The Modern Movement vs. the Miserable Moment
ATTENTION – VISITORS FROM CACC CAMPAIGN WEBSITES AND EMAILS. ALTHOUGH IT IS SPELLED OUT IN WHITE AND BLACK, MANY OF YOU HAVE FAILED TO REALISE THAT WE ARE NOT THE ORGANISERS OF THE EVENT. THE DEMONSTRATION IS ORGANISED BY MODERN MOVEMENT. Thanks, the Editors.
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Modern Movement, who are mounting a stand to the bleak language of the environmentalists, are planning a demonstration in favour of the Heathrow Airport expansion, to counter a demo planned by opponents of the scheme.
Support Airport Expansion: Thursday 19 February, 17.30 -19.30 on Parliament Square, East Footway
The extension of flying to millions of people has been a liberation. Most of us can now afford to go on holiday and welcome the cheapening of air travel allowing us to fly abroad. The development of aviation infrastructure is crucial to allow ever more people to fly.
This is why Modern Movement will be holding a counter-demonstration at the same time as the anti-aviation groups to show our support for airport expansion and urge on the building of the third runway at Heathrow.
Join us in front of Parliament to argue for guilt-free travel, for ever-cheaper flights and for freedom of movement.
Modern Movement – Faster, Cheaper, Better Transport for All!
Banners, flags and posters welcome but not essential. Look out for the large Modern Movement banner. This demonstration has been authorised by the Metropolitan Police.
This comes in the wake of what seemed to be a call for movement to be rationed from the Climate Change Committee chair, Lord Adair Turner, who gave evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee last week,
If there has to be demand constraint, we will then bring in the analysis I mentioned earlier of where are these flights, and one of the questions we will ask is, “How many of the flights which occur are of sufficiently short distances either because they are domestic or they are London to the south of France, London to the skiing resorts, et cetera”, that there is a believable story that they do not have to be flights, they can be high-speed rail, or are quite a lot of them things where, realistically, it is never going to be competed by high-speed rail and, therefore, you actually have to say that we have got to constrain demand in an absolute sense and people just will not be able to make as many journeys as they would want to in an unconstrained fashion. That is the analysis that we are going to do.
If you’re near enough to London to be able to make it to the demo on the 19th Feb, please do.
Tags: CCC, Climate Change Committee, Lord Adair Turner, Modern Movement, Plane Stupid
Posted in Blog | 56 Comments »
Inprotest, you write: “we are talking about the catastrophic destabalization of our global climate”.
I for one am open to the possibility of such a scenario. I do believe that “s**t happens” and we only need to look to human history for many many instances of massive disasters of all kinds. If a planet-killing asteroid hit the planet next year, or a new killer plague appeared, or nuclear war broke out in the next 10 years, I for one would NOT be surprised. Quite simply, s**t happens. Always has, always will. And climate change may indeed be one of those things.
However, I have tried and tried and I have not as yet found anything convincing in a practical way to support the view that we WILL kill our children through CO2 emissions. I am not a scientist by training, but I am technically minded, and I can follow logical arguments and question assumptions. I am also very interested in social dynamics, therapy, and unconscious motivations. I take a general interest in science and culture. And most of what I see about AGW is a cultural movement, with not enough science to justify it. The computer models have never been proven right. They can’t even be shown to be vaguely trustable. Only those scientists who are in love with their models will claim that they are the very best on offer. And if you read carefully what they themselves say about the models, there is a subtle distinction between “suing what we know” and basing policy on them.
Well, using what we know, most models about anything and everything are most likely wrong. That much we know from looking at the history of what does and does not work in modeling. But if the climate scientists took that on board, they would be left with NOTHING. They certainly would not enjoy the attention and importance bestowed on them by caring people like you. I mean that seriously. You care, they model scenarios, but your trust in them is not warranted. Really, you need to question whom you trust.
I expect in years to come we will see other scientific fields clamor for attention. Geneticists and epidemiologists will start asking for more research, warming that infections diseases are on the rise, and we could be facing major plague outbreaks. Astronomers will warn that risks from asteroids are far greater than previously thought, and will need to form groups to get the funding to put massive defenses into place, with massive engineering projects required to build means of diverting planet killing asteroids. And that is just the stuff that we can think of.
Much bigger s**t can happen than we could possibly imagine, and we as humans do well to not let our arrogance get the better of us. We have to think beyond one simple issue or problem. Climate change, one runway? That’s a tiny thing in the big scheme of planetary threats.
John’s point about a ‘responsible philosophy of life’ seems to be coming up regularly. Maybe it’s worth a look.
John doesn’t know what our ‘philosophy of life’ is. All he can see is that we seem to be in favour of the Heathrow development.
The problem is, John, that we aren’t convinced by the premises of the arguments that environmentalists put forward in their objections to the development. Therefore, you could only truly call us ‘irresponsible’ if we agreed that a third runway would send ‘the future of the earth and our grandchildren’ to hell.
We don’t buy the catastrophism, you see. And there are plenty of good reasons not to.
For instance, if you’d taken the trouble to investigate the site properly – which you clearly haven’t – you would have found us criticising the idea that science produces moral imperatives. And you would see that we explain the need for apocalyptic and catastrophic scenarios to generate legitimacy for political ideas. And you would find many cases where we demonstrate disparity between ‘the science’ and what people say ‘the science’ says.
That is not to say that climate change isn’t a problem. Nor even that the proposal to build the new runway doesn’t have problems which need addressing and debating. What it is to say is that your measure of what the terms of the debate are is polarised by some unhelpful binary categories and axioms (eg, ’sides’, and Stuart’s ‘with us or against us rhetoric).
In fact, we started this blog because we were concerned that environmentalism and anxieties about ’sustainability’ threatened to deprive this generation and future generations of the possibilities that development can create. We saw a deeply retrogressive tendency within the arguments being made by environmentalists and politicians. We thought that they were dangerous and ill-conceived.
It would be irresponsible not to challenge what we perceived as dangerous, wouldn’t it?
Now this is a rational comment from a sane green is it?.
“You are a hideously sad and irresponsible group of people. I can only hope views such as yours die out when our government finally wakes up to the need to take real action to stop the destruction of our planet.
So how does that move on the argument on this site ?.
SHAME ON YOU CHRIS.
Keep up the good work editors .
mat
Here is my take on why the anti-Heathrow expansion campaigners are on the wrong runway
http://www.postrecession.wordpress.com
What’s amazing about this heated discussion is that the real contribution of aviation to carbon emmissions – 3%? 5%? 13%? – is in practice really quite minor. And yet everyone is foaming at the mouth as if anyone who’s into cheaper, more plentiful air travel must clearly be some sort of baby-killing denial-junkie. get a grip, folks. So it’s 3%. Or 13%. Either way, it’s not really the biggest CO2 contributor in town, is it? You’d be better off standing outside Downing Street railing against central heating and radiators, wouldn’t you?
No. all the sound and fury is directed at aviation as a symbol of the supposed excesses of modern society, and all those beastly stag do’s that the Chavs now get to go on. 3%? 13%? get a life…
If you really want to do something about climate change, wouldn’t cogenerating nuclear power stations be the best way to start?
The single biggest contribution to CO2 emissions comes from fossil-fuel-fired power stations, while fossil fuel burning for the heating of buildings (which cogeneration would remove the need for) is responsible for CO2 emissions that are almost as high as those from cars, and more than those from trains, planes and ships put together?
No – environmentalism isn’t about the environment, it’s about middle class control-freak so-called “leftists” (who actually despise the working class).