Climate Change march in London: wet but inspiring

On Saturday I joined the Climate Change march in London with well over 6,000 others - amazingly I managed to meet up with many of those travelling in the two coaches from Gloucestershire - they carried some 75 Green party, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace members along with other climate change campaigners from Gloucestershire.

Photos above and below: mostly mine but a couple from Bryan Meloy (incl one of Derek Wall, Green party Principal Speaker)- this set has one of the police filming the crowd - as most campaigners will know this is something they do at all such events - one older woman I spoke to was shocked by this asking what on earth they want with film of thousands of peaceful protesters.

It was wet - very wet - indeed my the time marchers had reached the end a large percentage of the posters had collapsed and disintegrated along the way.

This march is the third organised in London - see my news release just sent off here - the march was part of hundreds of other actions across the world in over fifty countries. Indeed many towns and cities also held actions - back in Stroud some twenty five Green party members held an action in the High Street using an enormous balloon to highlight our use of CO2 (see release here). Infact the huge six foot balloon they use is using a similar to a short film using elephants to illustrate the amount of CO2 - in fact the film won an award in the "60 Seconds to Save the Earth" Ecospot Contest - see Dave Schlafman for his video entitled 'Sky is Falling' here.

See news releases of Climate march in 2006 here and 2005 here. See photos from various other sources of Saturday's march here.

As always there are some great banners and costumes - one of the ones that tickled me was the polar bear in the background of the photo with some Glos Greens who had a banner reading - 'Unless our home stops melting we'll have to eat Santa' - I have to say it is a worry with Christmas approaching.

Anyway one of the very blurred photos next to the one of me smiling is of George Monbiot who spoke soon after Caroline Lucas Green MEP - have to confess to missing Caroline as was in pub getting warm after being very soaked by the rain (see her on-street video here) - Caroline is usually very inspiring so a pity...anyhow George Monbiot talked about the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, whose replacement the Bali meeting is meant to be discussing. Indeed since it was signed, there has been an acceleration in global emissions - I read in yesterdays paper that new research shows that since 1990 our emissions have risen by 19% rather than the claimed 15% drop (all of which was before Labour due to the switch to gas).

It does seem extraordinary that our government still plans new coal plants, new roads and airport expansions. Perhaps one of the most frightening bits of research shows that if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2030, we will consume in that time economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs!!!!

As I noted in my press release "The real issues in Bali are not technical or economic: this crisis demands a much deeper discussion about who we are and what progress means. We cannot and must not continue on our current course: it was inspiring to be with so many others who also know we need radical changes now."