The Right Being Offensive

In preparation for the arrival at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Friday of Dolan Cummings and Claire Fox (or Foster) of the LM / RCP network, we’ve been looking at some environmental issues.

This jumped out at us: “Siberia feels the heat: It's a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting.”

The article suggests: “The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.
It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures." Full article here.

This is precisely the sort of ‘scare-mongering’ the LM group are against.

The LM group – you might remember –are (in theory anyway) ex-communists who are now enthusiastically against the environment. They’ve set up a string of front groups some of the cutest of which use the term ‘sustainababble’ to deride efforts to stop ecological breakdown, which they argue, just isn’t happening!!!

They run an anti-environmental gap year project here Worldwrite (an education charity with a difference’ – too right!) which it says is ‘designed to complement global exchange programmes which challenge conventional Western wisdom’. Read the whole rapid stream of propaganda here.

Another one from the LM/RCP stable is Audacity “a campaigning company that advocates developing the man-made environment, free from the burden of 'sustainababble' and 'communitwaddle'.

Thanks to Che who passed on this lovely lot here, who are also suffering a bit of eco-denial. They however have a solution – the free market will solve all.

They say: “The blog is named after the famous 1968 Garrett Hardin essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, where he established that common ownership of land and natural resources tended to lead to the degradation of those “common” resources.” Er, that’s the strangest analysis I’ve ever heard of that book…

Anyway, you can go along and give the LM / RCP folks a big welcome at the Book Festival this Friday, 7.30 pm, Charlotte Square Edinburgh.