When I pull up the steel pole containing the core ice sample of what I did in 2006, the unifying element to the work is the idea that only social change halts climate change.

In the summer I did a couple of benefit gigs for this week-long Camp for Climate Action. In September the Camp for Climate Action tried to shut down Drax power station, Britain’s single largest carbon spewer. The benefit gigs were performed in autonomous social centres in the north of England.

I spoke in London’s Trafalgar Square at a Stop Climate Chaos rally ( I’ll post the text soon). There were a lot of young kids there come to see the pop bands that were on, and I’m sure most of ‘em were just thinking: ‘Why is that nasty, unshaven man so angry? Shouldn’t he be happy that we’ve saved the planet already by our judicious consumer choices? In the same way that we ended corporate rule of the Global South with Live 8?’

Got to thinking about history in reverse because it seems to me that in the future sci-fi will be set in the past. I mean, there’s a saying among Arab oil-igarchs: ‘My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel.’ For them and for all of us the future will have to get along without all the hydrocarbons. I put these thoughts into a comedy musical and did a short theatrical run in July of show called: ‘No Planet B - the history Of The World Backwards.’

TV show ‘Robert Newman’s history Of Oil’ was broadcast a few times this year; and an article called ‘Capitalism or a habitable planet’ in the Guardian garnered hate mail from five continents.

Got into an interesting argument about climate politics with a friend of mine who is making a documentary about oil and climate change. When I told her that the novel I have been spending ever waking hour on since September is set in the late Elizabethan era circa 1600, she responded:

‘Two words: climate change.’That is, what a waste of time, there is only one subject worth anyone’s attention nowadays, this of all times is no time for escapist, swashbuckling fantasies.

I was speechless with fury for a moment or two. But then we got onto really interesting terrain (ie. I started to win the argument and win big with several tank divisions over-running while her cowering infantry divisions wetting themselves in the mud.)

Her argument was saying that climate change is the end of politics, which of course it is not. Such greenies remind me of those World War 2 posters which urged the people not to moan about the boss, not to complain about work or rations, and not to go on strike, because we had a common enemy. (Thankfully, to the great enhancement of the post World War 2 era, there were thousands of wartime strikes and walkouts).

Reducing carbon emissions is not a politically neutral act, every reduction creates winners and losers, and the deck is stacked against the powerless and in favour of the powerful . (For example, when Applied Energy Services planted so-called ‘offset’ trees in the West Highlands of Guatemala, local peasants gathering firewood for cooking was criminalized.)

And so a novel concerned with structures of power in the olden days ( at a historical moment of intense change) may not be a total waste of time. There is no end to complexity, in human relations and human society, and, there is above all, I said, removing my gloves from top hat and screwing topper at jaunty angle onto head: art! Why are we struggling if not for a world in which we carry on our searches for meaning and beauty, in which life is lived, celebrated…. [The full text of Newman’s Riposte has been set to Music and recorded by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra]

I bid you , good day!

-- RobNewman