And Now For A Healthy Emission - Michael Brull on New Matilda

It may say that it has 64 note polyphony and Schoenhut Mini Baby Grand Piano That sounds rather a lot, right? After all, you only have ten fingers so you can’t play more than ten notes at any one time.

By Michael Brull

http://newmatilda.com/2009/10/12/and-now-healthy-emission

Michael Brull loves the smell of civil disobedience
in the morning. And when hundreds of ordinary people showed up at a
coal mine south of Sydney on the weekend, he was there

By 11am the protest was underway.

A colourful crowd of a few hundred had turned up for the final day of
the Climate Camp protest in Helensburgh. People were meant to be
dressed in blue, but that didn't impede creativity. There were signs,
political paintings, tin drums and guitars. The spirit was festive, as
people sang various songs, including one to the tune of "Hey Mickey
you're so fine" with lyrics were directed at US based multinational Peabody,
the villain of the day. Peabody owns the local coal mine that was the
object of the day's mass protest, and they're a fitting target, having
been ranked by Newsweek recently as the most un-green corporation out of the 500 it surveyed.

The crowd was a diverse bunch, with a surprising mix of the young and
old. I turned up on Sunday, but most of the people had actually
attended the whole camp, starting on Friday. We marched through the
tiny town of Helensburgh, which was plainly unused to so much
attention. One woman yelled out to us that she supported our right to
protest. A young man with a few of his friends said "Maybe I should
join you." When I encouraged him to do so, he replied, amused, "But I
work for coal."

Not all of us had such pleasant experiences with the Helensburgh
folk. The locals became increasingly rowdy, yelling "f*ck off" at the
protestors to and occasionally throwing eggs.

From the protestors, however, there was a very conciliatory attitude
shown to the residents. Whilst speeches at the starting point of the
march were about climate change and the need for action, by the time
the march ended up in front of the Metropolitan Colliery, the
protestors were almost solely devoted to reaching out to the locals.
The chants became: "What do we want? Green jobs! Where do we want them?
Helensburgh!"

Those who were angry at the protestors, of course, may have believed
their jobs were at stake. Protestors I spoke to, however, rejected the
idea that there was a difference between the interests of workers and
environmentalists. Greens Parliamentarian Lee Rhiannon was only stating
the obvious when she told the crowd that coal was a "dying industry".
Surely, coal jobs will run out eventually - either profitable coal will
run out, or governments will eventually take action on climate change.
Under these circumstances, a deliberate shift from coal-dependency to
jobs in green industry is the best conceivable way forward for
communities dependent on coal jobs. The real factor eroding employment
in communities that see themselves as coal-dependent is the coal
industry itself. According to Climate Camp's Jess Miller, the coal
industry has lost 18,000 jobs since the 1980s. This isn't because of
tree-hugging do-gooders, it's because of increased use of automation in
the mining process. (Apparently, killing jobs to save the planet is
evil, but killing jobs to increase profits is okay.)

Next, after various speeches, came the non-violent direct action. On
stage, a woman, together with her mother and her son, announced that
they were set to walk onto the mine site. She declared that her family
represented three generations who needed to act on climate change. "We
will not resist arrest and we will remain peaceful," she pledged.

They marched through a corridor made in the Climate Campers crowd,
down to the police lines. They walked united into the row of police,
who stopped them. They tried again, in a somewhat polite manner, and
then they sat down. Next, a 61-year-old man and his father moved
through the parted sea of protestors and approached police lines. The
police were polite enough as they refused to budge, and these two also
sat down in front of police lines.

After a few more attempts, there was not enough room in front of police lines, and people sat down en masse near the police.

Of course, this wasn't too dramatic. Overall, Climate Campers are a
well behaved bunch, and though they turned up in significant numbers,
the police were largely unworried by the protestors. This is a striking
contrast to how police behaved around APEC time, over the trumped-up
threat of "anarchist violence". Yet it could be said that in many ways,
Climate Camp has an anarchist flavour to its forms of organisation.
Climate Camp is organised in a strictly non-hierarchical manner, and in
its decision-making processes the greatest efforts are made to
accommodate and respect minority views. There are no ideological dogmas
or party lines, people are organised in decentralised affinity groups,
and there are no leaders. They also maintain complete political
independence by refusing corporate sponsorship. They operate on a
shoestring budget, which forces their grassroots organising to be more
dynamic, rather than creating a sterile top-down organisation.

Last year, there was one Climate Camp. This year, there will have
been four, after the next one in WA in December. We can expect them to
grow each year. Civil disobedience and direct action will naturally
appeal to the Australian public, because they want serious action on
climate change, and our government is failing to do anything about it.

Rudd is willing to commit to an emissions reduction of 5 per cent, whereas Turnbull made a dubious proposal
for 10 per cent. Neither is good enough - they're not even close. If it
is granted that the Liberals were voted out partly because of their
weakness on climate change, what options will voters have at the next
election when both major parties reject public opinion?

That is not all. Our government has bullied Pacific Island states
to prevent their calling for stronger emissions targets. That is, we
don't want countries facing destruction through climate change to add
to international pressure to stop ruining the environment. Last week,
Oxfam complained
that "millions of people facing greater floods, droughts and failed
harvest after failed harvest will be the real losers if the US, Canada,
EU, Japan and Australia continue as blockers to the UN negotiations".

Oxfam frames the issue perfectly in its report Climate Wrongs and Human Rights:
by "failing to tackle climate change with urgency, rich countries are
effectively violating the human rights of millions of the world's
poorest people." This is not just a future threat, says
Oxfam: "hundreds of millions of people are already suffering" from
climate change. One report estimates "that 26 million people have
already been displaced because of climate change." Even "warming of 2°C
entails a devastating future for at least 660 million people." The
report notes the IPCC's finding that "climate change could halve yields
from rain-fed crops in parts of Africa as early as 2020, and put 50
million more people worldwide at risk of hunger... And up to one
billion people could face water shortages in Asia by the 2050s due to
melted glaciers."

This is the results of our emissions. We could do less harm if we
started systematically bombing poor countries. But that is not all: our
government is actually escalating our war on the climate. The NSW
Government is building two massive new power stations. It is likely they will be coal fired. The State Government is expanding coal exports, and increasing funding for coal.

With all that happening, what chance does the climate have? The NSW
Government in particular goes mushy and weak at the knees for coal
companies. It recently approved the expansion of the Metropolitan
Collieries targeted by the Climate Camp protest even though the Sydney
Catchment Authority has warned
that the expansion could cause the dam floor to crack and "cause
serious leaks from southern Sydney's main drinking water supply". Even
the NSW Liberals were appalled that the Government would "override two
key agencies in this way". As one Liberal MP said, "If it comes down to
a choice between coal and water, I know which one most people would
support."

Coal companies can exert economic pressure on governments to get their
way. From the other side, if public opinion isn't enough to push
governments to do the right thing on climate change, the public needs
to up the ante somehow. We know that civil disobedience works: the Wall Street Journal is whining
about Al Gore's "liberal consensus" of the need for civil disobedience,
whereby people acting on concerns about climate change have "succeeded
in making new coal plants nearly impossible to build".

This is exactly what a small group of Climate Campers realised. While
most of the protesters made their point at the gates of the Peabody
mine, early in the morning four brave young activists (and a
photographer) had gone to the BHP Billiton-owned Dendrobium coal mine further south near Port Kembla and locked themselves on to the conveyor belt.
They stopped production for four glorious hours. I managed to interview
Aimee, one of those arrested. Aimee is a pleasant and friendly
activist, and she had a nice chat with the cops about the lousy weather
while they figured out how to get the activists down.

Aimee, however, is an undergraduate student. She doesn't have the time
or money to make the kind of political example out of her civil
disobedience that the Kingsnorth Six did. For her bravery to pay off, we don't just need more Aimees, we need Australians to support her. That's our challenge.