Category Archives: Do something!

Join the Stop Government Snooping petition hand-in to Craig Whittaker on Friday 29th

Posted on by
Reply

On Friday the 29th, Shirley, a local 38 Degrees member, has arranged to hand the  Stop Government Snooping petition in to our MP, Craig Whittaker.

Energy Royd, as an online community of content creators, contributors and readers, has a direct interest in protecting  internet privacy.

The petition hand-in is taking place at 1st Floor, Spring Villa at 16 Church Lane, Huddersfield, HD6 1AT. Everyone is invited to  join Shirley on Friday at 3.30pm, to get ready to meet Craig Whittaker at 3.45pm.  A strong turnout will show him that many people in Calderdale oppose the government’s plans to spy on who we email, text and call.

The Petition says:


Dear David Cameron,

Respect our privacy. Stop the internet and phone snooping plan.

  • Don’t spy on our e-mail, phone and internet use
  • Keep your election promise to “reverse the rise of the surveillance state”
  • This is Britain, not China or Iran. We don’t want the government spying on our every move

Why the petition?

The government has set out its new plans for the year ahead in the Queen’s Speech. They want new powers to invade our privacy. 
They plan to collect and keep information on all of us about who we call, text and email, and which websites we visit. And they won’t need a warrant or reason.

38 Degrees says:

“Our civil liberties have taken a battering in recent years from politicians of all backgrounds. Now it’s time to for us to push back.” 

You can sign the petition here. So far over 184,000 people have signed. 38 degrees is hoping for 200,000 by the hand-in time.

What is 38 Degrees?

This is how 38 Degrees describes itself:

“38 Degrees is the angle at which an avalanche happens. In the UK, 38 Degrees will enable people to act together, to create an avalanche for change.”

 

Ask Nestle, Unilever & Neste Oil to stop buying illegal palm oil -& write to Nick Clegg while you’re about it

Posted on by
Reply

Please sign this Rainforest Rescue-drafted email and send it to the management of Nestlé, Unilever and Neste Oil, asking them to cancel their business relationship with the corporate group IOI.

Illegal rainforest clearance to make way for palm oil plantations

Rainforest Rescue reports that:

“one thousand people on the Indonesian island of Borneo have lost their forest. It was illegally cleared by the corporate group IOI that supplies Nestlé, Unilever and Neste Oil with palm oil. All three companies publicly pride themselves for their so-called “sustainability”.

Rainforest Rescue partner Nordin, head of the organization Save Our Borneo (SOB), has collected plenty of watertight evidence against the criminals. He is preparing to file a case and the local government is backing him. However, to prevent more damage elsewhere, the palm oil Mafia’s profit stream has to be cut off. This is where Nordin needs our support. 

Please call on Nestlé, Unilever and Neste Oil to cancel their business relationship with IOI.”

Continue reading →

Ask Craig Whittaker to sign Early Day Motion 47, calling for Energy Bill Revolution

Posted on by
Reply

Please email  craig.whittaker.mp@parliament.uk and ask him to sign Early Day Motion 47. This calls for Parliament to pass the Energy Bill Revolution proposal for the UK government to use the revenue from carbon taxes to pay for insulating people’s homes. Over the next 15 years, the government will raise about £4billion/year from the two main carbon taxes – the European Emissions Trading Scheme and the Carbon Floor Price.
Continue reading →

Ask Craig Whittaker MP – again – to sign the Rio-UK Declaration

Posted on by
Reply

Craig Whitaker MP hasn’t yet signed the Rio-UK Declaration, and he hasn’t replied to my request to him to sign it.

Has he replied to anyone else’s? I can’t be the only Calderdale constituent to have asked him.

Here are some ways of getting your MP’s attention

  • Email a follow-up message to Craig Whittaker MP at craig.whittaker.mp@parliament.uk. If you send a quick note to say you notice he hasn’t signed up yet, this will show you expect him to act.
  • Stop Climate Chaos has a downloadable declaration poster which you can send to Craig Whittaker MP and ask him to sign it.
  • Phone him on Tel: 020 7219 7031. Explain over the phone why this issue is important to you (and if possible their constituency). You can always leave a message if you can’t get through.
  • Meet him: Arrange a meeting – it’s too late to attend one of his surgeries – the next one is Friday 29th June 2012: Todmorden: 10.00am until 12.00pm, Brighouse: 2.30pm until 4.30pm. But it should be possible to book a meeting. Stop Climate Chaos suggest taking a declaration poster for him to sign – see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stopclimatechaos/7345368576/in/photostream
  • Tweet him:  Copy Craig Whittaker into your tweet and he’ll receive it directly. Here’s a sample tweet: “[@Craig_Whittaker] Please sign the #Rioconnect Declaration. I want to see your photo on this page http://www.stopclimatechaos.org/rio-action“
  • Post on his Facebook wall:  You could post something like the tweet above onto their facebook page. I’ve posted a message to him via his Facebook page.

Occupy Rio +20 petition

Posted on by
Reply

Occupy Rio +20 have created a petition that you can sign.

It basically calls on the upcoming Earth Summit, twenty years on from Rio in 1992, “to vastly scale up political, financial & public response to the environmental, social & economic crisis of our time, & to raise ambition to the level that science demands… Governments, corporations and financial institutions must wake up and dramatically prioritise people & the planet over abusive exploitation for short-term profit & “growth”.

The Durban climate justice website outlines some backgroundto the Occupy Rio +20 petition.

This video (a promo for an Alternative Conference for the Rio Summit, to be held on 16th/17th June in central London) lists the ways in which the 1992 Rio Earth Summit has failed, so clearly we need Rio +20 to decide on a more effective set of approaches to reducing and adapting to climate change.  One that puts people and planet first, not profit and financial speculation on carbon prices  and natural resources.

Here is the Rio + 20 Position Paper of La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement. It denounces “The great deceit of 1992… “sustainable development”, which social organizations initially saw as a possibility to confront the root of the problems. However, it was nothing more than a cover-up for the search for new forms of accumulation. Today they look to legitimize a new façade under the name “green economy”.

La Via Campesina’s Position Paper is clear that all the talk of “green economy” is in fact more of the same old same old. “Governments, business people, and the organizations of the United Nations have spent these last years constructing the myth of the “green economy” and of the “greening of technology”. They present it as a new possibility to bring together environmental stewardship and business, but it is in fact the vehicle to obtain new advances of capitalism, putting the entire planet under the control of big capital.”

This video explains how the “green economy”agenda that the rich countries seem to be shaping up for Rio +20 is part of corporate colonialism, that grabs land, dispossesses small farmers and undermines food sovereignty.

 

Green jobs alliance inspiration

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve come across two very interesting websites: Otesha UK and East London Green Jobs Alliance.

Green Jobs and Justice

Here’s an interesting blog about Green Jobs and Justice by a Co-Director of the Otesha Project UK

Between them, these two groups are organising green job training schemes in East London, working with local colleges, trades unions and businesses which are offering placements to trainees.

As far as I know, nothing like this is happening in Calderdale. Why not? There’s a crying need for jobs in the area, particularly for young people, and there’s plenty of need for green work to be done in all kinds of sectors like home and businesses’ energy efficiency improvements, renewable energy generation, waste reduction and prevention, cradle to cradle production cycles etc. Calderdale College is opening a Sustainable Environmental Technology Centre in September 2013, so there will soon be young people with green skills – and looking for work.

18 per cent of Calderdale households are on the edge of poverty

18per cent of households in Calderdale are on the edge of poverty, according to  Experian-calculated data in the Guardian. This means if the economy gets any worse, 18 per cent of Calderdale households would be forced into poverty.
UK ON THE EDGE INDEX – Calderdale:
  • 18% are on the edge of poverty – 15,624 households
  • Calderdale is ranked 116 in the UK out of 424
  • This is is how the community breaks down
    • Often indebted families living in low rise estates: 1,372 households, 1.5%
    • Older families in low value housing in traditional industrial areas: 2,431, 2.7%
    • Low income families occupying poor quality older terraces: 6,158, 7%
    • South Asian communities experiencing social deprivation: 3,275, 3.7%
How this index is calculated:
The index, created by Experian Mosaic, measures those suffering high levels of financial stress and finding it difficult to cope within their current income – they are the most vulnerable to poverty if their situation worsens.


Ask Craig Whitaker MP to support the Rio-UK Declaration

Posted on by
Reply

Stop Climate Chaos Rio Action is asking people to email their MP to support the Rio-UK Declaration – when I emailed Craig Whitaker, the Stop Climate Chaos website showed that he hasn’t yet done this.

Rio+20 is the global forum for countries to commit to new actions to reduce and adapt to climate change. OK, the original Rio Earth Summit hasn’t achieved what it needed to, but without it climate change would probably be worse than it is. It’s important not to give up on international cooperation and commitment.

 

Rio +20 – tell Nick Clegg we want environmental justice, not financial markets for natural resources

Posted on by
Reply

The World Development Movement has organised an email petition to Nick Clegg, who is the UK representative at Rio+20 in June. It asks him to make sure that the Rio+20 agenda focusses on environmental justice – not, as the rich G8 countries want, on creating financial markets for natural resources.

You can find out a bit about this idea of treating the environment as a source of “environmental services”  that can be monetarised and traded, in the environmental services section of the Energy Royd Land page.

You can find out more about the issues and sign the petition here.

Source: World Development Movement

From www.bollier.org

Commons-based law – instead of marketisation of “environmental services”

Instead of extending the market into environmental resources which are basically priceless because nothing else can exchange or substitute for them, a new system of Commons-based law  would provide practical, democratic ways of protecting value that the market can’t achieve, because the market is essentially about consuming and profiting from natural resources.

Commons-based law would start from the premise that the environment is a common good that exists on its own terms. It would require us to adopt a biocentric rather than anthropocentric (human-centred) view of the environment.

According to the founders of the Commons Law Project,  Commons-based law

“…asks questions such as: How can appropriate limits be set on the market exploitation of nature? What legal principles, institutions and procedures can help manage a shared resource fairly and sustainably over time, sensitive to the ecological rights of future as well as present generations?”

If you’re interested in the idea of Commons Law, you might also like to read about the proposal to create a law prohibiting Ecocide – the destruction of ecologies.