Often hailed as the essential ingredient for activism, hope is actually an obstacle. It is a sign of a vague and unfounded faith that things you have no power over will come out alright. It is the same as the hope of a paradise in the afterlife that made slaves accept their lot on this earth. It is a symptom of the relinquishing of our power as agents of the changes we know are needed. To be effective, we must move beyond hope.

Workers Beer Company are familiar to those of us who frequent music festivals in the UK. They sell the beer and give all profits away to unions and other organisations they deem worthy.

But the ethics only apply to those they deal with directly. They’re quite happy to make profits for companies that are widely boycotted because they fund homophobic, anti-abortion Christian funadamentalists, Bush-loving companies that oppose workers rights and human rights, and push hard for globalisation. What Workers Beer gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.

Breaking Glastonbury’s environmental rules, forcing bar staff to wear sweatshop T‑shirts that promote WBC’s despicable corporate partners and having Page Three ‘models’ pull pints for promotion in Rupert Murdoch’s big seller The Sun; it turns out the ethical image is skin deep.

Whilst Greenpeace trade on an image of daring direct action to confront governments and corporations that despoil the environment, much of what they do has the opposite effect.

Run by directors whose career paths move directly to the anti-environmental companies Greenpeace should challenge, deals are struck to not obstruct oil companies’ property, not to speak out against the largest industrial attack on wild nature in Europe, and instead to strengthen the hand of Europe’s largest industrial CO2 emitter.

The idea of planting trees to offset the emissions caused by our fossil fuel use seems worthy and responsible. However, it is impossible to really quantify how many trees equals how much CO2. But more than that, the whole idea is erroneous; planting trees does not and cannot offset fossil emissions.

Climate change is an issue that unites so many people; all around the world people feel as concerned, furious, scared and daunted as we are. We have all the evidence we need that governments are going to block rather than deliver solutions. If we want change, we have to make it ourselves. 

This summer sees the Camp For Climate Action, a place to gather those of us who want to kickstart a serious movement for this most serious of issues.

There are plans to dam all of Iceland’s glacial rivers to provide power for highly polluting aluminium smelters. It is the largest industrial assault on wild nature in Europe. Yet, in defiance of their founding principles, Greenpeace won’t say anything about it.

After a century of co-ordinated grassroots events, International Women’s Day, is being co-opted by corporate power with sponsors HSBC.

Corporations are, rightly, commonly held to be primarily responsible for humanity’s accelerating decline into suicidal unsustainability.

But a corporation is merely the agreement made by people to behave in certain ways. Their present obsession with short term financial profit is not an inherant part of how corporations need to behave.

It is quite possible for them to reorient themselves towards what their owners and workers most want and do best, and in doing so could stop working against everyone’s interests and instead work for the benefit of all.

From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored. The information will be held in a central database for a period of years. Even the police implementing it don’t know the all the reasons why the government want it. Bye bye privacy, anonymity and civil liberty, it was nice to know you.

This is the story of Fallujah, and how it became so famous and so dangerous; how it became a ruined city. It is also the story of how the United States – and Britain – became the problem in Iraq, not the solution.