Earth Hour

nice piece of info.....good to know that generations are on active sharing

I think "distious" (above) was supposed to be "disastrous" (as in devastating or catastrophic). Remember we are from different countries with various languages and dialects -- if I tried to converse in a language other than my own, I'm sure I'd mess it up.

The message is clear though -- greed & hostility towards others who are different must go -- we must put our children's needs first and leave them with a safe and habitable planet.

What scares me about this video is that the computer [she uses to express herself] in itself is a huge sensory stimulator.

October 26, 2009

When the Climate Change Center Can't Hold
Gridlock on the Way to Copenhagen
By PATRICK BOND ... Read More

After the weekend in which 350.org and thousands of allies valiantly tried to raise global consciousness about impending catastrophe, we can ask some tough questions about what to do after people depart and the props are packed up. No matter the laudable big-tent activism, let's face it: global climate governance is grid-locked and it seems clear that no meaningful deal can be sealed in Copenhagen on December 18.

The recent Bangkok negotiations of Kyoto Protocol Conference of Parties functionaries confirmed that Northern states and their corporations won't make an honest effort to get to 350 CO2 parts per million. On the right, Barack Obama's negotiators seem to feel that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is excessively binding to the North, and leaves out several major polluters of the South, including China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

Kyoto's promised 5% emissions cuts (by 2012, from 1990 levels) are impossible now. Obama's people hope the world will accept 2005 as a new starting date; a 20% reduction by 2020 then only brings the target back to around 5% below 1990 levels. Such pathetically low ambitions, surely Obama knows, guarantee a runaway climate catastrophe - he should shoot for 45%, say the small island nations.

The other reason Kyoto is ridiculed by serious environmentalists is its provision for carbon trading rackets which allow fake claims of net emissions cuts. Since the advent of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, the Chicago exchange, Clean Development Mechanism projects and offsets, vast evidence has accumulated of systemic market failure, scamming and inability to regulate carbon trading (see a website launched today www.350reasons.org).

A final reason we need to rapidly transcend Kyoto's weak, market-oriented approach is that devastation caused by climate change will hit the world's poorest, most vulnerable people far harder than those in the North. Reparations for the North's climate debt to the South are in order. The European Union offered a pittance in September, while African leaders are stiffening their spines for a fight in Copenhagen reminiscent of Seattle a decade ago.

Since this threat was raised by the African Union six weeks ago, subsequent Bangkok negotiations and web traffic have offered a sobering reminder of Northern stubbornness, on two fronts - those whose interests are mainly in short-term capital accumulation, but also the mainstream environmentalists who are only beginning to grasp the huge strategic error they made in Kyoto.

In the first camp, Obama's people are hoping non-binding national-level plans will be acceptable at Copenhagen. But their case is weaker because at home, the two main proposed bills - Waxman-Markey which passed in the US House of Representatives and Kerry-Boxer which is under Senate consideration - will do far more harm than good.

Don't take it from me; the best source is Congressman Rich Boucher, from a coal-dominated Southwestern Virginia district. Boucher supported Waxman-Markey, he told a reporter last month, precisely because it would not adversely affect his corporate constituencies. The two billion tons of offset allowances in the legislation mean that ‘an electric utility burning coal will not have to reduce the emissions at the plant site,' chortled Boucher. ‘It can just keep burning coal.'

Boucher was one of the congressional rednecks who wrecked Obama's promise to sell - not give away - the carbon credits, and then bragged to his district's main newspaper, the Times News, that ‘this helps to keep electricity prices affordable and strengthens the case for utilities to continue to use coal.'

Boucher and co are also working hard to disempower the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating CO2. This was accomplished in Waxman-Markey, and upon introducing his legislation, Senator John Kerry gave the game away by noting EPA regulatory authority is not gutted in his bill now, only so that it can be gutted later, so as to provide ‘some negotiating room as we proceed forward.'

The Senate bill has all manner of other objectionable components, which hard-working activists from Climate SOS, Rising Tide North America, Friends of the Earth, the Center for Biological Diversity, Biofuelwatch and Greenwash Guerrillas have been hammering at.

Hence in the US, the balance of forces is fluid. On the far-right, the fossil fuels industries are intent on making Obama's climate legislation farcical - and have so far succeeded. In the centre, the main establishment ‘green' agencies - such as the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defence Council - are plowing ahead with carbon trading strategies, hoping to salvage some legitimacy for Obama, because these bills are a ‘first step' to more serious emissions reducation, they claim.

Yet US negotiators will go to Copenhagen (as they did in Bangkok and will next month in Barcelona) with the aim of smashing any residual benefit of the Kyoto Protocol - such as potential binding cuts with accountability mechanisms - and then allow these US dynamics to play out in a manner that locks in climate disaster.

So just as in 1997, when Al Gore introduced carbon trading into the initial deal - and subsequently broke an implicit promise by failing to get the US (under both Clinton and Bush) to ratify the Protocol - there is every likelihood that if an agreement in Copenhagen were reached, it would be as worthless as Kyoto.

Which brings us to quandaries faced by two other forces: the ordinary environmentalist in the US - perhaps a typical fan of useful www.grist.org blogs - and activists based in the so-called Third World who have to deal with the most adverse impacts of climate chaos in coming decades.

Grist's Jonathan Hiskes recently reacted to the first dilemma by characterizing Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James Hansen - the most celebrated US climate scientist - as ‘especially troublesome.' Hansen not only put his body on the line this year in a high-profile arrest at a West Virginia coal generator, and testified repeatedly against carbon trading, but also endorsed Climate SOS, to Hiskes' dismay.

Why rail against Hansen? Hiskes claims that when describing Obama's bills as ‘worse than nothing', Hanson and other ‘no-compromise types' ignore ‘the historical precedent of legislation that is deeply flawed at first evolving into something effective and durable. The original Clean Air Act did not address the acid rain crisis, an omission not corrected until 1990. The original Social Security Act did not include domestic or agricultural workers, effectively excluding many Hispanic, black, and immigrant workers.'

The obvious difference is that those two laws empowered environmentalists and workers against enemies. They had universalizing potential and could be incrementally expanded. In contrast, Obama's climate legislation is so far off on the wrong track - by commodifying the air as the core climate strategy and empowering the fossil fuel industries - that the train cannot be steered away from its over-the-cliff route. Just let it crash.

(Oh bummer, the same seems to be true of 2009 legislation and fiscal programs for the economy and healthcare, which empower banksters, derivative financiers, energy firms, insurers and others who caused the problems in the first place.)

The second force caught in the quandary of climate politics is Penang-based Third World Network (TWN) and its many admirers, who insisted at Bangkok that the Kyoto Protocol be retained because, first, at least it offers the possibility of a binding framework, and second, countries not presently liable under Kyoto should still have the right to increase emissions so as to ‘develop.'

I'll grant the first point, for if US negotiators block Kyoto's extension, then national-level agreements could i

heheheh

All of the above -- the picture of earth should reflect what a Healthy Planet looks like ... lots of green and blue ...

stop mass production, and slow the oil filds !!!

let the 1st World countries take the responsibility and be accountable for the massive onslaught of climate change in 3rd world countries because of their huge multinational corporations..

'm sorry to say this but Copenhagen will be a waste of time and a farce. Nothing will come of it. Global warming is NOT caused by CO2, it's related entirely to the activity of the sun. Most of the other hot air comes from the mouths of politicians and bureaucrats.

October 26, 2009

When the Climate Change Center Can't Hold
Gridlock on the Way to Copenhagen
By PATRICK BOND ... Read More

After the weekend in which 350.org and thousands of allies valiantly tried to raise global consciousness about impending catastrophe, we can ask some tough questions about what to do after people depart and the props are packed up. No matter the laudable big-tent activism, let's face it: global climate governance is grid-locked and it seems clear that no meaningful deal can be sealed in Copenhagen on December 18.

The recent Bangkok negotiations of Kyoto Protocol Conference of Parties functionaries confirmed that Northern states and their corporations won't make an honest effort to get to 350 CO2 parts per million. On the right, Barack Obama's negotiators seem to feel that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is excessively binding to the North, and leaves out several major polluters of the South, including China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

Kyoto's promised 5% emissions cuts (by 2012, from 1990 levels) are impossible now. Obama's people hope the world will accept 2005 as a new starting date; a 20% reduction by 2020 then only brings the target back to around 5% below 1990 levels. Such pathetically low ambitions, surely Obama knows, guarantee a runaway climate catastrophe - he should shoot for 45%, say the small island nations.

The other reason Kyoto is ridiculed by serious environmentalists is its provision for carbon trading rackets which allow fake claims of net emissions cuts. Since the advent of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, the Chicago exchange, Clean Development Mechanism projects and offsets, vast evidence has accumulated of systemic market failure, scamming and inability to regulate carbon trading (see a website launched today www.350reasons.org).

A final reason we need to rapidly transcend Kyoto's weak, market-oriented approach is that devastation caused by climate change will hit the world's poorest, most vulnerable people far harder than those in the North. Reparations for the North's climate debt to the South are in order. The European Union offered a pittance in September, while African leaders are stiffening their spines for a fight in Copenhagen reminiscent of Seattle a decade ago.

Since this threat was raised by the African Union six weeks ago, subsequent Bangkok negotiations and web traffic have offered a sobering reminder of Northern stubbornness, on two fronts - those whose interests are mainly in short-term capital accumulation, but also the mainstream environmentalists who are only beginning to grasp the huge strategic error they made in Kyoto.

In the first camp, Obama's people are hoping non-binding national-level plans will be acceptable at Copenhagen. But their case is weaker because at home, the two main proposed bills - Waxman-Markey which passed in the US House of Representatives and Kerry-Boxer which is under Senate consideration - will do far more harm than good.

Don't take it from me; the best source is Congressman Rich Boucher, from a coal-dominated Southwestern Virginia district. Boucher supported Waxman-Markey, he told a reporter last month, precisely because it would not adversely affect his corporate constituencies. The two billion tons of offset allowances in the legislation mean that ‘an electric utility burning coal will not have to reduce the emissions at the plant site,' chortled Boucher. ‘It can just keep burning coal.'

Boucher was one of the congressional rednecks who wrecked Obama's promise to sell - not give away - the carbon credits, and then bragged to his district's main newspaper, the Times News, that ‘this helps to keep electricity prices affordable and strengthens the case for utilities to continue to use coal.'

Boucher and co are also working hard to disempower the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating CO2. This was accomplished in Waxman-Markey, and upon introducing his legislation, Senator John Kerry gave the game away by noting EPA regulatory authority is not gutted in his bill now, only so that it can be gutted later, so as to provide ‘some negotiating room as we proceed forward.'

The Senate bill has all manner of other objectionable components, which hard-working activists from Climate SOS, Rising Tide North America, Friends of the Earth, the Center for Biological Diversity, Biofuelwatch and Greenwash Guerrillas have been hammering at.

Hence in the US, the balance of forces is fluid. On the far-right, the fossil fuels industries are intent on making Obama's climate legislation farcical - and have so far succeeded. In the centre, the main establishment ‘green' agencies - such as the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defence Council - are plowing ahead with carbon trading strategies, hoping to salvage some legitimacy for Obama, because these bills are a ‘first step' to more serious emissions reducation, they claim.

Yet US negotiators will go to Copenhagen (as they did in Bangkok and will next month in Barcelona) with the aim of smashing any residual benefit of the Kyoto Protocol - such as potential binding cuts with accountability mechanisms - and then allow these US dynamics to play out in a manner that locks in climate disaster.

So just as in 1997, when Al Gore introduced carbon trading into the initial deal - and subsequently broke an implicit promise by failing to get the US (under both Clinton and Bush) to ratify the Protocol - there is every likelihood that if an agreement in Copenhagen were reached, it would be as worthless as Kyoto.

Which brings us to quandaries faced by two other forces: the ordinary environmentalist in the US - perhaps a typical fan of useful www.grist.org blogs - and activists based in the so-called Third World who have to deal with the most adverse impacts of climate chaos in coming decades.

Grist's Jonathan Hiskes recently reacted to the first dilemma by characterizing Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James Hansen - the most celebrated US climate scientist - as ‘especially troublesome.' Hansen not only put his body on the line this year in a high-profile arrest at a West Virginia coal generator, and testified repeatedly against carbon trading, but also endorsed Climate SOS, to Hiskes' dismay.

Why rail against Hansen? Hiskes claims that when describing Obama's bills as ‘worse than nothing', Hanson and other ‘no-compromise types' ignore ‘the historical precedent of legislation that is deeply flawed at first evolving into something effective and durable. The original Clean Air Act did not address the acid rain crisis, an omission not corrected until 1990. The original Social Security Act did not include domestic or agricultural workers, effectively excluding many Hispanic, black, and immigrant workers.'

The obvious difference is that those two laws empowered environmentalists and workers against enemies. They had universalizing potential and could be incrementally expanded. In contrast, Obama's climate legislation is so far off on the wrong track - by commodifying the air as the core climate strategy and empowering the fossil fuel industries - that the train cannot be steered away from its over-the-cliff route. Just let it crash.

(Oh bummer, the same seems to be true of 2009 legislation and fiscal programs for the economy and healthcare, which empower banksters, derivative financiers, energy firms, insurers and others who caused the problems in the first place.)

The second force caught in the quandary of climate politics is Penang-based Third World Network (TWN) and its many admirers, who insisted at Bangkok that the Kyoto Protocol be retained because, first, at least it offers the possibility of a binding framework, and second, countries not presently liable under Kyoto should still have the right to increase emissions so as to ‘develop.'

I'll grant the first point, for if US negotiators block Kyoto's extension, then national-level agreements could i

Thank you for your reply. This topic, like terrorism, is conflicted... a global issue were the lines of fact and fiction are often blurred. Who knows what we can believe? Green is great, but the Cap and Trade (cough cough Cap and Tax) is still a big no. I'm going to stop commenting on this.

Vote for earth through art. http://reddishblack.deviantart.com/art/vote-for-LOVE-144603999

Have already voted... though there is not much awareness in India. the attitude of Indian's needs to be changed.

We need India's vote

not again!

"Who will save your souls, if you won't even save your own".... Heal Gaia:)