Coalition of the Willing

Coalition Of The Willing from coalitionfilm on Vimeo.

‘Coalition of the Willing’ is a collaborative animated film and web-based event about an online war against global warming in a ‘post Copenhagen’ world.

‘Coalition of the Willing’ has been Directed and produced by Knife Party, written by Tim Rayner and crafted by a network of 24 artists from around the world using varied and eclectic film making techniques. Collaborators include some of the world’s top moving image talent, such as Decoy, World Leaders and Parasol Island.

The film offers a response to the major problem of our time: how to galvanize and enlist the global public in the fight against global warming. This optimistic and principled film explores how we could use new Internet technologies to leverage the powers of activists, experts, and ordinary citizens in collaborative ventures to combat climate change. Through analysis of swarm activity and social revolution, ‘Coalition of the Willing’ makes a compelling case for the new online activism and explains how to hand the fight against global warming to the people.

July 31, 2010
George Lakoff
Author, The Political Mind, Moral Politics, Don’t Think of an Elephant!

Posted: July 15, 2010 09:08 AM
Huffington Post

Saving nature is the central issue. Carbon fuels destroy nature. The Gulf Death Gusher is the most visible sign. But signs are everywhere. Overall global warming increases hurricanes and floods, destroys habitats for plants, fish, birds, and ground animals, spreads deserts, causes deadly waves, and destroys glaciers and our polar ice caps. The use of carbon fuels has been destroying nature. Our job now is to save it.

Interestingly, there is a short, 39-page bill before the Senate that would allow us to save nature and get paid substantially for doing it. It is the CLEAR bill, first suggested by Peter Barnes, and introduced by Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME). It is simple, it works, and it pays you!

The principle behind it is this: We US citizens own the air over the US equally. Carbon-fuel sellers are dumping pollution in our air, not just poisoning the air, but destroying nature. At least they should pay for permits to dump, poison, and destroy, and should be forced year-by-year to stop. Who should the sellers pay for permits? All of us, the citizens who live here, should be paid handsomely. And there should be predictably fewer permits every year, till the practice ends or reaches tolerable levels. Read the complete Post.

By Peter Goodchild

18 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Most people have enough trouble dealing with the reality of peak oil. It’s like being married to someone who says, “I’m not an alcoholic, I just sometimes drink too much.” But perhaps to soften the blow, or maybe just to simplify the numbers, what is generally left out is the fact that it’s not really peak oil that matters, anyway, but peak oil per capita, the date of which was 1979. In that year there were 5.5 barrels of oil available for each person on Earth; by 2009 it had gone down to 4.3. [2]

In terms of daily life, however, it is that per-capita figure that is most critical. Because everything in modern civilization is tied to oil, everything in our world has deteriorated since 1979. It’s possible to use various numerical data to prove that the standard of living has gone down since that year, and to tie that to increased costs that in turn originate in the decrease of oil per capita, but it’s also just something we feel in our bones. If we look back over any ten-year period during the last four decades, we can see and feel the difference. Read the complete Post.

Posted: 15 July 2010
04:03 pm ET

An upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere recently collapsed in an unexpectedly large contraction, the sheer size of which has scientists scratching their heads, NASA announced Thursday.

The layer of gas – called the thermosphere – is now rebounding again. This type of collapse is not rare, but its magnitude shocked scientists. “This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,” said John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “It’s a Space Age record.”

The collapse occurred during a period of relative solar inactivity – called a solar minimum from 2008 to 2009. These minimums are known to cool and contract the thermosphere, however, the recent collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain. “Something is going on that we do not understand,” Emmert said. Read the complete Post.

Studies predict major extinctions and collapse of Greenland ice sheet with temperatures rising well above UN targets

by Juliette Jowit and Christine Ottery
Published on Tuesday, July 6, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

The world is heading for an average temperature rise of nearly 4C (7F), according to analysis of national pledges from around the globe. Such a rise would bring a high risk of major extinctions, threats to food supplies and the near-total collapse of the huge Greenland ice sheet.

More than 100 heads of state agreed in Copenhagen last December to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C-2C (2.7-3.6F) above the long-term average before the industrial revolution, which kickstarted a massive global increase in the greenhouse gases blamed for warming the planet and triggering climate change.

But six months on, a major international effort to monitor the emissions reductions targets of more than 60 countries, including all the major economies, the Climate Interactive Scoreboard, calculates that the world is on course for a rise of nearly double the stated goal by 2100.

Another study by Climate Analytics, at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, suggests there is “virtually no chance” world governments will keep the temperature rise to below 2C, and the rise is likely to be 3.5C (6.3F) by the end of the century.

In both analyses the current commitments suggest a much better outcome than the estimated business-as-usual temperature rise of 4.8C (8.6F), but are well above the 2C maximum the UN hoped would be agreed at the next major meeting this December in Cancún, Mexico - and even further from the 1.5C target many developing nations argue is needed to stop the worst impacts of climate change in their countries. Read the complete Post.

By Tom Whipple

Wednesday, June 30 2010 12:56:18 PM

At last report BP was making progress on the relief wells that are being
drilled to plug the runaway well in the Gulf. The London Times reports that
BP hopes to penetrate the casing of the leaking well and start pumping in
well-sealing mud in about two weeks. Let’s hope something works.

In the next few weeks, or if things do not go well, perhaps months, the
leaking well will be plugged, fishing hopefully will resume, the tourists
will return, and the whole matter will be left to lawyers who will spend
decades arguing how much New Orleans strip clubs that lost business during
the oil spill should be remunerated by BP.

Someday, however, it will become apparent that the real disaster is taking
place 150 miles to the south at BP’s multi-billion dollar Thunder Horse oil
platform that was supposed to extract a billion barrels of oil at a rate of
250,000 barrels a day (b/d). Production at Thunder Horse began in May of
2008 and by the end of the year had reached 170,000 b/d. Then something
unexpected happened; instead of production increasing to the rated 250,000
b/d, production began to drop at 2-3 percent each month so by the end of
2009 production was down to 60 or 70,000 b/d. As BP is under no obligation
to tell us what is going on, little news other than mandatory federal
production reports have been released. Read the complete Post.

Posted on Jun 22, 2010

By Amy Goodman

DETROIT—“I have a dream.” Ask anyone where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. first proclaimed those words, and the response will most likely be at the March on Washington in August 1963. In fact, he delivered them two months earlier, on June 23, in Detroit, leading a march down Woodward Avenue.

King said:

“I have a dream that one day, right down in Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to live together as brothers. …

“I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children … will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

“I have a dream this afternoon that one day right here in Detroit, Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them and they will be able to get a job.”

Forty-seven years later, thousands of people, of every hue, religion, class and age, might not have used those words exactly, but they marched down that same avenue here in Detroit in the same spirit, opening the U.S. Social Forum. More than 10,000 citizens, activists and organizers have come from around the world for four days of workshops, meetings and marches to strengthen social movements and advance a progressive agenda. Far larger than any tea party convention, it has gotten very little mainstream-media coverage. Not a tightly scripted, staged political convention, or a multiday music festival, the U.S. Social Forum defines itself as “an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences.” It is appropriate that the U.S. Social Forum should be held here, in this city that has endured the collapse of the auto industry and the worst of the foreclosure crisis. In Detroit, one is surrounded, simultaneously, by stark failures of capitalism and by a populace building an alternative, just and greener future. Read the complete Post.

10 Jun 2010

As the final arrangements are made for this weekend’s Transition Network Conference (the weather forecast is looking good, by the way!), a newly released report from Lloyds Insurance and Chatham House does an amazing job of putting the case for Transition to a business audience (you can download it here).  Although given the mad, pre-conference swirl, I haven’t yet read it in detail, its conclusions are striking, indeed quite extraordinary, and I have reproduced them below.  Nothing about the role of communities, but then this is a report aimed at business.  It does, however, state that any business seeking to be successful in the future will need to be prepared for ‘dramatic changes in the energy sector’, and that energy dependency will become a key vulnerability. It is interesting also that it arrives just after the new UK government announces it is commissioning a review of global resource scarcity and how it will affect the UK.

This is, in effect, the Hirsch Report for British business… and provides the perfect case for the work that Transition Training and Consulting are now doing with businesses.

Conclusions: Read the complete Post.

The New York Times

June 5, 2010
Imagining Life Without Oil, and Being Ready
By JOHN LELAND

As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.

For Mrs. Wilkerson, 33, a moderate Democrat from Oakton, Va., who designs computer interfaces, the spill reinforced what she had been obsessing over for more than a year — that oil use was outstripping the world’s supply. She worried about what would come after: maybe food shortages, a collapse of the economy, a breakdown of civil order. Her call was part of a telephone course about how to live through it all.

In bleak times, there is a boom in doom.

Americans have long been fascinated by disaster scenarios, from the population explosion to the cold war to global warming. These days the doomers, as Mrs. Wilkerson jokingly calls herself and likeminded others, have a new focus: peak oil. They argue that oil supplies peaked as early as 2008 and will decline rapidly, taking the economy with them.

Located somewhere between the environmental movement and the bunkered survivalists, the peak oil crowd is small but growing, reaching from health food stores to Congress, where a Democrat and a Republican formed a Congressional Peak Oil Caucus. Read the complete Post.