Iran: revolt, revolution and social disintegration

I am very pleased to publish today an interview with TORAB SALETH about the recent nationwide wave of protests in Iran. The interview puts the revolt that has spread across the country, last year and this, in the context of the Islamic republic’s deep political and economic crisis. It discusses the way that such movements can be confounded by reactionary politics, and casts a very critical eye on the “left” groups. Torab Saleth was a leading member of a large Trotskyist group in Iran at the time of the 1979 revolution. He left it in protest at its continued cooperation with groups that had collaborated with the Islamic dictatorship. He is active today in the Revolutionary Socialist Tendency of Iran. You can READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

The Stansted 15: heroes for our time

This morning the “Stansted 15”, who last year chained themselves to an airplane to stop a planned mass deportation of people, including asylum seekers and those who feared for their lives, go on trial at Chelmsford crown court in Essex.

On 28 March last year, the 15, wearing hi-viz jackets, locked themselves to a Titan Airway Boeing 767-300 aircraft at Stansted airport. It had been chartered by the Home Office’s National Removals Command unit to return deportees to Nigeria and Ghana.

The flight was cancelled and the demonstrators – from End Deportations, Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, and Plane Stupid – were arrested.

Initially the Stansted 15 were charged with “aggravated trespass”, the usual charge used against

The action at Stansted last year. Photo by Stop Charter Flights

protesters who disrupt air traffic. But last summer the Crown Prosecution Service applied to the Attorney General to introduce a new charge – “endangering an airport”, under section 1 of the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990.

Although this Act does not specifically mention “terrorism”, it was explicitly devised as a response to an act of terrorism (the Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am flight in 1988) rather than to deal with peaceful political protest. The charge carries a potential sentence of life imprisonment.

The use of this charge is a threat to civil liberties, and to all those who want to use democratic

Will Labour’s climate policy rely on monstrous techno-fixes like BECCS?

Will a future Labour government perpetuate myths about monstrous techno-fixes for climate change? Or advocate radical policies to deal with global warming that don’t heap the pain on the global south, and industrial strategies to hasten the transition away from a fossil-fuel-centred economy?

This question was raised – by implication, anyway – at the Campaign Against Climate Change conference in London on Saturday. The 200 people present heard essentially opposing answers from

Photo by Garry Knight under a Creative Commons Licence

Barry Gardiner, Labour’s front-bench spokesman on climate change, and Asad Rehman, chief executive of War on Want.

The contrasting approaches were starkly evident when a question was asked from the floor about Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) – an untried technology on which the world’s most powerful governments are relying heavily to claim they are on course to meet their climate targets.

Basically, BECCS would involve growing plants, burning them in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted and storing it somewhere. (See also “Quick technological catch-up” below).

Despite the fact that BECCS has never been used anywhere yet, the latest (fifth) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has included huge amounts of it in its scenarios that plot how the world economy could move away from dangerous global warming. To make the numbers add up,

Ukraine: women organise in the war zone

About 100 women took part in a “march for women’s rights” last week in Lisichansk, close to the front line between Ukraine and the Russian-supported separatist “republic” in Lugansk.

“We need to fight for our rights!” was the main slogan of the march, on Tuesday 6 March.

Vladislava Nikolayevskaya, one of the organisers and a law student, wrote on her facebook page: “I

The women’s march in Lisichansk

think that there’s no need to prove to those active women of Lisichansk, who took part in our march, what rights exactly we are fighting for!

“I am very glad that, notwithstanding the sad situation and the negative comments, there are people who are not indifferent – who, on the contrary, are ready to defend their rights and to draw attention to what’s going on.”

“Women in the war zone were not scared to go out on to the streets”, Pavel Lisyansky, a lawyer and human rights activist in the area, reported. “The organisers of the march were women human rights defenders, women activists and women residents of Lisichansk.”

On Friday 9 March Vera Yastrebova, one of the organisers, reported on the Lisichansk event at a meeting of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in London. Vera, a lawyer, was there with Lisyansky,

Still bigger mountains of plastic on the way

Oil, gas and petrochemicals companies are responding to public revulsion about plastic waste in their own special way: by investing billions to INCREASE plastics production.

Thanks to their efforts, global output of ethylene and propylene, the two main raw materials for plastics production, is expected to RISE BY ONE-THIRD in the next seven years.

I am all in favour of campaigns to cut down the insanely wasteful use of plastic bottles, bags and

Plastic waste in Mumbai, India. From the India Water Portal web site

packaging. But let’s also make sure we understand the root of the problem: systems of production and consumption that aim only to raise output, and the mighty corporate interests that control them.

The trail from gas, oil and coal production, through petrochemicals plants, to manufacturing and trading companies thatgorge on needless mountains of plastic, has been well researched by campaigning NGOs, lawyers and journalists. Here is People & Nature’s handy guide:

Production: the US shale gas boom

Nearly all plastics are made from coal, oil or gas (see “Quick chemistry catch-up”, below). The recent boom in shale gas production has caused US gas supply to outstrip demand. That in turn has triggered a wave of investment in petrochemicals plants that make ethylene, the key raw material for several types of plastic.

In other words, it is the availability of cheap raw material – not any obvious human need – that is driving plastics production growth.

The US government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a report last month that three new ethylene plants (called “cracking” plants) had started up in 2017, and another six are due