Inside the Camp for Climate Action

Hundreds of protestors are expected in the capital this weekend for the Camp for Climate Action. Guest blogger Peter McDonnell tells us what the camp is all about

Mid-August, and Edinburgh's streets are brimming with folks who've come from all over the world to check out the festival. If you go anywhere near the Royal Mile, you'll see that it's festooned in flags declaring that this has been made possible through RBS.

Unfortunately, that's not all that the Royal Bank of Scotland are making possible. They are also providing huge sums of cash to enable some of the dirtiest and most controversial fossil fuel companies in the world to drill new wells, dig new mines, destroy more forests, poison more water ways, and drag us all further down the catastrophic path of a high-carbon future.

That's why myself and a bunch of other people from all over the country who are concerned about climate change are coming to Edinburgh to hold this year's Camp for Climate Action, which is targeting the RBS.

Previous camps have targeted big carbon emitters at the source, like the proposed third runway at Heathrow and the attempts to build a new coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth.

The RBS headquarters in Gogarburn doesn't have a big chimney belching out millions of tonnes of carbon, but it does provide the vital finance that enables many of the "belchy" projects to take place. Projects like the tar sands in Canada, which is poisoning indigenous communities and destroying boreal forests, and companies like Hargreaves coal in the UK, which wants to open one of the biggest opencast coal mines in the country.

It's even more outrageous when you take into account that RBS is doing all this with public money. RBS has loaned billions to these sorts of companies since it received the first of what would eventually be £45bn of taxpayers' money in October 2008.

So while we are all facing all manner of cuts, job losses and financial uncertainty, RBS has been spending our money on making the threat of climate change much, much worse.

Of course, it's not as if RBS is the only bank doing this, but a number of studies have shown that they are the UK bank most heavily involved in fossil fuel finance.

Yes, we are targeting RBS, but we also want to talk about the banking sector as a whole, the role it has played in the financial crisis and is playing in the climate crisis, and the economic system overall. The coalition government is waging war on the poorest sectors of society in an effort to get the economy "back on its feet", but is an economic system based on constant growth ever going to be able to address the issue of climate change? How much longer can we afford to ignore the elephant in the room, that capitalism is fundamentally unjust and unsustainable?

So here's hoping the weather holds in the coming days. The Camp for Climate Action is open for anyone who feels sympathetic towards what we are doing to come down and get involved. Bring your tent and a willingness to get stuck in. We want to create an atmosphere where people can live sustainably, learn about climate-related issues through the many workshops on offer, and find out a bit more about what direct action is all about and how it works - to the point where they might feel comfortable and empowered enough by Monday, when we have the big "day of action" against RBS and the fossil fuel industry, to try a little bit of civil disobedience for themselves.

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Aug 2010