Aberdeen Campaign Against Climate Change held a protest inside the auditorium of the All Energy conference in Aberdeen on Wednesday 23rd May. They unfurled anti-biofuels banners and interrupted a speech by US Ambassador to the UK, Robert Tuttle, in which he was praising the efforts of the US to fight climate change and was claiming that biofuels are part of the solution.
The protestors left peacefully when asked and continued their protest outside the show venue, Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre.
The All Energy conference also promoted wind, solar and marine energy sources as part of the solution to climate change. The protest was held to make sure that people distinguish between these clean, truly renewable sources of energy on the one hand and biofuels from large-scale monocultures on the other.
The Aberdeen edition of the Press and Journal reported the protest well (see picture at
http://3276.e-printphoto.co.uk/ajl/index.cfm?z=z&y=y&p_id=5176411&c_id=8
401&action=view).
Background:
The US government have been sabotaging progress at international climate conferences for years and their emissions continue to rise steeply. Large-scale biofuels do not mitigate global warming but make it happen even faster, as rainforests and other ecosystems are rapidly being destroyed to make way for vast monocultures to grow crops for cars in rich nations. Biofuel production has already been responsible for global food price rises which have been the target of recent riots in Mexico. People in the global South are suffering a double whammy, firstly as they are suffering most from severe weather events caused by excessive green house gas emissions from rich countries and now by having their livelihoods destroyed by massive biofuels monocultures which are imposed by rich countries trying to solve their energy problems. People are being forcibly removed from their biodiverse farms and are suffering health problems from agricultural chemicals. Both intensive agriculture and deforestation are major contributors to global warming and biofuels threaten to greatly increase those emissions.
For more info on biofuels see www.biofuelwatch.org.uk.
aberdeen_climatechange@yahoo.co.uk
http://climatechangecampaign.blogspot.com