In their biannual Captain Hook Awards for Biopiracy, the Coalition Against Biopiracy has dubbed Google Inc. Biggest Threat to Genetic Privacy for teaming up with J. Craig Venter to create a searchable online database of all the genes on the planet so that individuals and pharmaceutical companies alike can ‘google’ our genes - one day bringing the tools of biopiracy online.

From the nomination:

Google’s motto, “Don’t be Evil,” may soon take a backseat to a new mission statement unveiled by CEO Eric Schmidt in early March 2006: “We want to be able to store everybody’s information all the time.” Already causing concern over the way it uses (or could use) the vast amount of Google-user information it has collected and stored over the years, the company has now set the sights of its all-seeing eyes even higher. Google’s massive computer power and cutting-edge data-mining capacity make it a logical partner for Craig Venter and his ever-expanding collection of DNA samples taken from humans, animals and microbes living in soil, sea and air.

The governments assembled at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meetings in Brazil today reached an agreed to stop the push towards commercialising so called ‘terminator’ (sterile) seeds - a huge victory for the safety of the world’s food supplies:

“This is a momentous day for the 1,4 billion poor people world wide, who depend on farmer saved seeds,” said Francisca Rodriguez of Via Campesina a world wide movement of peasant farmers, “Terminator seeds are a weapon of mass destruction and an assault on our food sovereignty.

Read the full article on banterminator.org…

I’m in the process of archiving the best of my photos from the Montreal climate change negotiation here on this site, but I am also making DVDs with all of the original high-resolution photos. I’m selling them for $20, see this page for more details.

I am currently in Montreal at the global climate change negotiations. Things are really starting to get intense here, with marches in major cities across the world this Saturday, there is a huge amount at stake and the scientists now telling us we have only 10-15 years left to make the deep cuts in emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change, the stakes couldn’t be higher. I’m working with a huge number of other amazing youth organisers and campaigners here, and we’re posting regular updates on the aptly named It’s Getting Hot In Here blog. Check it out, follow what’s going on, and if you are in the UK and have time to call London and try to get some key messages through to the UK government (who currently are head of the EU) then please do contact me.

We’ve also been doing creative (fluffy) actions within the UN conference, and putting out a daily youth bulletin called ‘Tip of the Iceburg’ which is online at beyondkyoto.org.

That’s all great and good, but what I really would like to do is try to mobilise some young people in the UK to push the UK government from at home. The EU’s position on this stuff is in principle OK, but they’re not taking the lead they need to and the UK is in a key position at the moment to drive the EU’s position.

Without wishing to get into too much detail, the debate that’s going on here is about what happens when the current commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol finishes in 2012. The environmental groups and youth have taken the position that we need a strong decision from Montreal that will lead to a second round of compulsory emissions cuts starting in 2012 in line with the science. The EU position at the moment is that they aren’t against that, but they won’t really promote it either, and that simply isn’t good enough.

If anyone has time over this week and could work with me to do some phoning in to the government in London, and maybe some press work to try to get the message through to the delegates here that young people are watching from back home in the UK, and demand strong action to cut emissions from the government for the sake our our future, that might *just* help turn things around here.

So give me a shout - email, msn, skype - I’m trying to be online as much as I can manage. Literally 20 phone calls from young people to key people back in London asking them to pass the message through to the UK government team here could make a big difference in giving them the courage to do the right thing. We simply can’t afford for these negotiations to fail, we are out of time on climate change.

Just a few years ago, it seemed that ‘Climate Justice’ — the analysis of climate change as an issue of social justice as much as an environmental one — was a concept being recognised only by grassroots community groups, and indigenous rights campaigners on the forefront of community fights against the oil industry. Now more than ever, more mainstream environmental groups are taking up the fight in solidarity with communities already feeling the worst affects of climate change. Friends of the Earth International has focussed their climate change campaign around issues of Environmental Justice, and networks such as Rising Tide and Energy Action within the developed countries are adopting EJ principles and working to ensure that the voices of those most alienated by continued unjust energy policies are heard at the forefront their campaigning work.

Today, though, I read something that surprised me. A paper published in Nature this week by group at University of Wisconsin and reported in The Guardian details what many of us have been saying for a long time — that the impacts of climate change will disproportianately impact those who are both least responsible for causing the problem, and have been most affected by the injustices of the oil production cycle. Given the failure in recent times of the scientific community to stand up for the science of climate change in the face of increasing numbers of oil industry-funded “skeptics”, it’s great to see this kind of important analysis now being published.