Peace Group joins the Wave against Climate Change
Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group joined the tens of thousands of marchers in London on Saturday (5 December 2009), as an estimated 50,000 people surrounded Parliament to demand that world leaders, like Gordon Brown, take urgent action to secure a fair international deal to stop global warming exceeding the danger threshold of 2 degrees C.
The Wave demonstration, organised by the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, called on the UK Government to show leadership at the Copenhagen summit. It wants the United Kingdom to ensure that any international deal protects the poorest people in the world and ensures, not only that an agreement is reached, but that it is fair and effective.
Peace group members from Rochdale joined with other supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in distributing leaflets which reminded their fellow demonstrators of the dangers of nuclear power.
Philip Gilligan said,
“It is essential that relatively rich countries like ours provide our fair share of the resources needed to help people in poor countries adapt to climate change. This will mean increasing our overseas aid. The UK is historically one of the countries most responsible for climate change, and even today Japan, Europe and the US pump out over 40 per cent of global CO2 emissions. Rich countries like ours need to act first and fastest to cut their emissions.
They also need to ensure that future energy needs are met from renewable sources. We must not be misled by any dangerous and ineffective ‘quick fix’. Whatever the government’s spin doctors and the apologists for the nuclear industry tell us, nuclear power is not the answer to climate change. It is not sustainable and can only make a very small contribution to electricity generation. Nuclear power is dirty and dangerous. It produces enormous amounts of carcinogenic radioactive waste which will remain dangerous for thousands of years. The risk of nuclear accidents, such as those at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Windscale (Sellafield) hangs over all nuclear power stations, whenever they were built. In 2005, the Thorp reprocessing plant at Sellafield was shut after the discovery of a leak of 20 tonnes of radioactive material which had gone undiscovered for nine months. Nuclear power is not the solution. It is not worth the risk.”
For more information about The Wave campaign, please see http://www.stopclimatechaos.org/the-wave
