Cian’s 10:10 Summer Tip: Source your water from Cian O’Donovan on Vimeo.

Every day on planet Earth we burn a whole gulf load of oil up to make plastic bottles so firstworlders like myself can drink water just about anywhere we fancy. No longer!

Cross-posted from 1010uk.org.
10:10's Lighter Later campaign held a day of high-profile activity on Monday, the summer solstice, including a specially organised conference for MPs, peers and policy makers in Portcullis House, Westminster.

The event, on the lightest evening of the year, saw energy academics, road safety campaigners, representatives from the tourism industry and experts on crime and other social research areas come together to press the case for a change to the UK's clocks to GMT+2 in summer and GMT+1 in winter.

This weekend just gone, 10:10 launched quite possibly the most unique and inspirational climate change campaign the UK has seen for many many years; Lighter Later. Okay, I would say that, but think about it. By focusing solely on making life noticeably better for the vast majority of the UK’s citizens, 10:10 has taken the climate change debate to a whole new dimension. So pay close attention. The idea is ingenious in its simplicity. We shift our clocks to match better the hours we work. Wintertime in the UK would now run at BST, or GMT +1. And Summertime would be an hour ahead, GMT +2. So we would still change the clocks twice per year but it would mean that we’d spend more of our day in light, in evening sunshine in fact. Right now as you can see from these graphs we “waste” a lot of that light by sleeping right through it.

Here are the numbers and reasons just why this is such a good move (there are some more at LeftFootForward):

1. Cut at least 447,000 tonnes of CO2 pollution – equivalent to more than 50,000 cars driving all the way around the world – each year [1]
2. Save 100 lives each year and prevent hundreds of serious injuries by making the roads safer [2]
3. Lower our electricity bills by maximising the available daylight and reducing peak power demand [3]
4. Create 60,000–80,000 new jobs in leisure and tourism, bringing an extra £2.5–3.5 billion into the economy each year [4]
5. Reduce crime and the fear of crime [5]
6. Help make people healthier and tackle obesity by giving people more time to exercise and play sport outside in the evening [6]
7. Save the NHS around £138 million a year through reducing road casualties [7]
8. Improve quality of life for older people [8]
9. Make the nation happier – including reducing the effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder [9]
10. Demonstrate that dealing with climate change can be good for the economy, good for people and good for society as a whole

Full list of references for the above are here http://www.lighterlater.org/benefits.html.

In much of his work (certainly in World at Risk, 2007) Ulrich Beck discusses the the need for civil society organisations to start working together in a genuinely constructive manner in order to tackle some of the planet’s major risks, climate change paramount amongst the usual lineup of global terror, GM and nuclear. At Christmas I wrote of what I thought was the most exciting and progressive aspect of the 10:10 campaign, its intention to do just that. To work with already existing organisations in society, from the bastions of neo-liberal capital such as Sony and Microsoft, to traditional CSOs like Action Aid and People and Planet. Here then is the perfect example of that strategy in action. Incidentally, Beck writes also of the importance of the relations of definition. These relations play a crucial role in the ultimate success or failure of a campaign like Lighter Later, one could argue that the campaign is in fact solely about these relations, but that’s a much longer post, perhaps for a night with a little more light.

Amongst a host of partners, 10:10 is working with RoSPA, the royal society for the prevention of accidents. Has a climate change campaign ever before worked like this with what is primarily a road and society safety group in this manner? Unlikely. But why wouldn’t we work with as many different CSOs as possible, the co-benefits of the switch to a low carbon economy are simply too big to keep to a single climate change campaign.

I’m just back from a talk with Jonathon Porritt, at a BrighterFuture event in London.  Porritt gets it. The time for positive messages, for societal change that uses a carrot, not a stick, is now he stated. The time for the likes of 10:10 and Transitions Towns to get out on the ground, keep an eye on the big picture but all the time keeping two eyes on local, immediate, tangible action has come. Whether you agree with Porritt that all three mainstream parties in the UK are institutionally incapable now of adhering to that most basic of sustainability tenets, the notion of inter-generational equity, is irrelevant. If coalitions of societal groups like the one Lighter Later is building can be intelligently consolidated, around issues that are important, and importantly, tangible, then we have a chance.

So if you back one campaign this year, ask one request of your politician as she or he canvasses on the streets of the UK in the coming weeks, make it an ask for evenings that are Lighter, Later.

Oh, and join the facebook.com/lighterlater group right here. That would make me very happy.

Certainly the theme for Saturday in Copenhagen, if not Sunday as well, was mobilization. 100,000 marching from the city centre to the Bella Centre, location of the climate change conference, was impressive. More impressive was the diversity of the crowd. Both the international mix and range of organizations represented was phenomenal and in our experience unprecedented (we deal with this particular issue elsewhere).

While it led the mainstream news, to concentrate on the Copenhagen march is to miss the point of what is occuring around the world. According to the wonderful people at 350.org, over 3,000 actions took place globally. Take a couple of minutes to check out some of the media on their site. It’s easy for passionate NGO types to overplay these kinds of actions; 50,000 people marched in London last week for The Wave, In isolation that represents a medium sized UK demo. But add that to what’s going on in 100 or so countries within the past seven days though and a scale emerges. A scale that because of its distribution is easy to miss and easier still to ignore.

We saw Dieter Helm this November in London claim, perhaps correctly, that climate change had yet to produce a real political movement, that traditional politicians had yet to be given a mandate by their constituents. Reasons for this are legion, and it’s more than we have time for tonight to go into. However, around COP15 a light is being lit, and that light is illuminating individuals, communities and even whole nations (Tuvalu, the Maldives et al), who previous to now have not had a mainstream media cycle to jump onto. So a question for us in the NGO and media world is this: how do we turn this spotlight into that mandate Helm referred to? What do we do, and what to we tell Tuvalu to do between now the end of COP15 and Bonn, the next time we can reasonably expect international climate change negotiations to figure on front pages.

Another question then emerges. Yes we can keep shining the light, but sooner, not later, we have to throw the torch to our policy makers and let them run with the lamp. I’m recalling here a recent late night dicussion wiht @jamieandrews and @danielvockins. On whom, we asked ourselves, do we concentrate our efforts. Who are the tradionally invisible policy advisors to government and opposition we need to get to. And crucially, what do we give them for the win. For the language we need to communicate with is that of winning and losing in policy and media cycles. That’s what’s going to get the attention of the latter day Alastair Campbell’s, particularly in the UK and particularly five months from an election.

Back to COP15. 350.org and their like have done a huge job connecting the disparate dots all around the world. Using Copenhagen as the center of a web which brings in strands from all over. We all need to keep joining these. This isn’t about Copenhagen. It’s about giving all those who took part in actions over the past 48 hours the ability to mandate their leaders.

BTW, Keepfakingit will be moving on to the numbers beat Monday as the negotiations start to intensify.

[I'll link this up later, too much to do now]

In theory, a global carbon tax could do this. In the actual world, a global scheme of tradeable emissions quotas is the best solution. To work, such a scheme, which must form the core of any Copenhagen deal, has to meet three conditions: it must lay down a time-path for emissions cuts over several decades (to let businesses and households predict the net costs of such long-term investments as houses and power plants); allow for adjustments if – but only if – the science changes; and impose binding limits on all countries.

There’s a bit about the fairness of developing countries catching a carbon break and then some big numbers:

Selling unused quotas would, moreover, be hugely lucrative for poorer countries. At today’s European carbon price, yearly carbon emissions have a market value of more than €500bn, a figure which could increase significantly as the global ceiling took effect. The potential transfers from rich countries resulting from quota trading could easily swamp the €100bn per year the European Commission has estimated poor countries will need to tackle climate change.

Most countries seem to grasp the gravity of the challenge. If they can also see what is in it for them, a deal may yet be within reach.

It’s a bit late this evening for me to jump into the Stern Report to see if these numbers stack up but it’s a lot of money either way. I also think that last paragraph is crucial. We have a lot of heavy hitting economists on these issues right now. I have my doubts as to whether runaway CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be halted, not to mind lowered within a traditional western capitalism framework but it sure looks like these guys are going to make an effort.

[Hot air] refers to the tradeable bank of credits built up by Poland and others as a result of the collapse of their Soviet-style economies in the early 1990s. Potentially, these assigned amount units (AAUs) – also held in abundance by Russia – are worth a fortune. But they could seriously undermine the international carbon market.

The compromise agreed by EU environment ministers at their meeting in Luxembourg on Wednesday said the unrestricted “banking” and use of AAUs at their full value to comply with commitments on emission reductions beyond 2012 would have to be “addressed appropriately” to ensure the environmental integrity of a Copenhagen deal.

Frankie Frankie also mentions poorer EU states’ unwillingness to pay for original members’ polluting past (that’s since ~1750 for those of you in the UK):

Poland, together with other former Soviet satellites, sees no reason why it should have to dig deeply into its own coffers to help other countries combat climate change. (It also wants to hang onto its carbon-intensive coal-fired power stations as long as possible).

Heads of state meet in Brussels to get this sorted. They then have some last minute talks in Barcelona in November. If they can’t find a solution by then it’s tough to see one coming in the pressure cooker that will be COP-15. And ff the EU can’t get their own yard into shape it’s hard to see what leverage they can assert over the US or China.

From the Guardian

I’m using the Trafigura / Ivory Coast / press gagging travesty of human decency as a case story tomorrow. It’s shocking how little attention this is getting in the main stream media. Here are my notes, I’ll add some opinion tomorrow.

The Guardian broke this in the UK so lots of links are from there.

Video
First off check out this video featuring Real Victims ® http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/sep/18/trafigura-ivory-coast-probo-koala

Ok, now for some background.

The Guardian publish this background on September 16th. Some highlights:

Trafigura trader James McNicol wrote from the firm’s Oxford Street office block: “This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars … Each cargo should make 7m!!”

The plan was to buy a tanker load of dirty fuel, clean it on board, sell the good stuff and then Get rid of the slops.

Trafigura’s London head of gasoline trading, Leon Christophilopoulos, suggested a desperate remedy: a floating refinery: “I don’t know how we dispose of the slops and I don’t imply we would dump them, but for sure, there must be some way to pay someone to take them.”

The Probo Koala, was anchored off Gibraltar. Between April and June, it took three cargoes, each of 28,000 tonnes of contaminated gasoline [and cleaned them]. The Probo Koala’s spare tanks soon filled up with waste containing freshly created sulphur compounds.

The waste was shipped to Amsterdam where nobody would take it. So it set sail for the Ivory Coast. (Note: the Basel Ban, as well as the Bamako Convention, contains strict rules against the export of waste from developed to developing countries and according to Greenpeace clearly applies to this case.)

What followed was an environmental and human catastrophe.

The waste ended up being tipped all around Abidjan. It would have contained such unstable substances as mercaptans, mercaptides, sodium sulphide and dialkyl disulphides. Those living and working nearby risked burns, nausea, diarrhoea, loss of consciousness and death from contact with such compounds.

Thousands fell ill, the story broke locally and ultimately a case was taken against Trafigura:

As 31,000 Africans, many desperately poor, joined in an unprecedented group action for compensation organised by London lawyer Martyn Day, Trafigura tried repeatedly to give the impression that its ship had only pumped out ordinary slops from tank-cleaning: a completely different type of activity.

Trafigura settled with a £30m deal. That’s just under £1,000 per person involved.

The Guardian carry some details of the settlement here:

The settlement will cost Trafigura slightly more than 10% of its reported $440m (£270m) profits last year, and comes on top of the £100m the company had already previously paid the Ivorian government for a clean-up, also without conceding legal liability.

Hey, it’s like, 2009!

One of the big questions here is why is this only getting decent media coverage in the last month. The answer of course is lawyers.

This from the Financial Times:

The case cast an unaccustomed and uncomfortable light on a company that had until then enjoyed a low-profile existence as one of the world’s leading traders in commodities, including oil.

Trafigura has made heavy use of libel lawyers – including two defamation lawsuits and at least one court injunction – to combat coverage of the case, in which it continues to deny liability.

The company and Leigh Day & Co, lawyers for the Ivorians, reached their financial deal to settle allegations that the waste dumping had caused flu-like symptoms in people who were close to the site.

CSR: Letter to the Editor

Is this kind of City-media-lawyer-we’ve-got-bigger-dicks-than-you shit even legal? We’re going to find out, Conservative Peter Bottomley thinks not.

According to (who else but) the Guardian, he told MPs he was reporting Carter-Ruck, to the Law Society, saying that no lawyers should be able to inhibit the reporting of parliament.

“I will be seeking their advice on whether it is proper for any lawyer to purport or intend to inhibit the reporting of parliament,” Bottomley told the Guardian.

“It is the job of the press to make aware to all what is known by a few. Any court action which inhibits that should be approved at a very high level, with full justifications, and in normal circumstances, should not be made in secret.”

And just to reassure us all, GB has called the case “unfortunate”. Yeah thanks Gordon. Just like how it’s going to be “unfortunate” you’ll be an ex-prime minister next June.

In terms of media discourse, the breaking of the court ordered gag is interesting. I’m not sure it’s altogether Earth shattering though. Here’s what Guardian supremo Alan Rusbridger has to say. Go read it yourself. I’ve got other things to worry about.

So the media were bound by the laws of the land and those that would abuse them. What about NGOs. As far back as September 2006 Greenpeace were all over this.. Here’s an interesting para from that press release:

One question is whether the wastes were entirely generated via on board operations. In a statement to the press the charterer Trafigura states that the caustic nature of the waste was from use of caustic soda as a detergent for tank washings. However given the rarity of using caustic soda to wash tanks that carry refined petroleum products, it is not unreasonable to consider that the waste could come from land based sources.

After the Ivory Coast government and Trafigura reached a deal on cleanup costs, but importantly not on compensation for victims or even an admittance of culpability, Greenpeace came back with more.

“One cannot do justice without knowing the facts in their entirety. At this stage, it would have been more appropriate to secure a provisional settlement with an advance payment, rather than one that closes the books definitively, especially when the full extent of liabilities have not yet been determined,” said Jasper Teulings, Senior Legal Counsel, Greenpeace International.

Although this settlement has no bearing on the legal rights of the victims of this disaster, it is feared that the victims will now receive little, if any, support from their government in pursuing justice.

“This Faustian deal may provide the Cote D’Ivoire the much-needed funds to deal with the clean-up, but it is by no means fair. Trade in hazardous waste is a serious crime under international law (2), and by agreeing to this deal, the President has signed away his country’s right to bring a criminal corporation to justice,” said Helen Perivier, Toxics Campaigner, Greenpeace International, “The ease with which international environmental laws are broken and questionable deals exchanged for real justice, painfully highlights yet again, that the international community creates laws but simply lacks the political will to implement and enforce them.”

And Greenpeace is continuing the fight to convict Trafigura of a crime. Something that has not happened anywhere yet. This from Reuters.

Trafigura for their part have a series of related press releases on their site. Headlines such as
“High Court confirms that Probo Koala ‘slops’ cannot have caused deaths, miscarriages, or other serious or long-term injuries”
and
“SETTLEMENT VINDICATES TRAFIGURA”
aim to tell their side of the story. No doubt Carter-Ruck will have signed those release off after careful inspection.

The ship

In a move straight from Radar, here’s four links from the past week or so. Keepfakingit says yes to the best.

A Liberal Defence of Money by William Davies in The Liberal. Davies throws some high-value grenades back in the direction of Chris Anderson and the Free brigade.

The COP15 Train is being organized by the Campaign against Climate Change to get you to Denmark for some mid-talks debate. All aboard from St. Pancras International Friday 11th December.

Penn Station, New York. The way it used to be. It cost too much to clean the windows…

NEF, The New Economics Foundation. The independent think-and-do tank that inspires and demonstrates real economic well-being. The aim, to improve quality of life by promoting innovative solutions that challenge mainstream thinking on economic, environment and social issues.

For over three decades, our army of sturdy panda collecting boxes stood outside shops and offices around the UK, but were all recalled in 2007.

Rather than recycling the lot, we got together with specialist curators Artwise and challenged top British artists to reincarnate them as innovative and memorable artworks, to communicate the importance of our work in a truly inspirational way.

“Back to nature” is not a trip to the country-side. It’s a total realignment of humanity’s place in the encyclopedia. That realignment, or rather that correction of a categorization that should never have happened in the first place is one of the core treatises of the Dark Mountain Manifesto. And within the manifesto is as strong a call to action for writers, musicians and artists of all hues, to embrace a new thinking of our place in the world as Keepfakingit has seen for an awful long time.

The Manifesto is the work of Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth. My involvement in the project is slight. I answered a crowd-sourcing call for funding over Twitter and donated a small amount towards the publication of the first edition. The attraction at the off was simple. Here’s a project that seeks to address climate change through a wholly fresh literary/artistic prism. At least that’s what the pitch said, and that was good enough for me and my PayPal account.

The meat and potatoes of the slim hand-stitched 18 page tome as I see them:

Thesis 1.
Civilization is built on little more than beliefs. As beliefs fail, so too does civilization.

Thesis 2.
We are not apart from nature, from the world around us.

Climate change is the ultimate clash of civilization versus nature. Things won’t be fine. We’re not even sure if we want it to be fine.

Thesis 3.
What if we looked down? We believe it’s time to look down.

Thesis 4.
Artists are the only ones who can uncouple mankind’s ego from the blinkered view that separates us from nature.

Thesis 5.
Ecocide demands a response.

So Hine and Kingsnorth clearly aren’t overly concerned with telling us to change the lightbulbs or put a brick in the loo. In fact they don’t give a shit about that sort of middle-class-doing-my-bit-to-waylay-my-guilt approach and I’ll warrant the organic field-reared Spring lamb on offer down at Waitrose isn’t top of their shopping list either.

And why should they be. The time for small actions is over. This Manifesto is about the big stuff. The fragility of our social fabric and how that fabric, due to the wear and tear being inflicted upon in by climate change is about to rip right in half.

Bertrand Russell and Joseph Conrad are both quoted on the way to the assertion that

Our civilisation is built on little more than the belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

And it is in the belief that mankind is apart from nature that the problem starts.

The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won.

So it is nature that will suffer the ravages of climate change. But as luck would have it we (humanity) are outside of that nature. Yes Katrina and her bad tempered companions will occasionally give us a good going over but we’ll come up with solutions, “solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius.”

In the Guardian last week George Monbiot debated Kingsnorth on the merits of this viewpoint. It’s a debate that every climate change activist should read, one which should, if only for a moment, make all of us who consider ourselves part of this movement question what it is we’re trying to prevent. Is it nature’s destruction, the destruction of our own civilisation or something else entirely? And isn’t even the term “nature’s destruction” rather missing the point if we are after all joined at the hip.

During the debate Monbiot accuses Kingsnorth of actively longing for the other Eden, the post-fabric-ripped Mad Max visage. After having re-read the Manifesto it is more apparent that Kingsnorth does indeed seem to come out in favour of the nuclear option. But what of it? As a society, a civilization, surely we must once in a while look in the mirror in an effort to see of what sort of stuff we’re made. And if we don’t like what we see what is wrong with having the balls to put another vision on the table.

And this is a crucial point. Those ascending the Dark Mountain would have us believe we’re scared even to do that, to imagine. In their words scared to “look down”. And scared the economists, the priests of mono-theism and the politicians should be because this reflection offers them only an end to their way of thinking, doing and controlling.

So to the Manifesto’s ultimate cry. Our “leaders” won’t allow us to look at ourselves with a clear gaze. They won’t allow us examine ourselves and build that metaphysical bridge back to nature, the logical response to a diagnosis that is writ large by the Manifesto.
But ecocide demands a response they proclaim.

That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilization itself? What gallery mounts an exhibitions equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?

We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.

[Checklisted as Uncivilised artists before their time are Robinson Jeffers, John Berger, Alan Garner, Wendell Berry, WS Merwin, Mary Oliver and of course, Cormac McCarthy]

This is the call for Uncivilised Art. Art that offers a non-human perspective. Being literary types Hine and Kingsnorth’s concern is writing in particular. They insist that this Uncivilised writing

comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation, but from somewhere on its wilder fringes… from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing.

Ah, so these guys are hippies in disguise, looking for this century’s Watership Down, or Call of the Wild. That’s the cynical conclusion, one which is fended off immediately:

It is not environmental writing, for there is too much of that already… it is not nature writing, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people…and it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within.
The shifting of emphasis from man to notman: this is the aim of Uncivilised writing.

You can bring an artist to the Dark Mountain…

One doesn’t have to travel all the way down Kingsnorth’s Damascene highway of civilisation to appreciate the value of at least daring to look at the map. If we are to fight the almost unwinnable fight against the ravages of climate change we had better know what we want the win to look like. And it is the job of our artist to start painting what that looks like.

The Dark Mountain Manifesto may be be considered a preparatory sketch in this regard. If so, only one question remains, do our artists have the imagination to use it?