Comment from Admin
Time: May 1, 2006, 12:03 am

£1bn windfall for carbon trade firms

by Roger Harrabin, BBC News environment correspondent

Power firms could make a £1bn windfall profit from the EU Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme, BBC News has learned. The windfall is likely because many firms have benefited from increases in electricity prices brought about by the scheme without needing to make any extra investment in return. Peter Bedson, from IPA Consulting, confirmed to the BBC that the unwarranted profit could reach around £1bn.

Part of the problem, he said, is that firms have been given, free-of-charge, the carbon emissions permits on which the scheme is based. This, he explained, is like the government giving energy firms free money.

The WWF pressure group called it a scandal and demanded a windfall tax to re-direct the profits into energy conservation. The Conservatives said it was an example of government incompetence. Their environment spokesman Peter Ainsworth said: “MPs warned the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) this would happen but they took no notice.”

A true market scheme would see the permits auctioned, not given away by governments

The windfall lies in the design of the EU emissions trading scheme, which works by governments setting a limit for the total amount of carbon that can be emitted from its heavy industry and the power sectors. Instead of banning firms from exceeding the limit, governments hand the firms free pollution allowances up to a certain level. If a firm can cheaply cut its pollution by installing better technology it will have carbon permits to spare. If another firm is overshooting its pollution limit it will need to get hold of extra allowances. The firms can then trade carbon permits on the EU market.

Economists like it because it gives maximum pollution savings at least cost. But a true market scheme would see the permits auctioned, not given away by governments. The system means that generators using high-carbon fuels like coal need to buy extra carbon permits. That forces up the price of electricity overall, which benefits generators using low-carbon fuels like nuclear and gas. This is where the power firms have made their windfall profit.

Carbon price

Mr Bedson did a report on the issue for the DTI earlier this year. Since then the price of carbon shot up and his revised estimates suggest that the resulting windfall will reach around £1bn.

This will depend on the future price of carbon, which is in doubt since the crash in the carbon price partly triggered by over-allocations of pollution permits to French generating. Green groups are particularly angry that despite knowing about the windfall, the government have been fighting the EU in the courts to try to get the carbon allocation for the firms increased.

Last week they confirmed they would abandon the fight. But the DTI wants to compensate the generators by increasing their allocation under the next phase of the scheme. WWF, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems all want the government to set much tougher limits on carbon emissions from the biggest polluters. They all say the government should auction the permits.

Conservative environment spokesman Peter Ainsworth said: “All round Europe governments are in cahoots with the lowest common denominator of business. “The problem will not be sorted out until the market is made to work properly by forcing firms to bid for their permits instead of being allowed to lobby government for them free of charge. The DTI aren’t competent to decide on this.”

Pollution ‘increase’

Attention will now be focused on the government’s carbon targets for big business under the next phase of the EUETS, which are due to be resolved shortly. The government has said it will cut carbon emissions from big firms by between three and eight million tonnes. But experts note that the cuts are not real cuts - they are based on what industry is projecting it will emit in future. So the three million tonnes cut is in fact an increase in pollution. Government supporters will argue that there were bound to be problems when a large complex scheme like the scheme was set up, but that it was vital to design a scheme that would be supported by big business. They will hope that problems will be ironed out in future year when the scheme beds down.

Problems are happening across Europe. The price of carbon crashed last week, and the market is in disarray. It will come to a head this week when governments reveal how many extra carbon permits need to be purchased. The scheme is a mainstay of the EU’s policy for meeting its Kyoto obligations. Critics of the Kyoto Protocol are already celebrating the problems in the market. The UK government is failing in its carbon emissions targets. It planned to cut CO2 20% by 2010 to tackle climate change - described by Tony Blair as the biggest long-term challenge for mankind. But under Labour emissions have gone up by more than 2%.

(Source:BBC News)

Comment from Admin
Time: September 25, 2006, 4:00 pm

Global Temperature Highest in Millennia

(09-25) 14:51 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) –

The planet’s temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.

The researchers noted that a report in the journal Nature found that 1,700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average rate of about 4 miles per decade in the last half of the 20th century.

The warming has been stronger in the far north, where melting ice and snow expose darker land and rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the sun to be absorbed, and more over land than water.

Water changes temperature more slowly than land because of its great capacity to hold heat, but the researchers noted that the warming has been marked in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. Those oceans have a major effect on climate and warming that could lead to more El Nino episodes affecting the weather.

“This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution,” Hansen said in a statement.

Few scientists doubt that the planet has warmed, though some question the causes of the change.

Hansen, who first warned of the danger of climate change decades ago, said that human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate change factor.

The study said the recent warming has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius — 1.8 degree Fahrenheit — of the maximum temperature of the past million years.

“If further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today,” Hansen said.

___

On the Net:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: www.pnas.org

Comment from Admin
Time: November 17, 2006, 10:02 am

U.N. Nations Reach Deal to Cut Emissions
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

(11-17) 07:55 PST NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) –

With a concession to China, more than 180 nations at the U.N. climate conference appeared to reach preliminary agreement Friday on next steps toward negotiating deeper future cuts in global-warming emissions, Germany’s environment minister said.

Future meetings under the deal would review the workings of the Kyoto Protocol by 2008 with an eye toward setting new emissions quotas after it expires in 2012.

But China was assured that process would not negotiate cutbacks by developing nations, said Germany’s Sigmar Gabriel, who expressed some disappointment.

“It is not enough what we reached in the conference,” he told reporters. “Urgent action is necessary.”

The timetable still required approval by the full conference, expected later Friday.

China, India and others have resisted efforts at the U.N. climate conference to begin early talks in which they and other poor but fast-developing nations might be pressured to accept mandatory cutbacks in emissions linked to global warming.

Environmentalists feared such disputes might delay negotiations so long that the world would be left without emissions caps after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

“We are not seeing the bold leadership required. Further delay is totally irresponsible,” said Catherine Pearce, of Friends of the Earth International.

But European Union officials said a 2008 target for the Kyoto review — a process that would assess the latest science and the size of necessary cutbacks — should ensure no gap would open up at 2012.

If it’s done by 2008, “we’re well on our way to a new climate-change regime,” said Barbara Helfferich, an EU spokeswoman.

The 1997 Kyoto pact obliges 35 industrial nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States rejects that accord, with President Bush contending it would damage the U.S. economy and should have given poorer countries obligations as well.

Developing countries are expected to resist considering emissions reductions until they at least see acceptance of mandatory caps by the United States — a prospect some see as possible after Bush leaves office in 2009. Some Third World delegations had favored delaying the review until as late as 2011.

In a separate set of less-formal talks here, the Kyoto member countries have been exploring ways to bring the United States into a global emissions-reduction regime.

Scientists attribute at least some of the past century’s 1-degree rise in global temperatures to the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, byproducts of power plants, automobiles and other fossil fuel-burning sources. Continued temperature rises could seriously disrupt the climate, they say.

Too long a delay in the Kyoto review would likely leave a gap between Kyoto’s reductions and a new series of cutbacks, presenting “a real danger of the collapse of the carbon market,” said Hans Velorme, a Dutch spokesman for the environmentalist Climate Action Network.

The multibillion-dollar carbon market has evolved within the European Union. In imposing quotas on emissions from power plants and other energy-intensive industries, the EU established a trading system whereby companies that don’t use their full emissions allowances can sell credits to others that need them.

A similar market has developed in emission-reduction projects in the developing world, not obligated to cut emissions under Kyoto, but able to sell such credits to countries that are.

Speaking with reporters, Kenyan environmentalist Sharon Looremetta dismissed the Nairobi meeting as a failure. “Most major issues have been shelved until next year,” she said.

Her nomadic Maasai people have already been stricken by cattle-killing drought attributable to climate change, Looremetta said, but the countries emitting global-warming gases are doing too little to help.

“We don’t drive 4×4 cars, we don’t go on vacation by airplane, but we do suffer from climate change,” she said.

Comment from Admin
Time: December 28, 2006, 8:17 pm

Ice Mass Snaps Free From Canada’s Arctic

By ROB GILLIES, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, December 28, 2006

(12-28) 18:38 PST TORONTO, Canada (AP) –

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, scientists said. The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 497 miles south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada’s remote north. Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw.

“This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are loosing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead,” Vincent said Thursday.

In 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice, he said. The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 155 miles away picked up tremors from it.

The Ayles Ice Shelf, roughly 41 square miles in area, was one of six major ice shelves remaining in Canada’s Arctic. Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor.

“It is consistent with climate change,” Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906.

“We aren’t able to connect all of the dots … but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role.”

Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated. Weir notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.

Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as data from seismic monitors, Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.

“What surprised us was how quickly it happened,” Copland said. “It’s pretty alarming. Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly, but the big surprise is that for one they are going, but secondly that when they do go, they just go suddenly, it’s all at once, in a span of an hour.”

Within days, the floating ice shelf had drifted a few miles offshore. It traveled west for 31 miles until it finally froze into the sea ice in the early winter.

The Canadian ice shelves are packed with ancient ice that dates back over 3000 years. They float on the sea but are connected to land.

Derek Mueller, a polar researcher with Vincent’s team, said the ice shelves get weaker and weaker as the temperature rises. He visited Ellesmere’s Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in 2002 and noticed it had cracked in half.

“We’re losing our ice shelves and this a feature of the landscape that is in danger of disappearing altogether from Canada,” Mueller said. “In the global perspective Antarctica has many ice shelves bigger than this one, but then there is the idea that these are indicators of climate change.”

The spring thaw may bring another concern as the warming temperatures could release the ice shelf from its Arctic grip. Prevailing winds could then send the ice island southwards, deep into the Beaufort Sea.

“Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes,” Weir said. “There’s significant oil and gas development in this region as well, so we’ll have to keep monitoring its location over the next few years.”

Comment from Admin
Time: February 22, 2007, 10:04 pm

SchNEWS uproots the carbon offsetting myth

Where there’s a crisis there’s a cash-cow, and while SchNEWS has looked before at the stupidities of industrial carbon trading (See SchNEWS 514), it’s time to turn up the heat on those firms at the cashing in consumers fears about Climate Change. This week activists from London Rising Tide occupied the offices of the Carbon Neutral Company (CNC), at the forefront of the dubious practice of carbon offsetting. Rising Tide had been invited to take part in the load of hot air that is the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change (chaired by CNC) - but sensibly they chose to barricade themselves inside the CNC offices instead. They left voluntarily at 4.30pm without arrest, meanwhile others had carried out an action outside the company’s offices in Kings Cross.

CNC’s stock in trade is exploiting western guilt about the state of the environment. People send ‘em cash and in exchange trees are planted (or not) to offset carbon emitted by the now guilt-free paying customer. Does selling units of carbon amount to the privatisation of the atmosphere? Are customers buying hot air? We aren’t talking small potatoes here - ‘voluntary’ offsetting was worth around £20m in 2005 and is expected to top £300m over the next three years. Maybe money does grow on trees after all….

CNC’s founder, lifelong tree-hugger Dan Morrell (ex-video game importer, fashion retailer, night-club owner and advertising middleman), got creative when he saw the potential of the new market in ‘carbon trading’ - where in effect ‘units’ of emissions become commodities to be bought and sold. And who makes up his market? Rich people in high-polluting countries who feel guilty but want to be able to throw money at the problem. People who simply have to make that weekend shopping trip to New York, but don’t want to feel too bad.

Morrell’s latest attempt to cash in on the forthcoming apocalypse is media circus ‘Global Cool’, where such scientific luminaries as the Foo Fighters and Sheryl Crow line up to help make saving the planet sexy. He’s even roped in Tony Blair to hold a celeb-studded do earlier this month in aid of it. Their slogan? ’sign up and save a planet’ (see www.global-cool.com). And of course this whole enterprise is pushing carbon offsetting as a solution - Now that’s synergy! Rising Tide make the analogy that if the planet was a running bath, full almost to the brim, then offsetting CO2 emissions is like saying “I won’t turn off my tap. I’ll pay someone else £10 to pay someone else £2 to turn off their own tap.” This, of course, in no way faces up to the reality that just about every tap needs to become a mere dribble with global carbon emissions needing to go down 60-90%.

Even if the Carbon Neutral Company was planting the trees paid for, the whole exercise is next to useless. Desperate Dan claims that it would take ten trees to cancel out the carbon emissions of one US citizen for four months. So if the average Brit goes through six trees worth per four months - eighteen a year - do the math! To cover the whole country’s emissions it would require a billion trees a year to be planted. Within 30 years the whole country would be completely covered in pines. At least there’d be no room for airport expansions…

Fluffily-named carbon eco-capitalists like ‘Climate Care’, ‘Offset My Life’ are offering similar cynical products Our favourites CNC were flogging this package for £12.50: a Valentines Green Box with some organic chocolate, a keyring made of recycled leather, and - get this - a certificate for one month of carbon neutral driving - where 325kg of carbon has been set aside allowing 1,000 miles of happy motoring. Bargain! Conservation charity Trees for Life were offering the chance to buy your loved one a dedicated Scots pine in Caledonia for £15 - or snap up the special two for £20 deal!

Run Forest Run

The Rising Tide occupation came the day after a Carbon Trade Watch report was published. “The Carbon Neutral Myth - Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins,” is highly critical of the offsets industry, arguing that not only are supposed climate benefits impossible to quantify, but that projects are also being imposed on communities in the global South with little consultation.

The report also explains how these companies are using number-crunching trickery to boost their eco-friendly boasts - similar to the profit-inflating scam pulled by energy-criminals Enron. The wheeze is called ‘future value accounting’ and in the tree-planting game it basically means that when your eco-merchants ’sell’ you a tree, they do so on the basis that a certain amount of carbon emissions will be offset or neutralised - but the truth is that this figure is actually an estimate based on the tree’s whole lifetime and what it may neutralise in the future if it stays healthy and reaches full maturity - in up to one hundred years time! Whether there will still be an environment suitable for sustaining that tree in a century’s time does not come into the equation.

In addition, these great claims are made despite the fact that there has only been limited research into the actual long term benefits of tree-planting. “Carbon in a tree is not stored safely,” says Jutta Kill, of the environment group Fern. “Trees burn, trees die down, there’s insect infestation.” Last year WWF, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace issued a statement saying they do not support forestry projects to offset carbon emissions and last month a new US study claimed that where you plant makes a massive difference to effectiveness -

Little independent monitoring is done to ensure that plantations are properly managed, or exist at all. Take the roaring success of the project between green rockers Coldplay and CNC where the carbon emissions from the production of their last CD was to be offset by 10,000 mango trees in India. 40% of the saplings died because villagers didn’t have the water to support them, and money promised to villagers to maintain the trees didn’t come through. In Uganda (and other places across the global South), people have been expelled from their land to make way for plantation schemes, while workers are paid below subsistence wages for toiling on the West’s conscience-relief fantasies.

So in the end offset companies just breed complacency by selling ‘peace of mind’ to consumers. They are just another way of exploiting the poorest people for profit and only offer more distraction from the critical task of tackling our unsustainable consumption patterns and business practices. Tree-mend-us!

* For more see www.carbontradewatch.org

* For the full ‘The Carbon Neutral Myth’ report see www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myth.pdf

* Last week a group of activists in Manchester added up the carbon footprint of some local businesses and demonstrated their effect by painting the footprints on the pavement outside. See the photos at www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/02/361740.html

* March 17th is Rising Tide Scotland’s ‘Climate Action Gathering’, with talks, discussion and workshops at 3 Bristo Place, Edinburgh from 9am-6pm. www.risingtide.org.uk/climate-action-gathering-2007

Comment from Admin
Time: August 2, 2007, 8:08 pm

Russian Subs Seek Glory at North Pole
By DOUGLAS BIRCH, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, August 2, 2007

(08-02) 14:20 PDT MOSCOW, Russia (AP) –

Two small Russian submarines completed a risky voyage deep below the North Pole Thursday, planting their country’s flag in a titanium capsule on the Arctic Ocean floor to symbolically claim what could be vast energy reserves beneath the seabed.

The subs dove some 2 1/2 miles to the Arctic shelf, where they collected geologic and water samples and dropped the yard-long canister. After spending most of the day below water, they surfaced near the pole, guided from the murky depths by four radio beacons on the perimeter of a football field-sized hole cut in the thick Arctic pack ice.

“It was so good down there,” expedition leader Artur Chilingarov, 68, a famed polar scientist, said after coming back, according to the state-owned ITAR-Tass news service. “If someone else goes down there in 100 or 1,000 years, he will see our Russian flag.”

Warming global temperatures have made the region, a frozen terra incognita for most of human history, increasingly open to shipping and energy exploration.

Thursday’s dive was part serious scientific expedition and part political theater. But it could mark the start of a fierce legal scramble for control of the sea bed among nations that border the Arctic, including Russia, the U.S., Canada, Norway and Denmark, through its territory Greenland.

Canada dismissed the flag-planting as empty showmanship, and the U.S. said Russia’s move had no legal importance regardless of whether it planted “a metal flag, a rubber flag or a bedsheet.”

Chilingarov, who surfaced to cheers from colleagues aboard the polar research vessel Akademik Fyodorov, spent 8 hours and 40 minutes submerged with his two crew mates, ITAR-Tass said, with the last 40 minutes used to find the break in the ice. The second sub and its three-member crew, including a Swede and an Australian, surfaced more than an hour after the first, after about 9 1/2 hours under the ice.

Expedition organizers said the greatest risk was being trapped under the ice and running out of air. Each of the subs, which had 72-hour air supplies, spent about 40 minutes on the sea floor, said Sergei Balyasnikov, a spokesman for Russia’s Institute of the Arctic and Antarctic which organized the expedition. He said the crews were in good physical condition.

The expedition received intense coverage in the media here. While some Russians were blase, others expressed pride.

“Russia is a great power which needs resources, territories and the prospect of its development determines its action,” Muscovite Yevgeny Gaziyev told The Associated Press.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during a visit to Manila, Philippines that the expedition should substantiate Russia’s claim that the Eurasian continental shelf, which is under its jurisdiction, extends to the North Pole.

“I think this expedition will supply additional scientific evidence for our aspirations,” Lavrov said in televised remarks. He added that the issue of which nation what portion of the polar region “will be resolved in strict compliance with international law.”

A U.S. State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said that the Russian government was entitled to submit its claim but he dismissed the significance of planting a flag in the North Pole seabed.

“I’m not sure whether they put a metal flag, a rubber flag or a bedsheet on the ocean floor,” he said. “Either way it doesn’t have any legal standing.”

Peter Mackay, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, dismissed the voyage to the Arctic floor as “just a show.”

“Look, this isn’t the 15th century,” he said, according to the Web site of Canadian Television. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory.’”

Canada’s own claims to the Arctic, he said, were “well-established.”

“This is posturing,” he said. “They’re fooling themselves if they think dropping a flag on the ocean floor is going to change anything.”

Chilingarov told colleagues on the surface that his craft, the Mir-1, had reached the seabed about 2 1/2 hours after beginning his drive.

“The landing was smooth, the yellowish ground is around us, no sea dwellers are seen,” he said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. Mir-2 reached the bottom about a half hour later.

The subs and their three-member crews each spent about an hour in the murky depths. They had planned to conduct a study of the water chemistry, biology and geology near the seabed at the pole, according to Russia’s Institute of the Arctic and Antarctic, which organized the expedition.

Russian researchers also planned to use the dive to help map the Lomonosov ridge, a 1,240-mile underwater mountain range that crosses the polar region. The ridge was discovered by the Soviets in 1948 and named after a famed 18th-century Russian scientist, Mikhail Lomonosov.

In December 2001, Moscow claimed that the ridge was an extension of the Eurasian continent, and therefore part of Russia’s continental shelf under international law. The U.N. rejected Moscow’s claim, citing a lack of evidence, but Russia is set to resubmit it in 2009.

If recognized, the claim would give Russia control of more than 460,000 square miles, representing almost half of the Arctic seabed. Little is known about the ocean floor near the pole, but by some estimates it could contain vast oil and gas deposits.

Chilingarov became a hero of the Soviet Union in the 1980s after successfully leading an expedition aboard a research vessel that was trapped for a time in Antarctic sea ice. He is a deputy speaker of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament.

The Mir-1 reached a depth of 13,980 feet Thursday, Tass reported. The Mir-2 went deeper, to 14,144 feet below the surface.

The deepest dive on record, according to several sources, was by the bathyscaphe Trieste, which in January 1960 descended 35,810 feet into the Mariana Trench in the Pacific.

Comment from Admin
Time: August 12, 2007, 11:03 am

Government has encouraged use of stop and search and detention without charge

John Vidal and Helen Pidd
Saturday August 11, 2007
Guardian

Armed police will use anti-terrorism powers to “deal robustly” with climate change protesters at Heathrow next week, as confrontations threaten to bring major delays to the already overstretched airport.

Up to 1,800 extra officers will be drafted in to prevent an estimated 1,500 people disrupting the airport over the period of the camp for climate change, which is due to begin on Tuesday. The police have been told to use stop and search powers against the protesters, who have pledged to take direct action on August 18 and 19 but not to endanger life.

The Metropolitan police chief, Sir Ian Blair, has said he fears a minority of protesters intent on breaking the law could cause massive disruption as Heathrow prepares for its busiest week of the year. Yesterday Met commander Jo Kaye, in charge of the specialist firearms unit, said some people would “want to get their message across using criminal means”.

Scotland Yard’s plans for handling the protests are revealed in a document seen by the Guardian, which was produced by Met commander Peter Broadhurst during a legal hearing at the high court which imposed restrictions on a number of named campaigners.

“Should individuals or small groups seek to take action outside of lawful protest they will be dealt with robustly using terrorism powers. This is because the presence of large numbers of protesters at or near the airport will reduce our ability to proactively counter the terrorist act [threat],” the document says.

The police report makes it clear that the government has encouraged police forces to make greater use of terrorism powers “especially the use of stop and search powers under s44 Terrorism Act 2000″.

The law gives police powers to:

· Stop and search people and vehicles for anything that could be used in connection with terrorism

· Search people even if they do not have evidence to suspect them

· Hold people for up to a month without charge

· Search homes and remove protesters’ outer clothes, such as hats, shoes and coats.

Last night the protesters said they would not be intimidated. “We are trying to prevent climate change by stopping the expansion of the airport. There is no intention to endanger life. Our quarrel is not with passengers but with BAA and the government,” said a spokesman.

The civil rights group Liberty said it was alarmed at the police use of the anti-terrorism powers to deter peaceful protest. “Stop and search powers created to address the threat of terrorism should not be used routinely against peaceful demonstrators,” said James Welch, Liberty’s legal director.

The police tactics have echoes of the 2003 anti-war demo at RAF Fairford where law lords eventually ruled police had acted unlawfully in detaining two coachloads of protesters, who were stopped and searched and then turned back even though they were on their way to an authorised demonstration. Police used section 44 of the act 995 times at the Fairford peace camp, even though there was no suggestion of terrorist overtones.

The Guardian has established that at least two climate change campaigners have been arrested recently at Heathrow by officers using terrorism powers. Cristina Fraser, a student, was stopped when cycling near the airport with a friend and then charged under section 58 of the Terrorism Act. This makes it an offence to make a record of something that could be used in an act of terrorism.

“I was arrested and held in a police cell for 30 hours. I was terrified. No one knew where I was. They knew I was not a terrorist,” she said.

Ms Fraser, a first-year London university anthropology student, has been on aviation demonstrations with the Plane Stupid campaign group, but claims she was carrying nothing at all. The police later recharged her with conspiring to cause a public nuisance.