The London Letters on Climate Change

The Times Open Letter on Climate Change

2006-11-11T19:03:00.000Z

Success! We got our open letter in The Times on Saturday October 26.

You can read the letter here, with all 99 MP signatories listed under it:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,59-2425107.html

The determination is admirable, but are the current methods effective?

2006-10-18T12:32:00.000+01:00

My second foray into street campaigning recently was less than inspiring.
Trying to look earnest, enthusiastic, but non-threatening, I didn’t get far enough to ask most people how they felt about climate change, as they mumbled, “No thanks” and shuffled along with haste.

The fact is I usually walk past campaigners, without noting the cause.

If I stopped for every street campaigner on my way from the bus stop to work for instance, I would probably sacrifice two hours of my day to them, which I haven’t the time or inclination to do, so I understand their perspective. I feel compelled to 'do my bit' to tackle the problem of climate change but the minimal level of success I enjoyed with regard to actually engaging someone in conversation, let alone securing their support in the form of a signature on a postcard, I wondered whether my efforts and those of my fellow campaigners were warranted, at least in the form of street campaigning. Do environmental campaigners still need to be on the street, keeping this issue in the minds of the public?

The issue of climate change is addressed in the media on a daily basis. In a speech on the 14^th September 2004, our Prime Minister called climate change the world's greatest environmental challenge. Numerous surveys tell us that the public is concerned about the threat. And yet, carbon emissions continue climbing at an alarming rate, so it is essential that environmental campaigners maintain their efforts to remind the public about the challenge we are facing. But is street campaigning effective?

Even if a few members of the public stop to talk about the threat of climate change, when the invigorating chat is concluded, 'concerned citizen' then climbs into their 4x4 and continues the day as before, engaged in small activities that in collusion with millions of others continues to contribute to the problem, content in the knowledge that someone else (like the nice campaigner they spoke to) is addressing the threat of global warming … so they don’t have to.

Fellow campaigners, what should we be doing to inspire the public to actively participate in tackling the problem of climate change?

If you invite them #7

2006-10-05T21:06:00.000+01:00

In London, update on MPs who've signed:

Sarah Teather MP, Brent East - SIGNED
Dawn Butler MP, Brent South - SIGNED
Vincent Cable MP, Twickenham - SIGNED
Susan Kramer MP, Richmond - SIGNED
Mark Field MP, Cities of London & Westminster - SIGNED
Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP, Kensington & Chelsea - SIGNED
Emily Thornberry MP, Islington South & Finsbury, [NEW 05/10/2006] - SIGNED
Lynne Featherstone MP, Hornsey & Wood Green, [NEW 05/10/2006] - SIGNED
Jeremy Corbyn MP, Islington North, [NEW 06/10/2006] - SIGNED

Glenda Jackson MP, Hampstead & Highgate - approached and happy in principle. Waiting for official confirmation.
Frank Dobson MP, Holborn & St. Pancras - to be approached 06 October
Meg Hillier MP, Hackney South & Shoreditch - approached by Hackney & Tower Hamlets group - waiting for feedback
Andrew Slaughter MP, Ealing, Acton & Shepherd's Bush - approached by Hammersmith & Fulham - waiting for feedback
Ed Davey MP, Kingston & Surbiton - to be approached by Kingston FoE

If you invite them #6

2006-10-03T19:32:00.000+01:00

In London, update on MPs who've signed:

Sarah Teather MP, Brent East - SIGNED
Dawn Butler MP, Brent South - SIGNED
Vincent Cable MP, Twickenham - SIGNED
Susan Kramer MP, Richmond - SIGNED
Mark Field MP, Cities of London & Westminster - SIGNED
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, [NEW 03/10/2006] - SIGNED

Glenda Jackson MP, Hampstead & Highgate - approached and happy in principle. Waiting for official confirmation.
Frank Dobson MP, Holborn & St. Pancras - to be approached 06 October
Lynne Featherstone MP, Hornsey & Wood Green - approached by Tottenham group - waiting for feedback
Meg Hillier MP, Hackney South & Shoreditch - approached by Hackney & Tower Hamlets group - waiting for feedback
Andrew Slaughter MP, Ealing, Acton & Shepherd's Bush - approached by Hammersmith & Fulham - waiting for feedback
Ed Davey MP, Kingston & Surbiton - to be approached by Kingston FoE

Guest blog #2: Hardly out of the news

2006-09-27T09:07:00.000+01:00

This blog comes courtesy of Brent Friends of the Earth. This piece was originally written for the Brent Times newspaper.

"Climate change has hardly been out of the headlines this year. A seemingly endless stream of evidence has made it clear that climate change is happening, that we are making it happen and that – if we don’t act soon – the outlook is bleak.

This gloomy assessment applies to Brent as much as anywhere. Londoners struggled with the heat wave in early summer – the tube was unbearable, an unprecedented demand for air conditioning caused power cuts across the capital, newspapers were filled with scare stories about water shortages, rivers and streams ran dry, our parks and gardens were scorched brown and high levels of low level ozone pollution made life difficult for the elderly and those with respiratory diseases. Yet if climate change takes hold this summer’s heat wave may be nothing out of the ordinary – it might even be quite mild.

Thankfully last week Friends of the Earth and the Co-operative Bank showed that there is light at the end of the tunnel when they launched the results of research carried out by the UK’s top climate researchers at the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester.

The research offers a way out – a road map to a low carbon, climate friendly future which, if followed, will ensure the UK helps avoid dangerous climate change. The report calculates the UK’s carbon budget - how much carbon dioxide we can emit between now and 2050 if we are going to play our part in tackling climate change - and sets out what needs to be done and when to enable us to live within this carbon budget.

The report also provides us with a glimpse of what living in a climate friendly Brent would be like. It’s a future I would be happy to see happen.

There is no doubt that dealing with climate change will affect the way we live our lives however in many ways the changes will be positive for individuals and local businesses.

Yes we will need to fly less but, if the Government implements the policies outlined in the climate roadmap we could expect to swap the frustration of long check in queues at out of town airports with the convenience of high speed train travel between cities in the UK and on the continent.

Yes we would need to use our car less but we would be exchanging rush hour congestion for a comfortable, more frequent and better integrated public transport system. Or maybe a cycle ride into work along one of the many safe and well designed cycle lanes?

Yes we would need to cut down on our energy use but with the right kind of Government support we will see more and more affordable energy efficient appliances on our shelves. It will be cheaper and easier for us save energy and money by insulating our homes or even generate our own heat and power from mini wind turbines or solar panels fitted to the roof of our homes and businesses.

Yes we will need to look at alternatives to burning coal or gas to produce energy but if the climate roadmap is followed we will be replacing old dirty inefficient power stations with super efficient gas and coal power stations and clean renewable energy sources that harness the power of the sun, the sea and the wind.

It may strike you that most of the solutions to climate change which I have touched on rely on technology that we already have and use. This is an important point. Though some of the technologies suggested by the researchers will need a few years more work before they are ready for widespread use it’s not the science that is slowing our progress to a climate friendly future – it’s a lack of political will to put the policies in place that will turn this roadmap into reality.

If the Government is serious about climate change then it needs to start implementing the policies that will make it easier and cheaper for us all – business and individuals – to cut our carbon emissions. And it needs to act quickly – a major programme of action to tackle climate change needs to be introduced in the next four years if we want to deal with climate change in a manageable way. The longer we leave it the more drastic the action we will need to take. The longer we leave it the closer we get to dangerous climate change.

That’s why as a first step towards tackling climate change The Big Ask, Friends of the Earth climate campaign is calling on the Government to introduce a climate change law that will commit the UK to making annual cuts in our carbon emissions.

A climate change law is backed by over half of UK MPs from right across the political spectrum [including Sarah Teather (Lib Dem) Brent East MP and Dawn Butler (Labour) Brent south MP. Members of Brent Friends of the Earth want Brent MPs to write to the Prime Minister about a climate change law, and are currently asking Brent Councillors to bring in climate change policies in the Borough.

You too can add your support to the campaign by writing to your MP at www.thebigask.com or contacting Brent Friends of the Earth at www.foe.co.uk/brent ."

Climate Beats no.1

2006-09-19T21:45:00.000+01:00

I find that there is another world and that there is a curtain that separates us from that world like the leaves of brown and gold and red and yellow that twirl down my street as I stare out the window on Sunday mornings contemplating over coffee steaming grown on the slopes of Guatemala Indonesia Ethiopia taking water and sun and heat and hands and backs and people with leathered skin running up and down mountain sides like goats leaping over clouds .. clouds forming in towers and building cirrus white marshmallow angels feather pillow puffs of wind coagulated and solidified, towering particle ice steaming into the sky an extraction of the poles that thin thin thin and run run run away from the South to the ever decreasing circle of the North a Poincare conjecture of changing weather as the snow falls inward an introspective fluttering of delineated lassos reflective and regressing to infinitely small points fleeing the support offered for millenia to ghost bears which fall and swim and tire and drown and float, whitenowgreynowbonewhiteagain leaves, rapidly disappearing, their spirits rising in screaming agony in the swirls of coffee vapour that cloud my face and dead eyes with the fire of blame and sorrow drip back into the coffee oils colouring green rainbows over the brownblackcoffeesurfacemirror where they melt with no one's tears to cool their heat back into the evaporating diamond storm, where a slight hushed unguarded breath butterflies forth twirling and twisting in straitjacketed fits and parodies annihilated through open windows letting in the long late heat of autumn evenings.

If you invite them #5

2006-09-18T22:24:00.000+01:00

The Open Letter has now gone out to all MPs in the country, courtesy of Head Office's Media Team.

In London, update on MPs who've signed:

Sarah Teather MP, Brent East - SIGNED
Dawn Butler MP, Brent South - SIGNED
Vincent Cable MP, Twickenham - SIGNED
Susan Kramer MP, Richmond - SIGNED
Mark Field MP, Cities of London & Westminster - [NEW 18/09/2006] - SIGNED
[that's the 3 main parties covered now]

Glenda Jackson MP, Hampstead & Highgate - approached and happy in principle. Waiting for official confirmation.
Frank Dobson MP, Holborn & St. Pancras - to be approached end September

Lynne Featherstone MP, Hornsey & Wood Green - approached by Tottenham group - waiting for feedback
Meg Hillier MP, Hackney South & Shoreditch - approached by Hackney & Tower Hamlets group - waiting for feedback
Andrew Slaughter MP, Ealing, Acton & Shepherd's Bush - approached by Hammersmith & Fulham - waiting for feedback
Ed Davey MP, Kingston & Surbiton - to be approached by Kingston FoE

Feel like a spider at the moment, waiting in the middle of a vast web of people. I keep testing strands of the web, checking which ones need repairing, which ones have caught interesting morsels.

Sometimes the strands get tangled when a confusing wind blows through. But if we use all of our senses we can divine patterns and intuit understanding. All strands lead to the same destination after all.

There was a newspaper report the other day, warning that spider breeding season is upon us. The report said that there'd be more big fat spiders around, as fewer died in the mild winter, and recent rain and shine have given them plenty of bloated insects to eat.

Giant spiders prowl the streets of London due to Climate Change, hiding in our baths, in the arm of a cardigan, under the cushion we threw on the sofa the other day, behind a cereal packet. They're creeping, running - scuttling - around us, crawling on hairy legs.

I once said that "every hobby is a lobby", meaning that you can get any interest group hooked into Climate Change if you can hook Climate Change into their hobby. I'm not sure what catchy phrase to use for linking phobias to action on Climate Change.

But giant spiders scuttling through the living spaces of Londoners' flats and homes and houses and studio apartments and bathrooms and kitchens and bedrooms - that must surely be a massive reason to take action.

It's an ill wind that blows an eight-legged climate freak.

Guest blog #1: London through the cracks

2006-09-11T22:49:00.000+01:00

The London Letters on Climate Change is proud to welcome the first guest blog: the first letter from a normal person on how Climate Change makes them feel. What do you think? Do you share their views?

The author is Katherine Pitt, Coordinator of Hackney & Tower Hamlets Friends of the Earth.

"Imagining the future is not easy. Imagining the future in a changed climate is difficult and for a person suffering from depression, it is harder still to think about it and much less to care. Quite frankly, the human race can get stuffed.

There are, one may guess, a lot of depressed people in London. They pull themselves out of bed and struggle to work through the unnatural lighting, the unnatural proximity to strangers, the particulate-laden air of the tube, nature having long ago given up telling their dulled senses that this is not right, this is not their habitat. Their anxiety to get to work and get started on their scalp-tearing workload is randomly and inhumanly frustrated by delays and cancellations; an indifferent obstacle course of machines and humans travelling in a million different directions of space and purpose. The remains of the day are spent indoors, inhaling recycled air, in that harsh yellow lighting, gazing at a glaring and quietly humming screen as intensely as if searching the face of a loved one for a hint of reciprocal love.

Or perhaps they don't. They can't get out of bed because they can't face the day: the daylight, the people, the pressure, the pointlessness of it all.

In the face of an empty day, a concrete city wasteland, and a despairing future, though, the small things can bring comfort. The cheery dandelions that push their way through cracks in the tarmac. The tiny, indomitable wren that skulks in the scraggy weeds beside a road near Old Street. The grey wagtails that swoop and twitter above a car park in Camberwell as if they have mistaken it for a crystalline loch on a windswept Highland moor.

London is teeming with wildlife: it rummages in the discarded take-away wrappers, it hides in the brickwork, it scurries among the railway tracks and it flies home to roost in the spires and the tower blocks. It has adapted to the harsh environment and thrives in its multifarious niches. But can it adapt to a changing climate, to a London increasingly as desiccated as a desert or awash with fetid water from the overflowing Thames, or indeed alternating between the two? With the seasons merged into one mood-swinging summer of violent raging storms and overheated, sulking torpor. With swarms of oversized biting insects being all that's left of that abundance of wildlife.

Humans need to hold on to their connection with nature, for their sanity as well as their survival. The rhythm of the seasons is written into our cells and emotions, as the map of the heavens is etched into the brains of the swifts that one summer’s day are screeching above the city and the next are hurtling towards Africa. A life's purpose: to nurture what nurtures us: there's a reason to get out of bed in the morning."

If you invite them #4

2006-09-02T11:01:00.000+01:00

Some good news for the project.

Friends of the Earth's corporate media team have hijacked (in the most positive sense) the project. Instead of The London Letter on Climate Change, we will have a sort of All Party Open Letter on Climate Change.

This means that all groups in the country will be asked to approach their MPs with a revised version of the letter. The more MPs that sign the better. A letter from an MP to a national paper can make a news story. A letter signed by tens - perhaps scores - of MPs is more certain to attract media attention.

In London, that leaves us with a couple of pressures. For those MPs who've already signed, we have to go back to them with the revised national letter, and ensure they're happy to transfer their signature over from the London Letter.

And also, because the project came from London, it's only right that we get the highest representation of MPs on the signature list.

The publication date will be on or around 14th October, to tie off the Big Ask Big Month Big Lobby. Time is fast running out to get MPs' permissions. In London, I'm currently thinking about exactly how annoying I can get in chasing groups to get feedback from their MPs. If this was work it wouldn't matter - there's a deadline, a job to be done, I can expect results.

But this isn't work, and this is where voluntary work becomes interesting.

At work, there are rules and procedures, and getting decisions made can take a long time. However, once there's a plan of action in place, it has the endorsement of the institution of work, and deadlines have to be met. There is delegated authority in requiring action.

In voluntary work, there are few rules and procedures, so decisions can be made quickly, and more creative solutions tried in shorter timescales. However, no one, quite rightly, has delegated authority to require action of anyone else. We can only explain, and ask for buy-in. And then wait patiently.

On the whole, I find the two sides of working help each other. I can bring from work training and experience and access to information that would never be given in any voluntary work. And I can take back to work the spontaneity, creativity and enthusiasm of fellow volunteers. But there is frustration, inevitably.

When a project means a lot, and this open letter obviously a means a lot to me as I conceived it, then I don't want it to fail. And it means I'd like to do all I can to make it a success. At the moment my thinking on how to ensure it's a success is limited - it's stuck in my day job. I need to find ways of communicating that urgency, that meaning, to fellow volunteers, so that they keep up good communications on getting MPs signed up, and let their groups know about this project.

Perhaps there is merit in the words of others:

"We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond."
- Marcel Proust

"I have found it advisable not to give too much heed to what people say when I am trying to accomplish something of consequence. Invariably they proclaim it can't be done."
- Calvin Coolidge

"Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow."
- Plato

"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other thing."
- Abraham Lincoln

A stable atmosphere is a civil right

2006-08-26T17:24:00.000+01:00

This blog is a long one, it is an experiment in turning people to the criticality of Climate Change using other people's words. Most importantly it uses and will paraphrase the speech of a man who achieved great things. That man is dead, cut down long ago in midlife by those who believed that the Person and the Idea were synonymous. Those people were wrong; people might not be bulletproof, but ideas are. When Martin Luther King was killed, his vision was revealed as a Hydra. He was but one head, and when he was removed, his words proved an able body from which a million more heads sprung up. And from them, a million more to each head.

With Climate Change we are in a similar position to that of the North American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Our family, our sisters and brothers, our friends across the world are increasingly segregated from the right to a safe and secure environment, from an environment which supports a healthy life, from an environment to which they can turn for sustenance and support.

The text below is drawn from a speech King gave about Vietnam; in large tracts the text is unchanged, and where it is changed it is only to alter the focus from Vietnam to Climate Change, or to bring in relevant examples for the new subject, where King had ones relevant to the original text.

Using a speech about a passed battle is highly relevant to Climate Change. This time the battle is not for a nation but for the world, though both battles were, in the final analysis, ones of ideology, borne out then by the force of guns and bombs, and now by the force of markets and technologies. It is a global battle, and it is against ourselves, against our way of life, against our choices. It is a personal civil war for every person on the planet, where we must fight each day with our conscience and habits, fully cognizant of the reality of climate change, fully aware of how our actions contribute to it.

And fully aware of the inevitable and urgent need for change.

“I started this blog because my conscience leaves me no other choice. You join with me here because we are in deepest agreement with the aims and work of a mission that rings true through the sentiments of our own hearts, and with which all people find full accord: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Climate Change.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, people do not easily assume the task of opposing society's comforts, especially in time of war, for let us not fool ourselves: we are at war with ourselves and with our planet. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict with our planet, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our planet's history that a significant number of its people and leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of doom and self-protection to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history and science. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past few years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of the planet which gives us life, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the environment, Graeme?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent, the voices of those who say we must lose the comforts we have fought so hard to gain?" "Progress and environmentalism don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your movement," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path my life has followed leads clearly to these words.

I write this to make a passionate plea to my beloved planet. This blog is not addressed to any of the mighty organizations that run our societies. It is not addressed to any nation, no matter how large or small, how meek or powerful. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy that befalls our atmosphere each day. Neither is it an attempt to make me or any environmental campaigner paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role we must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While we both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of certain organizations and powerful nations, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

No, I wish not to speak with those who make powerful decisions on a grand scale, but rather to my fellow people, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that is exacting a heavy price across all continents, across all peoples and across all walks of life.

I am not a preacher by trade, though with the urgency of the problem we are increasingly living with, it is not difficult for me to find major reasons for bringing Climate Change into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious connection between our atmosphere and the struggle I, and others, have every day to improve our quality of life. A few years ago there were shining moments in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for everyone - in all nations developed and developing - through the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the betrayal of the Kyoto Protocol and the oil wars in the Middle East, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. I knew then that North America and the United Kingdom and Australia and other involved nations would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of our environment so long as such misadventures like these continued to draw people and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. I am compelled to see these oil wars as an enemy of the environment and to attack them as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that these oil wars were doing far more than devastating the hopes of the people in those oppressed countries, who had looked to us for salvation, whilst we looked to them for oil and strategic securities of supply. We send our sons and our brothers and our husbands, and our daughters and our sisters and our wives to fight for a past that needs to die, a past that will continue to kill our atmosphere for centuries to come; and all around them die those who dared hope for freedom, and they die in extraordinarily high proportions. And our past, our society that grew up on oil, which hangs onto our leaders like an infection, an addiction the like of which is seen in ghettoes in all countries, amongst the poor who know their lives are miserable and know how to make them better, but keep to their dark worlds and creeping infections and crazed addictions because they are too scared to move on; our society is infested with these habits of the past.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience of world events over the last three years - especially the last three summers. I have watched the news, and seen the desperate, rejected, and angry people of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. And also in Darfur, where the peoples of the region are driven to desperate measures as Lake Chad withers to a ghost of a glory that once gave life to Sudan and the surrounding region. I have seen these early effects of Climate Change, like Molotov cocktails thrown at the start of a civil war. I have tried to spare for those peoples my deepest compassion while, in the case of Darfur, maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But in Darfur who ever asks - what about Climate Change? They ask if their nations shouldn’t use massive doses of violence to solve their problems, to bring about the changes they want, to keep access to the waters of the Lake that sustains them. In New Orleans, the questions of Climate Change have now hit home, and we saw those that can never again raise their voices against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos. We saw their voices clearly drowned by the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - their own government. For the sake of those peoples, for the sake of the environment without which we would all be silent, for the sake of the billions trembling under the violence spewed forth from our changing climate, I cannot be silent.

You may ask a question, "Is this now about the environment or a protest against governments and war?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for environmental justice, and if you do, I have this further answer.

Over the years many people have joined organizations such as Friends of the Earth to bring about a real change in the way we work with our planet. And now after all these years we find that whilst we gave our souls and our attention and our creativity to worthy issues that could be tackled quickly – chemical pollution of waters, processing of our wastes, protection on an individual scale of our habitats, after all this work, we find that the one thing that protects and nurtures all life on this planet, that keeps us safe from harm, could within decades bring about a rein of chaos and destruction on all ecological systems, on all financial systems and farming systems, on all habitation and transport systems. And we find in the face of this adversity only one motto that can sum up the urgency of action needed to rally us to this most unique and righteous of causes. We choose as our motto:

"No Planet B."

We are convinced now that we cannot limit our vision to certain rights for certain people, but instead affirm the conviction that we all, of every nation and creed and religion, will never be free or saved from ourselves until our descendants are loosed completely from the shackles that combating and adapting to Climate Change put on us. The great quote of the Native American peoples is pertinent here:

”We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children”

What sort of a people tie their lender’s wrists together and refuse to give back their property? This is not called borrowing, it is called theft. And when we are identified as thieves, will our children not have the right to seek justice against us?

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of any person today can ignore the present civil war in our hearts and in our minds. If our soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Oil. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of people the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that the atmosphere will be returned to those who have lent it to us are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our environment, of our communities and families, of our unborn children.

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all peoples the calling to be a child of all Gods; for all Gods are God; and God is the mystery of life and creation and love.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers or sisters.

And as I ponder the madness of denying Climate Change and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people now dead and dying, dispossessed or homeless because of it. I speak now not of oil wars, not of the ideologies of different governments, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of Climate Change in silence for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

Coral reefs the world over are dying. The habitats they provide for fish and other marine life help feed us all. Globally, the resources and jobs we can link to them contribute some US $30 billion to the global economy. They have no voice but ours.

Shismaref, a small Inuit village in Alaska, has been moved, after three of its seven houses fell into the sea. A small number of voices, and yet if we choose to turn our ears, we will hear the tiny roar of an approaching storm amongst them.

The people of Tegua, a small island of Vanuatu, a small republic in the South Pacific are among the victims of Climate Change. They have been relocated from their traditional home by the United Nations, a scheme launched at a meeting called Many Small Voices, as average sea levels rose, swamping their island in storm surges.

In the European heatwave of 2003 an estimated 35000 people died. Their voices are lost.

Lima and Cuzco in Peru are facing fresh water shortages as glaciers – their principal source of fresh water – shrink. Over 8 million people are affected, and they are starting to make their voices heard.

17 million people will be affected as sea levels rise over the Bangladesh coastal area. Many of these will have relatives in countries across the world, and in time their voices will be disparate, but they will all have a common tale to tell.

So these people go from their homes and from our lives, women and men and children and the aged. And they watch as we continue to poison their atmosphere. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees that are the lungs of our planet. They wander into the hospitals with illnesses caused by their own energy use. Who knows how many have died in processes we do not yet understand to be connected to a changing climate. In heatwaves it is thousands, in wars it is hundreds of thousands, in droughts it is millions.

What must people think as they strive to achieve our level of comfort and prosperity, only to hear us with our louder voices saying – No, this life is contributing to your misery.

We have destroyed our understanding of our place in the world. We are destroying our land and our crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of our souls, burdened and dragged down by the stone of guilt and greed, and our fear of admitting we are wrong.

And soon there will be little left to build on, save bitterness. The dispossessed and the dead, the waterless and the homeless may well wonder if we plan to carry on our passive killing, our accidental genocide. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers and our sisters.

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the point of view of those who have most reason to hate us and to seek justice against our nations. To hear their questions, to know their assessment of ourselves. For from their view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of the world who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves life, to the leaders of all nations: The great initiative in this war for our planet is ours; the initiative to stop it.

If we continue to avoid making the brave decisions, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that our leaders have no honourable intentions. If we do not stop our war against the planet immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of developed nations that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning, that we have been detrimental to the life of all people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our governments should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: To agree a cap for global carbon dioxide and methane emissions, and global contraction and convergence strategies for achieving year on year reductions in those emissions.

Number two: Declare a unilateral approach to combating climate change.

Number Three: Give to the United Nations the power to regulate nations’ carbon emissions.

Number Four: Realistically accept the fact that there will be environmental refugees as a result of Climate Change, and that provision must now be made for them.

Number Five: Set a date by which we will see fossil fuels substantially phased out use.

At this moment in history the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. He said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. In the context of securing energy supplies, using energy and dealing with environmental refugees, this triplet is of extreme importance. We must bring into our world view, as environmentalists, the interconnectedness of equalities and diversity, with the needs of the environment.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values is already looking uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it looks across the seas and sees individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay a hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning cities with drought, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous substances into our air, water and land, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military offense than on programs of environmental betterment and social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

The richest and most powerful nations in the world, must lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war, whether that war be on a traditional battlefield or within our conscience. There is nothing to keep us from moulding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into an inspiration and a life worth living.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against ourselves. War is not the answer. Environmental catastrophe will never be defeated by the use of nuclear energy. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negativity, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are a fertile soil for reaping more of the mistakes of the past.

These are revolutionary times.

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become humanist. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to humanity as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all of humanity. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word".

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The rising tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent, environmentally sensitive coexistence or violent, environmentally destructive coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world, where our climate is calmed and stable. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of modern life militate against a realization of full and happy lives, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong

Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.

If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of life.

If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Holidays, Mushrooms and Hypocrites

2006-08-22T20:57:00.000+01:00

Back from holiday, with some new energy for getting the London Letter into reality. For the geeks, the holiday was camping in the UK, in the rain, albeit with a hired car to get around and see the sites (I don't own or drive a car normally).

Some good news from FoE Head Office - they've hinted that they want to replicate the London Letter nationally. Previously they'd wanted to mirror it in Yorkshire, which I understand is of a similar composition to London (in terms of MP numbers, and so on). To get a national open letter springing out of our Londoncentric one is wonderful.

And now onto a dilemma.

I recently got in touch with an old school friend (thank you Friends Reunited) and by chance needed to stay overnight in the city where he now lives. I stayed at his place, and we had a good evening catching up on the last 14 years of little to no contact.

He told me that he's getting married, which was wonderful news, and some weeks later I received a text message from his best man, inviting me to the stag do. Again, really good stuff.

And now I find the stag do is in Köln (Cologne) in Germany, which means flying out there for the weekend. Some years ago I would never have thought twice about this (other than my general fear of flying - there's something about being trapped inside a metal tube 11km in the air ...). Now, though, I'm highly sensitised about 'unnecessary' flights, and I suddenly find myself considering this as a dilemma - and one which I've already failed. (Yes, I'm going.)

The movement to a more sustainable society does of course need its hypocrites and failures. We all know people (perhaps ourselves) who are motivated to prove we're better than somebody else at achieving something, or at proving other people wrong, or those people who would never normally care unless they get a chance to be virtuous over those who try to bring some element of virtue into their day to day lives.

So here I am, a moral martyr. A practicing environmentalist. A qualified environmental policy manager. Someone who works during the day, and campaigns with their underpants outside their trousers in the evenings, on the environment. Someone who knows better, who chooses holidays at home, but who is unable to say "no" to a friend seen just once in the last 14 years over the issue of a short haul flight.

I contrast this with Mayer Hillman (http://www.psi.org.uk/people/person.asp?person_id=30), who at a public meeting I chaired in December '05, stated that he'd refused to visit Canada to see a life-long friend, because he didn't want to fly over fears of climate change, and how his relationship with that friend had soured somewhat.

There is your hero, your paragon.

And here am I. The hypocrite, the benchmark against which to measure yourself. The talk is there, but the walk has lost its swagger.

These times are a turning point in terms of our characters, the way we want our friends and family to perceive us - are we the pious lot, denying ourselves the earthly pleasures, Lot fleeing Sodom, the nuns and monks of a new religion, the Religion of the Carbon Copy God? Or are we the normal people, "doing our bit", Ildeth (Lot's wife) turning to salt for one last hurrah, making none of the really brave decisions, dangling our toes in the water, but never really plunging in for that bracing swim?

And if I, we, can't make those decisions, why should our business leaders and politicians?

Riders on the storm

2006-08-04T16:36:00.000+01:00

This blog:

More thoughts about volunteering and running projects in your spare time
Making decisions at the speed of blog

This blog wouldn't be possible without the internet and without email, and I would be a very different person today if the internet hadn't become as accessible as it now is. The opportunities that it has offered are incredible.

Some years ago, when climate change didn't seem so urgent in my life, I travelled the world. Nothing fancy about that, many affluent westerners do it these days. However, in a break with people who had travelled the globe perhaps just five years before me, I could keep in touch with friends and family very easily. An online diary allowed everyone to keep up to date with my adventures.

And email allowed me to keep in touch with my girlfriend, who wasn't able to go on the trip. Without that constant contact, our relationship would never have lasted. And if it had never lasted ... well, I wouldn't be here, in London, running a project entitled "The London Letters on Climate Change".

The internet has fundamentally changed the rules of life. I am running 95% of the project over the internet. I see my project partner once every two weeks. But we still keep on top of project management and progress by emailing several times a week.

Much of our own contact with MPs has also been virtual. True, we have had the face:face meetings to discuss climate change and the letter. But after that, it's all by email. And this makes life very convenient. Email is always there. People don't expect an instant response from email. We also know that we can draft responses, re-draft and re-draft until we're happy with them. It allows creativity to flow out, but it also allows us to run things in our time, whilst still giving the illusion of being prompt.

Without these tools, this project would still be languishing where it was in September '05 - an idea in my head, one of those things that "somebody should do".

I've advertised this blog on an internet site, BBC's Action Network:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/F1635812?thread=3323314

At the moment I'm waiting to see how much traffic it picks up, how much interest it generates. Doubtless people will pass through here from there. If you're one of them, think about leaving a message.

I wonder if volunteering - any kind of volunteering - is essentially different now than it was just 10 years ago. Perhaps the nature of it is essentially the same - after all, it's all about giving up our own time for something we feel strongly about - whilst the way it's conducted and the rapidity and scope of success have changed. I would never have contemplated running this project without these communication channels in place.

I think there must be some interesting projects to be carried out by political and social scientists on how much more influence people now have on politics, in an era of the internet and email.

I also wonder if the speed of response to climate change has accelerated as the internet has bedded into our day-to-day life. The net has allowed information, myths, facts, petitions, and decision making on climate change to take place at an astonishing rate, certainly at the sub-government level. And this presents a problem. We can get access to information very quickly. We can form opinions and make decisions much more quickly. For many people, that also seems to colour their opinion of how quickly governments should be making decisins.

There is mounting ground-up pressure to take swift, radical and decisive action on climate change. There's a feeling in the air, a sense on the data currents zipping around the globe, a palpable presence growing over the internet, in emails, on blogs like this, on news programmes and in newspapers. Climate change is invading everywhere we gain information about the world, and the pace of invasion across the internet is matched only by the spread of CO2 and heat through the atmosphere.

There will be a tipping point soon, as there was with Y2k. We all know at the moment, we all have information. And there are things going on everywhere to push us towards that tipping point. Little projects, big projects, but not tied together, sometimes joining, sometimes pulling apart. It won't be like that for much longer. There is hope out there, amongst the doom and gloom of an unstable atmosphere. Soon, we will have a branded and focused mission to tackle this crisis.

A storm is coming. And there will be riders on the storm...

If you invite them #3

2006-08-01T20:21:00.000+01:00

Update on MPs who've signed:

Sarah Teather MP, Brent East - SIGNED
Dawn Butler MP, Brent South - SIGNED
Vincent Cable MP, Twickenham - SIGNED
Susan Kramer MP, Richmond - SIGNED [New, 01/08/2006]
Lynne Featherstone MP, Hornsey & Wood Green - to be approached by Tottenham group
Meg Hillier MP, Hackney South & Shoreditch - to be approached by Hackney & Tower Hamlets group
[NEW] Andrew Slaughter MP, Ealing, Acton & Shepherd's Bush - to be approached by Hammersmith & Fulham

Current priorities:

Contact local groups to get an update.
Identify MPs not covered by local groups and initiate contact.
Give update to Head Office.
Identify support from Head Office Media Team. One officer was nominated for support, and we emailed him in the first week of July, with no reply. A follow-up email produced "out of office until 21st August". This puts us past our PR campaign design deadline. We're somewhat disappointed by this poor customer service.
Make contact with Evening Standard, get them interested in the project.
Possibly make contact with Time Out, see if they're interested.
Make entry on BBC Action Network.
Brainstorm with Camden FoE PR Campaign.

Because we want to publish this letter in late September or early October, pretty much slapbang in the middle of the Big Month Big Lobby and a month before Parliament re-opens, we feel we need to get the regional press on board now. This allows us time to get them used to the idea, to do their own research, and meet and explain the project objectives.

Dropping the letter in the middle of that month also gives the campaign a big boost in publicity, which will hopefully help local groups in making appointments around the country - for where London leads, other places follow.

Coming soon...

The first "London Letter" from a guest writer.

A storm is coming

2006-07-29T13:38:00.000+01:00

There were storms in London last week. London's now regular rainy season arrived with torrential downpours, thunder and lightning.

The weather is a great topic of conversation, and it affects our lives in ways that often aren't obvious. There's another storm coming. Before we talk about that, let's identify how climate change is affecting London this summer:

The Tube. Ah, the Tube. There can be no Londoner who doesn't have an opinion about the Tube, especially at the moment. The Tube is hot. Muggy. Stifling. It's hot enough in the sunshine when you're travelling overground. As soon as you get underground the problem escalates. The heatwave - climate change induced - is raising temperatures on the Tube. Millions of people are uncomfortable, complaining. They get drowsy, angry, thirsty, ill, tired, smelly, irritable, because of climate change. This phenomenon of the atmosphere is affecting our mood and our ability to think straight, and our opinion of how we get around.

Power cuts. Whilst California is going through a series of blackouts caused by an extreme heatwave pushing up use of air conditioning equipment (and thus contributing further to climate change), London has suffered through another mechanism. Lightning. The now regular late July monsoon weather knocked out electricity distribution in central London this past week. People left work early, unable to do anything without power. No bad thing on an individual basis, however the knock-on effects on the financial solvency of the companies those people work for could end up wiping their 'early-home-smiles' off their faces.

Food. The heatwave is wilting crops out in the farmland around London. Come the autumn there will be a shortage of vegetables and grains, which will raise prices.

The Drought. Londoners can be proud of themselves. Water consumption is down 7% in response to hosepipe bans and drought warnings. Changing behaviour to meet a situation of this sort is an excellent way to act. And I suspect that no one has inconvenienced themselves in any way with their water reductions. 7% is great, and it will all be from easy stuff - turning off taps, taking less time in the shower. The hard stuff comes later, if stand pipes are put in streets.

Death. Those vulnerable to heat are dying. People around you are dying due to the heatwave. Someone you saw today, perhaps an older person, could now be dead. Maybe it's a young mother whose baby overheated. What will her life be like, when she realises that she contributed to the climate change that killed her baby? Uncomfortable words to write, uncomfortable words to read. I, also, have contributed to the deaths of people dying in every country currently affected by a heatwave. Whenever we knowingly do something that degrades our environment, we commit what is now known as an envirocrime. That's a word in use in government organisations, and is generally applied to graffiti, litter, fly-tipping and abandoning vehicles. But envirocrime is a concept, not a set of examples. It applies to those who use hosepipes when there's a ban - indeed, even those who don't use hosepipes, but deliberately use the same amount of water through some other method and kid themselves that "it's alright, I'm not using a hosepipe!". It applies when we make choices that make no positive contribution to stopping this coming storm. Envirocriminals are all around us.

Barbecues. They're brilliant aren't they? Sitting outside, with food cooked like in the old days. If the weather's going to be warmer, may as well have a barbie. Unless you have asthma. Oh dear, here's the preaching. A man in my office was in hospital for 7 days in the past couple of weeks, following a major asthma attack. The attack was caused by raised levels of pollutants that have come from the massive increase of barbecues in the capital. It's not just food poisoning you have to worry about. Climate change is a killer.

RyanAir. Lovely! Cheap flights, let's get out of the country then. This point is not about carbon emissions. It's about Sweden. RyanAir is considering pulling out of Sweden because their government wants to impose an environmental tax on planes. Either way, we, the customer lose out. Either we can't visit Sweden (and whilst it may be among the first of countries to consider this tax, it certainly won't remain alone for long, so if you're no fan of Sweden ... just wait) or we pay more for our flights.

Just when life was getting good, when society was built to meet every indiviual's need, it suddenly seems to be going all wrong.

Our choices are starting to drop away. Do we choose to fly abroad and pay more, or choose to lose flights to certain places because the airline won't accept these new environmental taxes?

Do we choose to be like everyone else, and have unlimited barbecues, and by extension choose to harm people with asthma, or do we choose to limit the number of barbecues we have (not forgo, just limit)?

Do we choose to kill people by our actions? Do we choose to commit envirocrimes? Do we choose to put ourselves in the firing line of an increasing number of people who are victims of our envirocrimes? Do we want to face their anger, their ire?

Do we choose to use water like it's a free resource? Do we choose to change behaviours only when these pressures are in crisis mode? Or do we choose to avoid these crises?

Do we choose to cripple our food production? Do we choose supermarkets with empty shelves and expensive goods? When we are, as never before, ultra-aware of the food we eat and what it does to our bodies, do we choose to destroy our means of growing it? What will we do when there's not enough food? What course of action will we choose?

Do we choose powercuts like the Californians are experiencing? Do we choose to remove electricity from hospitals and street lighting?

Do we choose to travel by Tube, to swelter and bake? Or do we forget the Tube, and choose our cars, and make the situation worse? Do we choose a rock or a hard place?

There were storms in London last week.

Another storm is coming, and we're in its path. We have to face it head one. After all, what choice do we have?

If you invite them #2

2006-07-27T09:22:00.000+01:00

Update on MPs who've signed:

We now have two definite signatories to the letter. See below.

Friends of the Earth Groups

Harrow - hoping to approach their MP
Twickenham & Richmond - approached both MPs
Brent - discussed at group meeting, and already met two of three MPs, trying to meet third MP
Camden - attending Glenda Jackson's surgery soon
Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea - to discuss at group meeting
[New 27/07/2006] Barnet - to discuss at group meeting

Feedback from MPs

Sarah Teather MP, Brent East - SIGNED [New 27/07/2006]
Dawn Butler MP, Brent South - SIGNED [New 27/07/2006]
Vincent Cable MP, Twickenham - SIGNED
Susan Kramer MP, Richmond - contacted, waiting for response
Lynne Featherstone MP, Hornsey & Wood Green - to be approached by Tottenham group
Meg Hillier MP, Hackney South & Shoreditch - to be approached by Hackney & Tower Hamlets group

People should not be afraid of a fed up government

2006-07-25T14:46:00.000+01:00

In September Friends of the Earth is asking all volunteers to get out and meet their MP face to face. They say that they recognise MPs can be daunting to meet.

It's a shame they say that. It's not Friends of the Earth's fault. The fault lies with the MPs themselves.

For why should we feel daunted by meeting the one person who is employed to represent us nationally? If you'd hired a PR agent, would you be scared to meet them? No. If you were, you'd sack them.

There is, and should be, a complex interplay of respect between us and our MP. We should approach our MP knowing that they are paid to listen to us. That is their job. And it is us, as a group, who hired them for that job, and who pay them with our taxes. If you've never thought of MPs as being your employee, and yourself as a manager in this respect, then now is the time. We should respect any work they do on our behalf, and in return they should respect us and deliberately create the conditions to remove any perception of their being daunting.

The same is true, of course, with your local council and its councillors. And they, perhaps, are even more attuned and responsive to what you want to say. Which brings me to a potentially untapped method of getting the Climate Change Bill into effect.

In Germany and the United States of North America the governments work on a federal model. Individual states are free to adopt their own laws. A groundswell of policy in individual states can ultimately create national, federal policy.

If we look to the USNA now, we know that states such as California and cities such as New York are pressing ahead with climate change programmes. We also know that their Environmental Protection Agency is being challenged in court to prove that CO2 is not a pollutant when released in vehicle exhausts, and so being challenged to prove that its emission does not need regulation. A successful outcome from a climate change perspective would classify CO2 as a pollutant for vehicle emissions. And from there, the rest would fall into place.

Apart from talking with our MPs to bring about a change in national policy - that is, to adopt the 3% year on year reduction target for carbon emissions - we also need to be targetting our Councillors.

Each local authority in this country should be lobbied to adopt the 3% target as a policy framework. I don't think it would prove very difficult.

The public sector is subject to what's called the "Gershon Efficiency Agenda". This says that the public sector needs to find 2% savings each year, either as a direct cash saving or by improving productivity. Public bodies are measured on this, each year.

Sound familiar?

By writing to our Councillors, asking for a 3% year on year carbon reduction policy, and deliberately linking this to the Gershon Efficiency Agenda, we talk in their language. We present a solution to a pressure put on them by national government.

And importantly, we send a powerful message to government: that society is ready for such a framework, and that we are already on the path to implementing it.

When we lobby our Councillors, we should be letting our MPs know, too.

As an encouragement, at least one London Borough is already considering adopting the 3% target as a carbon reduction policy. If you're fed up with lack of progress with your MP, then don't let that energy go to waste. Re-direct it at your council. You might end up achieving more.

Cycling around the Tower of Babel

2006-07-20T19:45:00.000+01:00

Whilst I'm in a slight lull in our project - waiting for feedback from other London groups about progress with seeing their MPs - I think it's worth using the blog for some ego expansion. That's what blogs are for, really.

I've been reading a publication that I wish had come out ten years ago. It's called "Painting the town green", and reviews how the environmental movement communicates its aims, concerns and solutions to, well, those who aren't in the environmental movement.

Let's face it, many environmentalists are rubbish at communicating. They think that because something makes ethical sense (or at least, agrees with their inner sense of ethics), that everyone should therefore be doing it.

Painting the town green explores this common trait, and the downstream effects of it. And the key message in it is this:

Stop exhorting people to be more environmentally friendly. Stop talking from an ethical base. Let's face it, just stop talking and leave it to people who know how to communicate.

If the approach that the environmental movement has used for 15+ years was effective, then we wouldn't be here now. I wouldn't have set up this blog. I wouldn't want to be getting all London MPs to sign up to a letter proving to their own voters that they are showing political leadership on climate change.

Climate Change, and indeed all 'environmental sustainability' issues are far too abstract to people. What people need to realise is how normal it is to take some sort of green action. And what people also need is praise for any sort of action they take, rather than "well, it's great that you recycle, but how many energy efficient lightbulbs do you have?".

Many people I know have only just started taking action on being more environmentally friendly. And they've done it now because other people are doing it. Because they no longer feel lonely about talking about these issues. Because it's normal. And because they can fit it into their own approach to life - whether their main concern is security (crime, a safe environment, feel secure in the home, having secure finances) or gaining esteem (people looking up to them for having new things or having an enviable social life - which for most people is one that is described by consumerism).

And that's what the environmental movement needs to do. We need to stop saying "if we all did our bit...", and "you could save £1.26p per year with an energy efficient lightbulb". It doesn't work, it doesn't motivate people, it doesn't push their buttons.

What we need to start doing is making these things normal. Slipping things into conversation and not making them special. We need to say things like

"Oh, I've really banged my arm. I was changing my low energy light bulb last night, when the ladder slipped away from me..."
"You'll never believe what I saw in my street when I was putting the recycling out last night..."

There's nothing special there. The focus of the sentence is something normal (gossip, banging your arm), and the environmental bit is more passive, background, almost subliminal.

What we really need, of course, are soap operas to feature environmentally sustainable behaviour as a normal part of story lines. Imagine if the Eastenders script ran like this:

"EXTERIOR SHOT

It is early morning. We see Pauline putting cans and bottles into her green box. Dot approaches.
DOT: Morning Pauline.
PAULINE: Mornin' Dot.
PAULINE picks up the green box and walks to the pavement. She leans the box on her front wall, and looks at DOT.
DOT: 'Ere, Pauline, are you seein' Ian today? If you are, you tell 'im from me.."

... and so on. Nothing special, just background behaviour that all normal people do.

Coupled with this, I think, is that we need to lose the fear of letting go of the environmental movement. When people take up new behaviours, when 'non-environmentalists' have better ideas than us on how to sustain the environment, we must let them. And we must be willing to take a back seat, and say "This is now mainstream, where it should be, and I don't need to sneer at that."

Until we can do that, we'll all be speaking one language, whilst our family, friends and colleagues listen in another. All using the same words, all hearing the same words, but all attaching different meanings to them, based on what our inner motivations are.

http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/publications/PaintingTheTownGreenPub/

If you invite them, they will come

2006-07-15T12:48:00.000+01:00

An open letter on Climate Change. Signed by London-based MPs. A worthy project, and one that, when successful, will show that there is political leadership on this issue.

The output is great. All that visible stuff - reading the letter in the papers, seeing the covering story on the news, hearing interviews on the radio. It's the sort of thing we take for granted, the media's always got something about some group or other doing something worthy.

But how do they get these things done. And who does them?

Background details & an insight into voluntary work

Well, we're volunteers. We're running this project in our spare time - that's after we've been at work, done the shopping, cooked, eaten, been to the gym, had a pint, watched Big Brother, washed the dishes, washed the clothes, ...

The most important thing in running a project like this, I think, is: sheer bloody-mindedness.

In creating this project, starting from scratch with no support, umms and aahs from fellow volunteers, debates on the worth of such a project, in all that, there has to be a level of bloody mindedness, stubbornness. Or, if you will, an arrogant belief that you're right, that this is a productive course of action.

And of course, you have to be willing to be wrong, and to mistakes, and to say "yes, I made a mistake".

We started the project with a brainstorm. Anisa and I sat down, discussed the project, and then brainstormed everything we could around it. What could go wrong? What did we fear? What information did we have that could help? What information did we need? What were the benefits? What could we gain from it? What, after all that, was the first concrete thing we needed to do?

After brainstorming, we drew up a project plan (our first concrete thing) and stuck some dates next to each action. Then we had to start implementing it. I think there was a lot of doubts going through both our minds at that point. Would we have enough time? Had we planned things in the right way? What if everyone blanked us straight away? What if the MPs weren't interested?

Our first action was information gathering - things like MP names, surgery details, contact details. Then we had to get hold of a full contact list for all the London FoE Groups - no easy task.

Head Office was the next step. They showed very early interest and enthusiasm for the project. However, it seems that no London local group has ever established a pan-London project, and the organisation is set up in very different way to places where I've worked. It doesn't seem customer responsive; there certainly doesn't seem to be a standard customer service policy, like you would find with other large organisations.

This of course has thrown up some communication issues, which are not worth exploring on this blog. They're compounded, however, by our own working patterns. I work during the day, and can't spend time pursuing private interests in work time. Anisa works shifts, sometimes during the day, sometimes in the evening. If you're ever thinking of running a voluntary project, this is something to bear in mind: how do you keep good communications when the core project team don't get much chance to meet up and review the project plan? how do you progress it when the organisation you're dealing with works during the day, and the people you deal with do their work as a paid job, whilst you can only pursue project actions in the evening, as a volunteer, with all the time and energy left after everything else you have to do?

Inevitably it means tense telephone conversations and grumpy tones to emails - try pouring as much mental energy and diplomacy into an email at 11pm as you do at 11am, when you're fresh and recently breakfasted. On all sides, in a project like this, there has to be large amount of acceptance that you never communicate with people during their best times of day, and that you have to look beyond 'how' they are, to 'what' they are - on all sides, people with a vision and passion to make things different, to make things better.

Well, with Head Office's support, and an announcement in one of their regular mails to group coordinators, we recenty launched the first most nerve racking part of the project to date: emailing all the group coordinators and asking them to buy into the project.

We also made our first couple of visits to MPs, I think the second most nerve racking action.

And here we are then, to what this blog needs to give - the first project update now that there's been some contextual information.

Feedback from groups

Initial feedback has been very supportive, or at least not negative.

The Harrow group and Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea groups both pointed out a technical error in our Letter, which we had to change pretty quickly (I referred to the Early Day Motion as being the same as a draft Bill, which of course is not right).

There was enthusiastic feedback from some groups, and some very prompt action from other groups, as I list below:

Harrow - hoping to approach their MP
Twickenham & Richmond - approached both MPs
Brent - discussed at group meeting, and already met two of three MPs, trying to meet third MP
Camden - attending Glenda Jackson's surgery soon
Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea - to discuss at group meeting

Feedback from MPs

Sarah Teather MP, Brent East - receptive, currently looking over the letter with her policy team
Dawn Butler MP, Brent South - receptive, currently looking over the letter with her policy team
Vincent Cable MP, Twickenham - signed
Susan Kramer MP, Richmond - contacted, waiting for response
Lynne Featherstone MP, Hornsey & Wood Green - to be approached by Tottenham group
Meg Hillier MP, Hackney South & Shoreditch - to be approached by Hackney & Tower Hamlets group

And that's where we are so far. We still have a whole PR campaign to design. We're still waiting to hear back from Head Office's Parliamentary Team. There are groups that haven't let us know if they're going to take part. And there's more material to develop - Head Office will soon be sending out a campaign pack to London groups for the Big Ask, Big Month, Big Lobby. Our Letter goes in it, along with a page of type regarding how to ask MPs to sign up to it.

We've made good progress so far. If you have questions about the campaign, you should be able to leave comments on the blog. We look forward to hearing from you.

Graeme

The London Letters on Climate Change

2006-07-13T11:09:00.000+01:00

The London Letters on Climate Change

Doomed to a desert planet … Not yet.

“We’re going to end up living on a desert planet, with no food, forced to eat each other.” My friend’s particularly gruesome & desolate prediction for humanity brought a premature end to my lunch. We debated the moral implications of cannibalism and meat eating in general before resuming discussion on the initial source of my friend’s despair, a news article he had read earlier that day about the potential effects of climate change.

The article offered differing scientific viewpoints on the effects of climate change. There was consensus on the potential adverse affects of climate change, more extreme weather, floods, droughts, damage to the agriculture industry, and loss of clean water supplies, among others. The main cause for debate was predicting how much time we have left before the damage is irreparable.

Although the challenges posed by climate change appear to be receiving more media coverage and the public are increasingly concerned, there appears to be insufficient measurable action being taken to address the problem, by our government representatives or the public at large.

My friend’s bleak pronouncement is that the general public are locked into a destructive pattern and our government representatives operate in a realm isolated from the people they represent. I don’t agree with either viewpoint.

I am working with my local Friends of the Earth group on a project that is part of a larger campaign to tackle climate change. We are asking all London MPs to sign an open letter, indicating their support for setting actual targets to cut carbon emissions. With a positive indication from our MPs that they are committed to taking action, the next step is to invite the public to start making small changes in their behaviour that will have a cumulative significant impact.

We are creatures of habit, certainly, but people are also adaptable. The only question with regard to climate change is whether we will choose to adapt, taking the necessary measures to preserve our way of life, or whether we will continue as we are, allowing global warming to transform our world into an inhospitable environment, at which point we will be forced to adapt.

With regard to our government, the political machine may sometimes seem far removed from the people they represent, but this isn’t the case. The national debates we see played out on our television screens are influenced by people on the ground. We took the first step in our project, talking to an MP at their regular advice surgery. The result was more positive than we had dared to hope. The MP mentioned that an ever-increasing number people have been in contact by letter or in person to express their concern about the problems posed by climate change. (A small team at the constituency office ensure that every letter received is given attention). Our request to sign the open letter was welcomed as a potential opportunity to inform the public that their concern is being taken seriously.

Right now, climate change may seem like a remote threat, a lesser concern in the list of social issues like education or health. But the planet is not waiting for us to resolve our debates on other social concerns before the problematic cycle we have set in motion affects us negatively. The effects of climate change are starting to be felt now, and we have to act now.

Tackling climate change may seem daunting – enough to make you throw your hands up in despair. We can’t change the world overnight, but we can and must start tackling the problem one small step at a time.

My friend was not entirely convinced – but he is hopeful and that’s a start. He is ordering his recycling box from the council and purchasing energy-efficient light bulbs, while our Friends of The Earth community group is planning to approach another MP … one small step at a time.

Welcome to the London Letter on Climate Change

2006-07-10T22:23:00.000+01:00

Welcome to the first blog on the London Letter on Climate Change.

This blog, between July 2006 and October 2006, will track progress with a project run by London Friends of the Earth groups.

The aim of the project is to get as many London MPs as possible to sign up to an open letter, setting out their concern about climate change, and proving their commitment to show political leadership, by supporting the development of a Climate Change Bill.

There is a core project team of two people: Graeme Maughan and Anisa Jadwat-Reinecke of Camden Friends of the Earth.
The project, however, is delivered by all local Friends of the Earth groups in London, who will be approaching their MPs, asking them to sign the letter.

We want to publish the letter in The Evening Standard in early October. We also want to run a PR campaign around publication, to raise the profile of the existing political leadership in addressing climate change.

We don't know if this project will be successful. What we do know is that we'll share our progress in delivering the project with you. The ups, the downs, the successes, the frustrations.

After the project ends, we will be opening up this blog to fulfil its title: it won't be the London Letter (singular) on Climate Change. It will be the London LetterS on Climate Change.

When the time comes, we want your letters, to whomever, on climate change, outlining your concerns.

Welcome to the journey.

Graeme