Reasons for not going to Copenhagen

This is an attempt to speak on behalf of people not going to Copenhagen for the December 2009 UN Climate Change Conference.

Signing this statement along with supporters of the Enouranois website signifies agreement with it, at least in general terms.

Members of the Enouranois group are not going to Copenhagen, because what will happen there is what happened at the demonstration you see in this photograph: http://www.enouranois.gr/images/8dece2007.jpg

This was an international Climate Change demonstration, two years ago: December 2007. The photograph was taken in Athens, Greece, but it could have been taken anywhere. The message of the small group holding the two placards, in English and in Greek, saying Spraying from Aircraft is NOT the answer to Climate Change passed unnoticed. This is despite the fact of our having participated in the organization of the demonstration and tried unsuccessfully to influence the wording of the resolutions issued in the name of the demonstration as a whole.

Our position was, and is, that there cannot be meaningful discussion of climate change without simultaneous reference to the aerial spraying (with aluminium? with barium? with sulphates?) being conducted globally and represented by informal sources as an answer to the problem of climate change.

The veil of silence that shrouds this spraying, evidently detrimental to both the environment and human health, appears to be due not only to its illegality but also to the impossibility of its being legalized, given the difficulties faced by governments in persuading public opinion that deliberate pollution can represent a solution to any problem.

Because governments cannot face their citizens with honesty and self-respect, they resort to every type of concealment and distortion. Behind the scenes the sceptics, the people who set the terms of the discussion in the first place, continue to call the shots. Many times the same people who play the sceptic on the reality and the seriousness of climate change also argue that if there were a climate change problem, the best, and cheapest, means of dealing with it, would be through geoengineering (i.e. spraying with toxic aerosols.)

(See Edward Tellerss Sunscreen for Planet Earth http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3522851.html )

Unfortunately the existing political system and the people who serve it are unable to extricate us from this web of contradiction. Even a politician with an otherwise good reputation on environmental issues such as the EUs Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas is a hostage of the overall situation.

The solution is in the hands of citizens. We must insist on full transparency in relation to the geoengineering programmes, including programmes of aerosol spraying.

Also, because such spraying also appears to be serving purportedly military objectives, it is unacceptable that the subject continues to be off the radar screen of the anti-war and peace movements.

The honourable exception to this is the Report A4-0005/99 to the European Parliament on the Environment, Security and Foreign Policy, a product of the courage and persistence of the distinguished peace activist Maj-Britt Theorin.

Aigina, Greece, 20th November 2009