The Centre for Alternative Technology set itself a task in 2007: to work out if it was possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2030 in order to help avoid a critical 2° global temperature rise and provide energy and economic security. Published in June, the result is Zerocarbonbritain2030, a 400-page brick of a book, produced by NGOs, academics, scientists and industry.

The report is consciously framed in the context of the existing economic paradigm and while there are undoubtedly bigger issues that underpin a transition to a greener society, the authors set out to show that greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced to zero within 20 years without resorting to nuclear energy or international carbon offsetting. As such the report does not address issues such as international trade, neoliberalism, the politics of growth capitalism or class, gender and equity issues in anything approaching enough detail. However, it makes clear that embracing a zero carbon future would mean a deliberate reconstruction of the UK economy, ensuring climate and economic stability, increased energy and food security and millions of new, permanent jobs.

To secure a 70 per cent chance of staying below a 2° temperature rise, global greenhouse gas emissions will need to approach zero by 2100. The Zerocarbonbritain2030 report takes into account the UK’s historical responsibility for carbon emissions and argues that it should therefore take on a greater share of the burden to allow the majority world a longer period to decarbonise.

Power down to power up

Zerocarbonbritain2030 is the first fully integrated solution to climate change in the UK. The report is divided into five sections: the climate context, ‘power down’, land use, ‘power up’, and policy. ‘Power down’ demonstrates how we can reduce our energy demand by 57 per cent through energy efficiency and saving measures and ‘power up’ renewables to 100 per cent to meet the reduced demand.

The report’s proposals include:

n Buildings: It demands a deep refurbishment of existing buildings and highlights the needs for a code of sustainable refurbishment to cover the industrial and commercial sector. By constructing new buildings from wood, straw and other natural materials we can lock away millions of tonnes of CO2.

n Transport: Electrification of vehicles and a major shift to walking, cycling and public transport could produce a 63 per cent reduction in energy use for transport purposes. Contentiously, one third of current aviation could be maintained by growing sustainable bio-fuels in the UK.

n Land: One of the most controversial sections of the report is its land use scenario. The report shows how Britain can provide for its own essential food and fuel. But to do so would require a huge reduction in grazing livestock, which currently uses 83 per cent of agricultural land, generates 82 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and produces less than 30 per cent of the nutritional value of domestically-produced food. These changes, while radical, could be very positive for rural life, generating 93,000 net jobs.

n Renewables: The report demonstrates that all our energy needs, at all times, can be met with 100 per cent renewables. With the right mix of energy in different locations we can meet the challenges of variability in supply. Most would come from offshore wind, a huge resource, which could create thousands of jobs in manufacturing and installation.

A zero carbon transition could create millions of jobs in wind and solar power, and energy-efficiency programmes. For it to work, an international agreement on tackling climate change is vital, with ongoing climate negotiations taking a new direction that brings about swift action and a fair global agreement.

What would it be like?

The report offers one possible scenario that tries to balance what we are used to with what we need to do to reduce emissions rapidly. But what would a a zero carbon Britain look like?

We can imagine that people would be healthier as bikes and pedestrians dominate the roads and diets are largely made up of fresh vegetables, fruit and grains. There would still be cars, aviation and meat, but a lot less.

Rural areas would be repopulated as British farming is revitalised through changes in land use that bring new jobs. Smart appliances and energy efficiency would be buzzwords in the home; heating bills would dive as insulation became the norm and fuel poverty a thing of the past. Internationally a global agreement on climate change would mean that resources are equally distributed and a constant supply of infinite renewable energy would foster international security.

The solutions to create a zero carbon and a high well-being future for all exist. What has been missing to date is the political will to implement them. Zerocarbonbritain2030 is a practical approach to the biggest challenge that humanity has faced. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good beginning. n

Download the report: www.zcb2030.org

Making the cut

Scientists have called for a reduction of at least 50 per cent in global greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050 to stave off disaster. To do this, historically large emitters like the US and European countries will have to curb emissions by around 80 per cent. But conventional wisdom says that the US will not sign a treaty unless China also commits to binding targets. In Europe, Poland, which is heavily dependent on coal for electricity, is leading a nine-member ‘coalition of the unwilling’ to fight the EU’s plan for 20 per cent reductions by 2020. And the UK’s new Climate Change Act, which sets a binding 80 per cent target for emissions decreases by 2050, could see this undermined by allowing industry to purchase limitless offsets from developing countries in place of cutting pollution at home.

The battle over which countries should slash greenhouse gases, and by how much, is one in a larger struggle to define obligations. Through the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’, the UN climate convention attempts to account for countries’ role in causing the climate crisis. It creates a mandate for wealthy countries to provide financial support to poorer nations to cope with adaptation to ‘locked-in’ climatic upheaval and develop clean energy economies. But the existing Kyoto Protocol, which promotes carbon trading to meet this aim, provides richer nations with a means to buy their way out of responsibility instead of tackling their own emissions and over-consumption.

Developing countries will be looking for firm cash commitments from Northern governments on a range of issues, from deforestation to the deployment of low-carbon technologies. In each case, this could lay the groundwork for moving beyond ‘business as usual’ approaches, by promoting small-scale solutions and local, democratic resource control – although there are many potential pitfalls too.

UN climate talks are furthest along on adaptation. In Bali, an Adaptation Fund was established whose executive board has a majority of seats held by developing countries. This could be used by affected countries to exchange the myriad grass-roots adaptation techniques that already exist – such as seed swaps, a return to small-scale irrigation, and new forms of community organising. However, some critics warn that the money could end up being channeled to agribusiness – via new spending on GM crops – and other transnational corporations.

Deforestation, a second ‘pillar’ in the talks, accounts for about 20 per cent of global emissions. A global agreement on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) could channel billions of dollars from North to South, but the question is – who gets the money?

As currently conceived, governments could bank payments from a forest carbon market for keeping trees in the ground even if forests are really conserved by indigenous peoples. Logging companies might also be eligible if the definition of ‘forests’ includes ‘sustainably managed’ plantations.

Alternatively, negotiations could link fighting deforestation with the implementation of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, requiring governments to legally recognise land tenure and territorial rights as a precondition for participating in a REDD scheme.

Financial crisis v climate crisis

The financial meltdown has raised concerns that developed countries will be reluctant to spend money to tackle the climate crisis, although there is potentially a silver lining in new calls to reinvent whole institutions.

Chief among these is the World Bank, which – with the backing of the G8 – has been positioning itself as the leading international agency for tackling the climate crisis. Industrialised countries have pledged $6.1 billion towards the Bank’s new suite of ‘climate investment funds’, but environmentalists argue that these remain skewed towards destructive projects like coal power plants and large dams. The funds have been snubbed by India, China and the G77 group of developing nations, who argue that the loans offered by the Bank for adaptation leave poorer countries to foot the bill for coping with a problem they did not create.

The current economic disorder illustrates the danger of relying on poorly regulated and little understood free market instruments, such as carbon trading, to solve real-world problems. It reveals the importance of new institutions, such as an International Renewable Energy Agency, to provide the 1.6 billion people living without electricity access to truly clean energy. And it compels those working for climate justice to propose alternatives to a development paradigm that pits limitless economic expansion against a resource-constrained reality.

Janet Redman is a researcher for the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington

Concern can now be heard across the political spectrum. But has it resulted in a policy rethink?

In the UK and EU, at least, the answer is a qualified yes. The UK government is now considering a delay to its target of 5 per cent agrofuel use from 2011 to 2014. But the renewable transport fuel obligation – which came into force last April – will still award £550 million per year to agribusiness, according to a recent report from the right-wing Policy Exchange think-tank.

The EU has also made some positive revisions to its proposed agrofuels policy. The European Parliament’s industry committee voted on 11 September to keep a 10 per cent target on renewable fuels for transport by 2020, but no longer insists that this be met by agrofuels alone. Its proposed sustainability criteria are now far tougher than expected, with provisions to calculate the impact of indirect land use changes as a result of agrofuel production and to respect international law on land rights and labour conditions. A major review is now scheduled for 2014, which will include an assessment of how agrofuels are affecting food security.

This compromise falls short of the moratorium on agrofuel targets and incentives that many campaigners had called for. But the furious reaction of the European Biodiesel Board and European Bioethanol Fuel Association, the main industry lobby groups, tells its own story: this is an argument that is being won, and a policy that would have encouraged massive agrofuel expansion has been fundamentally altered.

Elsewhere in the world, though, the outlook remains bleak. Spurred on by ‘energy security’ concerns, the US is now the world’s largest agrofuel producer. In his 2007 state of the union address, George Bush set a 10-year goal for 20 per cent of agrofuels in the transport sector. This is unlikely to change if Barack Obama becomes president, since he has long championed bioethanol production. John McCain, who had opposed the subsidies, now supports them too – with one eye on votes in the US corn belt.

Brazil, the world’s second largest producer, and largest exporter, is also expanding its industry. It continues to lobby aggressively for continued subsidies and reduced tariffs at international trade talks.

China, which had planned a 15 per cent target for ‘renewable’ transport fuels by 2020, has started to express doubts. In June 2007, fearing competition with food supplies, the Chinese government put a freeze on new projects to convert wheat production to fuel use. But the country’s agrofuel production capacity continues to expand – with new refineries now looking to Indonesia and Malaysia for palm oil imports.

In India, meanwhile, a new law was passed in September stating that 20 per cent of the country’s liquid fuels should be agrofuels by 2017. The same package proposes to eliminate taxes and duties on biodiesel, and set minimum prices to encourage increased production.

The bottom line is this: although the political backlash has had some effects, global agrofuel production is still expanding. According to the UN Environment Programme, financing for agrofuels production grew by 16 per cent to $16.7 billion in 2007 – although this marks a significant slowdown from the equivalent 200 per cent growth in 2006, largely as a result of concerns about food supplies.

Huge new agrofuel plants continue to be constructed. The world’s largest biodiesel refinery, which will process 800,000 tonnes a year, will be opened by the Finnish company Neste Oil in Singapore in 2010. This will be joined by a similar-sized refinery in Rotterdam by 2011. World production may not double by 2012, as the International Energy Agency predicted in 2007, but it looks a good bet to double by 2030, as the US Energy Information Administration recently said.

Campaigning can force changes, as the EU debate has shown. But we are still a long way from winning the battle against the unsustainable industrial production of fuel from crops.

Moreover, E On is taking the threat of climate change seriously, as the main sponsor of the Guardian’s ‘climate change summit’, where it will convene a session examining ‘the role of energy companies in finding effective ways to deliver the transition to secure, affordable and low-carbon energy’.

More specifically, the website describes E On’s new ‘clean coal’ power station at Kingsnorth in Kent, which will replace existing plant and employ ‘supercritical technology’ to make it 20 per cent more efficient. To top it all, it will be built with the capacity to retrofit carbon capture and storage (CCS), a new technology designed to reduce emissions still further.

E On, it seems, is trying very hard. So hard that it has recently hired Edelman, a world leader in the public relations field and the self-proclaimed inventor of ‘environmental PR’. The threat? The Camp for Climate Action, which will be coming to Kingsnorth this August. E On says it respects the right to protest, and just wants to be able to operate and provide power for its customers’ homes and businesses.

Seems reasonable enough? Let’s look beyond the greenwash.

Kingsnorth is a coal-fired power station. Coal may pose ‘the greatest threat to the climate’, according to James Hansen, NASA scientist, but as a source of power generation it is very cheap. And there’s plenty of it, at least for the time being. So, as E On is firmly committed to maximising profits for its shareholders, it is firmly committed to coal. Which doesn’t really square with a ‘low-carbon’ goal.

E On UK is part of the German-based E On group, which has at least eight new coal-fired power stations planned in Europe and one in the US in the next five years. This energy giant prides itself on working towards ‘vertical integration’ – gaining control of the entire supply chain – and its portfolio covers coal, oil, gas, nuclear and renewable energy.

E On generates around 10 per cent of our electricity in the UK. Of that, for all the talk, renewables weigh in at a paltry 2 per cent, while coal accounts for a massive 61 per cent. E On has three coal-fired power stations including Kingsnorth, and their combined generation is greater than any other UK company’s.

Since the winding down of the UK coal industry in the 1980s, the coal-fired stations built in the 1960s and 1970s have been ticking over. However, EU legislation limiting emissions means that most will have to close. It is this, rather than any aspiration to be environmentally responsible, that is driving the wave of seven proposed new coal-fired power stations in the UK. These will ensure that coal is burned for the next 50 years at least. The new plant at Kingsnorth will produce eight million tonnes of CO2 per year. ‘Clean coal’ is a contradiction in terms.

Then we come to the big red herring that is CCS – an as yet unproven technology whereby CO2 is sequestered and stored away. Even if it turns out to be technically feasible, it will be costly and, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is unlikely to be commercially viable for decades – far too late to have any impact on climate change. But this hasn’t stopped E On and companies like it from using CCS as a justification for new coal-fired power power stations such as at Kingsnorth.

The alternatives are clear. If, as the government states, the UK is set to become a world-leader in technologies such as wind and wave power, the coal industry is ripe for what is known as a ‘just transition’ to green-collar jobs. The German environmental engineering sector has generated some 250,000 jobs in the past four years, a figure that dwarfs the 5,600 in UK coal.

The revitalisation of the coal industry is a path the government and energy companies shouldn’t even be thinking of treading in the face of climate change. It is up to us to stand squarely in the way.

www.wdm.org.uk/kingsnorth
thecoalhole.org
www.climatecamp.org.uk
www.eon-uk.com

The seeds of the transition town idea lie in the small Irish town of Kinsale, where in 2005 a group of students at the local further education college developed a process for residents to draw up an ‘energy descent action plan’ – a tool to design a positive timetabled way through the huge changes that will occur as world oil production peaks. The action plan covers a number of areas of life in Kinsale, including food, energy, tourism, education and health.

For example, for food, the plan envisions that by 2021 the town will have made the transition from dependency to self-reliance, where ‘all landscaping in the town comprises of edible plants, fruit trees line the streets, all parks and greens have become food forests and community gardens’. As a practical step towards this, the plan recommends the immediate appointment of a local food officer.

For housing, the plan envisions that by 2021 ‘all new buildings in Kinsale will include such things as a high level of energy efficiency together with a high portion of local sustainable materials’. A suggested immediate practical step towards this is a review of current building practices and future development plans.

The energy descent action plan approach landed in the UK when a Kinsale college tutor, Rob Hopkins, moved to Totnes and held a number of talks and film screenings to introduce the idea. In September 2006 Transition Town Totnes was launched, seeking ‘to engage all sectors of the community in addressing this, the great transition of our time’ and seeking to put ‘Totnes on the international map as a community that engaged its creativity and collective genius with this timely and pressing issue’. The initiative has spread beyond Totnes just one year on; towns and villages around the UK have started developing a transition town approach for themselves (see box).

One reason why the initiative has caught people’s imaginations is that, at its core, is a hopeful message. Many ‘transitioners’ are motivated to change energy use patterns not just because of energy shortages in the future but because of self-imposed energy rationing now – because cutting fossil fuel use is essential if climate change is to be lessened.

The transition movement shakes off the usual gloom and limitation around this message by calling for positive and pro-active changes. These are based in how the world actually is, rather than how we would like it to be if only someone, somewhere, would come up with that miraculous solution that will allow us to expand infinitely and indefinitely, all within a finite world. Rather than a vision of deferred promise and baseless hope it offers community-wide participation to find realistic and workable answers.

Whether the transition town approach can work at a citywide level, or whether its call for reduced consumption will have a wider impact on, for example, international trading systems and their inherently heavy use of fossil fuels, remains to be seen. In Totnes, at least, the creation of new businesses and land use initiatives suggests that the transitioners are in it for the long haul.

For travellers on the road from Bangkok to Malaysia, the crossroads at Bo Nok-Baan Krut might seem only a collection of rice fields, fishing boats, tourist resorts, coconut trees, temples and shops. Yet this is a community that defeated corporate and state plans to build one of the biggest coalfired power plants in Thailand on its beachfront.

The victory cost years of sweat and blood. Charoen Wat- Aksorn spoke up about corrupt land grabs connected with the project and was murdered in 2004. Other villagers spent countless hours exposing the fraudulence of its environmental impact assessment – in recognition of which Jintana Kaewkhao, a local woman who never finished high school, was awarded an honorary PhD. Today the community is consolidating its gains, exploring windpowered electricity and lending a hand to communities battling fossil fuel projects elsewhere.

One such community lies several hundred kilometres south in Chana district. Chana’s local monster is the prestige Trans Thai-Malaysian natural gas pipeline and refining venture backed by Thailand’s ousted tycoon prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Chana is less lucky than its sister community to the north. After years of fraudulent land deals, bribes and intimidation and beatings by police, a huge gas separation plant now sits defiantly on community wakaf land, supposedly inalienable Muslim commons entrusted to God, drawing gas from a pipeline illegally forced across a local beach. A gas-fired power plant is going up. Chemical works may not be far behind. But villagers are not giving up. They say that they are fighting not only for their lives and religion, but for a natural heritage that belongs to the whole country.

Some professional climate activists slight such local struggles as secondary to the task of negotiating global emissions reduction targets. They forget that dealing with climate change means, above all, finding practical means of keeping fossil fuels in the ground. As eminent climatologist Jim Hansen reiterated in June, burning the earth’s remaining coal, oil and gas ‘would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed’.

No one is better informed about what it will take to prevent that happening than communities like Bo Nok and Chana. Any serious climate change movement will have to connect with such communities everywhere, whether they are battling Shell in the Niger delta or in Rossport in Ireland or contesting the huge new National Grid gas pipeline in South Wales. These are communities dialled into the politics of the future. Their experience reminds us that however brilliantly the world theorises ways of getting carbon out of energy, it is also going to have to get energy companies out of fossil fuel deposits.

UK officials, for example, talk of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Yet they promote airport expansion, back World Bank efforts to ramp up fossil fuel use worldwide and are committed to large-scale carbon trading – a messy US invention that only slows the transition away from fossil fuels. As Oxford development studies professor Barbara Harriss-White remarks, it’s hard to see what British climate policy is doing ‘other than serving as a mass tranquiliser’.

In the private sector, meanwhile, banks such as Barclays parade plans to go ‘carbon neutral’, while at the same time expanding fossil fuel investment and their fossil fuel trading teams. Emblematically, Barclays has even pitted itself directly against the hydrocarbon protesters of Chana. With an investment of US$257 million, Barclays Capital leads the consortium of banks supporting the Trans Thai-Malaysia gas project. Despite repeated invitations, none of its 13,200 staff worldwide has ever even visited the Chana villagers. Contempt – not only for local livelihoods, but also for the aspiration for a liveable climate – doesn’t come much clearer than that.

Chico Mendes, the Brazilian trade unionist who was murdered in 1988 while working to save the jobs of rubber tappers threatened by Amazon clearance, had a famous saying. ‘At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees,’ Mendes said. ‘Then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realise I am fighting for humanity.’

The villagers in Bo Nok, Chana and elsewhere could say the same.An account of the struggle in Chana can be found at www.thecornerhouse.org.uk

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the camp last year was the positive response to the day of action – not so much ‘Why do you want to turn the lights out and live in the stone age?’ as ‘It’s about time somebody’s solutions squared up to the scale of the crisis.’ Within weeks, Greenpeace had staged a similar action at Didcot power station, the country’s second largest source of CO2 emissions. Then two dozen people were arrested after blockading a runway at Nottingham East Midlands Airport, and Plane Stupid, the country’s first anti-aviation direct action group, took off.

The protests have continued. On April 2007, a group occupied Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, another of the country’s biggest coal burners, and shut it down for several hours. The same weekend, s mini climate camp took place outside Bath, with workshops and a day of action against Land and Marine, the main construction camp building a controversial gas pipeline across Wales.

This type of action – actually attempting to shut down the biggest emitters – was unknown a year ago. Now it’s not only happening all over, but it seems to be pushing at an open door. All over the country, small groups are springing up to take action locally, shutting down petrol stations, travel agents and corporate offices.

New forms of climate change denial, such as biofuels and carbon offsets, are being rebuffed even as they try to take hold. In February, activists from London Rising Tide occupied the offices of the Carbon Neutral Company, coinciding with the release of The Carbon Neutral Myth (see www.carbontradewatch.org), a highly critical report on how ‘offsetting’ emissions detracts from the task of changing carbon-intensive lifestyles.

The precedents for the kind of collective mass action needed to address climate change are closer than we sometimes think. For all its faults, the Make Poverty History campaign got 250,000 people to stand up for a cause that was of no material benefit to them, and in many respects was asking for a reduction in our privilege and comfort.

There is a similar clamour for action on climate change now, but time is running short. Governments and corporations have made it plain that they prize economic growth over survival. We cannot wait for them to act and watch them fail. Change in 20 to 30 years time will be too late, and it is those of us who live in the major carbon emitting countries who must take responsibility.

From 14-21 August 2007, the second Camp for Climate Action will take place near Heathrow Airport. Heathrow’s planes emit the equivalent of 31 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year – more than even Europe’s biggest power station, and more than most countries’ total emissions. By pitching its tents at Heathrow, the camp aims to oppose the absurd contradiction of the government attempting emission cuts while forcing through large-scale airport expansion that would lock in massive emissions increases. The camp will also target industry giants, such as British Airways and the British Airports Authority, who are lobbying hard for a third runway at Heathrow, and will make plain the need for us all to fly less.

Although the location is different to last year, the philosophy of the climate camp remains the same – to be a place for sustainable living, learning, strategising and direct action, involving and evolving all of us who see the need to be part of this burgeoning movement.

Everyone now knows what the climate change problem is and what’s causing it. We need to be a spark that lights that powder keg of change.The Camp for Climate Action takes place from 14-21 August 2007 near Heathrow Airport. For more details, see www.climatecamp.org.uk.

Campaigns that use fear of impending climate disaster can further disempower and leave people waiting for promised government action. But education does not have to be about passively receiving information. It can encourage people to be active in their learning, and active in their lives. This is where popular education can come in, as a way to create collective knowledge and understanding of issues that can be used to change the world around us and challenge oppression.

From workers’ adult education to the civil rights movement and popular uprisings throughout Latin America, popular education has been crucial to many social movements. In the 1960s, Paulo Freire developed educational methods that aimed to challenge the oppression of illiterate peasants in Brazil. As the causes of their problems were considered, the students analysed and discussed what action could be taken to improve their situation. Crucially, popular education is not just learning about problems, but about taking action together.

How does this work in practice? First, popular education starts from an understandable reality, such as people’s own experiences or feelings about climate change. Second, it encourages participation, using brainstorms and interactive games. It tries to break down the hierarchy between teacher and learner – forget about having a pre-prepared talk or a set outcome but imagine adapting the session to the participants.

Activities are chosen from a toolkit of debates, guided walks, films, historical timelines, role plays, poster making and so on that can bring out opinions and share information. Moving towards action, whether a local composting scheme or an antiroads campaign, can be encouraged through uncovering histories of struggle, sharing inspiration from the thousands of grassroots projects that exist, building lists of resources, tactics, allies and ideas. Facilitators should be upfront about their opinions but not enforce their point of view.

All these things can take time and be challenging at times but are ultimately hugely rewarding, especially when there is a sense of building co-operation that will continue beyond the event.

Often hidden from view, there are thousands of projects that are working here and now to challenge climate change. People are doing it themselves in health collectives, community gardens, permaculture projects, bike collectives, micro-generation and training, as well as direct action and campaigns against climate criminals.

These projects rarely come from people being told these things need to happen, they emerge instead from people acting on the needs in their area and from cross-pollination of ideas from other places. One of the most rewarding things as a popular educator is to bring together groups of people and find common interests and spark conversations and projects. As someone touring with Rising Tide Climate Action in New York reflected, ‘Recently a group were doing a mind mapping exercise on disaster relief. Different folks that had never met before had skills in many of the identified areas. An email list sheet was passed around and taken away by one of the participants to organise their next meeting. A new project started!’

These ideas are not distant dreams, they are happening every day, everywhere. They are the cracks we need to peer through and see the new world.

These grassroots responses are the key to turning frustration, denial, apathy, anger and fear into positive, meaningful action. Powerful interests will eventually respond to climate change, but with as little disturbance as possible to the status quo. We have to educate ourselves, build capacity for people to take things on in our communities. The way we relate to and educate each other is just as much at the root causes of the climate crisis as cars and supermarkets. Education where we can re-learn co-operation and solidarity is a vital tool in responding to the climatic crises we face.

Trapese is a popular education collective that since 2004 has worked with student and community groups to inform, inspire and enable people to take action. We are touring the UK during summer 2007 undertaking workshops and teach-ins with our new book, Do It Yourself: a handbook for changing our world, published by Pluto Press in May.

For more information on the workshops or book contact info@handbookforchange.org or visit www.handbookforchange.org, and for details on the 2007 Camp for Climate Action see www.climatecamp.org.uk