WAKE UP AND SMELL THE GREENWASH

Last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that by 2050 ‘a million species could face extinction'! In the same year Tony Blair publicly announced that cutting carbon dioxide emissions was ‘essential to ‘avert disaster'' yet recently leaked documents reveal that the UK government was simultaneously attempting ‘to remove targets that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions during high-level meetings to formulate Europe's climate policy' (The Independent, 16.01.05). IT'S A SHAM, a facade, an act, a rip-off, a con, a trick ... Tony Blair is the Greenwash Guru, arguing that market environmentalism and the Kyoto Protocol will save the day. A Protocol, lets remember, which is not only a flawed method of reducing CO² emissions but involves turning the atmosphere into a giant commodity to be bought and sold like barrels of oil by traders, governments and corporations, further deepening the world's already gaping imbalances of power and not even effectively reducing emissions into the bargain!

A more realistic picture of Tony goes something like this ... he pedals a government that annually invests ₤40 million into research projects that are of direct benefit to the fossil fuel industry, has recently given the green light to a ₤5.5 billion road building programme, the biggest for two decades and his own Environment Agency has invested ‘₤64 million in oil firms [BP and Shell] that have been condemned for contributing to flooding and climate change' (The Independent, 07.01.03).

At the 2005 G8 summit we can unite in our opposition to climate chaos and the capitalist system creating it, our commitment to direct action and civil disobedience as the most effective form of struggle.

Not only that, we can build a European Climate Justice Network that can look beyond the G8 Summit and Blair's ‘leadership' of the EU and begin to challenge the global capitalist system, which has led us to the brink of climate chaos on a scale never before seen by human eyes. Solutions to this problem will not come from career path politicians or oil executives but from the bottom up, from the grassroots, from us.

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