Upcoming Events/Media

- "Costing The Earth" is on BBC Radio 4 tonight, from 9pm to 930pm, repeated Friday 1st January, 3pm. Tom Heap looks at if Britain can deliver on generating 15% of our energy from renewable sources by 2020. In Europe, only Luxembourg and Malta currently have a worse record at increasing the percentage of energy that comes from renewable sources.

- Later tonight, from 10pm to 1040pm, BBC 4 (digital TV) will have a documentary called Children of Guernica. It tells the story of 4000 Spanish children, refugees from their Civil War, who arrived in the UK in May 1937.

- The next Coventry World Development Movement speaker meeting is on Saturday 2nd February, from 10am to 12pm. It will be at Queens Road Baptist Church (Grosvenor Road, between Central Six and the ring road). Ann Farr and Edenis Guilarte will be sharing stories from Palestine/Israel and Venezuela. For more information, you can contact Gianluca on 07810 424 081, or at gianlu_om@yahoo.com.

- Finally, Sunday 3rd February is Garden Organic Ryton's Potato Day. It's from 10am to 5pm, and you can choose from dozens of varieties of seed potatoes on sale, plus talks, advice, tasting sessions, a cookery demonstration, children’s activities and seed swap.

Shell Full Year Results

You can read their full Q4 and full year results here.

Despite spending billions on exploration, their total oil production was down 7%, excluding the tarsands.

"Production is getting more expensive as easily accessible resources become more difficult to find. The industry reckons that the cost of production has gone up from $5 a barrel in 2000 to $14 in 2006 and many analysts believe that oil company profits may have peaked."

"Shell and Solar Century were among the 150 companies that recently signed up to the hard-hitting Bali Declaration. It is vital that companies act consistently with the rhetoric in such declarations, and as I have told Shell senior management on several occasions, an all-out assault on the Canadian tar sands and extracting oil from coal is completely inconsistent with climate protection ... Unless fossil-fuel energy companies evolve their core activities meaningfully, we are in deep trouble." - Jeremy Leggett, chief executive of Solarcentury, December 2007

Obama And YouTube

Barack Obama's YouTube channel has had 11 million visits. Yes, you read that correctly.

By Tuesday afternoon, Barack Obama's response to Bush's final State of the Union was the most watched clip in the world, drawing over 300,000 views in under 20 hours. The public has shown overwhelming and sustained interest in hearing from Obama directly. This is the third Obama video to shoot into YouTube's top three in the past 10 days -- and the first video that was shot specifically for web viewers, rather than broadcasting documentary footage of a speech.

It's not just YouTube. The Washington Post reports that on Facebook, Obama has more three times the number of Clinton supporters -- 299,000 to 83,000. Obama counts 240,000 MySpace friends to Clinton's 171,000.

If he becomes the nominee, and it remains a big if, those YouTube figures will grow and grow. How many millions will be watching each of his video posts in the fortnight before the election? Will that be a good thing for him, or an incredibly volatile situation? It's uncharted presidential election territory!

You Might Be A Green If ...

- You think about the wages and conditions of workers before you buy clothing

- You're in favour of having access to alternatives to mainstream healthcare

- You think charity shops are sexy, and agree that we need more adult education courses in make-do-and-mend

- You regard electric juicers and bread-making machines as just short of crazy

- You wonder why, with a record number of folks in prison, the government wants to bang up even more, rather than tough community sentences, getting reoffending down (drug treatment in prison, employment help on leaving prison), and stopping youth getting into crime in the first place

- You're not just worried about number one, and you wonder about your parents, or grandparents, and how they'll end up in retirement

- You've heard, even vaguely, about peak oil, and want to know more about the effects of it on society

- You think the first-past-the-post system of voting is a busted flush

- You have a sneaking suspicion that Labour's not as good on healthcare as they make out

The Blue Blindfold Campaign

"I was sold again, this time by my father. Again we went by boat to Italy, where I was kept prisoner for seven months. I was smuggled into the UK in a lorry. I was in London for five years. I worked every day, seeing 65 to 70 customers a day. I could earn up to £1,000 per day, but I had to pay £400 every day in 'rent' and £60 for a maid, as well as 20% of everything else I earned."

Green Collar Jobs

The Guardian today has a short article on "green collar jobs" -- manual-labour jobs in the new ecological economy, from mending bicycles to cladding buildings in solar panels.

Pat Thomas, the editor of the Ecologist, is quoted as saying that:

"A sustainable society won't be able to provide full employment because in a world where we don't produce more than we need, there is less to buy and there are fewer services required."

This is the elephant in the room that we need to talk more about.

If we buy less, and we do more ourselves (growing and cooking our food, making and repairing our clothes, building our own buildings, or creating healthcare that does not rely on petrochemical-based pills), we'll have less consumption. We equate a booming economy with vigorous consumption. If we have a decline in consumption, current common sense dictates that output will drop, jobs will be lost, and incomes will fall.

The existing economic structure (which the main three political parties accept) operates as a major disincentive to sustainable consumption.

So, we have a choice. Do we stick with putting endless growth in consumption at the heart of our society, or do we think about things in a different way?

If economic consumption can be decoupled from material consumption, if people purchased high-value services instead of resource-intensive artefacts, if consumer commodities become value heavy and materially light, then we could preserve economic stability and still meet environmental and social targets. If people accepted higher taxes and invested more in the future, we might even be able to preserve economic stability without a massive growth in private consumption. But these are all big ‘ifs’.

"Mr. W"

"Maybe I was too intense. Maybe I came on too strong. It was lonely, really lonely. Now, since I got this job, life is completely different. I finally feel useful."

Fish And Chips

The Observer:

We're still used to paying a fiver, or less, for fish and chips: a sum that reflects not the plenty of our seas (our waters have not been truly bountiful for decades), nor the unfashionability of fish (eating fish is hip: just ask any supermodel of your acquaintance), but the many and monstrous industrial ways it is caught and brought to our tables.

The fish at Tom's Place will be mostly line-caught, because it is the nets of vast trawlers that have put stocks in such peril. It will also come from sustainable, Marine Stewardship Council-approved sources. He is using small, family boats in Newlyn, Plymouth, Hastings, Lowestoft and Peterhead, owned by fishermen with pride in what they do, expertise and morals. If a customer wants to know more, their questions will be answered. Will he able to persuade people to pay these prices? "I think so," he says, carefully. "It's a case of people realising what is going on."

Network Rail Head Calls For High-Speed Lines

Iain Coucher, the chief executive of Network Rail, is proposing three new lines operating at up to 200mph: from London to Glasgow, via Birmingham and Manchester; London to Edinburgh, via Leeds and Newcastle upon Tyne; and London to Cardiff, via Bristol.

It's reassuring that someone has vision in the rail industry.

Network Rail has decided to take a lead after becoming frustrated by the Department for Transport’s lack of progress on the issue of high-speed rail ... [Coucher] said that High Speed 1, the 186mph (300km/h) line that opened in November between London St Pancras and the Channel Tunnel, should be viewed as the first part of a new network carrying faster intercity express trains.

He added: "Not just High Speed 2, but High Speed 3, maybe even High Speed 4 — that’s where we need to be by 2020. There is demand building up today. We’ll now sit down, working with the train-operating companies, to come up with ideas about where we think it should go and what it should look like."

Coventry City Centre Redevelopment

Clive Rosher, one of our local members, has a letter in this week's Coventry Observer, about the proposed redevelopment of the city centre of Coventry:

I am horrified by the proposal to demolish and rebuild the city centre.

Last year, the council published its Draft Climate Change Strategy in which it quite rightly sought to move to "One Planet Living" from our present unsustainable "Three Planet Living." This is an absolutely essential target which would be undermined by needlessly destroying existing buildings and rebuilding them twice as big to double the amount of shopping.

We are already pressed to shop 'til we drop. Instead, we should learn to be content with enough and remember that more than enough is too much. We must concentrate on minimising climate chaos and establishing a peaceful world in harmony with nature, where everyone the world over can enjoy neither poverty nor opulence, but a satisfactory degree of prosperity.

Leafletting In Earlsdon

This week, we've been distributing our January leaflet throughout Earlsdon, as well as a few in neighbouring wards (Lower Stoke, Westwood, Whoberley).

The leaflet has some info on how to get involved in the local party, some info on this website (hopefully, we get some symbiosis going between door-to-door canvassing, leaflets, and this blog), and info on transport (congestion charging; youth discounts on public transit).

I'll be getting together with two others to do the north part of Styvechale tomorrow (all the streets running off Knoll Drive).

If you see us, don't be a stranger!

Second Border Wall Hole In Gaza

2nd verse, same as the first:

Palestinians have bulldozed down part of the Gaza-Egypt border wall again, hours after Egyptian troops blocked holes recently made by militants. The UN has estimated that as much as half of Gaza's 1.5 million population has crossed the border in defiance of the blockade. The latest incident is a humiliating setback for Cairo, which must now decide how to respond. Egypt may now have to consider talks with Hamas, which it has previously ruled out.

US Election - John Pilger

The New Statesman, 24th January 2008:

Travelling with Robert Kennedy in 1968 was eye-opening for me. To audiences of the poor, Kennedy would present himself as a saviour. The words "change" and "hope" were used relentlessly and cynically. For audiences of fearful whites, he would use racist codes, such as "law and order". With those opposed to the invasion of Vietnam, he would attack "putting American boys in the line of fire", but never say when he would withdraw them.

That year (after Kennedy was assassinated), Richard Nixon used a version of the same, malleable speech to win the presidency. Thereafter, it was used successfully by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the two Bushes. Carter promised a foreign policy based on "human rights" - and practised the very opposite. Reagan's "freedom agenda" was a bloodbath in central America. Clinton "solemnly pledged" universal health care and tore down the last safety net of the Depression.

Nothing has changed. Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan. Hillary Clinton, another bomber, is anti-feminist. John McCain's one distinction is that he has personally bombed a country. They all believe the US is not subject to the rules of human behaviour, because it is "a city upon a hill", regardless that most of humanity sees it as a monumental bully which, since 1945, has overthrown 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed 30 nations, destroying millions of lives.

"The Planet Is Getting Skinned"

“The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture.” David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington describes modern agricultural practices as “soil mining” -- we are rapidly outstripping the Earth’s natural rate of restoring topsoil. True living topsoil cannot be made overnight. It grows back at a rate of an inch or two over hundreds of years. “Globally, it’s pretty clear we’re running out of dirt,” Montgomery said.

Five Stories To Read

- A peace pact has been signed in Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by the government and armed groups. The death toll in the past decade in DR Congo has surpassed any conflict since World War II - 5.4 million people have died.

- B&Q will stop selling patio heaters -- propane patio heaters produce 35 kilos of carbon dioxide emissions every 13 hours

- The Commons Public Accounts Committee wants dementia to be given the same attention as heart disease and cancer. 500 000 people in England already suffer from dementia, and our population is aging.

- Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of Unite, has written a letter to the Guardian, picking up on Stuart Rose's words on the rich/poor divide, and urging M&S to act on conditions for workers (mainly migrant and agency) in the meat industry.

- Johann Hari, in the Independent, predicts a John McCain presidency might be more military and imperial than Dubya's.