In just fifty years of mass consumption of plastics, we’ve managed to inundate watercourses around the world. Just as the ocean grinds rocks into sand, so it is breaking plastics into smaller pieces, making it reach the entire food chain. How long they will take to decompose is unknown, as is what will happen when decomposition releases their chemicals.

The proof of the police’s commitment to injustice comes in their response to crimes committed by officers. Instead of wanting to understand what happened, to see perpetrators punished and future crimes averted, they close ranks and use lies and aggression to discourage further inquiry.

Their campaign against the documentary ‘Injustice’ about deaths in police custody, and a strikingly similar one against ‘On The Verge’, about police harassment of peace campaigners, show that they regard justice as an enemy if it challenges their authority.

Whilst the expanding population is a real concern for the world, it’s not just how many of us there are, it’s how much we each consume. If we all consumed as much as Americans, it would be the equivalent of having 72 billion of us. The idea that developing countries can some how catch up is cruel hoax, and their trying to do so will be catastrophic. Something’s got to give. 

As even the renewable resources are running out, western level of consumption will be forced to decline. If we want there to be a safe future for those who come after us, we’ll deliberately start that decline before it’s forced upon us.

The G20 protests saw — once again — a minority of the crowd throwing things at the police, responded to with tactical outbursts of unprovoked police violence against anyone who was within reach. 

But just as threatening to the wellbeing of protesters was the tactic of ‘kettling’ — penning the whole crowd in and refusing to let anyone in or out for hours at a time. Thousands of people were held in continuous sunshine with no water. People with medical conditions who asked to leave were refused. 

The police strategy views anyone who would go on a demonstration as a security threat to be contained. It was the same vision they had of football fans in the 1980s, leading them to cause the Hillsborough disaster.

Kettling, and the tactic of batoning large numbers of people over the head, will just as surely lead to deaths.

On 15th April 1989 a crush at a football match left 96 people dead. Often portrayed by the police and media as an appalling accident or the result of hooliganism, the evidence says otherwise. Chaotic policing and regarding all fans as a security risk, compounded by poor stadium design, led to decisions that made the crush inevitable. The police spent the following years hiding evidence and to this day nobody’s been convicted.

As detailed knowledge of climate change is now commonplace, a high-level panel of politicians discussing it should involve plans for the kind of radical action that the science demands. Instead, and inevitably, it involves contradiction, game-playing, error and lies.

Every time they speak, those whose jobs it is to deliver solutions prove themselves unworthy. The changes we need will only come when we force them into it.

In our desperation to avoid cutting carbon emissions, all kinds of ineffective schemes are touted; biofuels, carbon offsets, hydrogen powered cars. But perhaps the craziest sounding and most dangerous are ‘geoengineering’; altering the planetary systems to reflect the sun or be more CO2 absorbent. Yet as the climate crisis intensifies, the crazier ideas are getting more of a hearing.

As the world’s governments meet in Poland to begin to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto treaty, one aspect is clear. If we are to tackle climate change we have to use methods that actually work.

Kyoto’s ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ — essentially carbon offsets on a grand scale — have not only failed to deliver carbon cuts, but they have created great social injustice.

Writing from the climate talks, Kevin Smith argues that the rich overpolluting nations need to drop their devices to maintain present levels of consumption and act fairly, swiftly and effectively.

With the intensifying urgency of the climate problem, the nuclear lobby have repackaged themselves as our saviours. But even if there weren’t the issue of deadly waste lying around for millennia, it is far more expensive and far slower to deploy than other solutions to hand. Its new spin is just a push to get us to commit a century of public money to this dangerous dinosaur industry.

The claims and counterclaims about genetically modified crops commonly ignore an intractable truth of modern farming — GM can’t be about ‘feeding the world’ because farming is not about feeding people. It is about making money. 

For as long as that is true, farming and the science that supports it are not working for the benefit of humanity but the benefit of shareholder dividends.