‘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.
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.
The National
Tamsin Carlisle
* Last Updated: April 20. 2010 6:08PM UAE / April 20. 2010 2:08PM GMT
The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF), made up of nations controlling 70 per cent of the world’s gas reserves, has dropped an Algerian proposal to cut gas exports, thereby proving it is no “Gas OPEC”.
Instead, ministers from its 11-member states resolved yesterday to push for gas prices to be linked to market prices for crude. Read the complete Post.
As for the Antarctic, the counterintuitive contradiction is actually explicable! According to ace climate analyst Dr Joellen Russell of the Univeristy of Arizona, general warming has caused a significant poleward migration of climate belts. This shifting of historic trade winds, etc., is partially behind the drougths in China, Australia, Argentina, etc., and is responsible for accelerated melting of the floating and land-bound ice sheets in coastal Anarctica.
Meanwhile, contrary to popular belief, the Antarctic ozone hole has not recovered–in fact, the largest hole ever was in 2008. Now, stratospheric ozone is a GHG and usually warms the upper atmosphere significantly. In the absence of ozone, there is a extremly cold column of air over the central Antarctic that extends to the surface. This is responsible for record cold and snow/ice accumulation there. In other words, both the melting periphery and the frigid core of the continent are real and the result of anthropogenic climate change (although by different mechanisms).
William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC
Professor
UBC School of Community and Regional Planning
604 822-2937
The U.S. Department of Energy admits that “a chance exists that we may experience a decline” of world liquid fuels production between 2011 and 2015 “if the investment is not there,” according to an exclusive interview with Glen Sweetnam, main official expert on oil market in the Obama administration.
This warning on oil output issued by Obama’s energy administration comes at a time when world demand for oil is on the rise again, and investments in many drilling projects have been frozen in the aftermath of the tumbling of crude prices and of the financial crisis.
Glen Sweetnam, director of the International, Economic and Greenhouse Gas division of the Energy Information Administration at the DoE, does not say that investments will not be “there”. Yet the answer to the issue of knowing when, where and in which quantities additional sources of oil should be put on-stream remains widely “unidentified” in the eyes of the most prominent official analyst on energy inside the Obama administration. The DoE dismisses the “peak oil” theory, which assumes that world crude oil production should irreversibly decrease in a nearby future, in want of suffisant fresh oil reserves yet to be exploited. The Obama administration of Energy supports the alternative hypothesis of an “undulating plateau” . Lauren Mayne, responsible for liquid fuel prospects at the DoE, explains : “Once maximum world oil production is reached, that level will be approximately maintained for several years thereafter, creating an undulating plateau. After this plateau period, production will experience a decline.” Read the complete Post.
From: Ann Rowan, Senior Policy Analyst, Policy and Planning Department
Jason Smith, Regional Planner, Policy and Planning Department
Date: February 17, 2010
Subject: Metro Vancouver and Peak Oil
Recommendation:
That the Environment and Energy Committee receive for information the report dated February 17, 2010, titled “Metro Vancouver and Peak Oil”.
1. PURPOSE
At its July 14, 2009 meeting the Environment and Energy Committee directed staff to prepare a brief analysis of how Metro Vancouver’s current policies address the dual challenges of peak oil and climate change. The request was in response to a presentation that suggested policy solutions designed to address climate change were not necessarily effective in preparing the region for sharp increases in fossil fuel prices.
From VPOE Jon Cooksey:
1) Who is Ann Rowan and what qualified her to write this report?
2) Did she or others speak with any peak oil experts, or members of the Vancouver Peak Oil Executive, Village Vancouver and the various Transition Network groups in the area that have been working to spread the word and prepare?
3) Am I misreading the conclusion – that there’s nothing Metro Vancouver has the power to do to prepare in the likely time-frame, based on the solutions not offered by the report – or is that really what it says?
4) What can we do to capitalize on this report, in terms of bringing the issue in front of the public?
We have more stuff and less time, connection and beauty, while living at the speed of our fossil-fueled machinery. No longer knowing the source of our stuff, we have lost the blessing, the skill and the satisfaction of quality and craft. We have allowed a whole life to be torn apart and marketed back to us needing to go to the gym, the nutritional supplement store, the daycare centre and eventually the nursing home.
The price for all of these dubious rewards is that Climate Change is in runaway mode. e.g. melting permafrost represents 20% of the fixed carbon on the surface of the planet and is composting and liberating methane which is 21 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2.; the warming oceans are less able to hold dissolved CO2; both of these cause the temperatures to rise more which causes both of them to occur even faster and so on.
The greatest global impact for all life is accelerating drought which is already occurring and running up against depleted aquifers and the predicted flooding of low lying areas with sea level rise affecting the most fertile lands. For humans the most devastating repercussion is crop failures. So yes re-localizing the capacity to grow food is an absolute necessity. Existing and predicted local impacts of CC include the loss of our glaciers, more of our precipitation in the winter mostly as rain with diminishing seasonal snowpack and earlier run-off ,this eventually combined with increasing burn-off of our highland tree cover. All of these are reducing creek flow during our increasingly hotter and drier summers and climate modelers predict migration to this region by drought refugees from at least two directions.
We have already extracted most of the easily accessed oil and what remains is ever more difficult, and expensive to procure. Depletion of known reserves stopped being matched by the finding of new ones as early as 2005 while the pace of increasing consumption in the developing world has accelerated wildly. In his book “Why Your World is going to get a Whole Lot Smaller”, Jeff Rubin who was the most quoted economist in all Canadian media as head of CIBC World Markets predicts $2.00 per liter gas around the corner as just the beginning of where it is headed. Read the complete Post.
Sunday, March 7, 2pm
The Unitarian Church of Vancouver
949 West 49th Ave, at Oak St., near 49th Ave Station on Canada Line
Suggested donation: $5-10 (no one will be turned away for lack of funds)
Featuring two speakers on the fight for climate justice after Copenhagen:
-Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s representative at the United Nations, lead spokesperson on climate change at the Copenhagen Summit
-Federico Fuentes, a participant in the revolutionary process in Venezuela and writer for Venezuelanalysis.com, Green Left Weekly and BoliviaRising.Blogspot.com.
The recent international summit on climate change hosted by the United Nations on Copenhagen ended in disappointment and recrimination. Greenpeace called it a “crime scene, with the guilty parties fleeing to the airport.” While Obama, Harper and other leaders of the rich countries stood accused, two heads of state in particular made connections with the tens of thousands of climate justice activists in the streets. Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, spoke for the world’s majority when they condemned global inequality and capitalism as the root causes of the climate crisis. Read the complete Post.
“There are many true things that are not useful for the vulgar crowd to know; and certain things, which although they are false it is expedient for the people to believe otherwise.” - Augustine of Hippo, City of God, 426 A.D.
Car salesmen and burger tycoons have sabotaged the most important decision of our generation.
As the highly-anticipated Copenhagen climate summit limps toward indecision, the largest money-making corporations on the planet privately celebrate their ability to undermine science and hijack the international political process.
The US – the greatest historic source of greenhouse gases – set the tone of duplicity in Copenhagen by offering “provisional targets” (translation: fantasy targets) and “politically binding” agreements (translation: non-binding) and by replacing the 1990 greenhouse gas baseline with a 2005 baseline (to make the non-binding, fantasy “targets” sound more impressive.) China played along with this deception by offering to “cut emissions … relative to economic growth,” known as “carbon intensity reductions.” (Translation: no reduction at all). China’s actual emissions, and the world’s emissions, will continue to increase through the next decade. Read the complete Post.
