Holyrood 350 — H35O

What to hope for? That 2011 is a break­through year for ecol­ogy and social jus­tice: that we dare to reclaim pol­i­tics from cor­po­ra­tions, and for com­mu­nity; that we replace the boom and bust cycle of the prof­i­teers, and reclaim the econ­omy for the peo­ple. Sim­ple. All the main par­ties are caught up in the logic […]

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That was an even more mis­er­able result than expected for those of us who at least thought the politi­cians would agree on unfair, unam­bi­tious, inad­e­quate but at least legally bind­ing emis­sion cut­ting tar­gets. For those who expected noth­ing of them, their expec­ta­tions are ful­filled. For us all, after a mis­er­able Copen­hagen: What next? The sug­ges­tion here […]

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Firstly, a 1962 advert in which ESSO boasts of it’s power to melt ice­bergs! Richard Hein­berg sums up what hap­pened in Copen­hagen and bril­liantly por­trays the larger con­text. Rob Edwards quotes James Cur­ran (Head of Sci­ence at the Scot­tish Envi­ron­ment Pro­tec­tion Agency) response in The Her­ald George Mon­biot in The Guardian sum­mar­ises what hap­pened at […]

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Along with about 45,000 other peo­ple I’ve been at the Bella Cen­tre in Copen­hagen where the main UN Cli­mate Change nego­ti­a­tions and side events have been hap­pen­ing in a place capa­ble of hold­ing only 15,000 peo­ple (see Day One below). Then I joined 100,000 folk to march on the Bella Cen­tre to demand real action now […]

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Kevin Ander­son, of the world renowned cli­mate sci­ence Tyn­dall Cen­tre, was in Glas­gow last week giv­ing a talk in which he took the most opti­mistic IPCC mod­els he could and still arrived at a pic­ture of the future in which human extinc­tion seemed pretty much assured since ‘mar­ket eco­nom­ics can­not deal with non-marginal changes’ and […]

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Great pho­tos here! As John Riley writes: the great suc­cess of this event “was very much down to the hard work of Keith Baker & Cindy Cour­tillier. Despite the driz­zly rain it was really uplift­ing day”. Led by John and the Samba Band from Big­gar and else­where, about 150 of us marched down the Royal […]

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Just in case you haven’t seen this arti­cle. It helps to estab­lish just what are the “Lim­its to Growth” — includ­ing the other lim­its besides cli­mate change: Fea­ture: “A safe oper­at­ing space for human­ity“ Nature 461, 472–475 (24 Sep­tem­ber 2009) | doi:10.1038/461472a; Pub­lished online 23 Sep­tem­ber 2009 “Iden­ti­fy­ing and quan­ti­fy­ing plan­e­tary bound­aries that must not be […]

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As peo­ple from com­mu­nity ini­tia­tives cam­paign­ing in sup­port of the Scot­tish Government’s cli­mate change tar­gets – and propos­ing the rad­i­cal mea­sures required for them to ful­fil and sur­pass those tar­gets — we appre­ci­ate every help­ful tar­get they estab­lish, every pol­icy that helps, and pos­i­tively insist that they (and we) must (and can) do far more […]

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On June 24th 2009 Scot­land made his­tory by estab­lish­ing the most ambi­tious cli­mate change tar­gets of any indus­tri­alised coun­try: Aim­ing to cut emis­sions on 1990 lev­els by 80% by 2050, and by 42% by 2020. Scot­land is able to place its cards on the table in this way because it is not (yet) fully inde­pen­dent and […]

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Pro­fes­sor Jacque­line McGlade’s lec­ture (at FoE’s ‘Build­ing a low car­bon econ­omy’ 30th anniver­sary event at the McE­wan Hall, Edin­burgh on Mon­day Feb­ru­ary 9th 2009) was an exce­lent sum­mary of the sit­u­a­tion, but Lord Adair Turner’s rec­om­mended solu­tion seemed to lag way behind McGlade’s sci­en­tific diag­no­sis. It was excel­lent that the event hap­pened, that 80% is […]

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