Tag: climate-change

Heat Strikes not Heat Strokes

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment published in the Plymouth Herald newspaper on 7th May 2024, urging the trade unions to take-up the call for maximum temperatures in workplaces, and for union reps to negotiate protections with employers. The trade unions, matching the leadership of the Labour Party, have detracted from organising on the issue of Climate Change and the impacts from the consequent extreme weather, and this has to change. Unions will have to challenge the Labour leadership ahead-of and immediately after the Party’s victory at the upcoming General Election. We must organise for that, now! PS, the weather is scorching hot today!

The ground is drying out at last. Local farmers are sowing and planting, seeking to supply us as well as compensate themselves for the over-winter losses.

We’ve had extreme levels of wet weather, already most of the average annual rainfall by the beginning of May. The soil has been too wet to work without destroying its composition, the winter crops rotting. 

This is just another example of The Change. No-one is honestly denying that Climate Change is with us, even if those wedded to fossil fuels and their private SUV’s want to argue against the cause. 

The speed and scale of change is not natural. Global warming is caused by the massive emission of gases, CO2, nitrous oxide and methane overwhelmingly produced by human methods of production, that trap heat inside the atmosphere causing land and sea to warm and expand, emitting more heat-trapping gases. 

The result is more extreme weather and the extreme shifts between weather patterns. One minute drenching down pours, the next, skin-burning heat. At a global level, deserts may be suddenly flooded, as in Dubai last week, or flood plains quickly turn to dust as in some southern states of the USA. 

The British Isles has seen the wettest winter and spring alongside it being the one of the warmest in record. The global heating creates more evaporation across the Atlantic and that produces more precipitation, rain to fall down on us. It’s going to get warmer but wetter, and most importantly, less predictable.

Nevertheless, every time the sun peers through the increasingly heavy and dark clouds, newspapers will carry front page news proclaiming “What a Scorcher!” with photographs of families lounging on beaches. Rubbish!

The majority of us will be at work, whatever the weather or time of year. And those outside will be at increasing risk of sun burn.

The extremes of weather will produce extremes of temperature, with unprecedented heights of heat waves becoming more frequent in the UK. 

High temperatures can be fatal for many elderly people, infants, disabled people and also workers exposed to heat for long periods.

The lack of health and safety regulations in the UK means that there are laws on working in the cold – minimum workplace temperatures below which you’d can stop work – but no laws on the maximum temperature. 

In recent years, because of global warming, heatwaves across the USA and Europe have led to the deaths of workers either in the outdoors or in extremely hot workplaces – building sites and kitchens are two examples, but glass sided office blocks are just as risky. 

It should be clear that the warming climate and heatwaves are trade union issues. Workers now require protection from extreme weather. 

Here’s some examples. If we are prevented from getting to work by transport disruption, or the workplace is unusable by flooding, our contracts should ensure we still get paid. If the workplace is too hot (much above 22 degrees Celsius) we should be sent home, and if we work from home, the employer should supply the air-conditioning to prevent over-heating. 

Union representatives have to be sitting with employers now to agree “conditions of service” – workplace conditions, that recognise the impacts of extreme or severe weather and protect the workforce. 

And for all the naysayers and climate deniers who consider such health and safety as woke, just look around you. A few years ago every time we had a heatwave people used to go out and sunbathe. Now, we sit in the shade under the trees, where they’re still standing, because the heat is becoming uncomfortable. 

If our employers refuse to invest in safe work conditions we should protect ourselves by joining together and refusing to suffer the discomfort. Instead of risking heat strokes, we should organise heat strikes!

The Climate Crisis Demands a Unified Response

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald, published on 2nd January 2024, making very basic and obvious points about the refreshed politic of climate denial being ramped-up by the mainstream parties. As the General Election looms closer, the backtracking and pooh-poohing of demands for action to save people and planet are going to overwhelm the mainstream media, despite all evidence to the contrary. We have to speak out and Act Now!

Last weekend’s welcomed rest and relaxation was certainly disrupted. Fierce downpours onto already sodden land ensured more local flooding. The transport disruption and electricity outages had one common cause – our increasingly extreme weather conditions.

There’s more to come. According to the World Metereological Association, 2023 saw a “deafening cacophony of broken records” across all climate measurements, the record heat set to escalate due to the “super El Niño” this year. Entire regions are already experiencing environmental and social catastrophe.

Last  year was the hottest year on record, and 2024 will be hotter still. Extreme heat, driven not only by the unprecedented levels of greenhouse gas emissions but also the development of the peak in the eleven year cycle of ocean warming, will ensure more intense heatwaves, wildfires and heavy rains which will threaten food production and transport dislocation.

The response to this, locally and globally, is abysmal. Here, and across much of the world, governments and politicians are pulling back from previous commitments and any future promises towards climate action.

In general they consider that any State spending on emissions reduction is a vote loser, the majority of the electorate (not the same grouping as the majority of the population) do not want to see tax money spent on social infrastructure such as home insulation, subsidies for renewable energy production and carbon-zero heating. 

This is untrue, of course. Most of us are worried about climate change, made anxious not so much the big threats of species extinction and global climate collapse which we feel powerless to affect, but the local day-to-day and observable impacts that cause us higher costs and growing discomfort. 

We also share a common nagging tension at the back of our heads about the potential major challenges facing our children. 

But the reaction against climate action is gaining hold. 2024 is election year, not just here in the UK but in the huge economies of the United States and India as well as countries across Europe. 

In every country where political tension is increasing due to the continuing cost-of-living crisis, investment in social infrastructure is being disparaged and condemned in favour of tax cuts – mainly for the wealthy. 

A narrative is being stoked – squeeze the power and costs of the State and free us all to live by our own wits and resources. It is an extreme individualist argument, borne of the far-Right of the political spectrum which always espouses survival of the fittest – despising and damning the poor and those in need of levels of help they cannot manage alone. 

The organised far-Right in every land is growing in capacity and influence. And the traditionally mainstream parties are kowtowing to this contrived “populist” vote, scapegoating minorities and ridiculing warnings of potential catastrophe. 

The “culture wars” are being ramped-up to publicly condemn any show of concern for others, for social welfare, or for the climate, as “woke”, spineless and unrealistic. 

There appears to be no mainstream party now demanding the scale of action required to reorder society to ensure resilience to the deepening climate crisis. The challenge to the Climate Movement, failing to be heard let alone to win timely government acton at the scale required, is immense. 

Nevertheless, our strategy has to be broadcast. Nothing less than a National Climate Service, overseeing all government agencies and ensuring the focus of all policy and spending towards climate action, will ensure protection of the tens of millions of working class people here. We require help to mitigate environmentally destructive routines and adapt to life inside unpredictable environmental conditions. 

This cannot be achieved by a local and piecemeal approach alone. We have to campaign for societal reorganisation and investment. And this year, that campaign is distinctly ideological, openly challenging the forces of corporate power and far-Right class privilege. 

Another Year of Inaction on the Climate Disaster

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 14th December 2023. The protests in Plymouth this year were small, the core of climate activists here depleted dramatically from the thousands pre-COVID lockdown. It’s hard to know why the issue has so little resonance at present, other than the cost-of-living crisis and general emotional sense of vulnerability seeing into the consciousness of the entire working class here. It’s a time for shutting the front door, keeping the outside outside and seeking some solace in the warm hearth of the holiday period (if you can afford the heating). Our climate march, joined with the local Palestine protest, managed over 120 people, whilst the Climate Summit, heavily publicised and built towards over the previous 6 months, drew 50 people – all already in the know. These are increasingly hard times, but a Movement of millions must be built quickly if we are to survive.

Why shouldn’t we be angry about the COP28 idiocy? A hugely expensive jamboree in the oil-rich Police State of UAE where 90% of the population are disallowed citizenship or human rights, protests are dangerously illegal, the government ministers and fossil fuel corporate executives packing-in 5-times the numbers of any citizen or NGO representatives, the rich flown-in on private jets to proclaim that it is the rest of us who have to tighten our belts because of the climate crisis whilst the poor remain voiceless.

Indeed, apparently, the climate catastrophe already killing millions each year and displacing millions more as climate refugees, is not the fault of greenhouse gas emissions. The President of COP28 this year, Sultan Al Jaber, head of the UAE State oil and gas company, says there is “no science” showing that we need to phase-out fossil fuels to restrict global heating to 1.5C.

After 30 years of this farce they’ve done nothing other than to protect the oil companies and their own voracious demand to get as rich as rich can be at the expense of people and planet. Yet thousands of scientific papers, peer-and-government reviewed before publication and published through the same United Nations entity, proves the precise opposite. These oil-rich billionaires should be considered as scum (a term recently judged by a UK court to be a perfectly legal derogatory term). 

The global average temperature in 2023 – the hottest year on record – actually reached 1.5C for a period. In fact, for three days it reached 2C. Whatever we do now, the changes to the earth’s climate have past tipping points that will ensure undeniable change everywhere – floods, fires, crop-failures, transport disruption and sudden extreme weather conditions displacing and killing people even here in wet-and-to-be-even-wetter England.

Unless we leave fossil fuels in the ground we have absolutely no hope of preventing climate breakdown. We are still putting more emissions into the atmosphere than we are stopping by moving to wind and solar. It doesn’t matter how many wind turbines you put up, or how many solar panels, unless you are scrapping the fossil fuel infrastructure and ensuring, through legislation, to leave coal, gas and oil in the ground, the Planet is going to boil. 

The highly effective and lethal fossil fuel lobbying, both inside the COP Conferences since 1992 and all day and night, every day and night, year-in and year-out, since the Second World War and before, has prevented most if not all effective action.

This has thwarted the simple things that need to be done. And while we sit and the years tick by, and we have so few years left now. We’re going to have to take drastic action if we’re going to avoid what could well be Earth systems collapse. This is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, and by design – as a result of the enormous oppressive and exploitative power of the fossil fuel industries.

And now they want the working classes of the world to pay for the clean-up, with our lives. Whilst the well-off and already entitled middle classes join the call for working class people to buy electric cars, eat pulses and wear hair-shirts, we live hand-to-mouth. One-third of Plymouth’s children are living in the poverty of damp housing, poor nutrition, rationed and paltry public transport, and charity-shop clothing, topped-up with food banks unable to meet the accelerating demands. 

Don’t you dare preach to us about buying an electric car or heat pump! Individually we haven’t the wherewithal. We challenge all moralising against the masses – individual actions are of little consequence given the scale of the challenge – it is the emissions at the point of production that have to be shut down, the rest will follow. The System has to change. 

The fossil fuel companies receive tax incentives to the tune of £11.5billion each year from the taxes we pay despite making record profits from energy bills three times the cost of 5 years ago. It is they, collectively, who should pay for this climate crisis, their billions in profits to be paid back-in to our society to immediately insulate and damp-proof our 14 million homes and decaying hospitals and schools, to renationalise and invest in decent free-to-use public transport, and train and recruit the millions of people required to change all production away from fossil fuels. 

We are in crisis right now – it’s visible. And that means we’ll have to change how we live, either by choice or necessity. But the lack of action by governments and corporation has shown we can’t rely upon them. Politicians will not legislate to stop all extraction of coal, gas and oil, and the corporations can’t transition in time, even if they wanted to. It’s the System of Capitalist exploitation – private profit -that has to be replaced or we face a torrid and barbaric future. 

COP28 used for Corporate Deals!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 27th November 2023. It was then of little surprise that, days later it emerged the President of COP28, Sultan Al Jabar, was quoted as saying that fossil fuels were not responsible for climate change (I paraphrase, but you get the gist). the corruption is beyond question, their culpability amounts to the greatest genocide in human history.

It should be of no surprise that the person in charge of this week’s Climate Conference is using the event to sign deals to extract more oil. The United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) has been held almost every year for more than three decades now and has achieved little or nothing. Some years ago it set targets for the global reductions in the emissions that warm the planet and destabilise the climate. In 2023 the emissions continue to rise, the target now requiring a 45% reduction in all our gases by 2030. 

It’s probably the case that no one believes the targets can possibly be reached. We are fast descending into a prolonged period of catastrophe for humanity and Nature’s Ecology. We are deep into the 6th Great Extinction of plant and animal life on the Planet, with Britain being the region most divested of wildlife on the Planet. 

The Climate Catastrophe, repeatedly predicted for over a century, is now with us, with 20,000 children forced to move forever from their inhospitable birthplaces every day. We face one billion, one thousand million humans, leaving their homelands in the Tropics, the southern states of the USA and southern countries of Europe, the centre of India and Southern China by the 2040’s.

Food shortages due to extreme weather conditions as well as long term regional climate changes will most certainly produce repeated global food shortages and transport disruption by the mid 2030’s if not much sooner. The resultant wars between states for the resources to maintain their societies have been predicted but are now actually with us – more than one hundred conflicts across Africa alone, and armies lining-up inside Europe itself. 

Civil wars sparked by food-shortages and unmanageable inflation levels are ensuring brutal repression of entire populations. The fear of mass migration is being ramped-up to ensure we are all desensitised to the plight of tens-of-millions of human beings, most but not all people of colour. Racism as a tool to dehumanise is being used to watch and ignore the development of refugee camps, millions of families living in crowded tents reliant on charitable food and water aid, and guarded by militia ready to shoot those who chance their lives on fleeing Northward for life and income.

So the revelations about the Conferences being used as bargaining bases to ensure higher emissions is just the latest damning indictment of the entire system. The United Nations is supposed to be the place where nations are brought together for international solidarity and support. It is not publicised as the broker of Corporate deals. The highest principal of the COP President is to rise above personal and national net rests to seek solutions for the common good. If the President of the COP process is seeking self-interest, then why shouldn’t everyone else? Trust in the COP process has collapsed. 

The COP28 Conference is supposed to be focussed upon the cutting the fossil-fuelled global warming emissions of C02, Methane, Nitrous Oxide and Fluorinated gases – all potent greenhouse gases. The drive towards renewable energy, greater energy efficiency leading to the reduction in the demand, and support and justice for those who are suffering the terrible consequences of climate change should be the focus for all decisions.

But the President of the COP28, the man presiding over the entire affair, is using the stage to ensure far more emissions. Dr Sultan al-Jaber is the head of the United Arab Emirates’ Oil company Adnoc. His company is talking with delegates to the COP28 about liquid natural gas projects in Mozambique, Canada and Australia, in collaboration with Germany and Egypt. The oil and gas deals carry-on being sealed, ensuring the predicted rise in global temperatures by at least 3Celcius by 2100, creating chaos to all human societies across the world.

This is corporate genocide on a global scale, funded and supported by corrupt government politicians focussed solely on short-term personal gain. From below, millions of conscious and empathetic human beings will be protesting throughout COP28, for human suffrage, climate justice and system change. The oil magnates and Sultans must be deposed. We have to force the end of fossil-fuel industries and global warming emissions now, or witness the end of human civilisation. 

Climate Conference Wake-up Call

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column published in the daily Plymouth Herald on 24th November. This is the local lead-up to our 10-days of actions and events coinciding with the COP28 United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai, UAE from next weekend. There is too much to say in less than 600 words, at a time when Climate is off the agenda and all protest actions are correctly focussed upon the genocide in Gaza. My attempt is to link the protests locally, identifying the common cause of climate collapse and genocide as Capitalism, and its most powerful presentation in the form of imperialism. the call for a joint protest march through the City centre is quite a gamble.

The TV news scenes flashed-up cars under water in Dubai following flash floods this week. The terms, “unprecedented” and “record-breaking” were spoken gravely for all the salaciousness and excitement that pulp-journalism could offer. They omitted to mention that Dubai will host the annual United Nations Climate Conference, a gathering of all interested parties next week. Corporations and their police allies will dominate the agenda.

This will be the COP28, in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, chaired by the oil magnate Sultan Al Jaber, managing director and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Over the past thirty years (they missed-off a couple of meetings) the COP process have intended to agree on policies to limit global temperature rises and adapt to impacts associated with climate change. 

They’ve failed miserably, the targets constantly revised upward, and with 2023 now witnessing the first period where global temperatures reached 2degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, the COP target being 1.5C. So much for greenwash talk. No wonder we’re protesting. 

Earlier this month, 9 women faced court charged with causing half-a-million pounds worth of criminal damage to the Canary Wharf headquarters of HSBC. None of the defendants, aged between 23 and 71, denied that, in April 2021, they used hammers and chisels to crack the windows of the Corporate headquarters and glued-on stickers reading “£80billion invested fossil fuels in the last five years” – “Just Stop Oil!”. 

The prosecution argued that, whatever their motives, there was no lawful excuse for what they did. last Thursday, the Jury disagreed, and unanimously found the women “Not Guilty”. Groups like this may be dismissed as troublemakers, but that was how people once responded to the suffragettes and those who marched in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Our attitudes may depend on how we think about Climate Change, and that will depend upon where in the World we live. After the case, one of the women, Susan, a retired community worker, said she’d spent her life caring for others. She quoted a UNICEF report detailing that weather disasters, exacerbated by climate change, permanently displaces 20,000 children from their homes every day. 

Most of us agree with Susan that our lives are inextricably linked with everyone else’s, not just inside our national boundaries but across the world. After all, the changing climate knows no national borders or separations caused by language of culture. What happens in the Antarctic has a direct bearing on weather conditions here. When people are permanently displaced by the destruction of their birthplace, happening now across the continents of Africa or Asia of South America, the countries of the North, so far less ravaged by fires and floods, and the desertification caused by high temperatures impossible to live through, feel the pressure of mass migration – Climate Refugees. We are all connected.

Scientists now observe that 2023 is the hottest year since records began. Indeed, global temperatures reached peaks not recorded in the evidence from trapped ancient gases in some half-a-million years – that is, before the dawn of our human species. That’s worth thinking about.

The UK government, alongside most across the world, is actively denying there’s a problem. Those who support them, and those who actively seek an early catastrophe, Armageddon in their lifetime, bullishly advertise and promote Climate Denial. There is a new movement, not those of us deeply concerned about the immediate threat of extreme weather to lives and livelihoods here as well as abroad. This far-Right movement has been named “Clexit”, and they, too are on the streets. Shouting out “Climate Exit”, they want complete withdrawal from all actions to limit Climate Change: the end of push towards electrification of transport; no investment in home insulation or heat pumps; more support and more money for new oil and gas fields. Let’s burn, burn, burn!

The Sunak Government has acceded. Most of even Johnson’s meagre measures to curb the emissions that cause global heating and climate collapse are being withdrawn. That’s the sub-text of this week’s Autumn Statement by the Chancellor. Where action to create new Climate Jobs and a low carbon economy can reflate and protect our economy, the domination of the oil corporations heralds ever-deeper disaster. Capitalist Business as usual in an era of fundamental change to our Planet. Absurd!