Endless debates about soup and paintings serve those who’d prefer we ignore the climate crisis

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Just Stop Oil activists with their hands glued to the wall after throwing tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery. Photograph: Just Stop Oil/AFP/Getty Images. dizzy: I’m assuming that this is a JSO image really.

Zoe Williams

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/01/debates-soup-paintings-action-climate-crisis-just-stop-oil-xr

Opponents of meaningful action are trying to sidestep the immediacy of the threat to our planet

Expert opinion is settled and public opinion united on the urgency of climate action. If our politics or our discourse were in any way functional, there would be no confusion, no debate. We would simply be proceeding from one bold practical action to the next, following the blueprints laid out by the Climate Change Committee.

Instead, we have energy policies stitched together from reheated cliches, which on the one hand doesn’t matter, since no prime minister has been stable or focused enough to iterate them since Brexit, but on the other hand does matter. There is nothing more depressing than to go back to Amber Rudd’s “energy reset” speech of 2015: what if, instead of dismissing renewables incentives as “Blairite”, she’d actually taken them seriously and built on them? What if she’d pushed energy-efficient homes instead of the “unfettered market”, what if she’d made a plan to reduce dependence on gas from Vladimir Putin rather than increase it? “Spoiler alert,” wrote the renewables entrepreneur Bruce Davis at the time: “this doesn’t end well for bill payers.” And nor has it.

Obviously, Conservatives are only interested in their own internal dumb-and-dumber popularity contests, and cannot be trusted to make sound, long-term decisions in the national interest. They degrade everything in public life. But they only get away with this because of the discursive cover provided by pointless debates about climate action.

Continue ReadingEndless debates about soup and paintings serve those who’d prefer we ignore the climate crisis

Dewsbury man who took part in M25 Just Stop Oil protests defends action

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https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2022-11-30/convicted-grandad-says-just-stop-oil-m25-protests-absolutely-necessary

A grandfather from West Yorkshire who took part in environmental protests which caused chaos on the country’s busiest motorway has defended the action as “absolutely necessary”.

Just Stop Oil supporters brought the M25 to a standstill over a number of days earlier this month by climbing onto overhead gantries during rush hour, forcing the police to close large sections of the motorway.

Anthony Whitehouse, 71, from Dewsbury, was among 63 people arrested. He later pleaded guilty to a charge of public nuisance and was due to be sentenced at Westminster Magistrates Court on Wednesday.

Whitehouse said: “We did it for the very necessary reason the government are not acting according to what is needed to prevent the climate emergency that is happening all around us.

“So unless we do take strong action to make people aware of what is coming down the tracks, then my children and my grandchild are going to suffer immensely.”

https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2022-11-30/convicted-grandad-says-just-stop-oil-m25-protests-absolutely-necessary

Continue ReadingDewsbury man who took part in M25 Just Stop Oil protests defends action

Just Stop Oil activist jailed for 6 months

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Climate campaigner Jan Goodey jailed over M25 protest

A Just Stop Oil protester has been jailed after a protest which saw “mile after mile” of tailbacks on the M25.

Jan Goodey, 57, of Brighton, admitted causing a public nuisance and was given a six-month prison sentence at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

On 7 November he climbed up an overhead gantry at Junction 16 for the M25/M40 turn-off during the morning rush hour.

The judge told Goodey, who had carried out the protest with a high-visibility jacket and climbing equipment: “You deliberately set out and equipped yourself to cause the disruption that you did.”

Goodey was also told to pay a £187 statutory surcharge by 31 July.

Continue ReadingJust Stop Oil activist jailed for 6 months

Climate Crisis Reality Check (2)

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The Paris Agreement 2015 is the latest international treaty on climate change.
  
Quoted from wikipedia 
 
...
The Paris Agreement's long-term temperature goal is to keep the rise in mean global temperature to well below 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels, and preferably limit the increase to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F), recognizing that this would substantially reduce the effects of climate change. Emissions should be reduced as soon as possible and reach net-zero by the middle of the 21st century.[3] To stay below 1.5 °C of global warming, emissions need to be cut by roughly 50% by 2030. This is an aggregate of each country's nationally determined contributions. 
...
According to the 2020 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with the current climate commitments of the Paris Agreement, global mean temperatures will likely rise by more than 3 °C by the end of the 21st century.
...
Countries determine themselves what contributions they should make to achieve the aims of the treaty. As such, these plans are called nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
...
In 2021, a study using a probabilistic model concluded that the rates of emissions reductions would have to increase by 80% beyond NDCs to likely meet the 2 °C upper target of the Paris Agreement, that the probabilities of major emitters meeting their NDCs without such an increase is very low. It estimated that with current trends the probability of staying below 2 °C of warming is 5% – and 26% if NDCs were met and continued post-2030 by all signatories.
...

The message from the above quotations is
1. The Paris Agreement is an attempt to limit climate change effects by keeping global mean (average) temperatures below 1.5C or 2C.
2. We are likely looking at global temperature rises between 2C and over 3C by the end of the century. 


We are currently at 1.1 or 1.2C global mean temperature above pre-industrial levels. There are extreme climate events now never mind at 1.5, 2 or over 3C. 

2022 saw record-breaking heat in UK while there were heatwaves and vast wildfires in North America, record-breaking temperatures and huge wildfires across France and Western Europe, huge drought followed by severe flooding in Pakistan, repeated flooding in Eastern Australia and currently East Africa is suffering the worst drought in decades.  

We are in a climate crisis at 1.2C. The crisis is now. 

The main cause of global warming is the use of fossil fuels. The best response to the climate crisis is to stop the use of fossil fuels as much as we possibly can and to transition to renewable sources of energy instead. This would also involve a programme of insulation to reduce the use of fossil fuels. 

Politicians worldwide are neglecting to address the climate crisis in any meaningful way. The protest group Just Stop Oil is calling for no new development of fossil fuels. Grant Shapps, UK's Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is so totally out of touch that he's not even familiar with Just Stop Oil's objectives: “I’ve no issue with people arguing for lower levels of petrol, gas or whatever other thing they want to campaign for usage, that is fine, that is one thing. But don’t go disrupting other people’s lives - it’s unacceptable, it’s illegal!”, the Business Secretary said.  

Young people particularly should get active opposing climate destruction because it's fekking their futures and otherwise they're just going to keep on getting totally disregarded, shat on. Extreme weather events at 1.2C are so serious, 3C may well lead to extinction and next to nothing is being done to prevent it.

Some links - try searching for your own e.g. extreme weather events 2022
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
Met Office: Unprecedented extreme heatwave (UK), July 2022
Analysis: Africa’s unreported extreme weather in 2022 and climate change
Over 20,000 died in western Europe’s summer heatwaves, figures show

16/12/22 Climate Reality Check 2021


Continue ReadingClimate Crisis Reality Check (2)

Just Stop Oil: Pair guilty of damaging Van Gogh painting’s frame

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Image: sailko at https://commons.wikimedia.org, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-63717863

Two Just Stop Oil protesters have been found guilty of causing criminal damage to a Vincent Van Gogh painting’s frame after gluing themselves to it.

Louis McKechnie, 22, and Emily Brocklebank, 23, caused about £2,000 of damage to the frame of Peach Trees In Blossom at London’s Courtauld Gallery.

McKechnie was jailed for three weeks while Brocklebank received a suspended sentence.

She had said: “I didn’t think I would cause much damage. Glue comes off.”

Continue ReadingJust Stop Oil: Pair guilty of damaging Van Gogh painting’s frame