We should all be at Heathrow protesting

Johann Hari: We should all be at Heathrow protesting

It is collective pressure on government, not consumer choices, that
the world needs now

Published: 13 August 2007

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2859059.ece

This week, two thousand people will gather at London's Heathrow
airport with tents and sleeping bags - not to EasyJet to the beach,
but to alert their fellow citizens to the Weather of Mass Destruction
we are unleashing.

If you need to know why this is necessary, take a look at the world
the deniers are so glibly averting their eyes from. The two countries
doomed to drown by global warming in my lifetime have already begun to
disappear beneath the waves. Almost half of Bangladesh is under water
as you read this, following monsoons four times more ferocious than
they should be. Ten million people are now homeless in the region. In
the Maldives, a series of massive swell waves stretching to 4.5 metres
drowned 68 islands this spring. The residents know the waves are
getting bigger every year, and soon they will swallow their homes
forever.

We are living at a time when the most politically important part of
any news broadcast is the weather forecast. I have just been out on
the borders of Darfur, meeting some of the survivors of the first
global warming- triggered genocide. For decades, the Arab nomads and
the settled African farmers of the region got along fairly well, with
elaborate procedures to share the region's water. But then, as the UN
Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon recently explained: "Two decades ago,
the rains in southern Sudan began to fail. According to UN statistics,
average precipitation has declined some 40 percent since the early
1980s." This was, he said, almost certainly the result of global
warming.

With the water supplies swiftly disappearing, Darfur's fragile Arab-
African relations broke down - and one side decided the only way they
could survive was to drive their thirsty rivals away, or into a mass
grave.

It is not only the poor world that is being shafted by the
destabilisation of the planet's climate into chaos. Britain has just
been battered by the kind of floods that should only happen every 200
years - except they have happened twice in a six-year stretch.

The protesters at Heathrow are trying to shake us awake, so we do not
sleepwalk into more and more of this. Over the next week they will be
smeared and slandered as "vandals" and "eco-terrorists". (The
Government has disgracefully encouraged the police to use powers
introduced to deal with jihadi murderers against them.) But far from
being "violent", they are trying to prevent the vast and growing
violence of global warming, without hurting a single human being.

Last year, the protesters targeted the Drax coal-fuelled power-station
in Yorkshire. This year, they have chosen Heathrow, an airport with a
fifth terminal opening in March and demands for a sixth already in,
for a simple reason. The current expansion in flying is, on its own, a
guarantee that Britain will fail to meet even the most modest of its
environmental targets.

Look at the figures. Flying currently accounts for nearly 20 percent
of Britain's impact on global warming - and unlike the other factors,
it is growing rapidly. The Tyndall Centre for Global Warming, one of
the world's most distinguished scientific bodies, has calculated that
air travel alone will take up 134 percent of the Government's
greenhouse gas targets by 2050. That means that even if we stopped
every car and shut every factory, flying alone would guarantee we
fail. If Britain - one of the richest countries in the world - can't
do it, we cannot pressure anyone else to.

Rather than deal with this real and persuasive argument, the right has
been inventing straw-men to savage the protesters with. You want to
keep the poor world poor! No, it is global warming that will keep
people poor - just ask the people of Darfur.

You are snobs, who sneer at working class people flying to Ibiza! No,
we would love people to be able to take more cheap holidays, and to
take them ourselves, if it wasn't for the fact it will contribute to
global disaster. You are, The Times jeered, "dogmatic flat-earthists"
opposed to science! No, we are acting on the overwhelming scientific
consensus.

And, finally they splutter - but you are so impractical! Actually, the
group Plane Stupid!, whose organisers have been absurdly banned from
the camp, has a very practical agenda to reduce these air-emissions.
The first is easy: stop the Government from handing the airline
industry vast sums of taxpayers' money. They pay no VAT, no tax on
their fuel, and have the Government pick up the tab for much of their
construction and maintenance work. The former Treasury economist
Brendan Sewell has calculated that this is worth £10bn a year.
Transfer this cash to cleaner, greener forms of transport.

Gordon Brown is doing the opposite: he has just appointed Digby Jones,
straight from his job as spokesman for big industry, including the
airlines, to the Government. As Chancellor, Brown championed the
Heathrow expansion. Only hard political pressure - showing that
further expansion plans will stir public rage - can change his course.

The Plane Stupid! agenda has two other demands: halt all expansion of
airports, and ban short-haul flights. It's astonishing to realise that
the most popular destinations from Heathrow are Manchester and Paris,
both of which can be reached easily on trains which are almost as fast
and 10 times less polluting. Currently, half of all flights within
Europe go less than 500km - the distance from London to Scotland.
Flying needs to become the very last travel option, after every
alternative has been exhausted.

Since so much environmental reporting by the right has turned into a
game of gotcha! against greens like Al Gore, I should explain my
attitude to my own carbon emissions. I don't drive, and I never take
short-haul flights. I only take long-haul flights for work, where I
kid myself that reporting on human rights abuses makes it worth
spending some carbon. I know the atmosphere does not hear my excuses,
and nor do the victims of global warming.

But it is not enough for a few people to voluntarily restrain
ourselves, while everyone else carries on. We need to all be
restrained, by law, or we will all face spiralling climate chaos.
That's why joining the climate camp is even more important than
changing your lightbulbs or recycling or shifting to a hybrid car: it
is collective pressure on government, not dulled and dispersed
consumer choices, that the world needs now.

Leila, a London admin assistant helping to prepare the camp, said this
weekend: "I realised that if I don't take action, I'm going to spend
my old age watching more floods, more droughts and more death, in the
knowledge I could have done something." To find out how to join her,
go to www.climatecamp.org.uk. How will you explain it to the drowned
people of Bangladesh - and the North of England - if you don't?

j.hari@ independent.co.uk

date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:01:15 -0700 author: SB