Greening Newcastle Welcome to issue 5 of the Newsletter of Newcastle Green Party Sustainable Cities public meeting Robin Harper, Green Party member of the Scottish Parliament for Lothian will address a public meeting at 7.30 p.m.. Thurs- day 25th November in the meeting room, Newcastle Arts Centre on Westgate Road, on the theme of “Greening the City”. Given the various battles over future development plans in the city at sites like the General Hospital & the whole south-east quadrant of the city centre, this is an excellent time to debate more sustainable options for the future. Robin has been standing for the Greens at local, national & European elections since 1986. He was elected as Lothians first Green Member of the Scottish Parliament, indeed Britain’s Cuts Campaigning first Green parliamentarian in 1999. During the course of his teaching career, he taught in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Fife, Kenya, Tyne and Wear Midlothian and Edinburgh. Robin was elected Rector of Edin- burgh University in 2001-2003 & Rector of the University of Coalition of Resistance: Aberdeen from 2005-2008. During his 11 years as MSP, Robin has been involved in many planning meeting Cross Party Groups, including co-convenorship roles on the CPG Children & Young People, Renewable Energy and Energy Wednesday 17th November, Efficiency, & Architecture and the Built Environment. In 2008, 7 p.m., Gateshead Civic Centre Robin received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Incorpora- tion of Architects & was elected President of the Royal Scottish (2 mins from Gateshead Metro and Interchange). Society of Arts in the same year. This planning meeting is open to all supporters of Coalition of Resistance who want to be involved in anti-cuts events and activities. If you haven’t been along before, please get along to this meeting and feel free to circulate - the Campaign welcome new faces! Greening Cities with Robin Harper, MSP Above is a picture of Vauban, near Freiburg in SW. Germany. 7.30 – 9.00 p.m., Solar housing can be seen in a new development built as “a sus- tainable model district” on the site of a former French military Thursday, 25 November 2010 base. It is the first housing community world wide in which all Newcastle Arts Centre,Westgate Road the homes produce a positive energy balance. The solar energy Conference room, first floor to the right: surplus is then sold back into the city’s grid for a profit on every access from courtyard, upstairs via blue doors home. Some 70% of residents do not own a car. — please be early The Greens and the Cuts The Green Party condemns the cuts as destructive and unnec- essary. What is necessary is fairer taxes and a real Green New Deal. The cuts will throw at least a million people out of work and create even wider social division. They will not work either. They are in fact a reckless gamble. As Keynes predicted and as was proved in the 1930s, a government really can spend to save the economy when in a recession. The present state of the Irish economy should be a warning to all. We need a Green New Deal to support our economy to make sure we come out of the recession, not to go back to the casino capitalism of the last three decades, but instead move towards a sustainable economy. A Green New Deal would invest in a massive labour-intensive UK wide energy-saving programme and a rapid shift to renewa- Above: a number of Green Party members took part in a protest out- bles, create affordable housing and expand public transport. It side Vodaphone early in November. Details of the company’s efforts would create a million jobs - real, skilled jobs. to avoid tax – and the complicity of the Treasury – have been chroni- To find the money for this we would raise taxes on the best off cled by Private Eye magazine (see http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sec- in society and on the profits of the corporate giants. It would tions.php?section_link=in_the_back&issue=1273). However it is just include a ‘Robin Hood’ Tax on the banks. We would also vigor- the tip of the iceberg. of systemtic evasion & avoidance. ously address tax evasion and avoidance – be it Vodafone or most of the cabinet! There are, of course, some cuts we would make – stop Trident, bring home the troops from Afghanistan, H2Oil stop the subsidies to the oil and nuclear industries, and to the arms trade, for example. People and Planet have organised a free showing of H2Oil, a sear- The cuts to our public services are ideologically driven. The ing look at the unfolding disaster of the Athabasca tar sands Conservatives are using the situation to drive home a funda- oil exploitation in Canada, one of the greatest environmental mental restructuring of society, reducing collective provision in catastrophe in human history (pictured below). favour of private profit. 20:00-22:00 The Green Party and Finance for the Future have produced Monday, 22nd November, a briefing focusing on tax justice: Cuts:“ the callous con Salsa Café on Westgate Road, Newcastle. trick”. It is available @ http://www.financeforthefuture.com/ TaxBriefing.pdf The snapshot below from the report gives a flavour of what might be done. The figures are in billions. The actual Report provides supporting references. The picture below shows another disaster: ‘mountaintop removal’ coal mining in Appalachia, something that President Obama has done little to halt. It demonstrates the falsity of all the hot air about ‘clean coal’. Limitless World? t is tempting to blame the weak performance of the Green Party on the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral sys- Item. We might also see ourselves as the innocent victims of tactical voting. However, many people didn’t vote Green be- cause… they are simply afraid to vote Green. They not only know little about party policies, but are very anxious about the present situation (and indeed, many do want to be more green) and don’t think there is a way out - so suppress it. And many sections of the media disparage any attempt to publicise the lim- its to growth. Indeed in some quarters, there is a very virulent in science and technology to solve all of humanity’s present opposition to everything for which we stand. problems. His refusal to recognise any real limits to growth was Channel 4, for example, has broadcast a series of ‘documen- extremely apparent, and in the end, despite being pressed by taries’ which explicitly and aggressively attacked the broad green a question from local Transition Initiative activist Steve Emsley, movement. Journals like The Economist and thinks tanks such as followed by Porritt, Ben-Ami pointedly refused to provide a the Institute for Economic Affairs sing from a similar song sheet. number for a limit on CO2 parts per million to prevent further It is one that sees the world as some sort of Aladdin’s cave, full climate change danger. This kind of reckless and irresponsible of treasure waiting to be unlocked by the appliance of human argument can be dismissed as at best naive, and at worst, perni- science and the creation of ever more powerful technologies. cious. They will fix every little problem, be it resource scarcities, pov- his was scientific optimism and blind believe in ‘progress’ erty, or even limits to how long we can live. Economic growth, in a very dark form, even to the extent of celebrating human they say, is the key to peace, prosperity and happiness for one “dominance” over nature as a great virtue and achievement, and all. Threats like climate change are either denied or treated regardless of the actual consequences. There was a limited as something that will be overcome by human ingenuity. discussion, endorsed by Porritt, of the ideas of environmental This worldview could be tasted at the recent ‘Great Debate’ economist Herman Daly, i.e.. his critique of conventional “false on Economic Growth when ‘boomster’ Daniel Ben-Ami debat- economics” and the need for a paradigmatic revolution that ed with the Green Party’s Jonathan Porritt in front of a packed incorporates a full accounting of the environment, and thus a audience. Such encounters matter. Critical to Green Party pros- radical redefinition of ‘economics’ itself and of ‘growth’ as well. pects is the battle of ideas. Large sections of the public agree Porritt expressed his optimism and great excitement over the with Ben-Ami’s line of thinking, albeit more at the level of broad potential for renewable energy technology, and especially solar sentiments than deeply reasoned arguments. So we must argue power, to bring about a radical progressive change in our entire our case at every level and at every opportunity. energy infrastructure. He also ended by invoking his sense of a Fortunately Porritt was on excellent form. He consistently need for and the meaningfulness of an underlying philosophical invoked and supported many aspects of central GP policies and and spiritual change in our culture, which offers further hope philosophy in his remarks. He denounced neo-liberal ideology for humanity’s future. and identified it as a source of the present crisis. He further ar- gued that any return to “business as usual” was not a viable way forward, given the magnitude of the climate change crisis,.. He Two to stressed the fact that we do not actually know how much time we have left to act to prevent runaway global warming above read the 2 degree Centigrade threshold agreed at the Copenhagen summit last December. The debate really hinged on the contrast between qualita- tive and mere quantitative growth.