Plebgate Proves You Are What You Own

The Plebgate affair, in which police stitched up MP Andrew Mitchell, has provoked a storm of criticism about police lying and corruption. You'll get that sort of support and outrage if you're a public school educated banker turned Tory MP. The rest of us, even when attacked en masse, find it's the perpetrators who get all the help the desire.

The construction industry blacklist is a major scandal any way you look at it. Thousands of people had their details held on an illegal database, used by most of the major construction firms to vet workers. People were denied a living because they wanted to unionise a workplace, or even because had tried to get workplaces to adhere to proper health and safety practices including those dealing with asbestos.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission says that gathering information for the construction industry blacklist seems to have been a normal, ongoing part of Special Branch work. Pete Francis, the whistleblowing ex-undercover Special Branch cop, said in August that as well as infiltrating protest groups, he believes his intelligence was used in the blacklist.

It reflects what was revealed in the McLibel trial, where a large corporation used illegal methods to stifle fair criticism from activists. More than this, both cases show that a two-way illegal exchange of information between police and corporate spies was a matter of routine.

IT'S NOT JUST McDONALD'S AND CONSTRUCTION

Secret operations, by their nature, are not often exposed. Does anyone think McDonald's is the only corporation to use spies in such a way, or just the only one well documented thanks to legal disclosure? Is construction the only industry to use a blacklist, or just the only one that's been caught?

Why would other industries not use such proven effective tactics to defend their power and profits?

In the summer we learned that the police's Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) had a list of over 100 blue-chip companies that had employed spies who used illegal methods (and that number was described as 'the tip of the iceberg').

It followed in the wake of the tabloid phone hacking scandal, but none of the companies on the list are in the media. It's banks, oil, construction (of course), pharmaceuticals - mostly household names, all giants.

SOCA had known about all this criminality for years yet had kept it secret. Its chair, Sir Ian Andrews, explained that revealing these crimes would

substantially undermine the financial viability of major organisations by tainting them with public association with criminality.

There. Right there. That is a bald admission that protection of corporate profit is more important than bringing known corporate criminals to book, or letting the public know what crimes are being committed against them.

Andrews is right - people would be put off a company if they knew how devious and criminal it really was. The same applies to individual citizens who commit crimes, yet they are all publicly named despite the impact it will have on their lives and livelihoods.

But very few citizens can compete with the importance of corporate profit in the eyes of the powerful and their protectors in the police. The automatic, unthinking, active protection of power extends to the watchpoodle bodies that are supposed to keep the police in check and, in turn, the public figures who watch the watchpoodles. It takes a Tory MP being fitted up in Plebgate for the Opposition to say the Independent Police Complaints Commission needs to be replaced.

Last week, the Mark Duggan inquest and the partners of undercover police were in the Royal Courts of Justice, but they are just ordinary citizens to be treated like, well, plebs. So when the IPCC has colluded with the police in those cases, and to cover up crimes in the cases of Hillsborough, Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson, Leveson and untold instances of individual violence and racism, it is fine. The victims aren't rich enough. You are what you own.

Not only will corporations do whatever they can get away with to increase profits, but they will be assisted by the agencies of the state that claim to protect us.

People ask why Mark Kennedy and the secret police infiltrated groups that were no physical threat to anyone. It is because there is no distinction made between the threat to life, the threat to corporate profit or the threat to police credibility. All of them are perceived as dangerously subversive and they must be stopped, in the words of the motto of the secret police's Special Demonstration Squad, 'by any means necessary'.

the lorax: turkeys advertising christmas

As adults have to face the fact that the myriad potential of youth is largely unfulfilled, so they tend to idealise their formative years. Not just their personal youth, but everything about the times and society they grew up in. Thus people around 50 seem to think 1970s Britain - National Front marches tens of thousands strong, dogshit everywhere, queerbashing a normalised activity ignored (or participated in) by the police, and no decent curry to be found - as a glorious arcadia.

This determined nostalgia makes adults, now substantially richer than when they were 12, readily vulnerable to being fleeced by people who offer them any reminder of their youth. Thus we see 30-somethings spending 40 quid on fucking Take That tickets.

In 2003 there was a Cat In The Hat movie. It wasn't actually a movie, it was an unmitigated pile of shite. The Boston Globe said

At one point in "The Cat in the Hat," the Cat, played by Mike Myers, is mistaken for a pinata by a group of children at a birthday party. One by one, they line up to smack him, and the scene culminates with a husky lad swinging a baseball bat directly into the unfortunate feline's cojones.

That's a remarkably precise metaphor for what this movie does to the memory of Dr. Seuss. If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.

Nonetheless $134,000,000 was handed over by people who went to see it. Even this was seen as a flop, and surely more money could be made from the Dr Seuss franchise. The lesson was learned and they decided not to make any more live action movies. Bring on the animation.and its marketing opportunities.

The thing with Dr Seuss is that it's not just whimsical tales with daft made up language and ear-stretching rhymes. The books have a clear agenda of encouraging children to explore themselves and the world, to be open minded, to not go for the greedy, destructive, mean and narrow - to reject all that marketing and advertising stands for.

The Lorax is perhaps the clearest of these. The Once-ler cuts down trees to make thneeds, a piece of junk that will make their seller rich. The Lorax come to speak for the trees, warning that if the Once-ler goes ahead then all the tress will be cut down and the forests will not regenerate.

Behold, the Lorax selling thneeds.



We're told the cars are Truffula Tree Friendly. The Mazda CX-5 has carbon emissions of 119g/km-144g/km, some 20%-50% higher than other cars presently available. And those lower emission cars are still an unsustainable environmental nightmare.

The solution is surely electric cars, a whole planet's worth of which, thanks to this ad, could be powered by a generator rigged up to the fast-spinning corpse of Theodore Geisel.

if i were the gm crop industry

Around fifteen years ago several large multinationals tried to introduce genetically modified crops to Europe. They were met with suspicion, and they responded - notably with Monsanto's 'Food Health Hope' advertising campaign that included URLs for anti-GM groups - with a concerted effort to allay fears.

They lost. They said that what they were doing was no different to the selective breeding that humans have been doing for centuries. But thus far nobody has been able to make a scorpion mate with a tomato; the results of such a novel genetic mix are far more unpredictable than crossing two tomatoes. They claimed their new crops would need less argichemicals, but part of the point of things like Monsanto's Roundup-Ready crops was to allow farmers to drench fields in the chemicals without killing the crops.

This leads us on to the really sinister part. GM was planned as a device to get farmers to use patented crops which tied you in to using their chemicals. You know the way Canon, Epson and co sell you an amazing scanner-printer for £40 then charge you £30 a time to get toner cartridges, leaving you skinter than planned or else with a printer that's perpetually out of use? Like that, but with the global food supply.

To ensure that farmers didn't wriggle out of it there were patents filed for 'terminator genes'; plants whose seeds would be infertile, meaning farmers couldn't save some of their seed to plant next year but instead would have to buy new seed every year from Monsanto.

Even as they conspired to take control of food away from those who can't pay, they claimed that anti-GM sentiment was ill informed fear of technology, a luxury only available to well fed rich people. This convenently ignored the fact that governments across Africa banded together to shun GM, and Indian farmers burned crops and protested in their hundreds of thousands, a scale far greater than in the rich nations. 

The UK press, used to food scares like botulism, salmonella, BSE, E coli and all the rest, largely portayed it as a public health risk, which ignored the much more definite threat of corporate control of global food production and impacts on wildlife.


The release of genetically modified organisms isn't like an oil spill or chemical leak. This stuff replicates and multiplies. It cross-pollinates with non-GM crops, leading to new mutations. The UK government allowed field trials, all but one of which showed detrimental effects on local biodiversity.

A 2005 study by the GM companies and DEFRA found that even fifteen years after GM oilseed rape was planted there will still be a GM plant in every square metre of the field.

The field trials were hampered by protesters going into the fields and ripping up the crops before they'd had chance to pollinate. With overwhelming public support, these few hundred underfunded people stopped a multibillion dollar industry dead in its tracks.

A few years later, BASF resurrected the idea. Once again they trotted out the unsubstantiated overblown claims of their new crops being essential to provide food for the starving. The anti-GM campaigners pointed out that BASF's potato grown for industrial starch isn't really a belly filler. That, coupled with outcry from local beekeepers whose premium borage honey production would have been affected, forced another complete climbdown.

So, what to do? GM is already planted across swathes of the Americas. There's an industry that's been geared up for Europe and is jealously coveting this untapped market. If I were them, on the back of two serious defeats, I'd realise this can't be done in one jump. Stepping stones are needed.

For example, the government know they can't simply privatise healthcare in one go, so they transfer fund-holding to GPs (who, though public in service, are essentially private in structure). When, in five or ten years, the GPs find they haven't the time or knowledge to run their own funding, the large corporations will step in and clean up. We'll then get crap doctoring for free and a range of top-up plans for anything that provides real health care.

By the same token, the UK is not going to take corporate-controlled chemically intensive GM crops. So ask, what do the protesters complain about, then tackle that stuff head on. Persons here assembled, I give you the Rothamstead GM wheat trial (and its opponents Take The Flour Back).  

What if we make a GM crop that really is a food crop, really does use less chemicals, and has no patents? The protesters will have to agree or look insane; all of a sudden the geneticists will appear like the reasonable ones. Then, that problem finally dealt with, we will have the way clear to bring in the GM crops that make money.

I'm not saying that's necessarily what's happening with the new GM crop of wheat being tested in the UK. Who knows, maybe the biotech industry has suddenly become altrusitic and has no interest in developing products in order to make profit.

once a scab, always a scab

The government have a secret underground bunker that they can escape to in case of attack. From 1952-92 it was at Kelvedon Hatch in Essex. In the 40 years of its service the lawns were trimmed to bowling green standards and the fixtures and fittings were kept polished and gleaming. There was nothing else for the bored staff to do as the facility was always on green alert.

Except once when it went to amber. It wasn't the Cuban missile crisis. It wasn't during Les Evenements of 1968. It was the miners' strike of 1984. The government really feared they'd misjudged the nation and that if people in unions banded together against the freshly militarised police force it could go to civil war. Sometimes you're a lot closer to victory than you dare to think.

But the government had spent a couple of years stockpiling coal so the electricity supply would stay on, they had the media sewn up (the BBC re-ordered footage of police attacking miners and the miners retaliating, putting the miners' response first making it appear an unprovoked assault on police), and they bludgeoned and bribed the impoverished strikers.

Some scabs, centred around Nottinghamshire, returned to work and formed their own breakaway union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM). Their chief Neil Greatrex and his deputy Mick Stevens led the organisation for many years. They later set the Nottinghamshire Miners Home Charity which ran a home for ex-miners in Chapel St Leonards near Skegness. Greatrex gave himself salaries of over £100,000 plus having his mortgage paid by the UDM.

In the late 1990s the Labour government set up the Coal Health Scheme to dish out £8bn of compensation to 750,000 miners who have been affected by serious medical conditions from their work. Typical New Labour, they had it administered through private solicitors who creamed off millions.

Neil Greatrex and Mick Stevens set up a company called Venside which made over £20m in fees from the solicitors involved in the scheme for referring claims to them. One of those companies was Doncaster firm Beresford's which took up to 30% of the miners' compensation. Partners James Beresford and Douglas Smith's joint earnings went from about £182,000 in 2000 to £23,273,256 in 2006. Taking such 'success fees' is unlawful and they were banned from being solicitors. However it is not criminal and they did not get prosecuted, walking away having trousered millions.

This money should have been caring for diseased old miners. There will be thousands having unnecessarily hard lives because the money went to buy luxury refits at the homes of people like Beresford, Smith, Greatrex and Stevens.

Seeing the UDM's firm so eagerly referring miners to such a dodgy company who were ripping miners off, the scandal put the Serious Fraud Office on the sniff around Greatrex. They discovered that, not content with his riches, over a period of years he had £150,000 worth of work done on his and Stevens' houses, paid for by the charity they'd set up. Police found that he'd got false invoices for the work, saying it was for lifts and a kitchen at the care home. Greatrex and Stevens were charged with 14 counts of theft.

Their trial took place this week. Greatrex lied to court saying the work was in lieu of salary, never mind that it said the work had been done on a care home that the builders never even saw. Even though Mick Stevens can be presumed to have noticed his home improvements, and even though he countersigned the dodgy cheques, he was acquitted of all charges.

Neil Greatrex was unanimously convicted by the jury of theft. The judge said he'll be getting a prison sentence. But, like James Beresford before him, he gets to keep the money.

mark kennedy spying to the last

The Mark Kennedy media bandwagon lurched to America earlier this month in the form of a feature article in Rolling Stone (paywalled link).

Rather like his documentary last autumn, it buys into the idea of a divided soul who loved his comrades and after he was sacked from the cops came back to the activists out of camaraderie. In fact, he set up his own private spy firm and came back to keep betraying those activists. He would still be doing it today had the activists not caught him.

Neither the Rolling Stone journo nor the documentary makers mentioned this, meaning either they were told not to by Kennedy's notorious publicity agent Max Clifford, or else they were too lazy to do some elementary googling.

The Rolling Stone piece goes one further: the documentary claimed he came back to activists for the sense of community, but Rolling Stone posit that he entirely gave up activism when he did so. This is demonstrably and unarguably wrong.

So let's set out what is known about this bit of his career in order to make it harder for lazy/puppetted journalists to get away with perpetuating a lie.

After he left the police Mark Kennedy took a break of several months then returned in early 2010, still as the activist Mark Stone. He was active all over Europe, mainly with a sudden interest in animal rights, an odd thing for someone who (despite his recent claims in the press) wasn't even vegetarian.

After Kennedy was uncovered, activists compiled a strictly factual database of all activism he could be verified as having taken part in. It has numerous entries from 2010 after his police career, including his trip to Italy for an animal rights gathering which has also been reported in other interviews with him, as well as animal rights work in Germany, anti-capitalist meetings in France and several animal rights and environmental things in the UK.

The sense of him being torn is hype. Rolling Stone says Kennedy's faith in policing was 'shattered' when he got a beating from the police at a protest in the summer of 2006 (none of the beatings, raids and fit-ups of the activists he loved made him feel that way, though, even when he'd helped to organise them). Yet despite this supposed lack of faith in his role he did not truncate or quit his mission, he continued as ordered for over three years until his superiors decided to withdraw him.

The article claims that he offered to help the activists being prosecuted in the Ratcliffe trial. Well yes, he said 'I'd like to help' to someone who was making him squirm in what he thought was a private conversation (you can hear it in this news report). He made no specific offer, no public offer, and most importantly he did not - then or at any time before or since - ever do anything to help the activists. Thus he upholds his police work.

Kennedy came to the environmental direct action movement in 2003. The police ended his mission in autumn 2009. A serious drop in income is a frightening prospect for anyone, let alone someone on the kind of salary he was used to. When he left the police he had no saleable skills bar his spying. So he continued to stab backs for money, just as he did previously in the police, just as he does these days in the press.

The world of corporate spies is not new. During the McLibel trial it was revealed that there had been meetings of London Greenpeace where genuine activists were in the minority. Most people there were police, private spies watching activists, or a second lot of spies hired to watch the first lot.

One such spy company is Global Open. It was set up in 2001 by ex-Special Branch officer Rod Leeming. It is known to have worked for Eon at the time of the Kingsnorth Climate Camp, a protest Kennedy was spying at for the police.

Kennedy told the Daily Mail that he was approached by Global Open's director Rod Leeming to work for him in January 2010 as he was leaving the police, and that he accepted and worked for them.

Of course, this is a claim of Kennedy's so must be subjected to extra scrutiny. He isn't just a liar in the normal sense but appears to be someone beyond that point who cannot actually determine truth from falsehood. His string of self-contradictions are evidence of this. But the lies tend to be things that mitigate him, things that make him out to be the victim, to be a good guy who has sympathy with all sides. Any statements that don't feed into this myth - and in fact make him look like more of a bastard, like being a private corporate spy - are more likely to be credible.

All companies in the UK have to be registered, and the names and addresses of directors are made public. The Guardian revealed that in February 2010, as he was leaving the police, Kennedy set up Tokra Ltd. He registered himself as the sole director and called himself 'logistics officer'. The address he used was the Bedfordshire work address of Heather Millgate, who was then a director of Global Open.

The fact that Kennedy did not stop spying after he left the police is perhaps the most damning aspect of his story. This is the one area where he appears to be far worse than any of the other officers so far exposed. He chose of his own free will to continue betraying the activists he lived among, scuppering their work and undermining the things they held most dear.

If, as he claims, he did genuinely feel any sympathy for the activists' cause then that makes him even worse; he not only wronged these people, he knew it to be wrong but did it anyway for money. Either he ideologically wanted to ruin them or he loved them but loved his own bank balance even more. Whichever it is, Mark Kennedy's post-police career was not one of someone who cared for the activists he lived among.

they're all in it together

So the other day I mentioned that the attention given to News International employees shouldn't distract us from the guilt shared by politicians and, especially, the police who colluded; that this wasn't just lowly constables accessing police files but something much more institutional.

After the police killed Ian Tomlinson in April 2009 they put out a string of lies to try to get away with it. They claimed to have had 'no contact' with Tomlinson, that their officers tried to revive him whilst protesters threw a hail of bottles (in fact protesters tried to get an ambulance for him whilst the police refused to speak to medical staff). They had a dodgy autopsy done saying it was all natural causes. They had the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission say there was no CCTV in the area, and after people published photos of the cameras they amended that to say they 'weren't working'.

And they did almost get away with it. Then the Guardian published the footage of the police assault. The response was to go round to the Guardian's offices and (glove puppeting an IPCC official) tell them to take it off the website. Anything to keep themselves in the clear.

Yesterday the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, resigned because of the phone hacking scandal (and Assistant Commissioner John Yates looks set to follow today). Like a thousand guilty coppers before him, he knows if you resign there's no real investigation and you keep your pension.

Press reports made much of the fact that Stephenson had a £12,000 stay in a health spa that the owners had 'forgotten' to give him a bill for. It's easily done, my workplace is always doing twelve grand's worth of work for a solitary client and then and absent mindedly neglecting to ask for payment. And a copper taking a massive freebie is in no way suspicious at all.

The spa and the Met both employed Neil Wallis, ex-Deputy Editor of News Of The World, to do their PR. Both sides say this is a coincidence and they didn't know about it. Stephenson now says the real reason was that he should have told the Prime Minister that Wallis was implicated in the phone hacking scandal.

However, it's interesting that the resignations comes less than 48 hours after it was revealed that the toppest of the Met's top brass, including Stephenson himself, made not one but two intimidating visits to the Guardian to tell them that their coverage of the hacking scandal was exaggerated. They particularly disliked the claims that the police were in any way colluding in the hacking.

These visits came two months after they started employing Wallis. If they didn't know Wallis was implicated, and if they didn't know the full extent of the hacking and the police's integral part in it, then it's a bit of a coincidence and pretty poor detective work (especially for professional investigators). From here, it looks very like the same tactics used on the same newspaper to cover their guilt on the killing of Ian Tomlison.

Resignation is no substitute for prosecution and conviction. It's time for the police to start arresting one another.

The Times - a Murdoch paper glad of an opportunity to deflect blame - says today

Journalists who bribe policemen are indicative of a flawed industry. Policemen who can be bribed are indicative of a flawed state.

This is true, but ignores the fact that the media barons, politicians and police are all prongs on the same fork. They share the same aims and values, and seek to maintain the same powers for one another.

And, just as the police response to the final damburst of information about the Mark Kennedy/Ratcliffe affair was to throw some blame on to the Crown Prosecution Service, so Stephenson has lost no time in waving an accusatory finger at David Cameron. He points out that the Met's man Wallis had left the News of The World without a hint of impropriety, whereas Cameron's man Coulson - Wallis' boss - had been forced to resign because of the phone hacking scandal. The implication is that if Stephenson had to go, it counts doubly for Cameron.

We can dream, can't we? They didn't imprison Al Capone for the Valentines Day Massacre, they finally got him in jail for tax evasion. By the same token, I want to see Coulson go down, not for the phone hacking but for getting Cameron into power. But like the feds with Capone, I'll take whatever I can get.

That said, if there's one thing this last week has taught us it's that we can't tell what's coming. This story is *still* gathering pace and is finally beginning to properly bring the Tories and police into it.

Even if it doesn't bring Cameron down, it can certainly be his Dodgy Dossier moment, the point at which the wider public consciously understands that the leader is a duplicitous scumfuck and that the real power is held by a shady swarm of evil people around him whose names we don't know.

phone hacking and spinning the police

The phone hacking scandal has been amazing. One day there's a move to refer the takeover of BskyB to the Competition Commission that looks like an attempt to sweep it under the carpet till the fuss dies down, the next day the entire bid collapses.

This story is moving so fast - and every move making it worse for Murdoch and News Corp - that The Guardian have a live updates page, they way they do when they're reporting a trial or inquest.

Interestingly, the American end of this may still be barely beginning. If there is proof that News International paid police for information then it is against US law - as an American corporation it is bound by legislation not to bribe officials of any state. And if there is any proof of attempt to hack 9/11 victims and their families, it's game over for Murdoch.

Top marks to Billy Bragg for already releasing a song about it (free download here), with a major nod to the Scouse boycott of the Sun ever since their foul lies about the Hillsborough disaster.

Reflecting on it all, it strikes me that there are several parallels with the Mark Kennedy affair. A scandal was passed off as the act of one bad apple, a rogue that the bosses didn't know about. Then it becomes clear that it was endemic, a policy run from the top. Then beyond that, it becomes apparent that it was the product of the shared political values of the police and the organisations they work with.

The police kept quiet and covered their arses for as long as possible, then when that became untenable they leaked the Crown Prosecution Service's guilt in the Kennedy affair; similarly with the phone hacking they did a lalala fingers in the ears inquiry but now it's blown up they're busy telling us how evil News International have been all along.

There is a major difference though. The guilt in the Kennedy affair lies primarily with the police, whereas in the phone hacking it lies with News International. However, the police were the source of much of the initial seeds of information that led to stories. It appears around £100,000 was paid to officers, a few hundred quid at a time. News International should go down for that, but so should the officers.

If the journalist who wrote the stories on Jennifer Elliott - daughter of Denholm, found begging on the streets with drug problems and being an occasional sex worker - can tell Radio 4 that he feels his work contributed to her eventual suicide, then that culpability is shared by the police officer whose tip off instigated the story in return for a slender envelope of cash.

The family of Jean Charles de Menezes have written to the government urging them to ensure the inquiry into hacking covers the police's involvement. The fact that their phone numbers were on the hack list points the finger squarely at the police.

Given the baseless personal slurs about de Menezes that came out in the tabloids, the relationship was more than bent constables taking a bung from a low-level journo hacking to try to get a story. It is the kind of thing that comes from media management strategy at a high level.

It is certainly a scandal that a senior News of The World executive was working for the Metropolitan Police at the time when the Met were investigating the hacking. But what really caught my eye in the story was that the guy's police job existed at all.

Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the tabloid, was paid more than £1,000 a day to work two days a month at Scotland Yard as a consultant to Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police commissioner.

You fucking what? £24,000+ of public money for a total of two weeks spin doctoring?

And Wallis' pay isn't the half of it.

Neil Wallis, who was questioned for several hours on Thursday, was employed as recently as last year as sick leave cover for the force's deputy director of public affairs

Presumably the actual Director of Public Affairs gets even more than the deputy.

Yet there are still people who say that the police do a good honest job with the resources they've got, people who deny the police are a political force who manipulate the media.

Like the Conservative Party leadership, the police are desperately wriggling at the moment, trying to hold News International at arms length. Yet it is plain that all of them share information, personnel and tactics, because they have shared values and a shared mission.

marley's mellow moneyspinner

Well the other week there was Bob Geldof selling his arse to promote watches.

This week I found product endorsement far beyond that. It is so unlikely that I didn't get disgusted or outraged but literally stood there in the shop laughing.

Having trouble sleeping? Try a can of relaxing citrus flavour Marley's Mellow Mood.



It's got several herbal extracts, though frankly if you ask anyone what herb they think mellowed Marley the answer is unlikely to be 'chamomile'.

Just as the Martin Luther King estate rob the great man's grave for cash, so the Marley heirs license his image to hawk soda drinks and thereby make him no different to the Disney toys that come free with Happy Meals.

watch out for geldof

Saw this in a jeweller's window the other day.



Even by the satanic standards of celebrity-endorsed advertising, and even within the confines of just a few words, it's amazing how many different kinds of wrong this poster can be.

FOLLOW YOUR CONVICTIONS
'I don't want to live like you. I don't want to talk like you. I'm going to be like me'.
Sir Bob Geldof - Musician, Activist, Businessman

The slogan makes it clear that we're trading on Geldof's Band Aid reputation here.

His outspokenness with authority was always a fine quality, even before Band Aid had him gobbing off at Thatcher. On a chat show he shared a sofa with Vidal Sassoon who said that everyone owed it to themselves to stay in shape so he does a few lengths of his pool every day. Geldof rounded on him and pointed out that most people have knackering jobs and family responsibilities that sap their energy, as well as a notable lack of money to buy their own pool. That's good stuff, but he crowned it by then asking Sassoon if he didn't consider himself grossly overpaid for a barber.

Anyway, what we're meant to think here is that the part of Geldof that was fearless in dealing with the powerful because he knew he had the moral high ground has somehow led him to wear a particular brand of watch. Whereas it's actually just the pay cheque, a lump of money for a man who is already a millionaire several dozen times over.

But more than this, if you buy the brand of watch that he's prepared to be on a poster for then you too will be as righteous and morally valiant as Geldof is perceived to be. (Let's just ignore his tax evading non-dom status.)

Next up we have that quote that's supposed to chime with this rugged valiance of the spirit that 'follow your convictions' has set up. It's taken from Lookin' After Number 1, the first of the Boomtown Rats' stupendous opening salvo of six singles.



It is written with glaring knowing irony from the perspective of someone toweringly arrogant and selfish.

Don't give me love thy neighbour
Don't give me charity
Don't give me peace and love or the good lord above
You only get in my way with your stupid ideas

I am an island
Entire of myself
And when I get old, older than today
I'll never need anybody's help in any way

I'm gonna take your money
Count your loss when I'm gone
I'm alright Jack,
Lookin' after number one

I don't wanna be like you
I don't wanna live like you
I don't wanna talk like you
I'm gonna be like me

This is obviously written as something that only an idiot would think rather than, as the advert believes, something to identify with.

Even that name under the quote, Sir Bob Geldof, isn't right. Geldof got gonged with a KBE, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. As he's a citizen of a country where the Queen is not head of state it's just an honorary knighthood. He is not a 'sir'.

All of this deconstruction component by component focuses on the advertiser and the advertisement. We then have the additional principle of the whole thing. Doing something good that makes you prominent and thereby leads to an incidental increase in your album sales is one thing. Taking the doing of good deeds and using them as a marketing tool to enrich yourself by getting people to buy a luxury item is a leap beyond.

As one of Geldof's punk contemporaries said,

I believe in this, and it's been tested by research,
He who fucks nuns will later join the church

Misrepresented as having integrity, misquoted as a lyricist, mistitled as a British knight, all in one swift shot. Advertising; the area where consumerism packs more of its wrongness per square inch than any other.

what would you do if i sold out a song?

Well, I think I'd stand up and walk out on you.

We always have to wonder not only about actions and deeds, but about what they normalise and what they point the way to. I just watched TV for the first time in months. On one channel in less than two hours, Gimme Shelter and Children Of The Revolution advertised computer games, Pretty Vacant advertised betting, the Lightning Seeds advertised a bank, and Lemmy actually appeared in the advert where there's a specially re-recorded Ace of Spades advertising beer. This is what we feared when The Clash advertised jeans in the 90s.

This has an anti-encouragement effect on me, it makes me feel soiled and hate the products. Then again, I suppose I'm not exactly the target audience.

But this is normal for most people isn't it? Like living next to a sewage farm, you stop smelling the stench of commerce after a while.

The average Briton watches four hours of TV a day. People who watch more than seven hours a day are more common than those of us who watch less than an hour.

Doomed. Deservedly.

hydrogen zombies from murdoch hell

For those of us who generally spend too much time on news sites, it was curious to see Rupert Murdoch decide to put his papers behind a paywall. Whilst it's cut The Times' website traffic by 90%, there are those who reckon it's nonetheless increased the revenue.

But it's also stopped most of us having anything to do with The Times. Chicken Yoghurt notes the clear air and cheers on the process.

Isn’t the world a nicer place with The Times behind its paywall? If nothing else now only a few thousand hardcore masochists are having their mornings spoiled (either directly or indirectly) by David Aaronovitch’s brainfaeces. Once Rupert Murdoch finishes shovelling the rest of his offal behind the paywall we can get on with finally founding Utopia.

I had occasion to buy a paper copy of The Times the other week. It wasn't for me, it was for a friend. Really it was.

The Greater London Assembly has been enthusiastic about hydrogen vehicles despite the fact that they make no sense in terms of economics or climate impact. Even the Green members support it. So it was no surprise to see Kit Malthouse, Tory member of the Greater London Assembly, trotting out an article for the Times extolling the virtues of hydrogen cars.

Times subscribers can read it here, but you don't have to fork out a quid if you don't want to. Any pro-hydrogen article will have the same old twaddle, zombie arguments long disproven yet still they walk among us.

Fantastic news: by 2015 you will be able to buy a reasonably priced family car that runs entirely on hydrogen

Mmm-hmm. The magic switchover to hydrogen cars has been five years away for about twenty years now. Mr Donkey, meet Mr Carrot.

Nasty 19th-century internal combustion will be out; pure 21st century electrochemistry will be in.

Sexy! Shiny! Space-age! Actually, not. The hydrogen fuel cell is 19th century technology, invented by Sir William Grove in the late 1830s.

Electric propulsion is, of course, the solution. But there is a divide about how to store and release the power: battery or hydrogen?

With a battery, you charge it up and off you go. Perfect for town, where short, frequent journeys are the norm. But there is a teeny problem: instant refuelling... electric cars take between six and ten hours to charge.

No they don't - their batteries take that time to charge. If you have ready-charged batteries waiting at filling stations, swapping your empty one for a full one takes the same time as filling up with petrol, or indeed hydrogen.

That requires new infrastructure at filling stations, but not as much as hydrogen. Additionally, you can recharge your car yourself at home overnight on cheap electricity when you have got hours spare. For convenience and availability, electricity wins because it's everywhere, whereas hydrogen is available nowhere.

Malthouse deftly avoids any mention of hydrogen's cost. There's a reason the protoypes have only been available on lease instead of to buy. As Shell Hydrogen’s CEO Don Huberts bluntly conceded

‘at the end of the day, hydrogen and other alternative fuels will be three to four times as expensive as oil based products, and if no one wants to pay for that, we can't make those fuels’(1).

Or, to compare, Ulf Bossel of the European Fuel Cell Forum said,

The daily drive to work in a hydrogen fuel cell car will cost four times more than in an electric or hybrid vehicle. 

Still, at least Malthouse does mention some other drawbacks.

Don't get me wrong, there are problems with hydrogen too. The main one is that it is pretty inefficient - it takes more energy to produce than it produces as a fuel.

And the understatement of the year award goes to...

In a recent post I mentioned the way the word 'recyclable' is used to imply that a product has no environmental impact so we can just use as much as we feel like, throw it away and get more. This also applies to 'renewable electricity'; it apparently has no impact to manufacture, install and maintain generating equipment, and is freely available in infinite quantity. Kit Malthouse certainly thinks so, and it lets him off the eye-watering inefficiency of hydrogen.

But if we use renewable energy to make the hydrogen in the first place, is this still an issue?

In a word, yes.

To replace our vehicle fuels with hydrogen would take as much electricity as we presently use for everything else combined (2). Do we think we can double electricity generation whilst doing away with fossil burning? Or is renewable-electricity hydrogen a non-starter?

Meanwhile, the Tory market values championed by the likes of Malthouse will see to it that we don't actually use renewable electricity. It is, by a huge margin, far cheaper to make hydrogen from natural gas than any other source. Renewable electricity, conversely, is by far the most expensive. Unless we have a stringent big-government regulatory regime, gas will be the raw material.

Making hydrogen from gas then using it in a fuel cell emits about 90g of CO2 for every kilometre you drive, about the same as a modern efficient petrol car (3). So when Kit Malthouse says that hydrogen cars

emit only water

it's true in the sense of what comes out of the exhaust pipe, but that's because the carbon emissions have happened at the hydrogen factory. The climate, of course, doesn't care where you emit the carbon, only that you do it at all. This use of gas as the raw material means that hydrogen is just another fossil fuel.

Perhaps the maddest scenario we could head towards is shifting from oil to another fossil fuel that's just as carbon-intensive and just as scarce, which then runs out after a couple of decades, leaving us with all this hydrogen infrastructure, making us squander our electricity on making hydrogen instead of the more efficient battery vehicles.

Bank-busting, ash-spewing Iceland has started to harness all that free geothermal power, aiming to be the hydrogen Saudi Arabia by 2060.

This is hardly, as Malthouse wants to imply, a reason for the UK to compete. Exporting hydrogen is very unlikely to happen on any major scale, as it contains a fraction of the energy of oil.

Iceland may produce its own hydrogen some time in future, but that is for several reasons that don't apply anywhere else. It is not only sat on more renewable energy than it can use (a few huge hydroelectric plants and a hell of a lot of geothermal energy); it is also little more than a city state. It has a population the size of Bradford and two-thirds of them live in one city.

Even then, its trumpeted 'hydrogen economy' has been and gone several times. In 2000 Iceland was to be the Bahrain of the North and the big breakthrough was five to ten years away. In 2002 it was touted as the Kuwait of The North with hydrogen cars to be on the roads in 2005. Shell put three hydrogen buses into action in Reykjavik in 2005. Two years later, two were scrapped and the third put in a museum.

The hydrogen vehicles are a gimmick, fluttered about by oil companies so we think the breakthrough is around the corner and therefore we can carry on with our cars. The wonder is that we're fooled by it over and over.

The electric vehicle may be more efficient, but the batteries take a lot of minerals and energy to manufacture. It too is being hyped as a decoy, just the way hydrogen has been.

To think there is an easy and renewable alternative to fossil fuels is a fundamental misunderstanding of what fossil fuels are; millions of years of stored energy. We have to stop thinking every individual can have the energy needed to carry a ton of metal and glass with them everywhere they go.

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

1 . Looking Ahead: Fuel Producers Weigh in on Hydrogen’s Fit in Cleaner Energy Production, Fuel Cell Industry Report, January 2003.

2.Decarbonising the UK – Energy for a Climate Conscious Future, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 2005, p74.

3. Well-to-Wheels analysis of future automotive fuels and powertrains in the European context, Version 1b, European Commission Joint Research Centre, January 2004, p50, Figure 8.4.1b.

like a war zone without the dead people

I went to Reading Festival once, nearly 20 years ago. It has none of the character of Glastonbury, none of the quirks and charm of smaller festivals. What it does have is a vast range of top rock bands playing blisteringly loud to massive beery audiences. For some people that's not enough to entice them but for others, like me in 1991, it's a definition of heaven.

It was overwhelmingly populated by teenagers wearing band T-shirts who enjoyed making campfires out of plastic. As I understand it, that is still the case, and their techniques and targets have evolved and expanded. Stories from a few years ago about lines of burning portaloos are truly the stuff of nightmares.

The festival is now so popular that it's held at two sites, Leeds and Reading, with the same acts on alternating nights. This year I helped with the salvage; teams of volunteers get a couple of days after the festival to pick up any decent tat left by punters.

There were people gathering camping tat like SolAIDarity collecting for the camps of migrants at Calais, others for displaced victims of the Pakistani floods, and scouting groups. Other charity collectors like Everything's Possible were looking for stuff to clean and sell as fundraisers.

The waste seems largely to be a product of the mindset of the punters rather than the infrastructure. During the festival, if you bring in a sack of empty cans and/or plastic bottles for recycling, you get a token for a beer. Yet I saw hundreds of full cans of beer lying around, let alone the uncountable thousands of empties.

There are camping gear drop-off points for people who don't want to take stuff home. Yet I would estimate that at least one tent in four was left behind where it was pitched.

This is a spliced together panorama. Bear in mind this is one corner of one empty field, everyone's gone home. There were acres of this.



Almost all the abandoned tents had stuff inside them. Many had just been walked out of, leaving sleeping bags, rollmats, clothes, cosmetics and food. Possessions were seen as disposable, not just by a few who were irredeemably irresponsible or acutely hungover, but as a culture among festival-goers.

Many of the tents and camping gear were clearly new, bought for the weekend, regarded as being as ephemeral as the beer. That was the good bit.  Finding otherwise decent tents slashed, or burned out, or shat in was much worse.

GREEN TENTS

One thing that caught my eye was the vast number of 'Green Tents'.



The words 'green' and 'eco' are, as we well know, meaningless. Vauxhall's new Ecoflex range of cars are eco, even though they emit over 130g of CO2 per kilometre, more than a third as much again as some normal cars already on the road. 'Recyclable' is used as if this means the virgin materials have less impact, and as if the recycling process has no impact at all.

Leeds Festival big up their partnership with Green Tent Company, telling us that buying their gear will

help us to reduce our carbon footprint, thus SAVING THE PLANET

They really do use capitals.

So go on then, what's green about a plastic tent? The makers explain

Traditionally a tent is made up of many different components such as fibreglass poles, metal eyelets and pegs, polyester material and nylon zips etc… which make them uneconomical to separate for recycling. This results in the vast majority of the tents being sent directly to landfill... until now !

The Green Tent Company are the first company in the world to design and manufacture a stylish competitively priced range of tents that are made solely of one product. That product is... polyester.

As if to equal Leeds Festival's jarring emphasis of nonsense, they really do put a three dotted drumroll before telling us their green material is the same non-degradable oil product all the other tents are made of.

Should any of our tents, camping mats or sleeping bags be left behind after a festival ends they do not have to be sent to landfill, instead they can be sent for recycling

They can be sent for recycling. They do not have to be sent to landfill. But, in the main, they are.

A two person Green Tent is £12.99. A full kit of tent, two rollmats and two sleeping bags is £30. You can order online and pick up at the festival, encouraging the throwaway attitude. Why waste precious beer space with camping gear when for £15 each you can get it disposably at the festival, and do the same next year?

The wastefulness is seriously exacerbated - and any potential generosity one may feel toward the company dissolved - by the manufacturer's shoddy quality of work. Some of the material is not fit for repeated use (there's a reason other tents don't use polyester pegs), the rest of it is scrappy single-skin stuff that is barely showerproof. The makers acknowledge this when they boast

If our tents have been well looked after AND fully dried out before being packed away, they could be used SEVERAL times

My tent - reasonable quality, still going strong, and I assure you really not that well looked after - has been to at least 80 festivals.

Put another way, had I bought Green Tent Company tents instead, I would have sent fifty or so to landfill already, or to recycling if I could find where to do it.

How would the eventual landfilling of my solitary tent compare to the energy use and waste of making and recycling a hundred Green Tents? Let alone, as would be more likely, to landfilling a hundred of them?

prozac for dogs

Does your dog bark or whine when you're not there? Chew the furniture?

Your pet is not a bad dog. Your pet's behavior is the result of separation anxiety.

Can this be cured? Why yes, and with a product that has a reassuring name, too - Reconcile.



Well that's a relief.

What is Reconcile?

a once-daily, chewable, flavored tablet for the treatment of separation anxiety in conjunction with a behavior modification plan.

No really, what actually is Reconcile?

Fluoxetine hydrochloride

You may already know that by its brand name. Prozac.

simon mann: the toff gets off

Simon Mann - a person who'd fit any decent working definition of 'international terrorist' - has been pardoned and released from jail in Equatorial Guinea, 16 months into a 34 year sentence for his attempted coup in the oil-rich nation.

To recap,

Neo-colonialist mercenary leader Mann was caught with a planeload of weapons and ex-apartheid South African special forces on their way to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea...

Mann certainly wasn't going there on any humanitarian mission. As with his previous campaigns, it was about clearing out one group so a grateful government - irrespective of its attitude to human rights - would bestow lucrative mineral rights upon him.

For a more detailed account of the activities of Mann and his friends around the world, check out my article Simon Mann: A Very English Killer.

During his trial in Equatorial Guinea, Mann sang like the proverbial canary and implicated 'Sir' Mark Thatcher (who pleaded guilty to involvement in a South African court) and plot-chief Ely Calil.

On his release, Mann said

I am very anxious that Calil, Thatcher and one or two of the others, should face justice.

I'm relishing the thought of it happening - oh please let plot-funder Jeffrey Archer have another spell in jail - but I cannot muster any faith that it'll come to pass. The establishment insulates its members well.

Indeed, this was shown in Mann's favour by Guernsey courts' refusal to allow the Equatorial Guinea government access to Mann's account records and safe deposit boxes, despite strong evidence that these contain hard and damning evidence of the plot.

Meanwhile, a vicious mercenary is now free to enjoy his millionaire's lifestyle and work on his book deal and film options.

= = = = = = = = =

UPDATE 11 NOV 09: Over at The Quiet Road, Jim's post on Simon Mann (and the comments) include specific discussion of my post here.

sacrilege

The phenomenon of the one-hit wonder is often talked of in terms that imply they had only a single moment of talent, as if commercial success is somehow a measure of creative worth. Sometimes that's true but often it's not.

Poor old Jeff Beck. He spends years being one of the foremost guitarists of his generation, fusing white backbeat pop-rock with real searing blues, yet what's the only track of his that everyone knows? Hi Ho Silver Lining.

Other one-hit wonders leave you amazed that anyone wanted to listen to anything they ever did in the first place. In the 1980s there was a swathe of blokey guys with guitars, the sort of sub-Bryan Adamsers who were clearly surrounded by an entourage of coked-up yesmen telling them they were some kind of Springsteen.

One of these was Rick Springfield. If you're 40ish in the UK, you may vaguely remember his only half-hit here, Jessie's Girl.

For those of you who don't, and indeed those of you who do but could do with a reminder about why you have no clear memory, here's the video. It's a great piece of unintentional comedy, just look at how this negligible tosser takes himself soooo seriously.



And if that was where we could leave him, well, what's the harm? I'll tell you the fucking harm. To explain the damage and my personal grudge, let's go on another one almost-hit wonder detour.

The Church are one of my favourite bands ever. For thirty years they've been making music of great beauty, mystery and intelligence, generating luscious opiate warmth yet with a tremendously potent sense of undefined unease and longing. Rich, soulful, beautiful.

In the late 1980s they had their fifteen minutes with a single called Under The Milky Way. Mercifully for them, their albatross-song isn't a Silver Liningesque anomalous novelty, it's actually pretty representative of their work.

If you're American you probably know it, but in Europe nobody has really heard of it unless they were into what we then called Alternative Music. I get genuinely surprised when I mention The Church to anyone and there's any kind of recognition at all. In the last couple of years there's been some sharper folks that at least know the song thanks to its use in Donnie Darko.

But anyway, Rick fucking Springfield. He just won't let it lie, he still makes albums, and guess what he's applied his one dimensional croak to?



And that's not actually the bad news. The song's had a sort of pincer movement performed on it.

We live in an age where any decent song is rapidly reduced to being just a corporate shill. Advertising, the most evil concept ever, debases anything you love in order to make you buy things you don't need from people you don't like.

The Cure's Pictures of You sells computer printers ('these pictures of you, I almost believe that they're real' - geddit? See what they did there?).

Stuart Maconie said of Frank Wilson's supreme northern soul belter Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)

If you want to know what the magic of Northern Soul is, get yourself a copy... and allow yourself to be swept away by its life-affirming, luminous, lump-in-the-throat beauty and effervescence.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no ailment or depression so profound and weighty that two and a half minutes in the company of this fabulous tune won't lift and banish.

These days it's the soundtrack for fried chicken adverts.

And of course, everything you ever cared about, from The Jam's harsh description of urban deprivation Town Called Malice, to Nick Drake's magical gossamer Pink Moon to Led Zeppelin's frenzied Rock n Roll, sells fucking cars.

Here's the new ad for the Lincoln MKT.



I'm off to put my head in the oven.

iceland's hydrogen bus stop

Last year I wrote a piece called Hydrogen: Not The Vehicle Fuel of The Future.

Amongst the things I mentioned was the way that Shell had touted its hydrogen powered buses in Iceland as some sort of pilot scheme for the rest of the world. I gave reasons why Shell were - undoubtedly knowingly - wrong.

Iceland is not only peculiar because it is sat on more renewable energy than it can use (a few huge hydroelectric plants and a hell of a lot of geothermal energy); it is also little more than a city state. It has a population the size of Bradford and two-thirds of them live in one city. So all you need is three or four filling stations and you’re covered. That simply cannot be scaled up to the UK, or anywhere else. The rest of us need a different solution.

There's a punchline to it. According to a recent New Scientist article

A trial of three hydrogen-powered buses ended in 2007, when two were scrapped and the third was consigned to a transport museum.

green britain day

Today is Green Britain Day, sponsored by power company EDF.

Under the government's Renewables Obligation, electricity suppliers must source a minimum amount of their power from renewable sources. This year, that's 9.1%.

EDF get only 6% of theirs from renewables, and must therefore pay a fine or buy credit from other people's certificates of renewable generation. They get 49% of their electricity - above the UK average - from coal, the most carbon intensive form of generating power yet devised.

Corporate Social Responsibility will continue to be little more than PR for as long as it is easier and cheaper to spin than to change.

- Corporate Watch, 'What's Wrong With Corporate Social Responsibility' report.
(PDF here, buy hard copy here)

economists vs climate

Guardian and Observer columnist Will Hutton says 'the environment is too important to be left to the green movement'.

Right out of the blocks, it's like he wants his opinion to be shot down. The article is based around the new book by his friend, Labour peer and The Third Way author, Anthony Giddens.

Given the groundswell of climate activism in the teeth of state opposition compared to the runaway train of hopeless implosional incompetence and sleaze in the Labour party, you've got to admire his brass balls for starting with

The green movement as it stands should receive the last rites.

But anyway, allegiances aside, let's deal with what he actually says.

The best arguments to kill the "so-what" factor over climate change are not scary tales from a far-distant future. It is to argue for investment in energy efficiency because it saves cash and makes strategic sense.

This is right, to an extent. Given the choice between cutting back consumption - feeling like you're not providing for your family - versus a few polar bears karking it, the guys in fur don't stand a chance. As George Marshall has made clear, climate change is not a mere environmental issue and we have to stop talking about it in those terms.

So yes, let us emphasise the immediate and personal benefits of climate mitigation, where it is true. But what about where it's not? What about where it costs more?

As if to illustrate this, Hutton goes on

Cars powered by electricity or hydrogen are cheaper.

No they are not. Hydrogen car makers won't sell any, only lease out a handful of them as decoys. Three guesses as to why.

In December 2002 Yozo Kami, Honda’s engineer in charge of hydrogen fuel cells, said it would take at least ten years to get the price of a hydrogen car down to $100,000. This from the people making one of the cheapest prototypes.

Some of the changes we make will cost us more. Some of the changes are for the benefit of the others elsewhere, geographically or chronologically. But if the Conservatives can make such a splash with their frankly brilliant 'Gordon Brown's debt' campaign focus, we can presume people are amenable to the idea of not fucking over your immediate descendants. Providing for your family and protecting resources for your children amount to the same thing.

many mainstream environmental intellectuals drop rigour when it comes to the environment, climate change and risk. Under the precautionary principle, almost nothing should be done that endangers the climate, just in case the worst scientific warnings are right. The aim should be sustainable development - to grow economically in a way that passes the globe on to the next generation in the same condition in which we found it.

Giddens joins Lawson in dismissing this thinking as wretchedly woolly. Are we really going to risk nothing? This is a refutation of our very risk-taking humanity.

The precautionary principle is not about being a quivering timid fool, 'risking nothing'. It is about ensuring that if there's a risk of serious and irreversible harm then those advocating the action must prove that the risk is worth taking. In this case, they must show that those worst scientific warnings are highly unlikely.

The idea that we should discount the precautionary principle on climate issues because of some inherent primal 'risk taking humanity' is, in itself, the most wretchedly woolly thinking I've heard in quite some time.

As a tangent, since when do we have that? Humans are almost universally prey to a range of risk-averse activities such as paranoia, vertigo and nervously worrying about mutually exclusive possibilities, every bit as much as we are reckless.

But anyway,

sustainable and development should not be used together so loosely. Development is a dynamic concept that necessarily depletes resources. Poor countries such as China or India can only develop unsustainably. They must burn coal. To ask the entire world to commit to sustainable development is to damn the less developed world to poverty. Those countries will never agree.

To say they can ever catch up to western levels of consumption is an even crueller strategy than letting them try. It will turn out to be impossible and saddle future generations with a legacy of squandered resources and climate change (as well as inflict poverty through the effects of climate change).

Jared Diamond compared American consumption to that of other countries and calculated

China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent. If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.

This does not, though, mean 'damning them to poverty'. We can use our resources to feed, clothe, house and medicate everyone without the extraneous tat that - and let's get this message out - doesn't really contribute to western happiness anyway. Clean water, clean power sources? You got it. Ready availability of 134 different types of cheese from around the world? Gotta lose that.

Having some countries develop by inflicting climate change on the rest is not a matter of justice or poverty mitigation. It's about making a few rich at the expense of the many.

the G20 protesters interpret climate change as proof positive of the evils of capitalism and the capitalist state... Climate change cannot be a political game, to be played as and when it suits particular protesters - G20ers or middle-class nimbys

Ah yes, because the G20 protesters are clutching at anything to validate their randomly chosen position. It's not that they see climate change as a symptom of a wider problem, or as the inevitable result of a literally insane system that thinks we can consume an indefinitely increasing amount of finite resources. They're just 'playing it when it suits them'.

Still, a former stockbroker turned economics journalist is unlikely to be able to question the basics of our economic model, even if it can be explained in less than two sentences why it is completely delusional.

Capitalism is not the cause of climate change (anyone see what the Soviet Union did in terms of industrial facilities?), but it is a system predicated on perpetual economic growth, which means spiralling consumption of resources, notably energy. To get ever increasing amounts of energy as cheaply as possible, we will burn fossil fuels. Certainly, we would not leave lucrative fossil fuels in the ground. This makes consumer-capitalism and climate change inseparable.

As George Monbiot highlighted

In a lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering in May, Professor Rod Smith of Imperial College explained that a growth rate of 3% means economic activity doubles in 23 years. At 10% it takes just 7 years. This we knew. But Smith takes it further. With a series of equations he shows that "each successive doubling period consumes as much resource as all the previous doubling periods combined."

In other words, if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2030, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs. Then, between 2030 and 2053, we must double our total consumption again.

When we're at a point where even the stock of renewable resources are collapsing, it's time to use the word crisis, and past time to be an apologist for a system that wants us to accelerate into the abyss.

god forbids climate change

On 25th March, Illinois Representative John Shimkus was on the panel considering climate change for the US House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment.

Sounds quite a normal thing for an elected politician like him to do, and indeed it is. There, we part ways with normality. He opened with a quote from the Book of Genesis.

I want to start with Genesis 8, verse 21 and 22.

"Never again will I curse the ground because of man even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood, and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done. As long as the Earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease".

I believe that's the infallible word of God and that's the way it's going to be for his creation... I do believe God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.

OK, even before he's tried to talk about climate change, he's cocked up. Because, even within the bizarre blinker-vision world of those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, he's fucked. As I've said before, the Book of Genesis cannot be infallible and perfect.

Which creation story is true? There are two. Not in an interpretation-of-metaphor way but in that straightforward creationist-style literal obvious-meaning-of-the-words sense.

In chapter 1 of Genesis God makes light, water, land, plants, animals, and then lastly in verse 27 he makes man and woman at the same time. Less than a page later, at a time before the earth has plants, he makes the first man from dust who has 15 verses of mooching about getting lonely before God pulls out a rib and builds a woman.

Even on the real-world stuff Shimkus is something of a wobbly clown.

The cost of a cap-and-trade on the poor is now being discovered.

He illustrates this with a picture of some miners who lost their jobs.

Firstly, for every miner that loses their job you'll find a wind turbine builder of insulation installer who gains one. If we wanted to, we could even make it be the same people retrained.

Secondly, American miners are not poor. Not poor like subsistence farmers already dried off Eastern African lands or Bangladeshi farmers flooded off their only lands, anyway.

OUT FOR THE VISCOUNT

The Subcommittee inexplicably heard from fully qualified swivel-eyed loon Viscount Monckton. That he is a hereditary peer and former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher are reasons to dislike him, but not discount him. The fact that he readily and unrepentantly admits to being a liar should ring some alarm bells, though.

They said, 'Don't you mind being made to look an absolute prat', and I said, 'No - I'm quite used to that'. History is full of stories that aren't actually true.

It's his complete lack of climate expertise is the thing that should have him kept away from such hearings. Like his brother-in-law Dominic Lawson, he's a climate denier, one who likes to use lots of impressive sounding but personally faked evidence to prove his position.

One interviewer said that

he suffers an extreme case of the patrician sense that good breeding and a decent classical education equip you for anything, even for outwitting the collective intelligence of the world's best scientific brains

Nonetheless, he's called by the Representatives as if he were some kind of expert.

He's had contact with the American government before. When Senators called on ExxonMobil to stop espousing climate-denying nonsense, Monckton wrote an open letter. Of course, he wasn't a climate scientist back then either, but he explained that he was writing in his capacity as 'a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature'. One problem there - he isn't any such thing. He simply lied to make himself sound more impressive than he really is. Again.

And so we see him there at the Subcommittee, his mouth is open and noise is coming out. That could never be a good thing.

Carbon dioxide is a plant food, it's necessary. Without it all plant life and therefore all life that depends on plantlife would disappear.

He's absolutely right. So everyone who is campaigning to remove all carbon dioxide from the atmosphere should stop right now. Go on, all none of you.

Shirkus likes Monckton's point and extrapolates. The problem with carbon emissions is that there aren't enough of them.

So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?... So all our good intentions could be for vain. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.

Presumably, he thinks there were no plants around before we started emitting greenhouse gases.

SAVING THE WORLD

Whatever Mr Shirkus or certain climate activists may think, averting climate change is not about 'saving the world'. Anyone who talks of 'saving the world' has delusions of grandeur. Humanity and the world are not synonymous. Algae, ants, rats, Keith Richards, all seem impervious to harm that would kill humans, and any of them may well come out on top after colossal habitat changes. Contrary to the opinion of those who think self-contradictory bronze age texts are perfect and infallible, the world is not here for human use.

The planet is incomprehensibly robust. Life is robust. Humanity is comparatively frail. Modern mass society, for all its many securities, sees much of our frailty multiplied. Earthquakes would have killed very few people five thousand years ago. What kills when they strike today is the collapsing buildings. It is humanity, especially modernised humanity, that is in peril. Not 'the planet'.

ADAPTATION

Texan Representative Joe Barton said

Adapting is a common natural way for people to adapt to their environment.

Hard to disagree with that one, isn't it?

I believe that the earth’s climate is changing, but I think it’s changing for natural variation reasons. And I think mankind has been adapting to climate as long as man has walked the earth. When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we get shade. When it’s cold, we find a warm place to stay'.

In prehistoric times we could readily migrate. To pick a point in comparitively recent history, when Britain's neolithic monuments were built there were about twenty million people on earth. Today the combined population of India's two biggest cities exceed that. Half the global population lives in places that would be affected by serious sea level increases. We all live in places built on certain climatic certainties of water supply and temperature.

We're also dependent on those same certainties for the places far away that supply our needs. The sheer numbers of us mean we are dependent on global food production being sustained. Mess with the heat and the rainfall and we're in trouble.

At the same time, we are dependent on others to do it for us. The basics of human life are mysterious to us modern humans. How many people you know could find their own clean water or make fire? Despite the deniers cliaming climate activists want us to go back to living in caves and foraging for grubs, it's drastic action on carbon emissions that will prevent us having to do that.

So, why would we risk catastrophe if it were easily averted? Because, says Joe Barton with a straight face, adapting to climate change is easier than adapting to the 'devastation' of a cap-and-trade policy (of the kind we've had in Europe for the last five years without most people noticing).

WE LET THEM IN THERE

We expect there to be loons. No threat has been so great as to be universally recognised, no policy so self-evidently sensible that there haven't been those who'll confidently decry it. And people often want to do wacky things in the name of religion. Stick Mr Shirkus with the Heaven's Gate crew waiting for the flying saucer people to rescue us, I'm sure he'd be happy.

What is indefensible and dangerous is that those with such ludicrous beliefs - impervious to evidence, using one another as references to prove their absurd point - get taken seriously in places charged with making policy for the real world. Allowing them in to positions of power is an act as ill-informed and deranged as they are.

burn baby burn

Jeremy Hardy has argued that we need to stop using the military euphemisms. There is, he says, something obscuring about calling kidnap for torture 'rendition'. It's a word you used to hear on the Two Ronnies with Corbett saying 'and now here's Barbara Dickson with a lovely rendition of a song,' and it didn't then have her waterboarding Ronnie Barker.

Personally, I'd add 'waterboarding' to the list. It sounds like a daring adventure sport rather than a terrifying method of torture.

Local government in Leeds seems to be following the American government's example, though. Leeds City Council are pushing this through doors in the city.



It's full of positive reports of Leeds' recycling, a visit to the sorting plant in the city (no more sending it to China for recycling that was actually sly landfill), encouragement to compost at home and other worthy things.

Turn to the back page and you find this.



A 'solution'. That sounds practical and good doesn't it? Who wouldn't want a solution?

It explains that they are going

to build a facility to deal with Leeds' waste and stop us having to rely on landfill sites.

Less landfill, great.

The council are currently working hard to appoint a successful contractor to build this facility.

Working hard, that's good to hear too, isn't it? And a successful contractor will be appointed? Great. Lovely lovely reassuring soothing positive words. Verbal Horlicks.

And, like pretty much any leaflet that uses that sort of language, it's a load of PR waffle. Given that the contractor's appointment is the definition of their success, 'appoint a successful contractor' is somewhat tautological.

But what's missing from this picture? There's the word 'solution' and three uses of 'facility'. No further information given.

What they're actually talking about is a PFI rubbish incinerator to be built in the city. But if they said 'incinerator at several times the cost of construction and operation with a chimney near thousands of your houses' it wouldn't sound as nice.

With this 'solution', the people of Leeds will pay over the odds to burn rubbish, with a serious risk of high pollution emissions in the city and a disincentive to ever reduce the amount of rubbish they produce or recycle.

Until recently, Leeds was governed by an unlikely coalition of LibDems, Conservatives and Greens. After some hesitancy, the Greens came out against the incinerator, and were put in the peculiar position of arguing against their own administration's policy.

With the Council pushing ahead with the plan regardless, in May 2007 the Greens acted with integrity and resigned from the coalition, saying 'the solution is not incineration or recycling, but waste reduction'.

But just as Windscale is Sellafield, as the War on Terror is the 'overseas contingency operation', as charcoal is biochar, so incinerators are now Energy From Waste facilities. So there's not only no need to reduce waste, but a reason to actively increase it.

Accelerates unsustainable consumption, hits all the targets, misses all the point.