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A Government still addicted to petrol
David Strahan, Independent
"All targets and no trousers" seemed to be the gist of the reaction from environmentalists to last week's Budget. Greens welcomed the introduction of new, legally binding, carbon-reduction goals but attacked the lack of a clear road map showing how they could be achieved.

Some applauded policies such as the extra subsidy for offshore wind and investment in building efficiency, but attacked overall funding of £1.4bn as miserly in comparison to the enormity of the climate crisis and recent financial bailouts.

But for those who are more worried about oil depletion, the Budget was utterly hollow. The car scrappage scheme came without efficiency conditions attached, the return to inflation-plus fuel duty increases was welcome but timid compared to the escalator that was killed off by the petrol protests of 2000, and tax breaks for North Sea operators will do little to stem the decline in output. Production has halved since its peak in 1999, and is now dropping at 7 per cent a year, dragging Britain ever deeper into import dependency.

Still less will the Budget improve the global oil outlook.
(26 April 2009)

UK police caught on tape trying to recruit protester as spy
Paul Lewis, Guardian
Undercover police are running a network of hundreds of informants inside protest organisations who secretly feed them intelligence in return for cash-in-hand payments, according to evidence handed to the Guardian.

In the material, the police claim to have infiltrated a number of environmental groups and say they are receiving information about leaders, tactics and detailed plans of future demonstrations.

The dramatic disclosures are revealed in almost three hours of secretly recorded discussions between covert officers, claiming to be from Strathclyde police, and Matilda Gifford, an activist from the protest group Plane Stupid.
(24 April 2009)
It's puzzling why police in the UK are aggressively targetting climate protest groups, as well as demonstrators in general. The end result will be to radicalize vast swaths of the middle class. -BA

Politicising the Policing of Public Expression in an Era of Economic Change
Paul Mobbs, Paul Mobbs/Free Range Network
Britain's Secretive Police Force
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What's the relationship between the recent 'authoritarian' crack-down on "protesters" in Britain, the current economic crisis, the debate on growth, the economy, climate change and resource depletion? Perhaps not that obvious?... A new report from the Free Range Network ties these issues together to try and find a deeper motivation behind the recent authoritarian shift against protest and dissent in Britain -- yes, the threads are there if you look for them!

The report looks at:

• the recent enactment of repressive laws on protest and dissent, even BEFORE "11/9";

• the role of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in their implementation and the intelligence agenda on "domestic extremism"; and
• the events surrounding G20 (although this report was in preparation a few weeks before G20) that illustrate how this process is working.

In particular we examine the role of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), it's secretive and private investigative organisations (NECTU, WECTU and NPOIU), and the way in which these groups are leading a politicised agenda against any form of non-representative (i.e., anything beyond voting, petitions and letter writing!) public pressure in Britain.

Why is this? Well, on its own the "threat of terrorism" just doesn't encompass the scale and depth of the changes that we see. However, when you look at the wider implication of present economic trends, and then factor them into present policy changes, the reasons become more obvious. It's not a "plot" or a "conspiracy", but rather a "coalescence of views" between those parts of the State involved in this process.

From Herbert Marcuse to Ian Blair, from energy efficiency to peak oil and renewable energy, and from Athelstan Popkess to the Stasi, in this report we try and make clear the complex trends that are shaping Britain today and why, in the coming era of incredible economic change the State is osmotically developing an ad-hoc agenda to restrict our freedoms to complain about it.

The report is 68 pages long, contains 215 references, and nearly all of those references are "clickable" so that you can investigate the background information on which the report is based. The report is also released under a non-commercial open license, so feel free to copy, distribute, extract, quote, etc. (for non-commercial purpose -- if not, just send us an email).
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Section 5. Conclusions

Environmentalism is a threat to the current economic and political consensus that defines current national policy towards the growth economy, trade liberalisation and the ascendancy of the market. The difficulty, and therefore the threat, that environmentalism represents to the present consensus is that the solutions which environmentalists promote are antithetical to the concentration of economic and political power, and wealth, that characterise the Western model of society today. Not because it represents a risk of violence or revolution, or because in some way it will create an insurrection against the state; the problem for the consensus is that the arguments of environmentalism have been proven “right” – the trends of human ecological overshoot and collapse that environmentalists have been discussing since the 1960s are now coming to pass.

This is the reason why the State, both from the political point of view, and from the security stance of groups such as ACPO, has shifted its position and now opposes the idea of non-representative protests (i.e., outside of “the usual channels”). Environmental protest especially, from the roads protests of the 1990s to the more recent anti-capitalist protests at the G20 conference, represent a threat because its message might receive a wider audience and greater appeal when the present trends emerge as an unavoidable crisis on society.

The greatest threat to the consensus is that people will finally understand that the concept of continual growth – that we can continue to consume without consequence – is a “great lie” that has no basis in reality.
(26 April 2009)
The report attributes a greater cohesion and awareness to the UK government than seems likely to me. As many British peak oilers have complained, the government is very slow on the uptake about peak oil, being more concerned about immediate issues such as the financial crisis and winning elections. -BA

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