The right climate?

On December 3rd, the Campaign Against Climate Change held a mass demonstration in Central London. The aim of the event was part of a global project of synchronised protests around the world to pressurise for urgent action on climate change, in particular the US failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. The date was chosen to coincide with the UN www.glClimate talks in Montreal that took place from November 28th to December 9th. The idea was to give one single united response about how strongly the public feels about the danger of a global catastrophe. BPEC received this first hand report from local Green Party Education Spokesperson, Rachel Fryer:

“The demo was the climax of a lot of hard work, with many public talks and conferences taking place in the weeks leading up to it. We organised coaches from Brighton, hoping it would encourage people to come but we didn't know until the day how many people would turn up so were a bit nervous. However when we arrived at Poole Valley there were streams of people and we nearly filled 2 coaches!

The day itself was great - we congregated at Lincolns Inn Fields, by Holborn tube, and there were thousands of people everywhere. It was a little hard to know when things were happening, as the organisers were told they would be arrested if they used the megaphones they had brought! This was particularly unhelpful when there was a sit-down protest half-way through the march and they could not make an announcement to move people on so that we would get to the speeches in time (Luckily the rain did the job).

Passers-by stopped in amazement at the thousands of people marching. When we turned corners we got some idea of how many people were there as we could not see the end of it. Estimates were about 10,000 but it's hard to tell. People of all ages, colours and religions came from all over the country to be there.

It's not so easy to be passionate about climate change as it is anti-war but as many people observed, it is more important - more people stand to die and suffer from climate change than from war. That was certainly the feeling on the demo.

When we reached the US embassy, not everyone could fit into the square. Luckily I was near the front and there was a great atmosphere and some very passionate speeches. Those which stood out were Michael Meacher, who criticised the government for letting climate change be dominated by politics when we don't have time for that and politics must be governed by climate change. And of course Caroline Lucas, excellent, passionate and inspiring as ever - she got massive support and cheers for almost every sentence.”

For more information and to learn how to get involved visit www.campaigncc.org, globalclimatecampaign.org or visit BPEC for details of future events.