Do black lives really matter to greens?

Posted on by benpileIn Uncategorized6 Minutes Read
Paul Robeson shows solidarity with British coalminers

It has been a fair while since we’ve had any airport-runway closing action from the climate, erm… ‘community’. But today’s protest at London City Airport saw black and green seemingly unite.

The logic of this move is not obvious. Luckily, the UK’s sole Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas was rushed to the BBC to explain.

Pollution is worse in the inner city, says Lucas. And that’s where black people tend to live. Therefore, pollution is racist. Airports are especially racist. And of all the airports, City Airport must be the most racist airport, because it’s near the City, where mainly rich white people work.

As many observed, the protesters were mainly white, and this led to claims that black people’s victim status had been ‘appropriated’ by these mainly middle-class professional campaigners. But maybe Green is the new black, because if anyone is hard done by in this equation, it is the climate protester. Have some sympathy for him(/her/whichever non-binary gender-neutral pronoun applies), because they are Britain’s most ignored minority. Which is why Green has had to reinvent itself as black… Nobody took any notice of them.

Climate direct action is so passe, so 1990s. In the era of ‘social-justice’, intersectionalismists, and whatever Laurie Penny and Jack Monroe talk about, it’s not enough to be preoccupied with a single issue. A constellation of victim-identities and claims to victimhood produce a constantly shifting hierarchy of counter-privilege. So the greens have blackwashed their campaign. They have blacked-up.

Never mind that the logic of today’s stunt is extremely condescending to black people, to poor people, and to people living in the inner city… And never mind that closing down infrastructure is the last thing that would help the urban jobless or low-waged… Put to one side the ‘problematic’ of claiming to speak as some victim group’s proxy… And ignore for the moment the possibility of a more developed understanding of social problems than the one which claims that they are caused by exhaust from jet ‘planes…

What evidence is there that black lives matter to environmentalists?

Well, there’s conspicuous caring, of course. Virtue signalling, and the such like, though, is cheap.

Better evidence of green concern for people of colour can be found in the consequences of green words and deeds. Recent events give us a clue as the depth of this performance of green compassion.

Just yesterday, 350.org joyfully announced its part in the denial of a licence to the planned Lamu coal plant in Kenya. The protesters demanded renewable energy instead.

This move by the county government of Lamu comes a few days after the resignation of the Minister of Trade, Tourism, Culture and Natural Resources citing her disapproval of the coal plant project. Environmental campaigners and social justice activists from Lamu, campaigning under the umbrella of Save Lamu, applauded her move and sought to increase the pressure on the government leading to the cancellation of the project.

The fact that green energy barely works in the world’s richest countries, and leaves many unable to afford basic utilities doesn’t seem to have occurred to well-off campaigners in the west, who sing and dance at their victory over industrialisation where it is most needed.

On Friday, indigenous people’s rights campaign, Survival International…

… urged the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) to address the spread of brutal shoot on sight conservation tactics at its world congress, which started yesterday in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Survival has asked the IUCN’s Director Inger Andersen to table the motion: “We condemn extrajudicial killing and “shoot on sight” policies in the name of conservation.”

The fact that conservation environmentalism has taken so long to respond to the vile abuses of human rights commited in the name of conservation is no surprise. Environmentalism is ideologically anti-human. And it always has been.

The Guardian, true to its two-faces, sends out the vile John Vidal to seek handwringing copy from green voices to counter what some people have been saying to John Vidal for decades. Says Vidal…

What has happened in Botswana is happening all over the world, according to an increasingly vocal group of campaigners, academics and environmentalists. They claim that indigenous peoples are being appallingly treated and abused, all in the name of a conservation philosophy that carries a heavy human cost. In order to make room for wildlife, tourism and industry, governments are using conservation as a pretext to drive the world’s most endangered peoples away from the lands and animals they have lived with for generations.

Some of the voices cited by Vidal wrote a letter to the Guardian last year (they might as well have written to themselves), saying…

Tribal peoples have managed their lands sustainably for generations. Forcibly removing them usually results in environmental damage. Such removals are a violation of human rights. The cheapest and quickest way to conserve areas of high biodiversity is to respect tribal peoples’ rights. The world can no longer afford a conservation model that destroys tribal peoples: it damages human diversity as well as the environment.

But hold on. First it’s green ideology that has transparently got a racism problem, but which greens are the least able to get a perspective on. And even when they can agree amongst themselves — multi-millionaires, Guardian hacks, and global green NGO executives — that shooting black people looking for food is a bad thing (oh, well done, guys, here, have a f***ing medal and a Nobel Prize), it’s not like they even overcome the racism.

Seeing ‘tribal people’ in particular terms is no escape from racism. We take it for granted that ‘tribal people’ want to be tribal people. But in the process, we might be denying ‘tribal people’ the opportunity to stop being ‘tribal people’. What if ‘tribal people’ want roads, jobs and airports as much as the white and black and brown and green and pink people of Newham? And what if they want electricity, even if it is made from coal, rather than silicon and sunshine? What do the Green Great and Good know that people can’t work out for themselves?

Meanwhile, some good news, which puts all this in perspective. The World health Organisation has now declared that Sri Lanka is malaria free.

The obvious point to make here is that the UN WHO were, not long ago, claiming that malaria was on the rise in the developing world, pushed by climate change. What happened to that story?

The UN make want to take some credit for the progress towards abolishing malaria. But another factor might be the ~6% of almost continuous growth the country has enjoyed in recent decades. Industrialisation, in other words, has slashed the rates of poverty, and thus exposure and vulnerability to disease has diminished. One third of Sir Lanka’s power is generated from ‘renewable energy’ — but it comes from hydropower, which environmentalists campaign against. The other two thirds some from burning fuel oil, and, since 2011, coal-fired power stations. Just 2.5% of power came from ‘renewables’ in 2014.

Kenya, meanwhile, produces what seems like a whopping 27% of its electricity from geothermal sources, and a further 37% from hydropower. Remarkable, that is, until we learn that this amounts to just 1.4 GW of capacity, in a country with a population of 44 million.

No wonder those greens like ‘tribal’ society, and ‘traditional lifestyles’, and are at last reflecting on the rights and wrongs of murdering people from ‘sustainable’ ‘tribal society’. When you’ve got mosquitos killing babies, you don’t need to burn fossil fuels in expensive helicopters. You don’t even need guns.

Choice of technique is a political decision. As much as greens try to claim that renewable energy is a moral imperative, it is not at all clear that poor people either in developed or developing economies have much to gain from intermittent and expensive energy, either in the immediate or long term moral calculus.

It is also not clear that decisions about choice of technique have not been swayed by pressure from green campaigning organisations, which routinely put ‘the climate’ before the needs of people. If black lives matter then coal matters. When the final history of environmentalism is written, the influence of green NGOs over the global poor will be read as no less a disgusting intervention than shooting people from fossil-fuel powered helicopters.

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41 Comments

  1. All lives matter, but the lives of those near the bottom of the economic ladder are most vulnerable to government propaganda.

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  4. It’s absolutely ridiculous, isn’t it? The Lucas clip is painful to watch as she crunches mental gears to get some kind of traction on the airport disruption performance:

    Interviewer: “Most or all of these protesters are white”

    Lucas: “I take your point [and can’t really go anywhere with that except to say groups of black protesters elsewhere… are definitely black. Very much so. The ones not at the airport.]”

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  5. I can’t quite make my mind up whether the Greens have black-washed their campaign or BLM have green-washed theirs. It’s getting confusing.

    I think you can blame the Unhinged and Somewhat Slightly Dazed Naomi Klein for much of this conflating climate change with racism though. She’s been pioneering that nutty viewpoint for some time now with the promotion of her climate justice agenda.

    http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/25/infamous-eco-wacko-ties-racism-to-the-fossil-fuel-industry/

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  6. The Black Lives Matter stunt was Plain Stupid with another hat on. I imagine it’s an attempt to avoid ratcheting punishment from the courts. It’s time the courts applied serious punished for these stunt because they act as a dangerous distraction from terrorism.

    What these people can’t admit is that capitalism and fossil fuels have done far more for the poor of this world than any amout of do gooding. And since most of the man made CO2 has been emitted since 1950, any advantage we got after that point had little to do with colonialism.

    They put the people drowning in the Med in the same breath as the poor living in Newham suffering from air pollution. The people drowning in the Med were desperate to have the chance to suffer from air pollution in London.

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  7. a Guardian comment:

    GRJones richmanchester
    2h ago

    I believe that I went to (a very posh public) school with one of the protesters. She’s been a professional climate campaigner for pretty much all her adult life, with a particular focus on airports, and a history of direct actions including breaking onto runways and clambering onto the roof of parliament. Given that the earlier BLMUK protests targeted airports, this was probably the agenda all along, and what we’re looking at here are a group of hardline environmental campaigners who are perfectly happy to stir up some racial hatred if it gets their agenda in the news. I’d suspect that they couldn’t care less about the issues facing minorities in the UK.

    Liked by 3 people

  8. Wow, I’d say 80% of comments on that thread are highly critical of the article and BLM’s ridiculous publicity stunt. If even Guardian lefty readers are turning against this nonsense, it’s bad news for both BLM and climate change campaigners – and the despicable Guardian for that matter. Climate change communicators in the UK are going to have their work cut out after this very public debacle.

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  12. If black lives really matter to greens (or more generally the welfare of poor people of colour) they should take a look at the words and pictures pointed to from these tweets last year:

    https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/656143038805184512

    On googling for the final story. from a decidedly green publisher (to give them credit), I realised the Daily Mail had covered the initial story over a year before. Essential reading.

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  13. Another interesting thing about the people named in the article Paul links to is the ages of some of the protesters. I think they’re referred to as ‘millennials’. The thing being that, for most of the life of anyone born since the late ’80s, climate change, multiculturalism and anti-racism has been central to government policy. I’m not saying anything as crass as ‘children won’t know what racism is’, but that by the time these people were out of nappies, an official purge of racism from public institutions had begun, and within a generation, the establishment, which had been the real seat of misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism and racism had turned its sights on policing citizen’s values, characterised by Blair’s ‘Respect Agenda’, amongst other things. Racism — as with other prejudices — became an abstract concept, which it could only be detected by numbers (how many of identity X populate institution A, and how does this compare to broader demographics) and by subjective interpretation, not by tangibles. Climate change and racism bear comparison, first as official doctrine, and then in the character of its absorption by seemingly grass-roots organisations, many of which were flattered, if not hired by the state, which itself was very much bent on creating ‘shared values’.

    Under the comments at the Graun article is a couple of comments, a few of which seem to be saying BLM has hijacked the climate movement, and then the other way round, which seems more likely. But then, the point is really that contemporary protest movements in the UK seem to have all been ‘hijacked’ by official orthodoxy, which they have thoroughly internalised. Only the protesters think they are saying something different to, or challenging the state. The ‘No Pressure’ video Ian discussed the other day, for instance, not only had corporate sponsorship (FFS!), it was a campaign that was very much the product of Ed Miliband’s office, the desire being to get a ‘grassroots’ (i.e. astroturf) movement to support policies that had already been drafted, debated, passed, and were already having a material effect.

    Something I forgot to add in the article… I live on the border of Newham, under the flight path of planes going to both City Airport and Stanstead. It causes me no grief — in fact I like it, and sitting outside my flat watching them, because I still find jet planes quite amazing. Like many thousands of Londoners, though, I live about 100 feet from an overground line, which has heavy freight trains running across it throughout the night. This occasionally does make life difficult — they can wake me up when they shake the ground or make loud screeching and rumbling. But as far as I’m aware, there is no green or anti-racist campaign against trains.

    Also, being a white male perhaps bars me from saying ‘there is no racism’. However, the relatively peaceful pluralism of East London cannot be denied. When I go to the supermarket — in Newham — for example, there are many different races and cultures, most of whom seem to manage to share the space without issue. I’m not claiming its a Utopia, but Bethnal Green or Brick Lane are a stones throw from my house, and are sure signs that white, black, brown, gay, straight or whatetever can cross paths without expressing the tensions that seemingly create the ‘crisis’ that BLM et al say exists. This does not compare with other European cities. Go to Brussels, for example, and regions of the city are divided far more by race. It’s often chaotic here, certainly, which is not for everyone, but it is no war zone. The state might want to take credit for that, but I think a more plausible explanation is that i) this coexistence occurs in spite of the state’s interventions; ii) whatever racism has existed or does exist, it has not been a barrier to making money, i.e. setting up businesses. That last point may seem crass to some, but I believe it is a real test of structural ‘prejudice’.

    Newham is in fact thriving. Substantially a result of the Olympics (which the state can claim credit for) injecting lots of capital here, the skyline is radically different, with nearly a new tower of some kind going up each week. I have to say it is quite ugly! Nonetheless, the fundamental objections to the consumerism and construction here, which can only make homes and opportunities for people of all hues here, is coming from these weirdo protest movements — especially the greens. It’s like the hipsters moving to Hackney and complaining about ‘gentrification’, simultaneously objecting to new developments and rent increases.

    Liked by 3 people

  14. That Mail article has now been updated as they’ve looked into the background of the protesters.

    “film producer Natalie Fiennes, 25, and LSE graduate Ben Tippet, 24, who live together in a multi-million pound six-bed house in a leafy street in Wandsworth, London.”

    “Actor Richard Collett-White, 23, from Kempston, Bedfordshire, the former Junior Common Room president at Oxford’s Exeter College.
    He was also a member of the Oxford University Association Croquet Club”

    Remember the Upper Class Twit of the Year Show? Rich public school boys Moonbat and Zac Goldsmith should look out, they may be under threat.

    Liked by 3 people

  15. — “film producer Natalie Fiennes, 25…” —

    I couldn’t help wondering… How close she is to Ralph.

    Turns out she may be his cousin, as revealed by this DM article on the Climate Camp a few years ago.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1209592/What-want-A-nice-Cath-Kidston-tent-The-remarkably-middle-class-Climate-Camp.html

    The photo with the caption reads: “The remarkably middle-class crowd included cousin of Ralph Fiennes Natalie (front) and her friend Ottilie who struggled with their tent”

    Liked by 1 person

  16. They should rename this wing, ‘Black lives like really really matter to me, yah. I think they’re like really important and stuff, yah. And the polar bears”.

    Liked by 4 people

  17. You’d think that the (presumably) hardline black radicals in charge at BLM would look at these bunch of limp-wristed posh white twats and say no way are we gonna let these people spearhead a major public campaign stunt in our name. But they did. I wonder why? Did certain mummies and daddies ‘donate’ generously to BLM coffers beforehand I wonder? Just idle speculation.

    Liked by 1 person

  18. Double-barrelled? Is that all? (I think double-barrelled usually means ‘oik’ these days – the children of unmarried parents from estates, dontchaknow.) There’s a triple-barrelled in there:

    http://www.thepeerage.com/p33641.htm#i336404

    One of the other arrestees, Deborah Grayson, was a member of peculiar posh totty activist group Climate Rush. They liked to dress up as suffragettes and glue themselves to statues.

    A quibble:

    The City Airport protesters claimed that the UK bears the greatest per capita responsibility for climate change. This claim has been doing the rounds for years and, if you don’t think too hard about various ‘sins of the fathers’ problems, it might even be true. The trouble is, nobody has yet done the right calculation. Such claims are always based on dividing national cumulative emissions for a particular period (from 1750, from 1850, from 1990, whatever) by recent national population snapshots (e.g. pops in 2005) rather than by national cumulative populations for the whole period. This is because it would be very difficult to come up with consistent cumulative pops for all the relevant players. One study claimed to have managed it for the more populous nations (US, China…) and for the regions into which it divided the rest of the world, but for all likely candidate nations, including the UK? Er, no. Not yet.

    I suspect that proper calculations for, say, 1850-2010 might push the UK even further ahead of the USA, historical blamewise, but at the moment it’s a bit dodgy (unscientific) to claim that the UK is the frontrunner, because nobody actually knows for sure.

    (And if anyone did, there’d still be the ‘sins of the fathers’ problems…)

    Liked by 1 person

  20. “I suspect that proper calculations for, say, 1850-2010 might push the UK even further ahead of the USA, historical blamewise,” Vinny Burgoo

    You’re forgetting that big emissions are a very recent event. They co-incide with private transport and a consumer society. Until the 1960s people were fairly poor here and the UK has been behind the US for a long time – at least a century. Central heating was rare until the 70s and wasn’t normal for at least another decade. Air conditioning is still unusual in domestic buildings. The two world wars and then rationing held back most of Europe for most of the first half of the last century. Russia and China only missed out because they went straight into Communism. Europe has smaller buildings, closer cities, smaller cars, etc. Though on average it is probably colder than the US. Since 1990, the US per capita emissions have been about twice the UK value.

    About 2.5 times as much CO2 remaining in the atmosphere was emitted since 2000 as was emitted before 1850.

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  21. TinyCO2, the reason we’re (probably) the word leader in this respect is entirely because of our emissions in the 18th and 19th centuries – nothing to do with central heating etc. We’re guilty because we started earlier.

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  23. Vinny Burgoo, but some if not all of that would have been washed out of the atmosphere by now and the amounts were much smaller compared to today. Don’t know the source of the data for this but it seems sensible. I doubt the UK was much in advance of several of the other EU countries for the earlier years.

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  25. It’s a popular meme with warmists that westerners have somehow robbed the rest of the world (colonialism and all that) but really what we did was benefit from peace and the ordinary person seeing improving conditions. It angers me greatly that those advancements should be considered bad and an attack on those that didn’t get or still haven’t got their act together. Most of the things we’ve learnt along the way are available for others to benefit from. China’s demonstrating that the differences can be made up over a very short period of time. And for those countries with massive populations, it could be argued that they got their share of emissions in a different way.

    Liked by 1 person

  26. TinyCO2, here’s a rather dramatic presentation of CDIAC emissions data:

    Over-dramatic? I don’t think so, or not by much, anyway. Perhaps in 1800 someone somewhere outside Europe was clearing large areas of forest and burning a bit of coal but this probably wouldn’t shrink the UK’s starting percentage by much – and it might already be included in the CDIAC data. (I haven’t looked at it recently.)

    Anyway – slightly dodgy or not, the pic shows what a difference being an early starter makes to national guilt.

    As for that guilt, I wonder what the world would be like if the naughty Brits – or some other naughty nation – hadn’t burned all that coal in the 18th and 19th centuries.

    Some argue that the blame game should only start in 1990, because that’s the year of the (1994) UNFCCC benchmark. For 1990-2012 emissions, the UK is the 10th naughtiest nation (using CAIT data, including LULUCF). In order of naughtiness: USA, China, Russia, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Germany, Canada, UK. Give former Third World countries a free pass and we’re the 6th naughtiest.

    Per capita 1990-2012 naughtiness including LULUCF? Here’s CAIT’s ranking, starting with the naughtiest and with non-ex-Third World countries in caps. (I think that, as usual, CAIT uses a snapshot year for pops rather than proper cumulative pops. Also, those pops prolly sometimes include guest-workers/commuters and sometimes not – this matters for small countries like Kuwait and Luxembourg. Also, embodied GHGs prolly aren’t included.)

    Kuwait, Brunei, Belize, AUSTRALIA, CANADA, Equatorial Guinea, ESTONIA, Trinidad & Tobago, Oman, LUXEMBOURG, USA, Qatar, Mongolia, Libya, Bahrain, Grenada, RUSSIA, Paraguay, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Papua New Guinea, Kazakhstan, IRELAND, NETHERLANDS, Central African Republic, NEW ZEALAND, CZECH REPUBLIC, Botswana, DENMARK, Suriname, BELGIUM, FINLAND, GERMANY, Saudi Arabia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Barbados and – coming in at 38th (14th) place – UK. (China is in about 90th place.)

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  27. That should have been 38th (15th) for the UK’s per cap 1990-2012 ranking.

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  28. The ‘Eco-imperialism: Green Power, Black Death’ web site has many examples of harm caused by Green interventions, and is maintained by the author of the book with that title, Paul Driessen. Here is the ex-Greenpeace leader Patrick Moore commenting on it: ‘“The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity. The pain and suffering it is inflicting on families in developing countries must no longer be tolerated. Eco-Imperialism is the first book I’ve seen that tells the truth and lays it on the line. It’s a must-read for anyone who cares about people, progress and our planet.”
    http://www.eco-imperialism.com/

    Liked by 1 person

  29. “shows what a difference being an early starter makes to national guilt.” Vinny Burgoo

    A) I don’t believe that in 1800 the UK was emitting near 100% of emissions and even if was true, 100% of sod all is still sod all.

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  30. One thing to question is how much CO2 is being emitted in the non western world and even some of those who should know better will be fibbing. Almost certainly some countries are poorly recording consumption but also deliberately lowering their ‘guilt’. When China realised that promised reductions were based on a percentage of exisiting emissions, their recent historical figures were revised sharply upwards. Even when figure come closer to reality, the environment absorbs all but a small proportion of our emissions. Weirdly that proportion is almost keeping pace with the rise in emissions.

    Even most of the EU countries bumped up their 1990 levels so that cutting CO2 would be less onerous. Only the UK did the opposite, to show off. Even by 1900, Germany had a bigger economy than the UK, and while I can believe that we had more coal heating, I doubt that their industries used much less coal.

    Prior to 1950, a significant portion of the CO2 in the atmosphere was down to the warming oceans. Pre industrial CO2 levels were also pre warming levels.

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  31. TinyCO2, here are some more comprehensive (more countries, land-use explicitly tackled) attempts at cumulative blame graphs.

    With LULUCF:

    Without LULUCF:

    Source: Hoehne et al 2011

    http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-010-9930-6

    The graphs themselves start at 1900 rather than at 1800, as in the one I posted earlier (Sato & Hansen – ‘mhs19’), but are based on emissions from 1750. Comparing the mhs19 graph at 1900 with these ones suggests that mhs19 might have overstated the UK’s cumulative contribution somewhat: ~40% in mhs19 versus ~20% for no-LULUCF and ~7% for with-LULUCF in Hoehne.

    Is that enough to negate the claim that the UK currently has the world’s largest per capita blame for climate change? Can’t say. The Hoehne graphs aren’t per-capita (And, as I said initially, nobody has yet attempted a proper national per capita evaluation and if they did it wouldn’t say a lot about per capita blame because ‘sins of the fathers’ etc.)

    But if the Hoehne et al graphs are more reliable than the mhs19 one, it does look like I might have been wrong about the rest of the world’s circa 1800 emissions not making much difference to the UK’s starting blameworthiness percentage (nearly 100% in mhs19).

    PS: I agree that official national emissions stats can be unreliable for various reasons, including perfidy.

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  32. I got the Hoehne graphs the wrong way around. The garish top one is ‘Without LULUCF’; the garish bottom one is ‘With LULUcf’. Predictable or wot?

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  33. But these graphs are measurements of percentage, not amount. Now it’s true that the earliest CO2 had the greatest effect but it was set against cold temperatures and as I wrote, some of the earliest emissions will have gone from the atmosphere and we’re not the only ones to have benefitted from early inventions.

    The per capita argument is more complex. Which is the ‘better’ country? The one that has a high CO2 foorprint per capita but low population growth or the country that has a low CO2 footprint but a high population growth? The former will have lower emissions in the long run.

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  34. The headline claim that “Climate change is a racist crisis” is back up by the following statement:-

    On the one hand Britain is the biggest contributor per capita to global temperature change. It is also one of the least vulnerable to the effects of climate change. On the other hand, seven of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change are in sub-Saharan Africa.

    The second point about vulnerability was made by the Eco Experts site nearly two years ago with their climate change maps. The global map is reproduced below.

    The interesting thing to note is that vulnerability to climate change is not due to some clever predictive computer modelling of where future droughts, flooding, sea level rise or extremely weird weather will fall. It is solely based on measures of poverty. For those that still believe that climate change poses future risks, the most effective policy is long-term high economic growth based on the cheapest source of energy. This is the policy China and India have been successfully pursuing for years.

    Liked by 1 person

  35. Further to my comment of 6.32pm, look at the quote again, but this time with the link.

    On the other hand, seven of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change are in sub-Saharan Africa.

    It is not to the Eco Experts figures showing the country’s most vulnerable climate change, but a Guardian article of 13 February 2015 titled Sub-Saharan African countries are failing to plan for climate change. It claims that decision-makers in some of the World’s poorest countries have a blind-spot when planning long-term infrastructure, as they make no allowance for the likely dramatic, but unspecified, changes due to climate change beyond 2050. But this is western intellectuals imposing their value judgments against the realities. If dangerous climate change cannot be predicted, as is claimed in the article, then the best policy is to reduce vulnerability to its effects through long-term growth. Infrastructure is a driver of that growth. for example, if building a port to enhance growth, it is best to plan on a time-scale of 10-20 years rather than over 50 years. It will be much cheaper, requirements might change, and if the port is successful it will generate the wealth to afford later extensions and improvements. Using the shorter-term planning enables more growth-generating projects to be financed, and reducing the waste of resources from unsuccessful ventures.
    With respect to climate, there is a further reason not to factor in long-term dramatic impacts of climate change. The self-proclaimed experts have no demonstrated track record in short term predictions of worsening climate or its impacts. So why would any rational decision-maker take into account their long-term prophesies of doom?

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  37. The title of this post is Do Black Lives Really Matter to Greens?
    More appropriately it is legitimate to ask if whether these nine battle-scared eco-warriors really support the aspirations of the group they claim to represent. Black Lives Matters UK is an off-shoot of a US organisation whose most publicized campaigns are when black people have died at the hands of the police. Climate racism appears to be a new line of campaigning, quite different to that which has gone before. Given the massive media coverage of the protest, and the involvement of people outside of the black community, one would reasonably have expected a mention on the website of the organisation. But four days after the events there is no mention.
    http://blacklivesmatteruk.org/news/
    Could it be that the eco-warriors are an embarrassment?

    Liked by 1 person

  38. Given the massive media coverage of the protest, and the involvement of people outside of the black community, one would reasonably have expected a mention on the website of the organisation. But four days after the events there is no mention.
    http://blacklivesmatteruk.org/news/
    Could it be that the eco-warriors are an embarrassment?

    Sounds very much like it. Who on earth came up with such ill-conceived cross-selling?

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  40. Conditional discharges and £95 costs for all nine defendants, even those with prior convictions.

    That’ll teach ’em!

    Liked by 1 person

  41. One of these days they’ll act as a decoy for something much more sinister and the public will want to know why they were indulged.

    Liked by 1 person

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