Pat Thomas writes: My guests this week are right in the thick of the microgeneration revolution. Mary Walsh is a lawyer and an expert in renewable energy development who devotes her time and portfolio of skills to helping groups develop and/or finance new energy initiatives. Chas Warlow is project manager at one of London’s most ambitious microgeneration projects, Ham Hydro, a social enterprise which is harnessing the power of community to bring clean hydroelectricity to residents on both sides of Teddington Weir on the river Thames.
A micro edition of Deep Fried Planet with new host Pat Thomas, who writes: My guests for this edition of Deep Fried Planet will be campaigning barrister Polly Higgins, whose new book ’Eradicating Ecocide‘ argues that the best way to save the planet from corporate and political corruption and destruction is to make ecocide a recognised crime against peace. I’ll also be joined by activist-lawyer James Thornton, founder of the environmental law group ClientEarth, which works in Europe and beyond to find pragmatic ways to make the law work for the environment instead of against it.
Climate Rush are back with a snazzily redesigned website and an event in London on 13 October, 7-8pm @ Toynbee Hall, Commercial St, E1. The hour of talks and workshops features Caroline Lucas MEP, Suffragette historian Diane Atkinson, Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp plus Tamsin Omond and Helen Boutler from Climate Rush. Update: Climate Rush confront the editor of the Daily Express. Links & References
Former Chair of Friends of the Earth International gives the John Preedy Memorial Lecture at the Friends of the Earth Local Groups Conference on Sunday 12th September 2010.
International climate change politics analysis at 22 mins and questions from 35 minutes until end.
The first in a possible series of responses to George Monbiot’s recent declaration that the international climate change process is dead.
Oil Painting Protest over BP sponsorship in Tate Modern Turbine Hall
Liberate Tate calls for footprint of art museum to be free from Big Oil
Tuesday (14 September) art activists from Liberate Tate staged a guerrilla art intervention in Tate Modern, covering the floor of the iconic Turbine Hall with dozens of litres of oil paint in protest at the museum taking sponsorship from BP.
The flash mob-style event was staged a day before a Tate Board of Trustees meeting. Liberate Tate are part of a growing public movement calling on Tate’s governing body to end its sponsorship agreement with the oil company. Tate’s Board of Trustees has decided to review the BP corporate sponsorship…
Merchants of Doubt – How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming – Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway (Bloomsbury Press, £25)
In 2006 the tobacco industry was convicted of criminal conspiracy to defraud the public about the dangers of smoking. Internal documents from the 1960s released during the landmark trial show that the industry’s own scientists had confirmed the link between smoking and cancer. Yet for over fifty years the tobacco companies waged a multi-million dollar campaign to put doubt into the public mind, muddy the waters by funding their own research and fend off both court cases and government regulation.
Similarly with climate change, as early as 1979 the basic science was settled. That year President Jimmy Carter commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to review the available science and the NAS concluded: “If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate change will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”
