Protest against climate change denier Nigel Lawson on Friday!

Here is the text of a leaflet to be hand­ed out at the venue, St John’s Chapel, St John’s Road. Meet there at 5.30pm (talk starts 6pm).

CLIMATE change is today pret­ty much uni­ver­sal­ly recog­nised to be very real and to be very dan­ger­ous.
There are still a few organ­i­sa­tions that are hold­ing out against this incon­ve­nient truth in dif­fer­ent ways. Exxon­Mo­bil, the world’s largest oil com­pa­ny, is con­tin­u­ing to fund researchers who cast doubt on glob­al warm­ing, despite pub­lic promis­es to cut sup­port for cli­mate-change scep­tics, report­ed The Dai­ly Tele­graph on July 2.
The British police also con­tin­ue to treat demand­ing action on cli­mate change as a crime, bru­tal­ly attack­ing pro­test­ers when­ev­er they get the chance, such as at Kingsnorth pow­er sta­tion last sum­mer and the City of Lon­don in April this year.
Lin­ing up beside these forces is Nigel Law­son, invit­ed by Chich­ester Fes­tiv­i­ties to put across the views expressed in his book An Appeal to Rea­son: A Cool Look at Glob­al Warm­ing.
So why has a for­mer finan­cial jour­nal­ist and Chan­cel­lor wad­ed into this rather spe­cial­ist field of debate?
As Gra­ham Stew­ard not­ed in The Spec­ta­tor: “Would we take seri­ous­ly an appraisal of his time as Chan­cel­lor of Exche­quer writ­ten by some­one whose only exper­tise was in oceanog­ra­phy?”
Oth­ers found Lawson’s argu­ments less than con­vinc­ing.
Robert Wat­son, the for­mer head of the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change and now chief sci­en­tist to the Depart­ment for the Envi­ron­ment, Food and Rur­al Affairs, accused Law­son of selec­tive quo­ta­tion and not under­stand­ing “the cur­rent sci­en­tif­ic and eco­nom­ic debate”. He also wrote in a let­ter to The Tele­graph: “Lord Lawson’s per­spec­tive that the UK and Europe are over-react­ing to the threat of human-induced cli­mate change is sub­stan­tial­ly wrong and ignores a sig­nif­i­cant body of sci­en­tif­ic, tech­no­log­i­cal and eco­nom­ic evi­dence.”
Robin McK­ie in The Guardian wrote of Lawson’s book: “Although it claims to demol­ish the cause of glob­al warm­ing, it sim­ply piles up sci­en­tif­ic howlers… What real­ly grates is Lawson’s con­vic­tion that most of the world’s cli­ma­tol­o­gists, mete­o­rol­o­gists, atmos­pher­ic physi­cists, Arc­tic experts, and biol­o­gists, as well as sev­er­al Nobel Prize win­ners, are all stu­pid, mis­guid­ed and wrong in think­ing man-made glob­al warm­ing is real…
“It is breath­tak­ing arro­gance, to say the least, although Law­son is not alone in dis­play­ing it… These Grumpy Old Deniers feel their lifestyles are threat­ened by gree­nies and so reject the entire con­cept of glob­al warm­ing. ‘With the col­lapse of Marx­ism, those who dis­like cap­i­tal­ism have been oblig­ed to find a new creed,’ says Law­son.’ For many of them, green is the new red.’ In short, glob­al warm­ing is a com­mie plot.”
It is clear that Lawson’s posi­tion on cli­mate change is polit­i­cal rather than sci­en­tif­ic in ori­gin. His posi­tion is that he accepts the IPC­C’s con­clu­sion that we can expect to see a warm­ing of between 3.2ºF (1.8ºC) and 7.2ºF (4ºC) by the end of this cen­tu­ry. But he argues that this would not nec­es­sar­i­ly be the dis­as­ter requir­ing an imme­di­ate cut in car­bon emis­sions — just the mes­sage that the Big Busi­ness pol­luters want to hear!
This con­nec­tion is hard­ly a sur­prise com­ing from Law­son. He was a key pro­po­nent of the Thatch­er Gov­ern­men­t’s pri­va­ti­za­tion pol­i­cy. Dur­ing his tenure at the Depart­ment of Ener­gy he set the course for the lat­er pri­va­ti­za­tions of the gas and elec­tric­i­ty indus­tries and on his return to the Trea­sury he worked close­ly with the Depart­ment of Trade and Indus­try in pri­va­tiz­ing British Air­ways, British Tele­com, and British Gas.
He also has a back­ground in pro­pa­gan­da, hav­ing penned a 1972 report on Sub­ver­sion in British Indus­try for the right-wing Insti­tute for the Study of Con­flict. He has attend­ed Bilder­berg con­fer­ences along­side lead­ing bankers and oth­er rulers of the cap­i­tal­ist world and is a non-exec­u­tive direc­tor of N M Roth­schild & Sons as well as chair­man of the Cen­tral Euro­pean Trust which boasts of co-man­ag­ing “the largest pri­vate equi­ty fund in Cen­tral Europe” and chair­man of Oxford Invest­ment Part­ners, which pro­pos­es a “mul­ti-asset, uncon­strained, invest­ment approach.”
Law­son and the world he rep­re­sents object to any chal­lenge to the pow­er of high finance and the unsus­tain­able greed of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism – his motives in launch­ing his cru­sade on cli­mate change are dubi­ous to say the least.
This is a man with an agen­da and you can be sure that the inter­ests of the envi­ron­ment and human­i­ty do not fea­ture on it.

Use­ful links:
www.transitionchichester.org
www.climatecamp.org.uk
www.earthfirst.org.uk
www.greenpeace.org.uk
www.greenpartywestsussex.co.uk
www.schnews.org.uk
www.indymedia.org.uk
www.resurgence.org
www.eco-action.org/porkbolter