The 10:10 campaign, which urges people to make changes to their lifestyle in order to cut their carbon emissions by 10%, has got themselves into a bit of trouble.

They commissioned a short film to promote their campaign, but yesterday were forced to pull it almost as soon as they’d released it after they realised it had the potentially to massively backfire and piss off a whole lot of people. To their credit, they’ve apologised fully and accepted they’d made a mistake. But this piece is about why it would get made in the first place, and the kind of thinking that underlines it. Check it out below:

Apparently the idea behind this was to be funny and edgy, and to be fair anywhere I’ve seen it being discussed the reaction has been really mixed. Personally I thought it was horrible, and potentially disastrous towards the climate movement. The message according to the filmakers was to “challenge apathy”:

“We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change,” said one of the creators, filmmaker Franny Armstrong.

The reason I hate this film is because it’s more of what absolutely has not and will not prevent climate catastrophe: personally guilt tripping individuals, so that we all feel personally responsible and shamed about a massive global problem over which we feel we have little control. What I took away from the film is that if you don’t support the 10:10 campaign you are basically an insensitive bastard who deserves to be blown up. The title of the film is ‘No Pressure,’ which is where the joke lies, because in fact the whole point is that you feel massively under pressure to do something. What else are we to take away from Agent Scully’s menacing repeat of the “No pressure” tagline at the end? (And shouldn’t you be telling Mulder his crazy theory is wrong when it’s clearly right?)

Climate change is a massive global crisis. It’s a crisis that’s resulted from an unsustainable socio-economic model which sacrifices the long term survival of civilisation in favour of the short term enrichment of a tiny minority of the human race, i.e. capitalism. As individuals there’s very little we can do about this. Yes, by all means change your lightbulb (my flat is illuminated by them, because they save you money!) and do your recycling. There’s nothing wrong with doing these things, and you are doing something that’s socially responsible. But the fact is that it simply isn’t going to cut it in the face of climate emergency. As isolated individuals we have little power. The power to do something about climate change comes from collective action as part of a mass movement. And this film will not motivate people to create or take part in such a movement.

The Alberta Tar Sands from space: changing your lightbulb is totally the way to go though

Guilt is a crap motivator. A lot of the environmental movement seems to approach the crisis we face as a species as if it was the result of personal sin and what was needed was a good Calvinist cleansing. Some people will respond to the kind of pressure applied to them by this film, but the vast majority will turn off, look away and react negatively. They have, correctly, concluded that they can’t prevent climate change through individual action.

One one level, I don’t want to just be knocking people who apparently donated their time and skills to try and do something about climate change. But unfortunately, this was a typical, middle class, individualist approach to a social problem. The writer of the film is the god awful Richard Curtis, also responsible for such unwatchable toss as ‘Love Actually’ and ‘Notting Hill.’ He also is one of the co-founders of Comic Relief, a “national institution” that has always done my head in. Similarly to this campaign, the message of his previous charity efforts has been to parade misery and suffering before you, in an effort to get you to give up some of your income, or feel really shitty about yourself if you don’t/can’t afford it. As one astute commenter on the Guardian put it:

“The upper middle class patronising the working class. Now with edge.“

Or as another suggested:

“It’s like a parody of something people mocking enviros would do.”

Which basically sums up the heart of my problem with it: it will turn people off, and yet again see those of us who want to prevent the worst of climate disaster as preachy, irrelevant wanks. It is in fact a gift to the worst enemies of humanity today, the climate change deniers and their backers in the fossil fuel industry. Armstrong said (as part of the rapid backtracking operation):

“Richard Curtis wrote what I thought was a funny and satirical tongue-in-cheek little film in the over-the-top style of Monty Python or South Park.”

In fact it did remind me of South Park, like the episodes where they mock Earth Day or more pertinently the one about ‘Smug’:

The main charity backer of the ad was ActionAid, who are most well known for their ‘Sponsor a Child’ ads which guilt tripping you into feeling you individually can overcome the results of global poverty, inequality and imperialism by setting up a direct debit. They’re a good example of how a well meaning NGO can actually end up doing more harm than good, particularly when you look at some of the cover they’ve given for US imperialism in Haiti.

The fact is, the strategy of mainstream NGOs, which consists of loading up individuals with guilt and insider lobbying of governments, has failed. If governments and big business were going to sort out the climate emergency, they would have done it already -- the facts have been plain for decades, and the world’s leaders have been flying around to talk to each other about it for 20 odd years with no concrete results. Liberal, middle class hand wringing isn’t enough any more, and in fact NGOs are in some ways acting as a block towards us seeing the real extent of the crisis, and how far we need to transform our society to avert it.

We need, as quickly as possible, to put together a mass movement of the majority of the world’s poor and working people to transform our society and stop the dominant social system from taking us all to the brink of apocalypse. We’re not going to be able to build mass support by telling people it’s their fault, and if they’re not taking tokenistic individual action then we’ll blow them up.

Climate hero my arse

After the most vicious battle between two brothers since Van Damme vs Van Damme in Double Impact, the victor for Labour leader has finally been declared. In a surprising result, Ed Miliband has defeated his brother David, despite being much geekier with him, not as good with women and not allowed to stay up as late as him during weeknights.

It’s also surprising given the New Labour/Media campaign against him, with Peter Mandelson denouncing him for losing them the last election. Mandy also declared any candidate – i.e. Ed Miliband – who wasn’t New Labour enough would lose the next election. The Daily Mail got in on the act by labelling him “Red Ed”, in a feat of tabloid literary imagination not seen since the Sun’s classic “Super caley go ballistic Celtic are atrocious”.

The justification for this campaign to brand Ed a dangerous Old Labour style Socialist comes from his left posturing during the leadership election, which includes support from the unions and a call for a living wage. As far as anything the Labour leadership candidates called for (with the exception of possibly Diane Aboott) the living wage was the most eye catching and progressive demand by far. While this might not be saying much now Ed is Labour leader Socialists in the SSP, SSY and Labour should push for him to pressure all Labour controlled councils to enact his living wage policy.

It was this willingness to at least sound a bit left-wing and break from the Blairite vs Brown infighting that won Ed the Labour leadership. Despite losing to his brother in the membership and MP/MEP votes, he had a clear lead in the union votes. Expect this to be used by the Tories and their media allies to attack the Labour Party as a puppet of the Unions.

The reality behind the red-baiting is that Ed Miliband is no Socialist or progressive. His campaign has simply been willing to make left sounding noises without any real substance to back it up. Ed has also had the advantage of not being in New Labour politics long enough to accumulate much dirt on his hands. Unlike his brother, he wasn’t involved in torture flights, or Brown’s economic policy like Ed Balls. He also managed to avoid being in the parliament for the vote on the Iraq war.

In his last position of responsibility in Government as Climate secretary however, Ed managed to reveal his true colours in putting the UK with the rest of the Western world in a campaign to bash the poorer countries over climate change at the Copenhagen summit. Socialist Resistance member Liam Macuaid has an interesting piece on his blog detailing how “Red Ed” tried to coeerce poorer countries into accepting a deal that would allow the US and other developed countries to continue pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Proposals by Venezuela and Boliva to examine capitalism as an economic system being responsible for he destruction of the environment were dismissed by Ed Miliband, who was much more keen on blaming China and whitewashing the West. So much for “Red Ed”.

Ed’s already been trying to break away from the Unions who got him his position. One of his supporters, ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock said,

“Ed Miliband owes the trade unions nothing. They haven’t asked and he certainly hasn’t offered, nor will he agree to any form of supportive role or order-taking. He’s certainly not enthralled to the unions, although obviously the support of some of the unions and some of the union members was immensely valuable.”

His first act as Labour leader has been to conduct interviews with the BBC laying down the line immediately that he is “his own man” and not in hoc to the unions. He’s already aiming for the same “middle England centre ground” Tony Blair did when he became Labour Leader.

Ed’s flagship “Left” policy, the campaign for a living wage is also a fraud – it is only about putting pressure on institutions to implement a decent wage, instead of a legal compulsion to do so. That’s quite unlike the SSP and SSY’s demand for an £8 an hour minimum wage to be enshrined by law for every worker over 16.

Labour are already seeing a new lease of life in many areas due to the brutal cuts planned by the Conservatives and the betrayal of the Lib Dems. In Scotland it looks likely that Labour will be the largest party in Holyrood next year. This resurgence in support for Labour has meant a lot of folk on the Left have advocated rejoining Labour, arguing it’s still the natural party of the working class.

But the fact that Miliband is considered a “left” shows how weak the left is in the Labour Party – any candidate not explicitly a Blairite is painted as being red. This is alongside John McDonnell being unable even to get on the ballot, and the candidate of the Socialist left being Diane Abott  - who only got 7% of the vote and was eliminated first.

It’s definitely true that the situation for the Socialist left outside the Labour Party isn’t good – but at least outside Labour you can put forward your own ideas and arguments about how to oppose the condems cuts, withdraw troops from Afghanistan and stop climate change to the general public. In Labour you’re trapped in a party where the left can’t even get on the ballot – and is eliminated first before it’s even able to start reaching out to people.

Michael O’Leary is the head of Ryanair, one of the richest men in Ireland, and loves nothing more than seeing his own name in the papers. The main job he does for his company is making ridiculous public statements about what cheapskates Ryanair are, like that they might start charging you to use the toilet in flight, or that they’ll have a “fat tax” for larger passengers.

The reason he does this is to make everyone who reads his wacky ideas think “Fucking hell, Ryanair are cheapskate bastards.” Although maybe this will mean you hate him and his company, you will associate it in your mind with cheapness, and check their site first when you’re going away. His whole public persona is built around basically saying to people “I am a total dick, and YOU FUCKING LOVE IT.” He calls it his “dog and pony show.”

It isn’t just an act though. He actually is a knobhead. Although he likes to paint himself as some kind of champion of the common man, but he attended Clongowes public school, described as “the Eton of Ireland.” He’s tried to completely ban trade unions from representing Ryanair staff -- the Irish union Impact say they have 270 outstanding cases of victimising and bullying. Staff have to pay for their own uniforms, training and meals, and office staff have to supply their own pens and are banned from charging their phones at work. He wants total deregulation of the airline industry, meaning your safety at 40,000 feet is in the hands of total free market gangsters -- he described the British Airports Authority as “overcharging rapists.”

It’s not just staff he bullies as well -- in 2002 a woman who won free flights for life as Ryanair’s millionth customer was awarded €67,500 damages after a judge found she’d been abused and bullied when she tried to complain that she’d started being charged again.

On top of all this he’s also a climate change denier, a position that makes quite a lot of sense for the head of a rapidly expanding airline. “Do I believe there is global warming? No, I believe it’s all a load of bullshit,” he said. Scientists argue there is global warming because they wouldn’t get half of the funding they get now if it turns out to be completely bogus. It’s horsehit.” Yes Michael, it makes total sense for scientists to make up something that runs counter to the interests of almost everyone with money, and who would have a vested interest in influencing research. Scientists give factual scientific opinions, not ones tailored to suit an agenda like you do.

In 2004 he bought a taxi license for his private Mercedes so he could drive it through Dublin bus lanes. As he put it to one interviewer: “I don’t give a shite if nobody likes me.”

His latest brainwave really takes the biscuit though. Last week he went on record saying Ryanair might get rid of co-pilots. Instead he said, if anything happens to the pilot a member of cabin crew can take over because “computers do most of the flying now.”

This may be a step too far for Ryanair passengers. The idea of sitting in a giant metal box a couple of miles in a sky that’s being controlled someone who’s training mainly covers flogging smokeless cigarettes and scratch cards. But Michael tried to re-assure us with the claim “”In 25 years with over about 10m flights, we’ve had one pilot who suffered a heart attack in flight and he landed the plane.”

Not Hogwarts, but Clongowes, the incredibly posh public school where O'Leary went

Which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be TOTAL BOLLOCKS. In a response letter to the Financial Times, Capt. Evan Cullen, President of the Irish Airline Pilot’s Association, spoke up on behalf of the pilot in question’s family, who were quite upset by O’Leary’s claims. The reason they were upset is because the guy in question did actually die. He didn’t get proper help from the cabin crew quickly enough because Ryanair hadn’t trained them in what to do if the pilot was incapacitated (I bet they’ll train them to LAND A PLANE th0ugh.) When doctors finally made it to the cockpit they declared the pilot clinically dead. They managed to revive him after “strenuous effort” but he later died. It may shock you to learn this guy did not land the plane, on account of being dead.

More importantly, what the incident in question does illustrate is the absolute necessity of co-pilots. Although the pilot was clinically dead, the plane landed safely because it had a co-pilot who was able to take over. There is a reason that when you go up in the sky you have a back-up in case anything goes wrong with the main person keeping you all from crashing into the ground.

As Capt. Cullen put it, in dead pan style, “That he [O'Leary] is prepared to make such statements while, apparently, not being fully briefed on these important safety matters is entirely consistent with Ryanair’s ‘innovative’ approach to staff relations, safety, pilot fatigue and related matters.”

But in an even better response, a senior Ryanair pilot came up with another suggestion to help the company save money. Capt. Morgan Fischer, who’s head of pilot training for the company, wrote:

“I would propose that Ryanair replace the chief executive with a probationary cabin crew member currently earning about €13,200 (£11,000) net a year. Ryanair would benefit by saving millions of euros in salary, benefits and stock options. Further, there will be no need to petition either Boeing or governmental aviation regulators for approval to replace the CEO with a cabin crew member; as such approval would not be required.”

We think this is a great idea, although we think that even then cabin crew/CEOs could be perhaps at least be paid a living wage. We’d much rather they were doing his job, which essentially involves being an arse in public on a regular basis, than flying planes. Straight off the bat this would save €241,000 in his salary, not to mention all the other money he rakes in from the company. It’s reckoned that he’s worth about €300 million, but nobody is sure. As he put it himself: “Money used to be my motivation. You always want to make the first million. Then you get to £10m and you think about £100m. But somewhere in the middle -- do not ask me where -- you stop worrying about money.” What a knob.

We doubt his cabin crew, existing on about £11,000 a year, have stopped worrying about money. Although we’ve been slagging the idea of cabin crew being made into pilots, that doesn’t mean we should disrespect the vital job they do, protecting people’s safety and making sure everything is ok in the body of the plane. The fact that on a Ryanair flight the main thing they have to do is sell stuff to you is an indictment of the company, not them, and they deserve Michael O’Leary’s millions much more than he ever will.

The Others are shocked by the consequences of Michael O’Leary’s penny pinching.

In love with himself: Bjorn Lomborg looks like he used to be in a boy band but then got too old

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish statistician and political scientist at the Copenhagen Business School who shot to international prominence a couple of years ago with his book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist.’

In it he basically argued that taking action to tackle climate change would be too expensive and a waste of money. He tried to show that the risks associated with ecological destruction had been overstated; despite having no particular expertise in climate science he thought he knew better than pretty much all the other scientists in the world. As a result he has faced a lot of complaints about the serious scientific flaws in his work, from bodies like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Scientific American magazine (don’t worry, the right wing Economist mag rushed to his defence!)

Basically his argument is that tackling climate change doesn’t amount to value for money, and if governments around the world are going to spend big cash on a major problem they’d be better placed getting to grips with poverty or AIDS (of course ignoring the fact that poverty, climate change and the spread of preventable diseases are all consequences of capitalism). This has rightly led to him being ridiculed for underplaying one of the greatest threats to ever face civilisation. But last week, The Guardian and other papers were delighted to report that he’d changed his mind and has declared that actually spending £100 billion a year on climate change would be good value for money. Thanks for that Bjorn, not like you’ve been wasting our time up until now!

Although he was never an out and out climate change denier, and accepted its reality, Lomborg became a poster boy for the far right effort to deny scientific reality, that at its root is motivated by people who want to defend capitalism in general, and the energy corporations in particular. So the fact that he’s changed his stance is on one level kind of good news. That is, until you look into what he actually proposes doing.

How Lomborg would like to see us spend a good chunk of this money is the exceedingly mental idea of geoengineering. This means gigantic mega-projects by which humans would attempt to take control of the global climate and control the weather, in order to try and counteract global warming. Projects like sending thousands of ships into the Pacific to spray saltwater mist into the air and make clouds more reflective to deflect heat back into space (one that Lomborg seems particularly keen on), or filling the sea with iron filings to encourage the growth of massive algal blooms that would then lock up carbon in themselves.

One of the ships Bjorn would like to see pumping mist into the clouds. The reason it looks like cheap sci fi concept art is no one has been crazy enough to do it yet

What’s wrong with this? Lomborg puts it quite well himself when he says that geoengineering “could lead to really bad stuff.” Basically, the global climate is an incredibly complex system, with huge numbers of different factors affecting it. Already we’re seeing the unexpected impact of our actions through anthropogenic (i.e. caused by humans) global warming. There’s absolutely no way to predict what unforseen consequences would result from mega-projects like these. It’s a bit like pulling a thread from a big complex tapestry, and then trying to repair it by pulling out other threads and tying them together to replace them – you’re almost certain to do more damage that you can’t predict.

His other solutions are generally along the lines of finding techno-fixes that will allow us to keep up capitalist society pretty much as it is, but maybe with some greener technology. This is where we get to the rub of why people like Bjorn Lomborg will be unable to prevent climate catastrophe. Fundamentally, what his work does is apply capitalist economics to the global climate and ecosphere, something that capitalism fundamentally can’t understand.

There are some simple facts about life on Earth. All species evolve in ecosystems that support them, and if they exhaust the capacity of that ecosystem to support them then they’re in trouble; if a predator eats all the prey to extinction, then pretty soon it’s extinct as well. Humans have done very well at using technology to offset our need for the natural environment to support us, but ultimately we are just another species, and need to recognise that we now need to choose between the short term survival of our ever expending, ever impoverishing socio-economic system, and long term survival. Lomborg’s line up until now has been to choose disaster in the long run, because it would be a waste of money to prevent it now. Now he’s changed his tune, but he’s still only a capitalist economist, trying to find ways to make our survival as part of the global ecosystem economically viable.

Even if we pretend for a minute that getting technology to fix everything for us would work, instead of just causing more problems, where does it end? Some scientists have tried to calculate the economic worth of all the tasks that the natural world performs for free that allows human civilisation to carry on as it does – purifying water and air, regulating climate, keeping the soil fertile etc. They found it ran to trillions of dollars every day. The more we damage these natural processes, and the more we rely on ourselves and our machines to do the job, the more we will start to take these costs on to ourselves, instead of just trying to live as a part of natural systems, not as a replacement for them.

The survival of civilisation isn’t economically viable under capitalism. It is completely possible for the human race to choose to live better, more equally and in a way that is sustainable over the long term. But to do that we need to get rid of capitalism. The future has a name, and it’s ecosocialism.

At Climate Camp last week our main target was the Royal Bank of Scotland for it’s part in bankrolling climate change, but a secondary one was Edinburgh based Cairn Energy.

Cairn aren’t a famous name like BP or Shell, but right now they’re at the heart of one of the biggest battles that the environmental movement faces in the next few years: the fight to stop extreme oil extraction.

More and more geologists now suspect that the world is approaching peak oil, the point at which we will have reached the maximum rate of global oil production, after which the rate will decline and oil will become harder and harder to extract. Most of the world’s most easily tapped reserves of oil are in production or in fact have already peaked. With declining availability, the price of oil gets pushed up. This problem is made even worse by the fact that financial speculators on the commodity markets take advantage of the situation, and push the price up even further. In this situation it becomes profitable to get oil from places so extreme that before companies wouldn’t have bothered.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rumours persist that protesters also had tent pegs, bicycles AND EVEN SILLY STRING

DOZENS of misinformed media outlets yesterday went on a hysterical rampage – going head-to-head with FACTS and SCIENCE – and causing chaos across the country as they poured an oily slick of lies across the nation’s front pages.

At the same time, hundreds of idiots wreaked havoc across the internet, using websites as diverse as Twitter and newspaper comments sections to vent their reactionary opinions and stupid world view.

The occasion was, of course, the weekend’s Climate Camp, and the hyped-up ‘day of action’ which took place on Monday. Inevitably, there wasn’t nearly enough ‘action’ to satisfy a media which had been building up this invasion of anarchists intent on violence and disruption for months, but hey, let’s not let the small matter of FACTS get in the way of some good RIOT coverage!!1!211

Faced with this lack of COP15 style scenes of thousands of riot cops and activists facing it down, they had to make do with total lies and some made-up nonsense about ‘weapons’ – all of which the police obligingly did their best to go along with.

Most of the press coverage of Monday has focused on a supposed ‘oil slick’ which was created by activists pouring ‘oil and vegetable oil’ onto two busy roads. This is a blatant lie which has been spread by Lothian and Borders Police in a bid to discredit the protests and any political points they were trying to make. Two roads were indeed shut by the police for several hours on Monday morning, but there’s no evidence to prove that protesters had poured oil anywhere, let alone over busy roads. In a couple of actions on the day, molasses was used, specifically because it has the appearance of oil, but is sticky and doesn’t present any present any great safety risk, as oil would. Somewhere, wires have obviously got crossed, and news about molasses being poured over the offices of Cairn Energy in the city centre has lead to the Climate Camp being blamed for presumably an accidental leak of oil on two Edinburgh roads – hardly a rare occurrence.

Lethal weapons recovered by the police

In another bout of sensationalism, police were able to provide the media with pictures of supposed ‘weapons’ that they’d retrieved from around the campsite. The key word here being campsite, particularly when it’s revealed that these dangerous weapons were in fact a chisel and a mallot. Leftfield can also exclusively reveal that the site had saws, spades and even pick axes. In fact, a whole marquee was dedicated to storing tools which we’d presumed were for site maintenance and construction – how terribly naive of us.

As well as the police, the media were able to rely on a bunch of populist politicians from the mainstream political parties to come out and call on the police to start beating up peaceful activists who were engaged in a “disturbing” protest according to Labour and an “absolutely unacceptable” one according to the Lib Dems, while the Tories added that “it is time that the police sort this out”. The chair of Lothian & Borders Police Board also came out yesterday and called for protesters to foot the bill for the policing of the entire camp, in a startling display of utter contempt for the democratic right to protest.

As it happens, Monday’s actions were highly successful, closing down the offices of two energy companies in the city centre, as well as various RBS buildings and branches. As we’ve already reported, the camp also managed to close down the entire RBS headquarters for the day, with staff being told to stay at home or work elsewhere. Most of the condemnation of the protests – from the media and equally misinformed idiots on the internet – is coming from people with little understanding of the camp, its aims, or what really went down on the day. From what I saw, the only lives that were endangered during the whole camp were those that risked travelling in a shaky siege tower as it took its lengthy journey down to the front lines…

Your riot cops are no match for our RHINO SIEGE ENGINE

I’ve just returned from 5 days of occupying the land of the Royal Bank of Scotland, a piece of direct action that yesterday successfully achieved its objective of shutting down RBS’ headquarters. On Monday when we looked across at the building we could see there was nobody working there apart from cops and security guards.

Context

A quick recap: for the past few days hundreds of activists affiliated with Climate Camp have targetted the Royal Bank of Scotland. Having previously taken direct action against projects like Kingsnorth coal fired power station and the (now cancelled) third runway at Heathrow, they’ve moved on to a target that’s slightly less obvious.

But for people concerned about climate change, RBS is in fact at the heart of the problem. As a financial institution, they are the biggest UK investors in fossil fuels, styling themselves “the oil and gas bank.” In an economy that is now kept firmly in the stranglehold of financial capitalism, banks and other investors must be held responsible for their leadership role in a socio-economic system that is destroying the ecological basis for civilisation.

This system is now in the early stages of falling apart at the seams, due to the interrelated crises of the environment, the economy and social collapse. In the UK, RBS is at the heart of this process.

The current economic crisis was caused by the fact that the dominant financial institutions, like RBS, had used debt and self-delusion to try and keep the economy going. This bubble lasted for a while, until the myths that underpinned it began to unravel. The UK government then gave RBS and other massive banks huge injections of our money. RBS is now 84% owned by the British state. However, they refused to take any control over the banks in return for this money, leaving RBS under the command of its previous owners.

The people that run RBS have one priority: finding ways to invest their money (which you and I gave them) that will generate them more profits and then more money to invest. That’s what they exist to do as an institution. One of the main ways they can do that is to put our money into energy projects. As the world’s supplies of fossil fuels dwindle, the ones that remain will become more profitable to extract, at least for a while.

So RBS has poured our money into projects and companies like the Alberta Tar Sands, ConocoPhilips who are destroying the Amazon rainforest, and E.ON, the energy corporation looking to cover Europe with new coal fired power stations. They do this not because they’re evil, but because they are designed as an institution to do a specific job, and they’re doing that job.

As it is currently structured, it would be impossible to make RBS act otherwise, which is why we should demand that instead of being controlled by private capitalists the wealth of RBS is used collectively and socially to solve problems in the world, instead of being used to create huge problems that will make the world a less habitable place for humanity in the coming decades.

This is all the more appalling when you remember that the working class is about to face one of the greatest austerity blitzkriegs of all time, after the government chose to facilitate RBS and its chums taking the money that should have been spent on public services, jobs and wages for the people who actually keep our society running – public sector workers. In this context, it’s clearly time for radical action against an institution which is poisoning our society.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some of SSY’s roving reporters are back to civilisation to give YOU all the latest news from climate camp…

After an epic amount of pushing, we stormed RBS headquarters this afternoon. Delicious molasses bombs were thrown, windows were smashed and there was a lot of scuffling with the police. Bear in mind that today was Sunday, and the bank wasn’t even open…! Who knows what’s on the agenda for the rest of the working week…

Most of the SSY delegation are still pitched up in the RBS back garden and will be until the end of the camp – stay tuned for a full climate camp analysis and review in a few days…

A few of us SSYers are about to head over to head over to Edinburgh to take part in the camp for climate action. If you’re reading this and can make it, get there! The camp took their site last night, at Gogar Station Road, right next to the Royal Bank of Scotland global headquarters!

Information for those of us outside just now is limited, but we’ll be trying to bring you updates during the day as we find out more. SSY will be part of the swoop today, from 12 a group will be heading from St Andrews square (where the bus station is) to the site. Come along and join us. If you can’t make it, just get to the site whenever you can. See the map on the climate camp site for where to go.

UPDATE: Me, Liam T and Liam M are at the camp now, and it’s fantastic! There’s a couple of hundred folk, and more arriving all the time. Tonight and tomorrow we’ll just be setting up the site, as much help as possible is needed. The grounds of the RBS complex are actually really nice, and it’s a great place to hang out.

Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend, Climate Camp is coming to Edinburgh.

Anything up to 1000 people are expected to descend on the capital for five days of discussions, workshops, training and direct action, in the fifth camp of its kind in the UK. Following past camps which have targeted airport expansion and coal power stations, this year the main target will be the ‘oil and gas bank’, the Royal Bank of Scotland, who handily have their huge, James Bond baddie style centre of operations on a site just outside of Edinburgh. RBS have come in for a huge amount of ire recently due to their direct funding of mineral extraction projects that’re hugely damaging to the environment, like the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada. And these are, of course, being funded with our money, given that RBS is now majority owned by the taxpayer following the billions poured into the banks by the Treasury.

The camp kicks off on Thursday, with a ’swoop’ on the site of the camp from four different locations in the city. The site will then be set up and made ready for the Saturday, when most climate campers are expected to arrive, and when the week’s activities properly begin. Over Saturday and Sunday, there’ll be a wide-ranging discussion on the way forward for the radical environmental movement, and how we can halt the onset of devastating climate change across the globe. Much of the debate will focus on the link between capitalism and climate change, posing such questions as whether we need destroy capitalism to destroy climate change, and whether we should ‘green the banks’ or ’smash the banks’. There’s also going to be workshops on stuff like fuel poverty, last year’s radical climate change conference in Bolivia, and the role of workers in fighting climate change. It’s not all talk though – there’s also going to be lots of legal training and direct action training in preparation for Monday’s mass day of action against the RBS HQ. With the RBS-sponsored Edinburgh Festival in full-swing at the moment too, the camp also promises a ‘greenwashing guerillas mission’, deep into the heart of the festival!

System Change not Climate Change!

The camp operates on a non-hierarchical basis of mass participation and consensus decision making. Based on geographical location, it’ll be divided into different ‘neighbourhoods’, each with its own kitchen and other facilities. The whole camp is free, but obviously does incur pretty big costs for the organisers – for young people going they’re recommending a donation of £10/15 for the camp, and a small donation for each meal you have.

SSY are planning on fully participating in the camp this weekend – and you should come too! We’ve heard a rumour that this might be the last really big, national climate camp in the UK, at least for a few years anyway,  and seeing as it’s in Scotland, it’s really too good a chance to miss.

The 2010 Camp for Climate Action handbook, containing a full programme of everything that’s happening over the weekend, plus anything else you need to know, is available here.