources to help inspire you to take action in you local area.

PUBLIC ACTIONS

12 Noon

PUBLIC ACTIONS

12 Noon

Help build a Camp for Climate Action in the City of London.Stopping carbon markets – because nature doesn’t do bailouts. Meet at the European Climate Exchange, Hasilwood House, 62 Bishopsgate, EC2N 4AW. Bring a pop-up tent, sleeping bag, wind turbine, mobile cinema, action plans and ideas … let’s imagine another world. Don’t let the financial and fossil fools make the rules!

For more details visit – http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/g20

6PM – *** POSTPONED by BP following police advice. ***

For reasons unfathomable yet deeply pleasing, BP* has chosen Fossil Fools Day to celebrate its centenary. This will take place at the British Museum, where the not-so-great and the far-from-good will quaff cocktails, snaffle canapes and watch a celebratory film. And Rising Tide and Art Not Oil will be there too, between 6-7pm, to say ‘Your Party’s Over!’ Bring banners, musical instruments, a sense of climate justice and a nonsense of foolery. Meet at 6pm at the British Museum’s Gt. Russell St. gate. * BP = Burning Planet, British Plunder, Bloody Profits, Broken Promises,Boring Parties, Breathtaking Protests and..? Send your unravelled acronyms to info@artnotoil.org.uk

RESOURCES

Media – Rising Tide has produced an 11 page Media Q&A for Fossil Fools Day. If you think you’ll be talking to the media on the day and want a few tips for tricky questions send us an email (info@risingtide.org.uk) and we’ll email you a copy.

Action Ideas – For a short guide on why and how to take direct action against the fossil fuel industry … including planning tips, target locations, examples of successful actions and much more visit the RT Resources page were you can download ‘15 Actions to Topple the Fossil Fuel Empire’.

FFD is only 5 weeks away so whether you’ve been looking for a chance to dip a toe into the growing climate action movement, or have had your kick-ass action planned since last year, now is the time to do it – whatever it is. On April 1st, join the global day of resistance and pull a prank that packs a punch.

http://risingtide.org.uk/fossilfoolsday2009