The second major direct action protest in three days is another gem. Congratulations to Plane Stupid for a fantastically conceived and executed action.

Perhaps one of the most interesting comments on this protest was this brief aside from Gordon Brown, as reported by the Guardian:

“Gordon Brown today condemned the activists, telling MPs during his weekly question time session:

“Decisions should be made in this house and not on the roof of this house, and that is a very important message to send out to protesters.””

Ah, the shining wit. But the subtext of the comment is pretty clear: members of the commons are democratically elected; the protesters are not. The protestors have no claim to being democratically representative, possess no mandate from the people, and so can be (indeed ought to be) ignored and dismissed. One commenter on Channel 4 News’s forums gets the message. Says “Fil2”:

“So remind me.

“Who elected the guys on the roof?”

Some, of course, might object that reducing the input of ordinary people to a mark on a piece of paper every four years is a thoroughly inadequate, truncated version of democracy. One contributor to the Guardian’s comment pages last September, for instance, noting the decline in party membership and the rise of activism and new political alignments, wrote:

“The old topdown ways simply won’t work any more. Think of the challenges we face: security, global competition, climate change, building stronger communities and responding to rising aspirations - none can be met without involving and engaging the people of Britain.”

That contributor was, of course, Gordon Brown. So how has Mr Brown been “involving and engaging” the people of Britain over the expansion of Heathrow? As Greenpeace write of the internal documents they obtained recently (available here) – which were also being floated down on passers-by in the form of paper planes on wednesday afternoon:

Through the Freedom of Information Act Greenpeace has obtained documents which reveal worryingly close links between the airport authority and the Department of Transport, working together to influence the outcome of the consultation:

▪ Extraordinary collusion between BAA and the government. They have set up a joint body - the Heathrow Delivery Group - aimed at steering the plans through the consultation process.

▪ BAA officials have written parts of the consultation.

▪ BAA supplied the data for calculations of noise and pollution that inform the premise of the consultation document. Opposition groups have not been permitted to challenge the data.

▪ The Department for Transport and BAA have drawn up a ‘risk list’ – a list of threats to the building of the 3rd runway. The list includes the 2M campaign, the group comprising councils representing 2 million people that is opposed to the plans.

Who can honestly say they’re surprised? Since Brown appointed the unelected Digby Jones, former “voice of business” (according to the Telegraph) and chair of aviation industry lobby group “Flying Matters” to the Cabinet last year, the congruence between the interests of big business, the aviation lobby and the government can hardly have been more obvious. As a consequence, while claiming to be “involving and engaging the people of Britain”, the consultation process over Heathrow has been stage-managed from the outset by BAA, in collusion with the government.

But that, I’m afraid to say, is just the start. If you take a look at the December 2007 report by Woodnewton Associates (a consultancy whose clients include “government departments, agencies, businesses and not-for-profit organizations”), you find some rather interesting information on the attitudes of the British public to the proposed expansion. Among the details (my emphases):

“Many people believe that aviation makes a major contribution to the national and local economy. Despite this, a majority of the public is opposed to airport expansion when they consider the environmental impact.”

“… according to an Ipsos MORI poll in 2006, where people were reminded about the impact of aviation and about climate change generally, support for “a policy aimed at slowing down the growth in air travel” rises from 37% to 57%.

“… three in every five people think it is a bad idea to increase capacity at UK airports: even those people who have flown in the past 12 months are, on balance, against airport expansion. And the latest data shows that only 18% of the public support expanding Britain’s airports, with a clear majority (52%) supporting a standstill on new capacity.”

“The public wants action on climate change, even where knowledge is uncertain and even if this means making personal sacrifices. There is no evidence that the public believes that aviation should be treated as a special case.”

“… attitudes are continuing to shift in the direction of government action to curb aviation growth.”

Nevertheless, Brown, who apparently favours “reflecting the concerns and aspirations of the British people” told the CBI last November:

“[W]e have to respond to a clear business imperative and increase capacity at our airports - and you have rightly called for action at Heathrow. ... And this week we demonstrated our determination … to press ahead with a third runway.”

When it comes to the crunch, then, the need to “respond to a clear business imperative” overrules the “concerns and aspirations” of the British public, among whom 71% do not favour the expansion of our airports.

If we do want our “concerns and aspirations” to be reflected in the democratic process, then, the implications are obvious: we should be looking to the men and women on the roof of the House, not at the man in front of the dispatch box.

But there is another dimension to this, which it is important not to ignore. The effects of climate change are primarily going to be inflicted on other people, above all the world’s poor, and disproportionately on those least responsible for causing the problem. As an Oxfam briefing paper put it last year:

“There is a deep injustice in the impacts of climate change. Rich countries have caused the problem with many decades of greenhouse-gas emissions (and in the process have grown richer). But poor countries will be worst affected, facing greater droughts, floods, hunger, and disease.

“The impacts of climate change are already putting at risk the lives and livelihoods of millions of people – across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific – who are least responsible for causing it, and least equipped to cope with it.”

Benito Müller, director of Oxford Climate Policy and senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, asks (and with some justification):

Why should a poor country face these catastrophic social effects when the core responsibility for them lies elsewhere?

This has serious implications when we talk about democracy, and how we judge our leaders’ claims to possess a democratic mandate. Democracy, if it is to be meaningful, entails accountability on the part of the people making decisions to the people most affected by those decisions. In this case, most of the people in the latter category live thousands of miles away from Britain, and lack the ability even to vote (albeit for a government that will largely ignore you) in our political system. But the responsibilities impingent on states to act in accord with democratic principles are not confined to the geographical boundaries of the territories they rule. The Universal Declaration on Democracy adopted by the Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1997 makes a number of pronouncements – implicit and not-so-implicit – on democracy in the international sphere (emphases again mine):

11. Democracy is founded on the right of everyone to take part in the management of public affairs; it therefore requires the existence of representative institutions at all levels and, in particular, a Parliament in which all components of society are represented and which has the requisite powers and means to express the will of the people by legislating and overseeing government action. …

24. Democracy must also be recognised as an international principle, applicable to international organisations and to States in their international relations. The principle of international democracy does not only mean equal or fair representation of States; it also extends to the economic rights and duties of States.

25. The principles of democracy must be applied to the international management of issues of global interest and the common heritage of humankind, in particular the human environment.

It’s not difficult to discover what these responsibilities mean in practice: international public opinion favours serious action to address climate change, and soon. Analysis of a wealth of international polls by the Project on International Policy Attitudes’ WorldPublicOpinion.org initiative “reveals strong support around the world for decisive action to reduce the emission of climate-changing gases.”

“In most countries,” according to PIPA, “majorities see an urgent need for significant action.” According to Steven Kull, director of the World Public Opinion programme, “publics around the world are signaling that they are ready to do more than their own governments have been asking of them.”

In the absence of international democratic institutions, Gordon Brown simply has no mandate to take decisions that will so gravely affect the lives of millions of people. Indeed, his decisions fly in the face of the will of the public internationally; even of the British people whose views and aspirations he claims to value so highly. The protestors on the roof of the Houses of Parliament are not an affront to democracy: they are its most strident defenders. They are representing the majority of the public the government is ignoring; they are exposing the vested interests driving its policies; and they are providing a voice for those entirely without a voice in our political system, whose lives the government is willing to trample into the ground in pursuit of its own interests. They don’t just deserve our support: we should be taking action alongside them.

Also: On the theme of global democracy, there are a couple of campaigns on this that are worth having a look at. One is the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (you can also sign their appeal here); another is the Committee for a Democratic UN. If you’re on Facebook, you can also join the Campaign for a World Parliament.

“BAA respects people’s democratic right to protest lawfully.”

(Spokesmen for people’s champion BAA, “Climate protesters arrested after scaling Heathrow jet”, The Guardian, Monday 25 February 2008.)

Some photos of a beautiful action, carried out yesterday at Heathrow airport:

Some video footage of the event:

And you can read Joss Garman’s commentary here.

Peter Wilby is pretty close to the mark in his commentary on US election coverage in Monday’s Media Guardian:

Interest in the game eclipses the message

I don’t want to spoil the fun, but I wonder if British columnists are getting a little too excited about the US elections. In the Guardian, for example, Timothy Garton Ash, writing after Super Tuesday, saw it as a triumph for the “soft power of democracy”. He reckoned you could “strike up a conversation with a complete stranger in any bar in any city on any continent” and ask whether he or she was backing Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But the more pertinent question would be whether, even in America, the stranger had the first idea as to what either candidate would do in office.

The Pew research centre in Washington estimated, even before the voting started, that two-thirds of media coverage was dedicated to “the game” rather than to the political content of the candidates’ campaigns. American political writers, like our own dear Westminster hacks, find it hard to wrestle with policies and ideologies, and largely duck out of their responsibility to make such things accessible and interesting. The result is that US presidential candidates, when they take office, are hardly at all constrained by electoral commitments, except to corporations and pressure groups who provided the campaign funds. And this is the electoral system commentators hold up for our admiration.

Garton Ash compared the Clinton-Obama contest to “an exciting horse race or a well-made soap opera”. Precisely.

If anything, alas, he was understating his case. The management of this election by the media seems to be serving to actively undermine American democracy.

Take the issue of climate change. The League of Conservation Voters have been continuing their count of the number of times the top Sunday hosts of the major TV networks in the US have so far mentioned global warming in their questions to candidates in the presidential race. At present, they’ve reached a grand total of six – out of 3,061. That’s just under 0.2% of the total. Two-and-a-half times that number of questions were specifically about one Mr Bill Clinton. Nine times that number were about religion and faith; around thirteen times that number about abortion.

But let’s look on the bright side. Fox News are no longer in the lead in terms of questions asked, as they were a month ago; they’re now level pegging with NBC and CNN, each of them mentioning global warming a grand total of twice each. And climate change is at least still beating the issue of UFOs, which come in at a poor three questions (0.1% of the total).

Before we start despairing about the ignorance and apathy of Americans towards the rest of the world, however, it’s worth having a look at how significant US citizens themselves – as opposed to their national television media – consider the issue to be. Fortunately there’s no lack of polling data on this, and the picture it reveals is quite striking.

Environmental Research Web, for instance, reported on the results of one major poll of US opinion in October 2007 (emphases mine):

According to a recent survey of public opinion in the US, 68% of respondents were in favour of a new international treaty requiring the US to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 90% by the year 2050. The poll, conducted by Yale University, Gallup and the ClearVision Institute, also found that 40% of those questioned said that a presidential candidate’s position on global warming will be either extremely or very important when they vote.

“One of the most surprising findings was the growing sense of urgency,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. “Nearly half of all Americans now believe that global warming is either already having dangerous impacts on people around the world, or will in the next 10 years – a 20% point increase since 2004. These results indicate a sea change in public opinion.”

In addition to the reported results, a further 35% of respondents say that a candidate’s position on climate change will be “somewhat important” when they vote (bringing the total of those who see climate change as at least a “somewhat important” election issue to 75%). 30% of respondents said climate change is having “dangerous impacts now”. 62% agreed with the statement “Life on earth will continue without major disruptions only if we take immediate and drastic action to reduce global warming”. (33% “strongly”; 29% “somewhat”). 50% “personally worry about global warming” (15% a great deal; 35% a fair amount).

In addition (all data cited below is available via these two pages):

• A March 2007 poll by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org found that 43% of Americans consider climate change “a serious and pressing problem”; 46% view it as a “critical threat”; a further 39% consider it “an important but not critical threat”. 93% of Americans consider improving the global environment at least an “important goal” (including some 54% who consider it “very important”).

• An April 2007 ABC News/Washington Post/Stanford University Poll of Americans found 82% of respondents saying global warming was at least “somewhat important” to them personally; including 52% said it was either “very important” (34%) or “extremely important” (18%).

• A June 2007 poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 47% of Americans view climate change as a “very serious” problem, while another 28% say it is somewhat serious.

• In an August 2007 Newsweek Poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, 63% responded that climate change would be at least “one of several important issues” on which they would base their vote for members of the U.S. Congress (4% said the single most important). A plurality of 46% saw global warming, “[l]ooking ahead 50 years from today” to be “a major threat to human life on earth”.

• A September 2007 BBC World Service/GlobeScan/Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) poll found that 59% of Americans thought it necessary to take “major steps” on climate change “very soon” (another 33% thought it necessary to take “modest steps in coming years”).

• In a September 2007 Associated Press-Stanford University poll by Ipsos Public Affairs, 59% of respondents agreed that “[i]f nothing is done to reduce global warming in the future”, it will be a “very serious problem for the world” (23% “somewhat serious”).

• In an October 2007 Harris poll, fully 81% of respondents agreed that, “[a]s the world’s leading industrial country, the United States needs to set the lead when it comes to controlling greenhouse gases and pollution.”

Whoever they may be representing when US media election coverage marginalises climate change, then, it certainly isn’t that country’s population. There are various reasons why this may be, but the most significant are without doubt economic. As the authors of one study put it,

“Television’s tendency to present a one-sided view is compounded by the economic imperatives of a system funded by advertising. The upbeat tone of the coverage [is] seen as necessary to retain advertisers, since nobody wants their product surrounded by images of death, pain and destruction.”

Media decisions (or simply the prevailing journalistic culture) are constrained and influenced by

“the need to deliver to advertisers audiences in the “proper mindset” to be conducive to commercial messages. Thus, rather than as a result of any explicit “conspiracy,” the media [need] to minimize any potentially controversial messages which might unsettle the audience.”

As Peter Wilby (who has in the past edited the New Statesman and Independent on Sunday) put it in an earlier column (emphasis mine),

“whatever readers want, newspapers face relentless pressure for more good news from one particular source. Most advertisers do not like to be associated with bad news. If readers feel worried and insecure, advertisers believe, they are less likely to go out and spend. Guilt-inducing copy about poverty, disease, starvation and climate change is worst of all.”

According to some fascinating information gleaned by the US organisation Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting from AdAge.com, the oil giant BP have:

“issued directives demanding that their ads be pulled from any edition of a publication that included potentially “objectionable” content. BP went so far as to demand advance notice of any stories that mention the company, a competitor of the company or the oil and energy industry in general”.

And they’re not alone. According to one “anonymous editor”, speaking to Advertising Age, there’s “a fairly lengthy list of companies that have instructions like this”; as one magazine executive – also speaking anonymously – adds, “magazines are not in the financial position today to buck rules from advertisers.”

Here’s another interesting example, from the Los Angeles Business Journal:

“KNBC-TV (Channel 4) President and (General Manager Paula Madison said she has instructed her sales department to forward any advertiser concerns to management. “We can work that out. We can structure content so that your ads are not placed against disturbing pictures,” Madison said. …

“Madison acknowledged that advertiser skittishness hits television worse than other forms of media.”

While advertisers are powerfully influential then, there are some other avenues of pressure – a good reason to tell the Sunday news hosts to start troubling to ask about the most significant crisis the world faces in their questions to presidential candidates. So: why not help do your bit for American democracy – along with the future of human beings in general – by signing the League of Conservation Voters’ petition?

From Climate Code Red:

Summary

• The extensive melting of Arctic sea-ice in the northern summer of 2007 starkly demonstrated that serious climate-change impacts are already happening, both more rapidly and at lower global temperature increases than projected. Human activity has already pushed the planet’s climate past several critical “tipping points”, including the initiation of major ice sheet loss.

• The loss in summer of all eight million square kilometres of Arctic sea-ice now seems inevitable, and may occur as early as 2010, a century ahead of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections. There is already enough carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere to initiate ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland and to ensure that sea levels will rise metres in coming decades.

• The projected speed of change, with temperature increases greater than 0.3°C per decade and the consequent rapid shifting of climatic zones will, if maintained, likely result in most ecosystems failing to adapt, causing the extinction of many animal and plant species. The oceans will become more acidic, endangering much marine life.

• The Earth’s passage into an era of dangerous climate change accelerates as each of these tipping points is passed. If this acceleration becomes too great, humanity will no longer have the power to reverse the processes we have set in motion.

• We stand at a time where we still have the power to make a choice. Only by dealing with the full scale and urgency of the problem can we create a realistic path back to a safe-climate world. Targets should be chosen and actions taken that can actually solve the problem in a timely manner. A temperature cap of 2–2.4°C, as proposed within the United Nations framework, would take the planet’s climate beyond the temperature range of the last million years and into catastrophe.

• The loss of the Arctic sea-ice unambiguously represents dangerous climate change. As the tipping point for this event was around two decades ago when temperatures were about 0.3°C lower than at present, we propose a long-term precautionary warming cap of 0.5°C and equilibrium atmospheric greenhouse gas level of not more than 320 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide.

• The USA’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, stated recently that we should set an atmospheric carbon dioxide target that is low enough to avoid “the point of no return”. To achieve this, he says, we must not only eliminate current greenhouse gas emissions but also remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and take urgent steps to “cool the planet”.

• These scientific imperatives are incompatible with the “realities” of “politics as usual” and “business as usual”. Our conventional mode of politics is short-term, adversarial and incremental, fearful of deep, quick change and simply incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed. The climate crisis will not respond to incremental modification of the business-as-usual model.

• There is an urgent need to reconceive the issue we face as a sustainability emergency, that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise. The feasibility of rapid transitions is well established historically. We now need to “think the unthinkable”, because the sustainability emergency is now not so much a radical idea as simply an indispensable course of action if we are to return to a safe-climate planet.

Read on ...

“While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.”

- Just in time, the woefully oppressed intellectual blasphemer Alexander Cockburn reveals what the world’s scientists have been trying so desperately to hide from the public for so long: burning fossil fuels produces only incense and fairy dust.

Talking of public opinion and the democratic deficit, here’s a great book I read recently, which should be required reading on the topic:

Justin Lewis tackles some popular myths about popular opinion in the US, and explores the media’s ideological role. Highly recommended.

There’s also a good short film based on the same, so I’ve discovered, which is available online. And here it is. Enjoy:

While they’re often more protective of established power than they should be, as noted here previously, Human Rights Watch are to be applauded for their brave, timely and outspoken 2008 World Report, emphasising the West’s indulgence of dictators and autocrats under the cloak of “democracy promotion”. It’s an eerily familiar story, but it hasn’t lost any of its currency. As the BBC reports it:

West ‘embraces sham democracies’

The US, EU and other democracies are accepting flawed and unfair elections out of political expediency, Human Rights Watch says in its annual report.

Allowing autocrats to pose as democrats without demanding they uphold civil and political rights risked undermining human rights worldwide, it warned. …

‘Playing along’

In the report, HRW said established democracies such as the US and members of the European Union were increasingly tolerating autocrats “claiming the mantle of democracy”.

“In 2007 too many governments, including Bahrain, Jordan, Nigeria, Russia and Thailand, acted as if simply holding a vote is enough to prove a nation ‘democratic’, and Washington, Brussels and European capitals played along,” it said. …

HRW said the West was often unwilling to criticise the autocrats for fear of losing access to resources or commercial opportunities, or because of the perceived requirements of fighting terrorism.

“It seems Washington and European governments will accept even the most dubious election so long as the ‘victor’ is a strategic or commercial ally,” Mr Roth said.

HRW director Kenneth Roth’s accompanying essay on the subject, “Despots Masquerading as Democrats” does nonetheless contain some shortfalls. It includes Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez under the section on “Silencing the Media” – a categorisation which is more than a little dubious. The Chávez government’s refusal to renew the license of RCTV – a station whose coverage uncontroversially aided the coup attempt against the Venezuelan government in 2002 (even receiving explicit thanks from the coup’s leaders) – may not have been entirely justified, but it hardly amounts to a “silencing” of the media: the channel is still available to view on satellite and cable TV in Venezuela. As Peter Wilby astutely points out, we would do well to consider how a case closer to home might fare in the same circumstances:

“As the Venezuela Information Centre points out, the Broadcasting Code in Britain forbids material likely “to lead to disorder” and it is hard to imagine that if, say, Channel Five had done something similar, a British government would have waited five years to get it off air.”

To this day, Venezuela’s major media continue to be perhaps the most oppositional in the whole of Latin America. And, as Roth has acknowledged, all in all the country is basically democratic.

Also according to Roth, “[d]emocracy is a metric by which the United States still measures up fairly well”. This is also thoroughly debatable. The issue of healthcare – which most Americans want to see made available to all through government funding – is a case in point; but there is a striking divergence of public opinion and elite policy in the United States on issue after issue – have a look at the relevant page from the Project on International Policy Attitudes, for instance. Whether “counter-terrorism” is as much a priority for the West as Roth makes out is also more than a little dubious – given that our governments have been consciously pursuing a policy that enhances the threat of terror. The following fact about the invasion of Iraq should hopefully be well-known by now, but just in case it isn’t:

“The Joint Intelligence Committee, the top level of British intelligence, warned Tony Blair on 10 February 2003 in the following terms:

“‘The JIC assessed that al-Qaida and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq.’”

As Roth puts it towards the end of his essay:

“To recapture the powerful ideal of democracy, so central to the human rights cause yet so at risk of being manipulated as a false but beguiling substitute, requires heightened attention to the clever subterfuges of its detractors.”

I think that’s seldom been better put. But it’s advice that should first and foremost be applied by members of the public towards their own governments – including us, towards ours.