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Toward Copenhagen: Do Something!
As we approach the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference, December 7 to 18--the world's last chance to secure an emissions reductions agreement that will replace the Kyoto Protocol before it expires--activists racing against a ticking environmental bomb are channeling their energies at the UN talks and beyond. Join them.
350 parts per million represents the maximum amount of C02 that can exist in the atmosphere with people and the planet continuing to thrive, according to scientists. Any more than that and we're screwed. At 350.org, founded by Bill McKibben, you can find out more about the science behind the number, sign up for action alerts, help plan upcoming actions, and add your name to the 350 pledge, which will be delivered at Copenhagen. This video chronicles the group's recent international day of protest.
The Yes Men, a loose-knit association of some 300 activists worldwide who impersonate corporate leaders to call attention to their misdoings, have devoted recent pranks to climate change, and have established a website, beyondtalk.net, where you can pledge to take environmental non-violent civil disobedience.
Rising Tide North America is also a good resource for direct action organizing--something everyone from scientists like James Hansen and politicians like Al Gore now see as increasingly necessary--providing speakers, trainings and workshops. The group also devotes significant energy to educating on the root causes of climate change and debunking what it argues are the fallacies behind proposed market-based solutions.
Gear up for November 30, the eve of the Copenhagen talks and the tenth anniversary of the WTO Seattle shut-down, with Mobilization for Climate Justice. Putting social justice at the center of the debate, they highlight the need for real, non-market based solutions that protect those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change: people of color, low-income, and indigenous communities--in the US and globally. They will be staging a nation-wide series of non-violent direct actions targeted at "corporate climate criminals."
To support activists on the ground in Copenhagen donate to transnational movement, Climate Justice Action and check out their website for an "Atlas of Global Resistance" and an "Action Calendar", whose key dates include December 12, a Global Day of Action.
The Energy Action Coalition is a US-based online community of young environmental organizers striving to leverage collective power and create change for clean, efficient, just and renewable energy. Its PowerShift conference has become an important annual gathering place for activists to share ideas and strategies.
The Campus Climate Challenge pushes colleges and universities to become models for the clean energy revolution. The hard results so far are impressive: 285 colleges committed to becoming climate neutral through the Presidents Climate Commitment, a set of principles put forth by a group of college and university presidents. Check out a The map of participating schools as well as resources for students to push the challenge at their own schools. The site also maintains a blog, offering dispatches from the youth climate movement.
1Sky offers concrete plans for pivoting to a clean energy economy, which has the potential to relieve US dependence on foreign oil, and usher in a new era of good, green jobs.
The Climate Crisis Coalition was founded in 2004 specifically to broaden the constituency of the climate action movement.
International long-running environmental giants Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace continue to work around the issue of global warming. Greenpeace offers a robust climate change action center; FOE's demandclimatejustice.org implores Obama to take bold action at Copenhagen, and Oxfam's Copenhagen campaign, tcktcktck.org, offers ways to get involved in demanding "an ambitious, fair and binding climate deal."
Just do something.
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7 Comments so far
Show AllIn my view Obama represents the interests of Corporations and more importantly will attempt to place any financial burden related to climate change on the backs of working people. Until and unless the tax structure is made radically more progressive, working people have no choice but to resist climate change legislation. They simply do not have the extra money that will be required to heat their homes and drive their cars. They will simply be out in the cold.
As the anti-people legislation of the last thirty years meets reality it becomes immediately clear that working people are broke. Now, the Congress is burdened with Eighteenth Century legal architecture that is not capable of operating the rapid requirements of the Twenty First Century. Collapse is inevitable; therefore, climate change will be addressed through collapse. Be careful what you wish for.
If you spend $40,000 per year, a sales tax of 60 basis points would cost you $240 a year. For this you could have free public transit in your town. In return you would get:
-- easier access to jobs
-- parking relief downtown
-- lower medical costs
-- lower carbon emissions
-- revival of the town center
-- $9,000 per car not needed by your family
-- reduced pressure on drainage
-- less tax needed for roads and parking
-- suburb land more affordable to organic farms
-- much more... see http://frepubtra.blogspot.com
A lot of the "solutions" to climate change do not address Jevons' principle. Basically this: burning non-fossil-fuel reduces the price pressure on fossil-fuel thus encouraging growth in that area.
Free public transit is a solution that will lead to qualitative change. It will undercut the subsidies currently given the auto-system which artificially inflate the value of sprawl.
http://frepubtra.blogspot.com
People who want to do something positive -
- Channel your energies in a
positive way. Here are some suggestions, build a web page,
phone your congressman, attend meetings in your local area
with like minded people to form or support freedom coalitions,
email your local representatives, call Washington, have group
viewings videos that have verified information pertaining to
amendment rights... www.bailoutmainstreetnow.com
Write down a list of stuff you wish to buy locally. Describe each item in a paragraph in terms of the acceptable materials and processes for its production, your price, and the volume you expect to consume. Post it in your local public place. This is how you demand local sustainable production. This local economy you help build becomes something to defend, so you will pay more attention to politics, and vote your own principles. You'll tend to look for local solutions for the wider infrastructure. For example, a railroad provides transport between your community and the next one. You vote to buy train cars from the vendor who makes the technical data public, so you can build the replacement parts in local workshops. With all technical data in the public domain, your local community preserves its independence. So when a snake goes slithering into Washing-town, you recognize that as a threat to you. Because you know that snake will try to make a law to make the train data private. So the snake can buy up the train business, and gain economic/political control over your community. And enslave your family. And destroy all of your environmental protections. And impose a permanent war tax on you. Sound familiar? So you vote the snake down. You vote third party. So the snake slithers back into a hole in the ground.
Before you cheer on this Copenhagen agreement, watch this You Tube video of Lord Christopher Monckton telling the dismal truth about what will happen to national sovereignty if it is signed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMe5dOgbu40
Yes, do something about the general mess on this one and only home of ours: Earth. Do something and stop all that talk, talk and more talk - which is nothing more than stalling tactics. The meek and all others will inherit one shitty world.