World News Roundup
ARAB TIMES, THURSDAY, JANUARY 1, 2009
20
INTERNATIONAL
Climate
‘Greens’ targets too
‘Crisis’ sparks
climate radicals
LOUISA, Virginia, Dec 31, (AP):
Under arrest, Paxus Calta raised two
fingers from his shackled hand to
flash a peace sign. Fellow environ-
mental activists cheered as US police
escorted him to the van that would
take him to jail.
He had intended to get arrested, as
he had before in 12 countries on three
continents.
For two hours, Calta and 19 other
protesters associated with the grass-
roots group Rising Tide North
America had occupied the visitor’s
center at Dominion’s North Anna
Nuclear Power Station.
While radical groups and their tac-
tics are by no means new, climate
change is a new cause for them.
Rising Tide isn’t protesting the
causes of global
warming as much
as the solutions. It
is
against
clean
coal, nuclear power
and capping carbon
pollution while let-
ting polluters buy
and sell rights to
pollute under the
cap — the very
fixes under discus-
sion in Washington. It disdains the
compromise
and
collaboration
between the Big 10 environmental
groups and elite corporations, as well
as the view that technology can save
the environment.
The protest at Dominion — which
is seeking to build a new reactor —
was the latest stunt organized by
Rising Tide.
“There are lots of different ways
that you can approach the problem of
climate change. What the direct action
movement believes is that the market-
based solutions that have been used in
the past are inappropriate,” Calta said
in an interview after he was charged
with trespassing, and released from
jail at 2 am on $1,000 bail.
Alternative
“The alternative is that we let cor-
porations and governments do what
they have always done, and the world
is going to die,” he said.
Rising Tide originated in the
Netherlands in 2000. It came to the
US in 2006. That’s when a group of
activists involved in Earth First!, one
of the earliest groups to use in-your-
face tactics such as tree sitting and
blocking roads with human chains,
decided