You can listen here to a podcast of this radio show about the problem of corporate capture of government and what to do about it, with Alex Scrivener from World Development Movement, Ewa Jasiewicz from No Dash for Gas, Emma Hughes from Platform, Jamie Kelsey-Fry from New Internationalist and Occupy London.
Greenpeace support for the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has allied it with US national interests and oil companies that stand to benefit from an underwater land grab of around 1.5 million square miles of sea bed. This is the area that UNCLOS has opened up for hydrocarbon and mineral exploration by U.S. firms alone. It includes part of the Arctic sea. At the same time, Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign aims to create a sanctuary in the uninhabited area around the North Pole and a ban on offshore oil drilling and industrial fishing in the wider Arctic region.
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Are you a supporter of Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign, and would you be willing to talk to me briefly on the phone or answer questions in an email or via this website’s contact form, to provide information for an article I am writing?
I’m writing an article about Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign and would appreciate comments from supporters of the Save the Arctic campaign about a contradiction that my article explores.
I have already asked Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign to comment and they have agreed to this. They aim to provide a comment by Wednesday 8th. It would be interesting to know what campaign supporters think too.
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This is climate change – arctic sea ice melt is pushing jet stream south .
So let’s have some effective laws asap, to stop ecocide and corporate profiteering from burning fossil fuels that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
This video from Yale Climate Forum explains that we are half way to the threshold temperature at which arctic permafrost will thaw and release huge quantities of carbon dioxide and methane into the earth’s atmosphere, triggering uncontrollable climate change.
Recent research from Oxford University indicates arctic permafrost thawing will occur if the earth’s temperature increases to 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial temperature of the earth.
We are now 0.8ºC hotter than in pre-industrial times, so it’s vital that we reduce human-caused carbon emissions quickly and steeply, in order to have a chance of stopping the rise in the earth’s temperature before it reaches 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial level.
Despite being the UK’s front-runner to receive funding from the European Union NER competition for carbon capture and storage (CCS) schemes, last autumn 2CO’s Don Valley CCS project didn’t make it to the UK Coalition government’s shortlist for the competition. No-one could understand why – the Don Valley CCS project was far more advanced than any others and had come out top in a parallel European Union assessment of UK CCS schemes.
Mock up of Don Valley Power Project_2CO image
The official United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Doha have agreed that the Kyoto agreement will continue for a second commitment period, 2013-2020, and a number of countries have made carbon emission reduction commitments for this period. But not enough reductions have been agreed to limit global warming to the 2°C rise above the pre-industrial average global temperature by the end of the century, that most climate scientists believe is needed in order to avoid potentially disastrous climate impacts.
The reductions that have been agreed will not have any real impact by 2020, and Carbon Action Tracker calculates that on the basis of this scenario, by 2040 the average global temperature will have risen more than 3°C above the pre-industrial level. This is bad news.
Enough to “make Nick Clegg throw his toys out of the pram.” Chris Heaton-Harris MP says 30,000 social media activist members of 38 Degrees helped force Clegg to stand strong on climate targets.
