I shout at the TV and radio news. They tell so many lies. It doesn't make me feel good any more. As I grow older the Right Wing Ideology makes less and less sense to me, which is not how it's supposed to be. Old people are supposed to believe that the world is ruled well, probably because it is ruled by other old people whom they have grown to admire.
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At the end of last year, the son of an ex-president was elected to the presidency of the United States by a majority of five to four unelected and unnaccountable judges. The news media still refers to America as a Democracy in spite of the evidence they were broadcasting barely six months ago. With this amazing mandate, the new president began to break international laws designed to protect the peoples on the planet.
The Kyoto Protocol is nowhere near strong enough to stop climate change, as it is designed to do, but it is the only international process that steps in the right direction. In spite of ten years of international negotiation towards it, the new US president rejected it outright. Other nations are reluctant to sign up to it unless it is weakened so that they don't have to do anything. However, if they didn't have to do anything, no one would need them to sign up to any treaty at all. There would be no point.
The reluctance to ratify a strong and binding treaty is due to the following reasons:
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Disbelief. If you live in an air conditioned office and the flood waters won't lap at the door, the evidence is easy to ignore. There seems to be a lot of freak weather around, even in England with its once-a-hundred year floods happening every year. The northern ice cap is in retreat and seventy percent of coral reefs in the Indian Ocean have died in the past few years. Coral reefs do not grow overnight, so such an event must be quite rare in nature. There is a lot made of the uncertainties of the climate models that the scientists use to make their predictions. It turns out that the predictions they had made for this year, 2001, are not as bad as it has actually turned out to be. As a consequence, their predictions are being revised upwards in terms of rate and degree of change. The process of climate change is now irreversable for the next fifty years, since the effect is long delayed.
Our leaders are weaklings. You would think that if they were democratically elected by the people, these guys would be powerful enough to push a few rich people around. But they're not. The president of ICI, at the stroke of a pen, can shut down a whole chemicals plant and walk away. That's power. There is further power in the threat to do such a thing. I don't know of any "capitalist" government actually daring to shut down a factory wholesale in the public interest. They usually wait until it goes bankrupt or burns down, before picking up the pieces at great expense to the public. They are willing to manage disaster, but not avert it. When disaster strikes they will blame it on us, as usual, for keeping them in office with our vote, even though we are the ill-informed masses who don't know better, according to their statistics. As with any impending crisis, they will only respond to climate change after it has become a disaster, and at no earlier time when it would have been less costly.
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The "Friends of the Earth" NGO organized a protest outside the UN conference centre in Bonn where the environment ministers of the nations of the world were conducting another round of treaty negotiations. The Americans, having officially pulled out of the process, sent along a delegation anyway just to be unhelpful. That was their intention.
The protest action itself was run by the local German group, which was extremely efficient. They organized accomodation in a school gymnasium, cheap food and beer from their soup kitchen, all the logistics of the protest action, the parade route, the speeches, the Samba band, extra paint for making signs, and a party afterwards. We paid just 48 pounds each for a chartered bus from Leeds to Bonn which took 15 hours and arrived at two in the morning.
There was less political discussion or reading matter than I had hoped for on the way out and on the way back. It seemed as if it was rude to talk politics among these people, like it is in normal company. The bus journey was really long and uncomfortable and I would have prefered to have gone by train. If the Kyoto Protocol were ratified, trains would become a more economical form of transport because they use less fossil fuel (and can run on electricity). In comparison with plane flights, trains replace massive fuel consumption with labour. Labour is a highly taxed resource, whereas aircraft fuel is not.
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In the morning, after a mass breakfast, there was a free tram service down to the town centre where the action was to begin. The trams filled up, so the rest of us walked. The official action for the parade was to drag a huge wooden lifeboat through the streets and leave it outside the conference centre as a reminder to the politicians inside of what was at stake. First we had to build the boat. It started as a huge wooden frame on wheels. The idea was to paint slogans on planks of wood and nail them to the frame. Then the sections of the boat would be assembled and we would march along with it, holding our other placards and protesting.
There were other self-made exhibits on the parade, such as "rinky-dink", a sort of dressed-up rock group on wheels with pedal powered electric amps. The group I was with, Liverpool Friends of the Earth, didn't like their music so much, particularly as we kept getting stuck in front of their speakers. Often, at stationary points, we'd barge through the crowd with our banner to get nearer the pipe band or the Samba band which were a little easier on our ears.
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After an initial good walk out of the centre of town, we filled one half of a dual carriageway. Progress broke down frequently as the lifeboat got wheel punctures and other hold-ups happened that we were not told about. Police were everywhere in ill fitting uniforms padded out like Michelen men. I couldn't see what they were hiding under their jackets. Possibly spare weapons and armour. Everyone was frightened of the Anarchists, but they didn't manifest themselves. This was a protest for more law, internationally, not less. Bodies such as the World Trade Organization are the true anarchists with their desire to strike down every environmental and trade law in their path.
The sun began to blaze down on us and the tarmac got pretty hot. I carried one plank of wood over my head, which read: "All the money in the world can't buy another planet". There had not been enough room to nail it to the boat. Earlier I had nailed on: "This is not good enough", and "Dump the P.O.O.P.", a fine acronym used by presidentmoron.com to stand for "Petrochemical Ownership Of Presidency".
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Meanwhile, Bush was parroting the phrase: "I will not sign an agreement that harms the American economy." This, of course, does not make sense if climate change does harm America by, for example, causing hurricanes and droughts on their continent, and further impoverishing their "trading partners" so that they cannot afford US products. For some reason, such events are not thought to affect the American economy, partly because the "economy" no longer stands for what we thought it meant. It refers to something else that has nothing to do with people. The calculations that economists make prove that pollution is good for the "economy" because it kills people off before they get too old and have to be supported in their retirement. It's a kind of state sponsored down-sizing. If there was a robot which could do every working person's job better, they would sack the lot of us and hope we'd die soon so that we wouldn't be a drain on this new "real" economy.
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Similarly, Globalization, is not what it claims to be. It has nothing to do with the global economy because it excludes most of the global peoples. When faced with an actual global problem, such as climate change, the Globalization cause is pathetically impotent. In the next decade, the UN predicts that the number of environmental refugees fleeing from droughts and flooding will outnumber the present number of war refugees. The so-called Global nations will respond by arming their borders against "economic migrants", a local solution if ever I saw one.
Other Global problems, such as mass hunger in a world of sufficient food, disease in a world with cheap-to-manufacture medicines, and mass misinformation in a world with the greatest communications system ever, are actively exacerbated by the agents of Globalization who say it will only get better when their project is complete, even though it is now complete enough to see the results.
After a series of delays and rescheduling of the route of the march because we were behind time, we finally pushed the boat around the conference hall building, chanting:
What do we want? No Sinks! What do we want? No Nukes! What do we want? Sixty Percent! What do we want? Ratification! When do we want it? Now!
One of the chief negotiators on our side came out and gave a little speech of encouragement, and then we all walked away.
Our group from Liverpool tagged on with a couple of Bonn students who took us on a walk along the Rhine and then to a beer garden in the afternoon. Back at the home base we had two servings of chick pea curry before wandering off to the party across town in a University canteen. They had a band from Brittany playing folk music which was just superb. Normally this sort of Irish-type diddly-diddly music drives me nuts, but they could play long screeches on their violin and bagpipes that were easy on the ear. It was magical. I closed my eyes and listened to it in a trance.
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We set off on the bus by 7am. Three stops later, including the short ferry journey, brought us to Leeds by 9pm. A bus link to a train from Huddersfield took us to Liverpool. I was more rested than after most weekends because I had slept on the bus and been forced to do no work. I was still angry, but it was different now. Not one paper we read reported the lifeboat action, but so what. That was not necessarily the point. The news this morning says the treaty is still afloat, but much weakened. When disaster further strikes and the politicians are forced to confront climate change, the framework will be in place for doing something twenty years too late.
I do feel a bit better for having demonstrated rather than shouted again at a TV whose communication is strictly one-way. There is some shame and embarrassment in making one's politics known among friends. It makes you vulnerable to ridicule. You are not thought qualified to speculate on anyone's needs except your own. You might be wrong and someone might find you out. You are considered arrogant if you speculate on what other people in the world need. Of course, you are never wrong about what you want for yourself, so you can talk about that at length without contradiction. And that never bores anyone.