Now airline taxes are killing the world's poor

By Richard on 24/08/2009
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Source: Flickr

When historians of the future look back on the 21st century, there a few things more likely to puzzle them than the aviation industry's ability to spin. How, they will wonder, did anyone ever fall for the idea that Air Passenger Duty - which will add £11 to a short haul flight, and by 2011 a pitiful £60 to a flight to Bangkok - was an unjust, ignoble stealth tax?

But for certain facets of the media, this is the greatest outrage yet inflicted on the world. Sod climate change, starving millions and bankers wiping their pampered bottoms with our taxes: charging people a token amount for flying (while exempting them from any fuel duty or VAT) is the root of all evil. Never mind that Ryanair and others charge you more than that to check in and sit down: it's all the Government's fault.

Complicit in this bullshit is a whole army of people who quite like being in the paper. A while back some numpty at ActionAid tried to justify air-freighting produce on the grounds that it alone was keeping Africa from starvation. She'd decided that a few jobs working with highly toxic chemicals in intensive agriculture was worth the continent slowly drying up from climate change and had failed to grasp that most of the farms are owned by rich white people who give sod all back to the local economy. Sadly the global South's agriculture is not being run by an anarcho-syndicalist collective which shares the wealth and work equally. (Perhaps we'd do better encouraging starving people to eat the beans they're growing for us, rather than sending them over here because we can't bear to just eat seasonal produce.)

The latest publicity addict is Ajaya Sodha, "the chairman of Key Travel, a travel Management company that works in the not-for-profit sector".  In a piece in the Times, headlined 'Lives could be saved with money lost to the 'green' travel tax', Sodha claims that development charities are unable to cope with plane tickets increasing and are cutting back their trips abroad. With nothing to gain from a cut in taxes (except more profit for his "travel Management company") Sodha suggests that we should lower (or at least not increase) APD and that doing so would save loads of lives and stuff.

Bollocks. People in Africa are not dying for want of a few NGO types being grounded because of sky-high taxes. They are dying because we keep giving loads of money to dictators, selling weapons to anyone who wants them, stealing all their resources at gun point and allowing murderous companies to operate with impunity. They're also dying, and will be doing so at a growing rate, from climate change: 182 million by the end of the century, according to Christian Aid.

There's something slightly creepy about sending Westerners over to Africa to teach them how to cook and farm. I'm sure that every trip over is purely altruistic, and no one is in the air because they kind of fancied a holiday somewhere exotic which they can justify on work grounds. Seriously, why not train people in Africa to do the work, instead of puffing up the passports of the thousands of International Development graduates SOAS churns out every year?

So if we really want to help Africa, we should: a) stop flying there on culture trips, b) stop buying shit made from stolen African resources, c) stop the arms trade and d) stop trying to steal their grain to make bio-fuels, e) stop climate change before the whole continent becomes a pressure cooker and, most importantly, f) ignore self-serving idiots writing in the Times.

Advertising Standards Agency to rule on Airbus's 'green' adverts

By Richard on 18/08/2009
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Last week I foolishly lashed out at Mandelson, Airbus, and anyone within reach, annoyed that tax-payers' money was to be spent propping up Airbus while the Vesta workers got handed P45s. Turns out I was wrong. Airbus is one of the good guys, or so their advert in the National Geographic claims.

There's no need to worry about aviation's emissions, because "Airbus sees the bigger picture, and works to minimize environmental impact by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, lowering fuel consumption, and creating quieter, more efficient aircraft." Doesn't it sound lovely? Hold on a second: reducing greenhouse gas emissions? How on earth does an aircraft do that? Does it suck up and capture the carbon as it flies, like a giant carbon-hoover with wings?

Oddly enough Airbus are simply lying: their emissions, and the emissions of any company which uses their aircraft, are increasing. In fact the whole industry's emissions are increasing, because they keep getting more and more people to fly - partly because misleading adverts like this, with cute chameleons on them, tell people that flying's OK really, because it's like green and stuff.

But the Advertising Standards Agency has woken from its slumber and agreed to make a ruling (after some not inconsiderable persuasion by a colleague). I'm not holding out too much hope - the ASA is as toothless as a new-born - but it's about time someone did something about ridiculous greenwash adverts. Ideally something involving a tin of paint and some creative 'touch ups', but anything would do.

No money for Vestas, but Mandelson bails out Airbus

By Richard on 14/08/2009
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Source: Flickr

I'm speechless: Mandelson, Prince of Darkness and proud wearer of custard, has just offered Airbus £340 million to keep producing planes. Meanwhile Vestas has closed and 400 hundred green jobs have been lost. Is anyone else getting angry?

I'm finding it quite hard to write anything intelligent or rational about this. I don't want to see 1,200 people who work for Airbus out of work. But I also know that there are hundreds of people on the Isle of Wight who are unemployed because this Government refused to support the only windfarm manufacturer in the UK - and that one of those companies tackles climate change, while the other makes it worse.

Tackling climate change means making tough decisions. Given a choice, this Government and the vested interests it represents will make the wrong decision every time. Mandelson, and everything he represents, has no place in the world we want to build. We need to kick him, and his crony mates, as far from power as we can (and an extra punt for good measure).

While single-issue campaigning is fantastic at exposing a problem, it can't give the systemic critique we so desperately need right now. As hard as we try, Plane Stupid can't do much about the banking sector, labour rights or the theft of resources from the developing world. That's why we need broader campaigns which can show how capitalism and the systems which support make our lives a misery - and help us take action against it.

Conveniently there's loads you can do over the next fortnight if you're as worked up as I am. There's the Climate Camp Cymru this weekend, and the Earth First! Summer Gathering next week, both of which offer workshops, skill-sharing and camp fire chats about how we get out of this mess. Then the Camp for Climate Action kicks off, swooping on a secret location somewhere in the M25 for a very long weekend of naughtiness. Get busy!

Drax or Ratcliffe: you decide!

By Richard on 08/08/2009
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Source: Flickr

This summer, the biggest heavyweights of climate change will face off in a media-friendly extravaganza. In the red corner, emitting 22 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, the UK's single biggest emitter of CO2... Drax coal-fired power station. In the blue corner, weighing in at 13 million tonnes, rising contender and the largest investor owned emitter of CO2... Ratcliffe on Soar coal-fired power station. Who gets blockaded? You decide!

Later this year a whole mob of direct activists - and you - will be descending on a coal-fired power station, and closing it for a short while. Previously these things have been done under the cover of darkness and secrecy, but that can be a bit exclusive. It's hard to get new people to join this growing movement when you can't tell anyone what you're up to!

So the Climate Camp, Climate Rush and Plane Stupid have decided to throw back the covers and expose ourselves to the world by organising a very public day of mass action for the 17-18 October. The target is being voted on, right now, on t'internet. We want to know: where would you rather blockade?

So get voting, get packing, get ready: the Great Climate Swoop is coming to a power station near you. I've no idea when voting will end, but I can guarantee you that someone will win and that there will almost certainly be bunting. Seriously, we've got boxes of the stuff now.

Where is Modern Movement?

By Richard on 07/08/2009
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All the Spiked-baiting earlier today got me thinking (and not about revisionist interpretations of Marx): where has their front group, Modern Movement, disappeared to? Earlier this year anti-expansion campaigners were terrified at the prospect of the Living Marxism cult's latest offering: a bunch of ex-RCP types demanding we all keep flying lest it stop progress.

For those of you who didn't get the memo, Modern Movement, Spiked and the Institute of Ideas are all part of the amorphous Living Marxism network. LM, which itself spun out of the Revolutionary Communist Party, is built around the cult of Frank Furedi, a radically revisionist Marxist humanist who thinks that progress = unalloyed goodness and that anything which stops progress (like toning down the number of flights we take) is part of a Culture of Fear designed to keep us all in check.

Things which go against progress include: telling people about Swine flu, the environment, debating the merits of GM food, Plane Stupid and labour rights (except when they don't - LM/RCP types are nothing if not fluid in their thinking). Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked, really really dislikes us, and goes out of his way to invent new angles on the same, tired old story: greens are anti-progress and anti-fun (and a bit posh). It's like the only thing Furedi and his clan learnt from Marxism was to take tractor production as the sole measure of happiness.

For a while I thought that MM might have flown to Ireland to support the Thomas Cook workers, given that we've been down at Vestas and the Spiked/MM/LM/RCP lot seem to think that supporting green jobs meant opposing workers in high-carbon industries. This idea of a just transition is why the Workers' Climate Action movement has been helping everyone suffering from climate and labour issues, including the workers at the Visteon car plant and Lindsey oil refinery (workers who should, by MM's analysis, be our uber enermy, but of course, aren't) while MM have contributed sod all except some pithy text on an online magazine no one reads.

Then I stumbled upon a lead, which might indicate where Modern Movement have gone. The above video, posted on Myspace, suggests that Suzy Dean and others have reformed as an American thrash-rock band - a move I can only describe as progress. I can’t help but feel I’d feel more warmly towards them if they’d been doing this outside parliament. After all, who can forget Voltaire's famous saying: "I may not agree with what you say, but I will die to defend your right to say it loudly and angrily through the medium of thrash-rock. Dude."

P.S.: Joy of joys, I've just been handed a delightful video by another LM/RCP/IoI front, Worldbytes. Worried about the rainforests being destroyed? Chill out man, it's progress, says a very stoned Jay Kaplinsky.

Spiked: free marketeers for labour rights!

By Richard on 07/08/2009
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"Dad, do I have to keep holding this sign? I'm cold, and Byker Grove is on soon." "Shut up and keep protesting or I'll confiscate your Beano and leave you only the Trotskyite classic Terrorism and the State to read!"

So we got an email from Spiked Online - formerly Living Marxism, formerly the Revolutionary Communist Party - this morning, which suggested that we might like to pop over to their website and have a read of the latest critique of a post-Marxist, post-structuralist, reimagining of dialectical materialism, entitled Defend green jobs! Smash ungreen jobs! Brendan O'Neill, revolutionary communist turned revolutionary capitalist, has taken issue with our support for Vestas and our lack of support for the occupation in Ireland.

What occupation, you may ask? Well, while the Vestas occupation was underway, a similar one was taking place against the sacking of 28 workers at travel agents Thomas Cook. And yesterday the notoriously violent La Guardia smashed their way in, dragged them all out and arrested them, causing one woman to go into premature labour.

It's great that O'Neill has stopped sucking up to big business just long enough to give a toss about the rights of labour, but he's seeing conspiracy where there is none (as usual). Funnily enough, we were talking about the Thomas Cook occupation last night - the first I'd heard of it - and thinking about what we could do, because it's always been clear that this sort of thing - layoffs of workers in the fossil fuels or high-carbon transport sectors - was going to be the inevitable result of decarbonisation.

Tackling greenhouse gas emissions isn't a middle class obsession, as much as O'Neill would like it to be. It's an issue of rights and justice for the poorest in society. The people causing it have names and addresses. Sadly they are also the most likely to profit from the disaster, just like those "cynical companies and corporations that frequently dress up downsizing and cost-cutting as an environmentalist measure". Those worst hit - the displaced in Bangladesh forced out by rising sea levels; the millions of Africans left starving by drought; people living in unisurable homes in the UK fighting back another round of floods - are also those least responsible.

The Thomas Cook layoffs are the first of many, and we have to be ready. People earning minimum wage working in a travel agents are not responsible for climate change; nor are the workers at Kingsnorth, Heathrow or anywhere else. But that doesn't mean we should all keep flying; instead, we need a just transition to help workers unfortunate enough to be working in high-carbon industries find new, better jobs in greener sectors. Because if we don't they, and their children, will be the ones paying for climate change, unlike O'Neill and his post-communist corporatist cronies at Spiked.