18/11/2018

Dozens Arrested After Climate Protest Blocks Five London Bridges

The Guardian -  | 

Thousands of protesters occupied bridges across the Thames over extinction crisis in huge act of peaceful civil disobedience

 Thousands block five London bridges to protest over climate crisis.

Eighty-five people have been arrested as thousands of demonstrators occupied five bridges in central London to voice their concern over the looming climate crisis.Protesters, including families and pensioners, began massing on five of London’s main bridges from 10am on Saturday. An hour later, all the crossings had been blocked in one of the biggest acts of peaceful civil disobedience in the UK in decades. Some people locked themselves together, while others linked arms and sang songs.
By 2pm the blockade of Southwark Bridge had been abandoned and protesters moved from there to Blackfriars Bridge, where organisers said they were soon to move west towards Westminster Bridge.
Demonstrators occupied Southwark, Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster and Lambeth bridges.
The Metropolitan police said all the bridges had since reopened and that most of the arrests had been for obstruction under the Highways Act.
Afterwards, demonstrators gathered in Parliament Square to hear speeches. Roger Hallam, one of the strategists behind the actions, told the Guardian he felt the protest had been fantastic.“This is total prediction stuff, mass participation civil disobedience,” he said. “They can’t do anything about it unless they start shooting people, and presumably they won’t do that.”
The day was due to end with an interfaith ceremony outside Westminster Abbey.
The move is part of a campaign of mass civil disobedience organised by a new group, Extinction Rebellion, which wants to force governments to treat the threats of climate breakdown and extinction as a crisis.
“The ‘social contract’ has been broken … [and] it is therefore not only our right but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty and to rebel to defend life itself,” said Gail Bradbrook, one of the organisers.
Alice, 19, from Bristol was one of those blocking Westminster Bridge.
“I took the coach at 3am to make sure I didn’t miss it,” she said, “and I’m so glad that I did. It’s a tiny personal inconvenience and, having made it, I get to be part of a rebellion.
“This moment will be remembered in the history books, when we finally stopped allowing our leaders to take us over the cliff.”
Jenny Jones, the Green party peer, joined the protest on Westminster Bridge. She backed the nonviolent direct action taken by demonstrators.
“We are at the point where if we don’t start acting and acting fast we are just going to wipe out our life support system,” she said.
“It’s fine to think we are a rich country, the sixth biggest economy in the world, but actually we won’t do any better than anywhere else because climate change will massively affect us too.
“Basically, conventional politics has failed us – it’s even failed me and I’m part of the system – so people have no other choice.”


Jenny Jones: "If we don't act fast, we're going to wipe out our life support system."

Father Martin Newell said on Blackfriars Bridge: “What brought me here is the climate emergency, the extinction emergency and my faith in God who created all this and whose creation we’re destroying and crucifying … I’m called as a Christian to protect our neighbour who’s being abused.”
In the past two weeks more than 60 people have been arrested for taking part in acts of civil disobedience organised by Extinction Rebellion ranging from gluing themselves to government buildings to blocking major roads in the capital.
However, those disruptions were eclipsed on Saturday, when organisers say 6,000 people took part in protests.
“It is not a step we take lightly,” said Tiana Jacout, one of those involved. “If things continue as is, we face an extinction greater than the one that killed the dinosaurs. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be a worthy ancestor.”
Extinction Rebellion, which cites the civil rights movement, suffragettes and Mahatma Gandhi as inspirations, said smaller events took place in other UK cities as well as overseas on Saturday.
Organisers say they are planning to escalate the campaigns from Wednesday, when small teams of activists will “swarm” around central London blocking roads and bridges, bringing widespread disruption to the capital.
“Given the scale of the ecological crisis we are facing this is the appropriate scale of expansion,” said Bradbrook. “Occupying the streets to bring about change as our ancestors have done before us. Only this kind of large-scale economic disruption can rapidly bring the government to the table to discuss our demands. We are prepared to risk it all for our futures.”
Extinction Rebellion demonstrators on Westminster Bridge in London. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA
The group is calling on the government to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025 and establish a “citizens assembly” to devise an emergency plan of action similar to that seen during the second world war.
On top of the specific demands, organisers say they hope the campaign of “respectful disruption” will change the debate around climate breakdown and signal to those in power that the present course of action will lead to disaster.
The group, which was established only a couple of months ago, has raised around £50k in small-scale donations in the past weeks.
It now has offices in central London and over the past few months has been holding meetings across the country, outlining the scale of the climate crisis and urging people to get involved in direct action this weekend.
“Local groups are setting up across the country and even new groups are seeing around 100 people come to meetings, and we have coaches coming, from Newcastle to Plymouth,” said Rupert Read, a philosophy academic at the University of East Anglia.
The campaign hit the headlines a couple of weeks ago when the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was one of almost 100 academics to come out in favour of it.
In a letter published in the Guardian they said: “While our academic perspectives and expertise may differ, we are united on this one point: we will not tolerate the failure of this or any other government to take robust and emergency action in respect of the worsening ecological crisis. The science is clear, the facts are incontrovertible, and it is unconscionable to us that our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of an unprecedented disaster of our own making.”
The civil disobedience comes amid growing evidence of looming climate breakdown and follows warnings from the UN that there are only 12 years left to prevent global ecological disaster.
The group is also making international contacts, with 11 events planned in seven countries so far, including the US, Canada, Germany, Australia and France.
“To properly challenge the system that is sending us to an early grave we have to be bold and ambitious,” said Read. “Forging new connections across the world and learning from each other.”

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Who’s Running Late For The Paris Agreement?

University of Melbourne - Dr Daryl Holland

In order to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, should countries lower their emissions’ target to meet their climate change commitments?

You’re having a party on Saturday night.
You’ve timed everything perfectly, starting with canapés and cocktails at 7:30pm. Except there’s one problem – your friends are always ‘fashionably late’. So, on the invitation, you put the starting time as 7pm.
That way you know most guests will have arrived by the time the party really kicks off.
More than 150 world leaders pose for a family photo during the COP21, United Nations Climate Change Conference. Picture: Getty Images
Now, what if your friends are the nations of the world, the party is the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, and everyone is running late to lower their emissions fast enough to stop catastrophic climate change? Can we change the time on the invitation?
Attempts to tackle the growing threat of climate change seem to be continually hampered by the self-interest of people, corporations, and countries - who say they want to do their fair share but in reality do the minimum they can justify.
Because of this, the world is on track to overshoot its goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
Researchers from the University of Melbourne and University of Potsdam have quantified the self-interest of countries that have signed up to the Paris Agreement on climate change, proposing a radical solution that allows countries to act with self-interest, but still achieve the goals of the Agreement.

Not so ‘fair and ambitious’
The goal of the Paris Agreement is to limit global temperature rise to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C”.
Dr Yann Robiou du Pont from the University of Melbourne’s Australian-German Climate and Energy College says the agreement is considered a landmark framework for countries to work together to avoid the dangerous impact of climate change, but there is problem with how each country’s contribution is calculated.
President Trump announcing he will pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017. Picture: Getty Images
“Each country proposes its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), that has to be of the highest possible ambition, according to the Paris Agreement,” he says.
“Each NDC has a section describing how it is fair and ambitious, but our research, and other international reports, say these are collectively insufficient to achieve 2°C.”
Why is this? When each country has pledged to set its contribution in a way that is ‘fair and ambitious’?
“Each country justifies how it is fair and ambitious, and according to that definition of fair and ambitious,” says Dr Robiou du Pont.
This bottom-up approach can lead to self-interest, where countries pick the vision of equity that means they can make the least possible contribution.
In fact, the team built a simulation to see what global warming would be if the world followed the ambition of a single country. For example, if countries around the world made the same commitment to a Nationally Determined Contribution as Australia - the global temperature would increase by 4.5°C.

The consequences of self-interest
To test this idea, Dr Robiou du Pont and Professor Malte Meinshausen, who has a shared appointment with the Universities of Melbourne and Potsdam, created a hypothetical situation where each country acts to maximise its self-interest.
“We modelled the situation where each country can individually pick the least stringent of the categories of equity,” says Dr Robiou du Pont.
“So, in their narrative, they can say they are doing something fair, but collectively, because of that self-interested vision of equity it would be insufficient.”
The research team used five categories of equity, broadly defined as: capability, equality, responsibility-capability-need, equal cumulative per capita and staged approaches.
The Pledged Warming Map provides an assessment of global warming when all countries follow the ambition of a given one. The scale goes from 1 degree (green) to 5 degrees (dark red). Picture: Supplied
The result of this modelling, unsurprisingly, is that the world will overshoot its global warming target.
“If we aim for 2°C, we get to 2.5°C,” says Dr Robiou du Pont.
The catch is, this isn’t just hypothetical, it’s happening. When the researchers calculated each country’s NDC, they got the same result as their self-interest model, a likely increase of up to 2.5°C of warming by 2100.
“Collectively, it is as if the world is self-interested – keeping in mind that some countries are doing better than just being self-interested, and there are also some countries doing less than could be considered equitable, even in a self-interested manner,” says Dr Robiou du Pont.
So, in other words, some of your friends arrive early, but most are late, and a few RSVP but don’t even show up to the party.
The team published their research in Nature Communications, and in the paper they suggest a radical solution – rather than forcing nations to be more fair, why not ‘change the time on the invitation’.
In other words, set a lower goal.
“If we disagree on what is equitable and let each country pick the least stringent approach, then we have to be more stringent on the collective goal,” says Dr Robiou du Pont.
They calculated new aspirational goals that would allow for collective self-interest while still reaching the goals agreed in the Paris Agreement.
In fact, these results can be used in climate litigation cases against countries. Dr Robiou du Pont’s previous work has been used in a case against the EU’s institutions for failing to adequately protect them against climate change.
The goal of the Paris Agreement is to limit global temperature rise to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”. Picture: Arnaud BOUISSOU/Flickr
To keep warming below 2°C, they calculated that the world needs to agree on a 1.4°C target. To hit the more stringent 1.5°C target would require a revised 1.1°C target.
“Overall, it is very unlikely that this sharing will be adopted. Fairness is often more used as a justification for action (or inaction) than a driver,” says Dr Robiou du Pont.
“The novelty of this metric is that it can still tell which country is making a sufficiently ambitious contribution in the absence of a universal agreement of what is fair and ambitious.”
And then maybe everyone can enjoy the party.

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