Such negative questions and attitudes are increasing. How refreshing, on cold, windy Thanksgiving Plus One Day, which we spend with our children and grandchildren, when I went outside to shoot baskets with 5-year-old Connor. Connor is very bright, but needs work on his hand-to-eye coordination. I set the basket at a convenient height for him, but his first several shots banged off the backboard off-target. Then he said, very brightly and bravely, “I don’t quit, because I have never-give-up fighting spirit.” It seems his karate lessons are paying off.

Some adults need Connor’s help. A Scientific American article by Michael Lemonick, “Beyond the Tipping Point”, described our 2008 paper “Target Atmospheric CO2 : Where Should Humanity Aim?” Lemonick concluded with the almost-obligatory “fair and balanced” opinion, delivered by Steve Schneider. In response to our conclusion that we must get atmospheric CO2 to peak during the next few decades, and then decline back to 350 ppm or less, Schneider opines “It has no chance in hell. None. Zero. The best we can do is to overshoot, reach 450 or 550 parts per million, then come back as quickly as possible on the back end.”

Everyone knows we are overshooting. The 2009 CO2 global mean is 387 ppm and it is increasing 2 ppm per year. In our “Target” paper we showed that, if coal emissions were phased down linearly to zero in 2030 and emissions from unconventional fossil fuels were prohibited, peak CO2 could be kept at about 425 ppm—or even lower if a rising carbon price made it uneconomic to go after every last drop of oil. But Hillary Clinton recently signed an agreement with Canada for a pipeline to carry tar sands oil to the United States. Australia is massively expanding coal export facilities. Coal-fired power plants are being built worldwide. Unless the public gets involved, young people especially, CO2 of 450 ppm or higher may become unavoidable.

What would make Schneider’s “450 or 550” ppm unavoidable is a defeatist attitude. Humanity does have a free will. We do not have to accept the inevitability of extracting and burning all of the most miserably polluting fossil fuels on the planet. What we need mostly is some gumption, some never-give-up fighting spirit. I am sending to Steve, a friend of almost 40 years, the addresses of some karate schools located conveniently.

Cavalier “450 or 550” also warrants comment. Coming back to 350 ppm or less from a temporary peak of 425-450 ppm is something that would be feasible this century, mainly via “natural” actions such as improved forestry and agricultural practices. 550 ppm is a whole different cup of tea, guaranteeing a chaotic situation with climate system amplifying feedbacks and dynamics out of humanity’s control.

The most foolish no-fighting-spirit statement, made by scores of people, is this: “we have already passed the tipping point, it is too late.” They act as if a commitment to a meter of sea level rise is no different than a commitment to several tens of meters. Or, if a million species become committed to extinction, should we throw in the towel on the other nine million? What would the plan be then—escape to Mars? As I make clear in Storms of My Grandchildren, anybody who thinks we can transplant even one butterfly species to another planet has some loose screws. We must take care of the planet we have—easily the most remarkable one in the known universe.

Let’s say we have passed a tipping point—say current atmospheric composition is enough to cause a large eventual sea level rise. What do we do? Wring our hands? What we must do is restore the planet’s energy balance, or make it slightly negative. That does not guarantee that heat already added to the ocean will not further erode ice shelves and cause sea level rise. But it gives us a fighting chance to minimize that problem. Of course, it would help if we knew the current planetary energy balance accurately, and the climate forcings—that’s the subject in chapter 4 of Storms.

Any Hope of Cutting Global Carbon Emissions?

Absolutely. It is possible—if we give politicians a cold hard slap in the face. The fraudulence of the Copenhagen approach—“goals” for emission reductions, “offsets” that render even iron-clad goals almost meaningless, an ineffectual “cap-and-trade” mechanism—must be exposed. We must rebel against such politics-as-usual.

Science reveals that climate is close to tipping points. It is a dead certainty that continued high emissions will create a chaotic dynamic situation for young people, with deteriorating climate conditions out of their control, as described in my book.

Science also reveals what is needed to stabilize atmospheric composition and climate. Geophysical data on the carbon amounts in oil, gas, and coal show that the problem is solvable, if we phase out global coal emissions within 20 years and prohibit emissions from unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands and oil shale.

Such constraints on fossil fuels would cause carbon dioxide emissions to decline 60 percent by mid-century, or even more if policies make it uneconomic to go after every last drop of oil. Improved forestry and agricultural practices could then bring atmospheric carbon dioxide back to 350 ppm (parts per million) or less, as required for a stable climate.

Governments going to Copenhagen claim to have such goals for 2050, which they will achieve with the “cap-and-trade” mechanism. They are lying through their teeth. Unless they order Russia to leave its gas in the ground and Saudi Arabia to leave its oil in the ground (which nobody has proposed), they must phase out coal and prohibit unconventional fossil fuels.

Instead, the United States signed an agreement with Canada for a pipeline to carry oil squeezed from tar sands. Australia is building port facilities for large increases in coal export. Coal-to-oil factories are being built. Coal-fired power plants are being constructed worldwide. Governments are stating emission goals that they know are lies—or, if we want to be generous, they do not understand the geophysics and are kidding themselves.

Is it feasible to phase out coal and avoid use of unconventional fossil fuels? Yes, but only if governments face up to the truth: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, their use will continue and even increase on a global basis. Fossil fuels are cheapest because they are not made to pay for their effects on human health, the environment, and future climate.

Governments must place a uniform rising price on carbon, collected at the fossil fuel source—the mine or port of entry. The fee should be given to the public in toto, as a uniform dividend, payroll tax deduction, or both. Such a tax is progressive—the dividend exceeds added energy costs for 60 percent of the public. Fee-and-dividend stimulates the economy, providing the public the means to adjust lifestyles and energy infrastructure.

Fee-and-dividend can begin with the countries now considering cap-and-trade. Other countries will either agree to a carbon fee or have duties placed on their products that are made with fossil fuels. As the carbon price rises, most coal, tar sands and oil shale will be left in the ground. The market place will determine the roles of energy efficiency, renewable energy, and nuclear power in our clean energy future.

Cap-and-trade with offsets, in contrast, is astoundingly ineffective. Global emissions rose rapidly in response to the Kyoto Protocol, as expected, because fossil fuels remained the cheapest energy. Cap-and-trade is an inefficient compromise, paying off numerous special interests. It must be replaced with an honest approach, raising the price of carbon emissions, and leaving the dirtiest fossil fuels in the ground.

Are we going to stand up and give global politicians a hard slap in the face, to make them face the truth? It will take a lot of us—probably in the streets. Or are we going to let them continue to kid themselves and us, and cheat our children and grandchildren?

Intergenerational inequity is a moral issue. Just as when Abraham Lincoln faced slavery and when Winston Churchill faced Nazism, the time for compromises and half-measures is over. Can we find a leader who understands the core issue, and will lead?

Related Links:

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

What to make of the new climate poll

Learning how to count to 350

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.

Next month, at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the wealthy nations that produce most of the excess carbon in our atmosphere will almost certainly fail to embrace measures adequate to ward off the devastation of our planet by heat and chaotic weather. Their leaders will probably promise us teaspoons with which to put out the firestorm and insist that springing for fire hoses would be far too onerous a burden for business to bear. They have already backed off from any binding deals at this global summit.  There will be a lot of wrangling about who should cut what when, and how, with a lot of nations claiming that they would act if others would act first.  Activists -- farmers, environmentalists, island-dwellers -- around the world will try to write a different future, a bolder one, and if anniversaries are an omen, then they have history on their side.

A decade ago, and a decade before that, popular power turned the tide of history. Nov. 30, 1999, was the day that activists shut down a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle and started to chart another course for the planet than the one that corporations and their servant nation-states had presumed they’d execute without impediment. Since then, events have strayed increasingly far from the WTO’s road map for global domination and the financial scenarios that captains of industry once liked to entertain.

Until that day when tens of thousands of protestors poured into the streets of Seattle (as well as other cities from Winnipeg to Athens, Limerick to Seoul), the might of the corporations made their agenda seem nothing short of inevitable -- and then, suddenly, it wasn’t.  Disrupted by demonstrators outside its door and, on the inside, by dissent from poor nations galvanized by the ruckus, the meeting collapsed in confusion. Today, the WTO is puny compared to its ambitions only a decade ago.

The Berlin WallThe mass civil disobedience in the streets was, in a way, an answer to another landmark day a decade earlier:  Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and tens of thousands of Germans swarmed across the forbidden zone splitting their once and future capital city to celebrate, and eventually to reunite their nation.  The fall of the Wall is now often remembered as if the gracious acquiescence of officialdom brought it about.  It was not so.

“I announced the wall would open, but it was only the pressure by the people that made it possible” said Günter Schabowski, then-East German Communist Party central committee spokesperson, earlier this year. Had those East Germans not shown up and overwhelmed the guards at the Wall, nothing would have changed that night. In fact, popular will toppled several regimes that season.  Thanks to creative civil-society organizing, steadfastness, astonishing courage, and imagination, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary also slipped out of the Soviet bloc and so out of a version of communism tantamount to totalitarianism as well.

There was a lot of triumphalism in the West thereafter.  From the White House to business magazines and newspapers came a drumbeat of pronouncements that communism had failed and capitalism had triumphed.  As it happened, those weren’t the binaries at stake in the astonishing uprisings that season in Eastern Europe, or in the failed uprising in Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital Beijing that spring. People certainly wanted freedom, but it wasn’t the freedom to trade mysterious debt instruments and buy Double Whoppers, exactly. Nor was it capitalism, but civil society, very nearly its antithesis, that had risen up and brought down the Wall. The real binary then was: civil society versus top-down authoritarianism -- and framed that way, our situation didn’t look quite as good as Washington and the media then made out. 

Nevertheless, for a decade afterward, it wasn’t that easy to argue with the logic of capitalism’s triumph, since even China was making a beeline for a market economy and, in the process, doing an especially good job of proving that capitalism and democracy were separate phenomena. It was also the decade of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first of a series of broad international treaties meant to secure the terms of corporate power for a long time to come.  Its implementation on January 1, 1994, prompted the Zapatistas, the indigenous peasants of southern Mexico’s jungle, to rise up against the treaty, which promised -- and has now delivered -- a grim new chapter in the deprivation and dispossession of Mexico’s majority. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas came as a great shock.

The sucking sound and the turning tide

Few remember how dissent against NAFTA was dismissed and even mocked in the era when the treaty was debated, signed, and ratified. In his debate with Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush during the 1992 presidential campaign, Ross Perot was ignored when he said, “We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.”  He was ridiculed for describing the “giant sucking sound” of those jobs heading south. Which, of course, they did -- and then on to China in a financial “race to the bottom,” while cheap corn raised by Midwestern agribusiness also went south where it bankrupted Mexico’s small farmers.

Cheap food, cheap labor, cheap products turned out to be very, very expensive for the majority of us. It’s a sign of how much things have changed that Hillary Clinton felt compelled to lie in last year’s presidential campaign, claiming she had long been against NAFTA. In that, she was just a weathervane for changing times.  After all, in the decade since Seattle, most of South America liberated itself not just from a legacy of American-supported dictators and death squads, but from the economic programs those instruments existed to enforce.

Venezuela lent Argentina enough money to pay off its debts to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that earlier instrument for imposing free-market ideology and corporate profit. Various other countries did the same, and the continent largely freed itself from the imposition of neoliberal policies that mainly benefited Washington and international corporations. The IMF was so impoverished by Latin American divestment -- which went from 80 percent of its loans to about one percent -- that it’s been reduced to selling off its gold reserves. The World Bank is doing well only by comparison. By 2005, the tide had clearly turned, and the power of these institutions and of the so-called Washington Consensus that went with them was on the wane.

That tide had just begun to turn 10 years ago, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred to the people in the streets of Seattle as “a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix.”  He charged, “What's crazy is that the protesters want the W.T.O. to become precisely what they accuse it of already being -- a global government. They want it to set more rules -- their rules, which would impose our labor and environmental standards on everyone else.”

Nice though our labor and environmental standards might have been elsewhere too, most of us didn’t want the WTO to do anything or to have any power. As the Direct Action Network organizing leaflet from August 1999 put it, the WTO’s “overall goal is to eliminate ‘trade barriers,’ frequently including labor laws, public health regulations, and environmental protection measures.”

That day in Seattle a crane dangled a pair of gigantic banners shaped like arrows: the first, inscribed “Democracy,” pointed one way; the second, labeled “WTO,” pointed the other. The leaflet and banners were pieces of a carefully organized resistance, and it’s important to remember that events like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago or the shutdown of the WTO weren’t just spontaneous uprisings; they were the fruit of long toil.  While the right and too many American media outlets like to remember a fictitious Seattle that was nothing but a cauldron of activist violence (while ignoring serious police violence), too many on the left wanted to think of it as a miraculous convergence rather than the result of careful coalition-building, strategizing, outreach, and all the usual labors.

Straying Far from the Blueprint for Our Era

In the twenty-first century, free-trade agreements came down with their own version of swine flu, a disease likely generated on a gigantic Smithfield Farms hog-raising operation in Veracruz, Mexico, and nicknamed the NAFTA flu. NAFTA itself has been widely reviled.  Presidential candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador campaigned in Mexico’s 2006 election on promises to renegotiate it; Hillary disowned it. The plan for a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was met with massive opposition in Miami in 2003. It crashed and burned in Argentina in 2005 and has since been abandoned.

Latin America went its own way while the Bush Administration locked its attention on the Middle East. Indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Bolivia had a particularly rousing set of victories, while the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, astonishingly, defeated U.S.-based Bechtel Corporation's privatization of their water, and Ecuadorans are suing Chevron for environmental devastation in what could be the biggest corporate settlement in history -- $27 billion.

Meanwhile, the WTO lurched from one meeting to another, safe in the Doha round from pesky protesters, if not from the dissent of developing nations.  It was again besieged by activists in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico -- in scale and impact another Seattle -- and then further battered in 2005 in Hong Kong. The next ministerial conference of the WTO actually convenes in Geneva on Nov. 30, a decade to the day since the Seattle shutdown, still attempting to resolve issues that arose in Doha. Of course, in the meantime, sneakier bilateral trade agreements have taken the place of big multilateral ones, but this has hardly been the triumphant era predicted a decade earlier.  Even Iraq hardly proved the hog trough the big oil and contracting corporations had anticipated.

In fact, for the corporations nothing much has turned out as planned. Capitalism itself failed a little more than a year ago. Or rather the bizarrely rigged corporate-run market economies that determine at least some portion of nearly everyone’s life on Earth imploded in a frenzy of deregulated fecklessness and weirdly disassociative procedures. Then, they were propped up by governments in a way that made the phrase “socialism for the rich” truer than ever. For a while, the same business newspapers that had celebrated capitalism’s triumph in 1999 were proclaiming “the end of American capitalism as we knew it” and the “collapse of finance.”

It was as though the world economy had been a car driven by a drunk.  Even if we have now let that drunk back behind the wheel, at least his credibility and the logic of what he claimed to be doing have been irreparably harmed. On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Time Magazine’s cover story was: “Why Main Street Hates Wall Street” and it told readers in its opening passage that they should be furious.  The fall of Wall Street, you could call it, if you want to hear the echo from Berlin.

Oil-price hikes, the misadventures in turning food into biofuels, and economic meltdowns have had other consequences. Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times more than a year ago:

"In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington... and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead..."

Another death knell for the sunny corporate vision of globalization had nothing to do with ideology; it was about oil, since the more it cost to ship things around the world the less financial sense it made to do so. As the New York Times put it this August:

The passages cited above came from the New York Times, not the Nation or Mother Jones. Which is to say that if communism failed 20 years ago, then capitalism staggered 10 years ago in Seattle, and fell to its knees a year ago. The crises of petroleum and food costs only augment this reality. But the crisis of climate change matters more than all the rest.

Futures that Work

There are endless questions and conundrums about the largely unforeseen situation in which we now find ourselves, all six billion of us. One of them is: if capitalism and communism both failed, what’s the alternative? The big tent of subversions and traditions called the left hasn’t, in recent times, done a very good job of providing pictures of the possibilities available to us. Still, perhaps the answer to what the political and social alternatives might be will prove very close to what a sustainable world in the face of climate change might look like:  small, local, smart, flexible economies and technologies, democracy as direct as possible, an elimination of excess wealth as part of a leveling that might also eliminate dire poverty.

Some of our hope for the future has to be that, one day, the ecological and the economic can be aligned so that, among other things, petroleum and coal become increasingly expensive, as well as increasingly offensive, ways to run our machines. Will we be creative enough to embrace change before crashing systems and wild weather force change on us in the form of an unbearable crisis? Decisions about the nature of that change to come must be made by the citizenry, which seems to be fairly willing to face change when it gets its facts straight, rather than by wealthier nation-states and their leaders who seem, at this juncture, more interested in protecting business than life on Earth.

To survive the coming era, we need to re-imagine what constitutes wealth and well-being and what constitutes poverty. This doesn’t mean telling the destitute not to hope for decent housing, adequate food, and some chance at education, as well as some pleasures and power. It means paring back on the mad consumption machine that has been the engine of the global economy, even though what it produces is often enough entirely distinct from what’s actually needed. American life as it is now lived is poor in security, confidence, connectedness, agency, contemplation, calm, leisure, and other things that you aren’t going to buy at Wal-Mart, or at Neiman Marcus for that matter. If we can see what’s poor about the way we are, we can see what would be enriching rather than impoverishing about change.  

Anniversaries of a whole host of revolutions seem to fall in years ending in nine -- from 1789 in France to 1959 in Cuba and 1979 in Nicaragua. And then, in our calendar of nines, there was the fall of the Wall and the Battle of Seattle.  The “revolution” that got us into this era of climate change, however, can’t be dated that way.  It was the industrial revolution, a gradual shift to an era of mechanization made possible by, and paralleled by, the rise of fossil-fuel consumption. We can’t, and shouldn’t, undo this revolution, but we need to reject some of its premises and recognize some of its costs, including alienation, degradation, and commodification. 

We need a postindustrial revolution of appropriate technologies, both in the developed world and in the developing one, so that, for example, kerosene lanterns and wood-burning stoves will be replaced not by conventional appliances but by elegant solar technologies.

There needs to be another revolution in addition to these, one that finishes decolonizing the world so that Europe and the United States are no longer using the lion’s share of resources and emitting the lion’s share of carbon per capita. The WTO, the IMF, and other instruments of neoliberalism existed to keep that world-as-it-was going; the revolt in Seattle was against their ideology as well as their impact, and the decade-old graffiti that said, “We are winning,” had a point.

The “we” that could win and needs to win in the climate change wars isn’t the United States itself.  As Bill McKibben recently wrote of President Obama, “The announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month’s Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won’t be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is -- as it has been for the last two decades -- the United States.”  The citizens of the U.S. need to revolt, again, against their nation’s failure of vision and responsibility, in solidarity with the rest of the people of the world, and the animals, and the plants, and the coral reefs, and the coastlines, and the rivers, the glaciers, the ice caps, and the weather as we now know it, or once knew it.  That's why November 30th is going to be a global day of action.  

Everything is going to change either as runaway climate change takes hold, with its concomitant destruction and suffering, or because a set of programs will be embraced that forestall the worst and return our planet to an atmospheric carbon level of 350 parts per million, now considered the necessary standard to avoid environmental catastrophe.  We’re already at 390 parts per million.  Unfortunately, a lot of the nations in the key Copenhagen negotiations have fixed on an outdated notion that the world as we know it can survive at 450 parts per million, which would conveniently mean that relatively moderate adjustments are needed.

Remembering how dramatically -- and unexpectedly -- things have changed in the recent past is part of the toolbox for making a deeper, far more necessary change possible. Surely, the extraordinary power of ordinary people in Berlin and Seattle provides us with the kinds of history lessons, the riches we need, to start learning to count.

Related Links:

Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

EU pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Torrents of mud and boulders flattened villages in El Salvador recently, leaving over 100 people dead and thousands homeless. From all indications, climate change will be most acutely felt in an escalating frequency and ferocity of floods and droughts. It’s chilling to think that we ought to expect much more of this kind of devastation in the coming years.

I was in El Salvador to meet with government officials and non-governmental representatives to mull policies to manage water as a commons -- ensuring that future generations (humans, plants, and animals) will receive their fair share of water through sensible, sustainable management. Earlier this year, Mauricio Funes of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) -- the left political party that emerged from El Salvador’s civil war -- took office. Expectations are high that he will correct centuries of policies of plunder that have impoverished El Salvador’s hillsides and El Salvador’s poor.

We discussed a lot of possibilities, but not how to stop a lethal wall of mud. That’s not a job one can do alone. Might any support be forthcoming from the upcoming climate discussions in Copenhagen?

Although the outcome of those deliberations is far from certain, best case scenarios would cap emissions and establish payment mechanisms for poor countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Those small but critical global steps mean that the onus for managing water in a time of global warming falls squarely back on the Salvadorans. What measures can the Funes administration and similar developing nations take immediately?

The principles of the water commons are useful guidelines here.

Think watersheds. Mudslides are aggravated by the inability of the soil to absorb water all along the watershed. Never has it been clearer how interconnected we are upstream and down. The implications of caring for a watershed holistically and as a commons are, however, quite daunting. El Salvador’s 262 municipalities share dozens of watersheds including some with Guatemala and Honduras. A comprehensive management plan that brings together often squabbling ministries and municipalities won’t be easy to forge and implement. But it is essential.

A happy slope will likely stay put. Managing water as a common means giving consideration to all the plants and animals that live from the water supply. This isn’t a matter of generosity of spirit, but pragmatic ecology. If the slope is managed to retain its vegetative cover and keep its soil intact, there will be less mud. It may sound obvious but is not frequently practiced: Water agencies must work side by side with environmental agencies which must work together with municipal governments towards environmental improvements.

Seek the cheapest solution first -- public participation. When it comes to financing water infrastructure, whether flood control or potable water pipes, policymakers get nervous about the numbers. It’s certainly true that this work can be very expensive. However, in places like Tamil Nadu, India, facilitating planning between water users and water engineers has resulted in low-cost solutions that build on communities’ expertise and labor. Of course these new public spaces -- watershed councils for example -- carry their own challenges. Are they legally recognized bodies with decision-making authority? Is the water public? If it’s private, communities may have little influence over shareholders’ plans. By inviting citizen stewardship of a public resource, President Funes has the chance to show communities that they have real say-so about how to manage their natural resources.

Join a worldwide call for a high-level U.N. sponsored summit on water. Upcoming climate change discussions will focus on emissions reduction. They should. They must. But the planet also needs a debate at the highest level about how to manage our shared water commons -- the realm in which climate change will hit hardest. Mirroring the creeping trend towards water privatization, the private World Water Council has taken to convening recent World Water Forums. However, the Council's many directors working for for-profit water companies undermine the World Water Forum's legitimacy. Countries can come together in Copenhagen to ask the U.N. to convene a non-partisan global water forum as a follow up to the climate debate.

The good news is that we are getting smarter. We have to. Needing to effectively face disasters like the Salvadoran mudslide don’t give us a whole lot of choice. Opportunities to act smarter are also on the rise. Progressive governments like El Salvador’s and Bolivia’s are willing to rethink water policy and institutional arrangements. They offer an extraordinary real-time laboratory to get water commons management right.

Rain clouds gathering on the horizon, fanned by climate change, hurry this work along. There is no more urgent time than now to encourage the flourishing of progressive water management experiments.

Related Links:

Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Learning how to count to 350

Photo: Adam D. SacksJames Inhofe.
Marc Morano.
Richard Lindzen.
Bjørn Lomborg.
George W. Bush.

Names of shame, ignominy, criminals against humanity, against planet Earth itself.  Agents of the lethal delays in our response to escalating, accelerating, catastrophic global warming.

Yet, as deniers of climate change, they're amateurs compared to us.  Us activists, environmentalists, scientists, and certainly Copenhagen politicians.

Even though we're believers, not skeptics, our denial is far more insidious and subtle.  So subtle, in fact, that we've managed to convince ourselves that we're not in denial at all.  Quite the opposite.  Why, the thought is too absurd even to contemplate.

But it's true.

We're deniers every time we say "80 percent by 2050," or even "80 percent by 2020"; every time we refer to tipping points in the future tense; every time we advocate substituting "clean" energy for "dirty" energy; every time we buy a squiggly light bulb or a hybrid vehicle; every time we advocate for cap-and-trade, or even a carbon tax; every time we countenance the mention of loopy geoengineering schemes; every time we invoke the future of our children and grandchildren and ignore the widespread suffering from global climate disruption today.

Every time we say these things and more, we're promoting denial of dire climate reality, the reality that's spinning out of our grasp so fast that we conduct our frenetic climate "solutions" efforts in a kind of stupor, obsessing with parts-per-million statistics, keeping desperately busy to ward off our own utter collapse borne of despair.

The reality we're denying?  We're denying that we've put so much carbon into the atmosphere already that positive feedback loops are well on their way to amplification hell.[1] We're denying that time lags between carbon emissions and their effects are frighteningly relevant, and that the disastrous effects we're seeing now are from emissions of 30 years ago.  We're denying that non-linear responses of physical systems cannot be calculated and therefore are perilously ignored. We're denying that our consumption and waste have far exceeded planetary capacity, possibly irreparably so.[2]

We're denying reality because we're not talking about it; we're invoking fantasies and free lunches instead.[3]

Why do we act like this?  Because just like the skeptics, we are inordinately fond of our cushy lives.  Because we don't want to give up our privileged, well-stocked existences any more than the skeptics do (and enter the realms of unthinkable thoughts, to wit, go back to the jungles? the caves? the starving, thirsting millions -- or is that billions? -- never, never, never, not us).  Because in our heart of hearts, we want the skeptics to be right.  We are brothers and sisters.  And so we join them.

But our denial is much, much worse, because we are the ones presumably advocating for action on global climate disruption.  And when we fall short, who's left to do the job?

Here's an example, in a note from a friend of mine and fellow climate campaigner:

I was quite disappointed by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) presentation last night. The meeting title was "Roadmap to a Carbon-Free Society" or something like that. 

There was no roadmap discussed at the meeting. They showed a bunch of charts and graphs showing how we could get to a 26 percent carbon reduction by 2020 and a 56 percent carbon reduction by 2030 (from a 2005 baseline). All those carbon reductions were based on changes to U.S. and state policy, it wasn't clear what those proposed policy changes would be, although they seemed to involve some sort of cap and trade and a renewable energy mandate. 

They were primarily focused on reducing carbon in electricity generation. They had only 2 to 3 percent savings in carbon in buildings. Their proposed savings in the transportation sector seemed to focus on switching to ethanol (but not from corn). 

There was absolutely no call to action. 

There was no elaboration of priority. 

There were no specifics regarding the changes that would need to be made. 

This was a U.S.-only proposal. When asked about global effects, they basically said that was out of scope for their project. 

I am looking hard for something I can do that will make a real difference in the lives of my children and their children. 

Mark

Here's another example, from UCS again.  I don't mean to pick on them -- they have a lot of co-enablers -- but they are real scientists, for goodness sake!  Yet they are as ensnared in the silencing trappings of culture as any of us.  They're still on an 80-percent-by-2050 path (below 2005, not 1990, levels), and they still imagine that global warming is simply a consequence of greenhouse-gas emissions ("Global Warming Crossroads: Choosing the Sensible Path to a Clean Energy Economy"). As such, they avoid the lethal implications and challenges of the impossible exponential growth that drives our lives (more on this in my Aug. 23, 2009, post, "The Fallacy of Climate Activism").

After attending some of their mildly alarming but strangely reassuring presentations, I have spoken with several UCS scientists personally, and with hardly a tickle of prodding they quickly confess how panicked they are.  Why don't they just state it outright, in public?  Because, they say (just like so many climate activists, with such a uniform voice one might concoct a conspiracy theory), the public can't take it.[4] People will shrivel up into their TVs and McBurgers and never come out again.  Then we'll really be in a fix. (But I thought we already were?)

In December 2008, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), another well-meaning house of denial, sponsored a forum aimed primarily at climate activists, oddly entitled "Taking Climate Change Seriously" (I guess they figured we hadn't done that yet).  SEI folks are very nice, very smart people whom I like personally.  And they are working sincerely and hard on solutions (which, however politically palatable, nonetheless carry very little weight with the thunderous forces of nature). 

A very bright, well-spoken UCS scientist opened the show by revealing that she would speak frankly with us, in a way that she wouldn't with a general audience because they wouldn't be able to take it.  A cartoon flashes onto the screen, showing the entrance to two different movie theatres.  One is showing "An Inconvenient Truth," which has no customers.  The other, "A Convenient Lie," has drawn a large crowd.  The implication, of course, is that the public (whom we chronically assume is dumb) doesn't want to know. She was pretty open about our dire circumstances, however, with those of us who already knew it (remember, we were there to take climate change seriously).

The irony of all of this is that her presentation itself is the embodiment of the convenient lie: that it's the public's fault, despite the fact that scientists and climate activists don't tell them the truth!  How on earth are they supposed to know?  No wonder the skeptics hold such tenacious sway.

While An Inconvenient Truth was critically important as a wake-up call, the title of the movie became part of the problem: Climate change isn't simply "inconvenient."  It's lethal.  Yet now that it's been branded as "inconvenient," it's not so bad, we can live with it -- we work around inconveniences, right?  We do it all the time.  Suppose that just yesterday a CFL burned out and it was dark in the hall and I stubbed my toe looking for my shoes and I had to bike to the hardware store (I don't own a car) and it was chilly and wet outside and my glasses fogged up.  That's "inconvenience."

Here's how the public can come to know the truth about climate: repetition.  Learning and comprehension require repetition.  Think about repetition being used to learn multiplication tables, or in advertising, or in political campaigns, etc.  Certainly dire climate explanations require even more repetition because it is difficult emotionally as well as cognitively.  But we haven't yet even begun to tell that story, we are so spooked by our own reactions and what we think others' reactions will be.

To reiterate, in order to elicit a response commensurate with the problem, we have to start telling the truth about climate.  We have never actually tried it!

If we tell the truth, certainly some people will run away at first.  But we keep telling it regardless.  Otherwise we engage in palliatives as the world crumbles.  There really is no other choice.

-----

Finally, I'd like to say a few words about the recent remarkable 350 day, Oct. 24, 2009, when thousands of coordinated demonstrations across the world stated the climate emergency message loud and clear.  An unprecedented and truly impressive organizing effort.  I attended the local convocation of several communities meeting in Concord, Mass.  We were regaled by activist politicians, a playful tug of war between costumed buckethead deniers and polar bears, post-hippie music, brochures, and photo ops galore. 

And generous dollops of denial.  I found it all rather depressing.  People were enthusiastic about sending our banners to Copenhagen, as if the "leaders" there would care (they would pretend, of course).  The clean energy revolution held center stage, as if simply substituting windmills and solar panels now would make a difference to our beyond-tipped-point physics, as if it were all just an energy problem.

But just scratch the surface and it was clear that we were grasping at straws, and the sense of helplessness and hopelessness, bleeding through the forced cheer, was pervasive.  Perhaps we must confront and embrace the depths of our despair before we can see clearly.  Once we do, however, the remarkable fact is that we can likely do something about climate catastrophe, despite the necessity, for the moment, of bypassing our globally failed political process. Very briefly, local self-sufficiency and sustainability, steady-state no-impact economics, eco-restoration, and rational birth reduction (starting with but clearly not limited to "developed" countries, whose impacts per capita are many multiples of third-world countries). 

Sounds difficult or even close to impossible.  The question is how badly do we want it.  Clearly not badly enough -- yet.  It will require a dizzyingly quick cultural transformation, but the seeds have been planted and are starting to sprout worldwide.  We can turn this disaster into opportunity and hope.

But only if we transcend our denial, and stop lying to the public. 

And, especially, stop lying to ourselves.

---

Endnotes:

[1] Strictly speaking, it may be difficult to nail down a feedback loop in action, such as melting ice.  At what point can we say "the ice is melting and the resulting darker, warmer waters are more rapidly melting ice resulting in more darker, warmer waters" (amplifying feedback loop), as opposed to "the ice is melting simply because temperatures are warmer due to increasing atmospheric carbon" (no amplifying feedback loop, just garden variety endless global carbon pollution).

Here's what I suspect is the key: acceleration. Think of moving a microphone towards a speaker, the volume and frequency of the feedback rapidly accelerate. Similarly, the climate phenomena that have arrived decades early, perhaps early by a century or more, may well be the manifestations of feedback loops in action before we know exactly what they are.

[2] I've written about this before, in "The Fallacy of Climate Activism," but I think it bears a lot of repetition. I hope you will write about it too.

[3] Barry Commoner, in his 1971 book The Closing Circle, defined the four laws of ecology succinctly and directly: Everything comes from something (there's no such thing as a free lunch), everything goes somewhere, everything is connected to everything else, and nature knows best.

[4] For a critically important alternative perspective, see Clive Hamilton and Tim Kasser, "Psychological Adaptation to the Threats and Stresses of a Four-Degree World" [PDF]. "Among the methods to encourage adaptive coping strategies, Crompton and Kasser recommend that that environmental campaigns could: help people express their feelings of fear, sadness and helplessness; gently point out when people are avoiding facing up to the facts of climate science; and, promote problem-focused strategies and mindfulness ... Among the methods to encourage a value shift, Crompton and Kasser recommend that environmental campaigns could: avoid appealing primarily to selfish desires and motivations (such as by promoting “Ten ways you can save money by reducing your carbon emissions”); frame messages to connect with intrinsic values like cooperation and non-material benefits; and, deploy programs that activate an awareness of the inherent value of nature and empathy for non-human animals." (pp. 7-8)

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Learning how to count to 350

Bill McKibben says time is running out on climate delays

The 350.org International Day of Climate Action a week ago was unprecedented, historic, stirring, and inspiring. Watching the pictures scroll across the computer screen at 350.org from literally all over the world, seeing the very concrete evidence of a worldwide grassroots movement for climate justice, was truly unforgettable. It was impossible not to feel that, yes, despite the very long odds, we actually may be able to win the race to prevent looming, catastrophic climate change and to enact climate and social justice.

What is the one thing most needed right now if we are to win this race? Oct. 24 showed us: a visible, growing, mass movement in the streets.

There are some who believed, and still do, that the key to the needed clean energy revolution was the election of Barack Obama. Although it is important to have a president who understands that climate change is happening and that action is needed to address it, it has become very clear over the last nine months of his time in office that this is not enough.

We can see that when we look at what has been happening in Congress and in the international negotiations leading up to the Dec. 7-18 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. In both cases, the results so far have been very problematic.

In Congress, despite Democratic Party control of the White House and the House and Senate, a very weak piece of climate legislation was passed by the House in late June that doesn’t come close to being what is needed, and it is very possible, if not likely, that when a bill eventually reaches the floor of the U.S. Senate it will be even worse. The target for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions over the next 10 years, an absolutely critical period of time if we are to have any hope of avoiding world-wide catastrophe, is way too weak, and it is questionable if even this weak target would be met. It contains a huge percentage of problematic "offsets" that will likely allow U.S. corporate polluters to avoid or minimize actual reductions of emissions from their dirty coal plants or oil refineries for 15-20 years or more. Only 15 percent of the permits to emit GHGs are auctioned, half of them being given directly to the fossil fuel industry, despite Obama’s call for a 100 percent auction of permits while campaigning for president. It strips the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate coal plants and other stationary sources of GHGs. Its cap-and-trade framework allows Wall Street speculators to get into the huge new "carbon market" being created. It is nuclear power-friendly, and it projects giving the U.S. coal industry tens of billions of dollars for carbon capture and sequestration, an unsafe boondoggle that only dangerously postpones the critically needed, dramatic shift to renewables, conservation and energy efficiency.

As far as the international negotiations, this is what Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, had to say about the most recent meetings in Bangkok, Thailand in early October:

Since 2002, I’ve been speaking, taking action, and organizing in support of a clean energy revolution. During those seven years I’ve also been active with the peace movement in opposition to the Iraq war. I’ve been struck during that time by one major difference between these two movements when it comes to tactics.

The peace movement, up until the election of Obama, was repeatedly organizing mass demonstrations of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, in Washington, D.C. and many other places. In 2008, for example, 30,000 or so people demonstrated against the war in St. Paul, Minnesota on the day before the opening of the Republican Convention.

The vast majority of climate and environmental groups, on the other hand, have little experience with mass actions in the streets. This is especially true for the groups based in Washington, D.C. Instead, their work is all about lobbying members of Congress, trying to convince them of the correctness of their positions, developing position papers, getting their members around the country to send emails and make calls to Congressional offices, etc.

I do some of this myself. It’s not that these are bad things, when done in combination with a range of other tactics and activities. But when done in a way which deemphasizes grassroots organizing and "street heat," it’s of very limited value. Indeed, it’s a waste of resources, because it’s just not going to get the job done.

Fortunately, there’s a new climate movement emerging that gets it when it comes to this issue of tactics. The 350.org network is a major component of it, as is the mushrooming anti-coal movement. In 2007, there were only eight anti-coal demonstrations and 33 people arrested in acts of civil disobedience, according to Source Watch, compared to 49 actions and 266 people arrested so far in 2009. There are the continuing, dramatic actions of Greenpeace and the actions organized by groups like Mountain Justice, Rising Tide, the Rainforest Action Network, and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. There are the plans for another big international day of action on Dec. 12 right in the middle of the Copenhagen conference, and some of the groups which mainly do lobbying are part of the coalitions calling for those actions.

Last Saturday, as I marched in the pouring rain with many hundreds of others down 16th St. to the White House, young people leading the march at one point began a chant I’ve heard at many other actions on other issues: "Ain’t no power like the power of the people, and the power of the people don’t stop!" Yes, and we can’t stop until we’ve forced, or changed, the governments of the world so that they act as is necessary if we’re to have a fighting chance for a future we can look forward to.

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Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

EU pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

From coast to coast, teams of young volunteers are organizing Clean Energy Forums.  As part of Focus the Nation's campaign Community and the Road to Copenhagen, young organizers are engaging their communities for a day of climate dialogue and reaching out to their senators to join the conversations.  Through this nationwide effort, we hope to distill the political will for a strong U.S. commitment at COP15, the U.N. climate conference that will take place in Copenhagen in December.  

Out of each forum, Focus the Nation HQ will generate a Clean Energy Action List.  We will take these to COP15 as evidence of the American people's desire for clean energy solutions, and of the hard work of the U.S. climate movement this fall.

The campaign kicked off last Friday in Durango, Colo., in conjunction with a 350.org event.  In Durango--a coal-, oil-, and gas-dependent town near the four corners of the United States--rural Southwest youth, like youth around the country, are demanding inclusion in the conversations about how their energy is generated.  The Durango event featured a diverse panel including local politicians, representatives from the Navajo Nation, and forward-thinking business leaders.

Now the campaign is going national with Clean Energy Forums in November:

If you'd like to get involved, sign up on Focus Local and find your region's team to join in the organizing fun.

We still need organizers for events in the key states of Alaska, Delaware, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia.  Focus the Nation is offering organizing stipends and funds for event budgets (when was the last time you turned down some cash?), so recommend a talented organizer or sign up yourself to help. You don't even have to wait to hear from a Focus the Nation staffer -- you can start organizing today using the Organizing Guide and Clean Energy Forum Module.

Consider the Clean Energy Forum to be the final ingredient for this fall of climate action.  First, there was the creative outburst for 350.org's International Day of Climate Action on Oct. 24.  Then the training and excitement from Energy Action Coalition's regional Power Shift summits.  Sprinkle in pranks from the Yes Men on the Chamber of Commerce for its anti-climate stance.  And you can top it all off with high-level civic engagement and dialogue by organizing your very own Clean Energy Forum.

You don't want to miss this opportunity to help the lay the road to Copenhagen!

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Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

December 19th

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

The Canadian campaign Moms Against Climate Change just released a provocative video (below) that makes a boldly emotional appeal for action on global warming.

Set in an unnamed city, the 86-second video “Demonstration” features a protest march comprised entirely of children. Riot police block the street, tap their shields and clubs ominously, and hold back barking dogs. Eventually the cops let loose on the children, chasing one boy up a chain link fence while another falls in the street.

It ends with the message, “If our children knew the facts we do, they’d take action. Shouldn’t you?” The violence is presumed, not shown explicitly, but the implication is that we’re all engaged in violence against children by failing to head off the climate changes whose biggest impacts will unfold later this century.

There’s more: Moms Against Climate Change also launched a new website that encourages Canadian mothers to post photos of their children beneath a message to the Prime Minister: “Stephen Harper: Remember who you’re representing in Copenhagen.” Given the reservations many parents have about posting private information about their children on the internet, it’s a strategy likely to cause controversy. The children’s first name and hometown accompany the pictures, and there is a note about private protection in the “Upload” section.

The campaign is a joint effort of two Canadian environmental groups, Environmental Defence and ForestEthics. But it holds importance everywhere, because the Conservative Harper is a world leader that climate negotiators are particularly worried about.

The prominent Australian author and climate activist Tim Flannery recently called on Harper to change his “obstructionist position” on a climate treaty.

"We desperately need Canada to play a much more positive role in the coming months," Flannery said at a recent news conference in Ottawa. "Canada is an important country with important obligations."

With the “Moms” campaign, Harper will hear that message from Canadians too.

The video:

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Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

December 19th

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

Environmentalists have been looking forward to the Copenhagen climate talks this December with a mixture of dread and expectation, as it may be the last opportunity to craft a global climate treaty as we barrel towards dangerous tipping points pointed out by leading scientists. Yet, as environmental organizations started to prepare to mobilize their members, send out their lobbyists, and make their arguments for climate action, there is new momentum from both ordinary citizens and unusual partners. Global civil society organizations, representing hundreds of millions of people, the leaders of religions, humanitarian organizations, business groups, and many more, have embraced the reality that climate change is not an environmental problem, it is a human problem.

This year, a group of leaders from humanitarian, anti-poverty, and environmental circles came together to try something new to build the political will for a global climate treaty this year. Many pundits had already written off the Copenhagen climate treaty, saying that governments had given up on climate change after the financial crisis. To get world leaders to support a global climate treaty, people all over the world need to show that they are ready for an unprecedented level of leadership. Citizens needed to call on their Presidents and Prime ministers to show that they were willing to think ahead to the future, not just the next financial quarter.

The truth is that polar bears and melting icebergs are not sufficient to more leaders to regulate the sprawling and powerful fossil fuel, agriculture, and timber industries. The language of environmentalism and political pressure from the membership of organizations that have led on responding to climate change would not have been sufficient. So a few campaigners, organizations, and leaders decided that climate change was too big for just the environmentalists to take on. Even before the Copenhagen climate conference, 2009 is shaping up as the year where the rest of civil society took up climate change.

This year has been the year where athletes, doctors, musicians, and bloggers from organizations big and small have added their voice and their efforts to secure a global climate treaty. Over just the past few weeks, from my perspective as a blogger for the TckTckTck campaign, I have watched as groups that I never expected, suddenly joining in to take action on climate change.

Freerunners, the acrobatic athletes jumping across rooflines, held the largest simultaneous freerunning event on September 26th, in over 75 cities around the world. The International Red Cross/Red Crescent joined the TckTckTck campaign, moved to act by the health and humanitarian impacts of climate change. Leading bicyclists served as ambassadors for 350.org and inspired bikers all over the world. Dozens of international musicians recorded a remake of the classic "Beds are Burning" song to inspire their fans to act. When the pictures from the organizers of the Global Wake Up Call on September 21st, streamed in last month, photos of Nepalese monks blowing horns and holding signs were next to crowds setting off their cell phone alarms in London, of people beating pots and pans in Dehli. Over 7,000 bloggers have signed up, to write about climate change on Oct. 15th, no matter what they normally write about on a day-to-day basis. Something is happening here.

I think what is happened is that the world is waking up to climate change and not just the environmentalists concerned about coral reefs and the rainforest, although we need to protect the coral reefs and rainforests, but also the people living on islands and relying on forests for their livelihoods and even their survival.

The big messy world of humanity has realized that climate change is such a huge issue; it will impact whatever they hold dearest. However, people are not just focused on the threats and dangers that climate change can hold to their community. Ordinary people, from all walks of life are getting really excited about the opportunities to make their community healthier, more secure, and a better place to live.

The beautiful thing, to see people from different cultures, different walks of life, and very different reasons to care joining an effort to take action on climate change is the example that is being made to world leaders. When diplomats and lobbyists and nonprofit groups descend on Copenhagen this fall, perhaps the cliché that the whole world is watching will, this time, be nothing but the truth. If so, this could be the start of something new, the rise of a global climate movement that actually starts to represent the cultures and societies of the world.

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Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

EU pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Technology brings together a 3, 5, and 0 worlds apart: Sydney, London, and Copenhagen350.org via Flickr Creative Commons

Kicking off with thousands gathering on the steps of Sydney's iconic Opera House, global warming protests took place around the world Saturday to mark 50 days before the U.N. climate summit.

From Asia to Europe via the Middle East, activists staged lively events addressing world leaders and to mobilize public opinion around climate issues.

Many waved placards bearing the logo 350, referring to 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere which scientists say must not be exceeded to avoid runaway global warming.

France's politicians received a "wake up" call from several hundred Parisians who chose clocks as their symbol.

Protesters who met in a central square had set their alarm clocks and mobile phones to ring at 12:18 p.m. in reference to the closing date of the summit, which lasts from Dec. 7-18.

The summit is considered crucial as world leaders will try to thrash out a new treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions in place of the Kyoto Protocol which will expire in 2012.

However, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen said Saturday that preliminary discussions are not moving fast enough for an international decision to be concluded in Copenhagen.

"It is time to give full speed to the negotiations," Rasmussen said, adding that he wanted a legally binding international agreement to be in place by January.

There is growing concern that a treaty deal in Copenhagen could be hampered by issues including U.S. domestic politics and the problems of securing agreement between developed and developing countries.

Rasmussen underlined that progress had been made on climate issues but that these "key political questions" still had to be resolved ahead of the December meeting.

In Berlin, some 350 protesters wearing masks with the face of German Chancellor Angela Merkel came together in front of the Brandenburg Gate in the city center.

In London, more than 600 people gathered beneath the London Eye Ferris wheel by the River Thames to arrange themselves into the shape of the number five, according to organizers Campaign against Climate Change.

An aerial photograph of the event was added to pictures of a giant "three" and "zero" from around the world (photo at top).

"Hundreds of thousands of people are taking part (globally) and for us that's so important, to have people out on the streets," campaign activist Abi Edgar told AFP. "We want serious action on climate change and we want it now."

Across the Thames, some 100 musicians playing trumpets, trombones, saxophones and clarinets gathered outside parliament to play the same note -- an F, made by the frequency of 350 Hz -- for 350 seconds, organizers said.

In the Lebanese capital Beirut hundreds of activists, many wearing snorkels, held demonstrations in key archaeological sites.

They gathered around the Roman ruins in central Beirut, in the ancient eastern city of Baalbek and along the coast, carrying placards bearing the logo 350.

"It's not the first time Beirut will have gone under water," Wael Hmaidan of the IndyACT group organizing Beirut's protests said to AFP, explaining the goggle-wearing, "but this time it's going down because of climate change, and not earthquakes."

In Jakarta, around 100 students from the London School of Public Relations also gathered to form the symbolic number 350, coordinator Candy Tolosa said on Detik.com news website Saturday.

In central Madrid, the Spanish capital, members of the Platform Against Climate Change, grouping social organisations, ecologists and unions, acted out parodies of the "catastrophic consequences of climate change on the planet," the Platform's press release said.

Environmental activists in the Turkish metropolis of Istanbul staged their protest in a boat, unfurling a banner reading "Sun, wind, right now!" under the main bridge linking Asia and Europe over the Bosphorus Strait, Anatolia news agency reported.

They then sailed to the ancient Maiden's Tower, which sits on a tiny islet in the Bosphorus, and unfurled another banner reading "Jobs, climate, justice," the report said.

Here's a full slideshow of the worldwide events:

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Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

EU pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Will getting to 350 ppm be the great barrier to saving the Great Barrier Reef? Poppy and Jarrah via 350.org Flickr Creative CommonsIn parts of the world, today is already the first-ever International Day of Climate Action in places like New Zealand, but it's not too late for millions of you to find the biggest, weirdest, adorablest, most inspirational, or flat-out nearest demonstration of support for the goal 350 ppm CO2 emissions.

We found a few such events worth noting -- some which have already happened and others which you can still join:

If you haven't found one that suits you and your grassroots style, check out this map of 350.org climate action events and take your pick. And after you get home, don't forget to drop us a line, a video, or a photo from the events via email, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Keep your eye on our page rounding up all the latest goings-on around the International Day of Climate Action.

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Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

Learning how to count to 350

Bill McKibben says time is running out on climate delays

Here at Grist we're fans of (at least) two things:

Lucky for us, our buddies at 1Sky are working to bring about these two things with their 1Climate, 1Tweet contest.

It's a campaign to purge Twitter of annoying climate deniers flood Twitter with a single rallying message to strengthen and support the Kerry-Boxer climate bill currently wending its way through the Senate. All you have to do is:

We know it's prize enough for you just to lend your support and creative juices to ensure the U.S. completes item No. 1 on my (first) list above, but if -- hypothetically -- you needed any more reasons to join the 1Climate, 1Tweet campaign, here they are, in yet another list:

The contest ends Friday, October 23, at 6 p.m. EST, so hurry up and tweet the climate movement's next rallying cry!

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State of the Climate Movement: Can fasting and asceticism save the world?

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Bill McKibben and Chip Giller want you to get pumped up for the International Day of Climate Action.

When Grist was launched 10 years ago, a key idea behind it was that the web could be used to spread the news about what’s really happening across the planet. Turned out to be true.

Now the question is: Can the web spread more than information to the farthest corners of the planet? Can we really use it to effect the outcome of the most important scientific questions we’ve ever faced? And the answer to that looks to be "yes" as well.

Those of you who’ve been following 350.org know that the campaign has gone viral in recent weeks, in the lead-up to the International Day of Climate Action.  There will be more than 4,000 events in almost 170 countries on Oct. 24—pretty much every place that isn’t Burma or North Korea. It’s certainly the most widespread day of environmental action ever—as far as we can tell, it will set the record for political action in general. And it’s all been done without much coverage from radio and TV and the newspapers. It’s been the electronic media—the network of bloggers and YouTubeists that Grist helped to spawn—that have been spreading the word.

No matter where you live, there’s something going on nearby on Saturday—in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, and in Iran, and in the coup-ridden capital of Honduras.  Underwater on the Great Barrier Reef, and on the shores of the Dead Sea in Palestine and Israel and Jordan. In 300 Chinese cities, and just as many places in India. Against the backdrop of Machu Picchu and the Pyramids. And in a thousand American cities and towns. If you want to see what these actions will look like, check out some of the best early pictures on Flickr.

And every one of these events is scientifically literate—people just like you are taking a data point and using it to make a political point. 350 parts per million is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere—and we've already surpassed it. The Copenhagen climate talks in December won't just be a forum for negotiations between China and the U.S.—the real talks are going on between humans on the one hand and physics and chemistry on the other.

Help spread the word in the next few days, on the web and also to the mainstream press, so they’re not entirely left out of this huge spectacle. Call your local newspaper editor or radio station or AP bureau, and ask if they’re going to cover the International Day of Climate Action.

And, of course, join in the action yourself.  Wherever you are, there will be an event going on nearby; find one.  One of us (Chip) will be on Vashon Island, Wash., with his family, at the farmers market where the local action is taking place. The other (Bill) will be in Times Square in New York City, coordinating the showing of photos from events all over the world on three of those huge JumboTron advertising signs usually devoted to vodka or cigarettes.  Where will you be?

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Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

State of the Climate Movement: Can fasting and asceticism save the world?

Learning how to count to 350

Get involved in the fight against climate change.

Got plans for Saturday, Oct. 24?  Join up with climate-concerned citizens around the globe for the first-ever International Day of Climate Action, to demand that world leaders get moving in the fight against climate change. 

More than 3,000 events in 170 countries are in the works, many of them focused on the number 350, which represents the safe upper limit for CO2 in our atmosphere (we’ve already surpassed it—d’oh).

Find an action near you, or organize one yourself.  Anything goes!  Events will include everything from major rallies at iconic spots like the Taj Mahal and Machu Picchu, to underwater scuba-assisted protests, to mountain climbers hanging “350” banners and churches ringing their bells 350 times.  Don’t miss out.  “It’s shaping up to be to be the biggest day of grassroots action on global warming ever,” according to Bill McKibben and the other organizers at 350.org.

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Never-give-up fighting spirit: lessons from a grandchild

State of the Climate Movement: Can fasting and asceticism save the world?

Learning how to count to 350

As an activist who has been arrested for civil disobedience, organized national climate mobilizations, protested outside of coal plants, and worked for Greenpeace, I am calling on my friends and colleagues to fight for the Kerry-Boxer "Clean Energy Jobs Act" and a strong global treaty in Copenhagen. On Monday Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Energy Secretary Steven Chu said there is a chance of passing a climate bill in Congress before the international talks in Copenhagen this December. Many of us have spent the better part of a decade preparing for this moment. While supporters of the Kerry-Boxer legislation fend off well-financed attacks by the fossil fuel industry, they simultaneously face opposition from progressive voices within the climate movement.

It's time for radicals and moderates to come together around what we stand for. Being right isn't enough. Each of us must be loud and strong and boisterous in defense of our cause. Oppose offsets and giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. But let us fight hardest for what we believe in -- a strong climate bill and a stronger global treaty -- than what we fear.

In November 2000 I had the privilege to be one of 200 young people from the U.S. and Africa invited by Greenpeace to lobby delegates at the U.N. Climate Negotiations in The Hague, Netherlands. We stood below a stage listening to four middle-aged Inuit women, who had traveled outside of their homeland for the first time. They were coming from Alaska, a place where winter temperatures had increased 6 degrees since 1950. Fighting back tears we listened as the women told us of men falling through melting ice while traversing age-old caribou hunting routes. They spoke of dwindling food supplies from altered seasons and seeing mosquitoes in a region that had never known such things. They felt the climate crisis first-hand and were reaching out to us in partnership.

Instead of leaving us in fear, the women joined together in a traditional dance. At that moment we knew what we were fighting for: a strong global climate treaty -- to preserve hope, love, community, tradition. The lesson for me: in a crisis, fight hardest for what you believe in, not what you fear. While we should never be afraid to oppose weaknesses and flaws in a policy, they should not rule our agenda or define our movement.

Nine years later there is still no cap on carbon pollution and the stakes have risen. CO2 has risen from 369 ppm in 2000 to 385 ppm in 2008. Progressive opponents of the Kerry-Boxer Clean Energy Jobs Act include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the recently-formed Climate SOS coalition. The Energy Action Coalition, a youth clean energy alliance that I co-founded in 2004 while serving as Greenpeace Campus Organizer, has struck a largely positive chord on the climate bill. However, several of the 50 member organizations are part of Climate SOS lobbying swing Senators to filibuster a federal climate law. These voices have real power and legitimate concerns.

Real Power

In 2008 Energy Action Coalition mobilized over 300,000 youth to sign a pledge to vote for candidates supporting a clean energy economy. Responding to student pressure, over 650 college and university presidents have committed to eliminating carbon pollution on their campuses. Students in Appalachia and around the country have fought side by side with fence-line communities against new coal plants, stopping several. The call for 80 percent carbon reductions by 2050 landed in Barack Obama's climate platform and was inserted into the federal climate bill following a youth-led "Step It Up" campaign in 2007. If united, the climate movement has the power to pass a federal climate law and a strong global treaty in Copenhagen.

Legitimate Concerns

Those who follow climate science and support people on the front lines of this crisis are frustrated. By now we should have built a unified movement so powerful that in policy debates we wrangled over penalties for Big Oil as if they were Big Tobacco instead of capitulating about carbon offsets and tolerating coal subsidies. We know that the climate bill's carbon reduction targets are not strong enough to prevent dangerous tipping points. Many polluters will buy carbon credits rather than reduce their own emissions. We will continue a long trend of wasting tax money on false energy solutions like "clean coal", offshore drilling, and nuclear power. This is unfortunate -- and we should make it clear that we do not support these things and will fight to change them. However, the consequences of inaction are much higher.

Bold actions are needed now more than ever. On July 8, Greenpeace activists put their lives on the line, hanging a giant banner on Mt. Rushmore that reminded President Obama of his obligation to lead: "America Honors Leaders, Not Politicians. Stop Global Warming." The President and leaders in Congress will only stick their necks out far enough if we come together to make them act.

The truth is Kerry-Boxer, by itself, will not solve the enormity of our climate issues. No matter the outcome, we will have work left to do. Nevertheless, Kerry-Boxer is an important step forward and its overall impact will be overwhelmingly positive.

Because of a four-month fight from a coalition of civil rights and labor groups led by Green For All, the Clean Energy Jobs Act includes important equity provisions. These provisions would provide access to quality green jobs and job training for under-served communities through funding for the Green Jobs Act and a first-of-its-kind Green Construction Careers Demonstration Project. More than words, the climate bill represents legal action that will force change.

There is a principle that says to change people's hearts you must first meet them where they are at, not where you would want them to be. As much as we would like to believe everybody in America is part of the climate movement, it is not the case. People want clean energy and they want change, but they are afraid of a weak economy and rising energy bills. An army of powerful, moneyed forces with short-term interests is playing on peoples' fears to kill any action on climate change.

In this defining moment in our history, I am calling on fellow climate activists to fight for a federal climate law and a strong global treaty in Copenhagen. Let us be a generation of "Yes we can" instead of "We should not." If noise gets attention, let our noise be solution-rich. Let's win real change for real people and build upon each success as a foundation for something better.

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Photo: Adam D. SacksIn "The Fallacy of Climate Activism," I suggest that we as climate activists are not telling the unadulterated truth -- which seems to worsen daily -- to the public.  This is one critically important reason we're making so little progress in changing behavior and politics commensurate with the drastic acceleration of global warming.  We have hurled ourselves far beyond the point where simply reducing greenhouse-gas emissions will make a difference that makes a difference.

Having examined some of the what of our missteps in "Fallacy," in this piece I take a look at some of the how: the timid, tentative, emotionally impoverished voice of our communications, the feelings unexpressed in the face of the premature and squalid end of so much of what we love, the unfathomable reluctance to speak to the depth of the grief we are bringing upon ourselves.

Global climate disruption -- having graduated in short order from a spectre a century away to a battering present-day reality -- foreshadows the demise of civilization, the failure of our life-support systems, and even, perhaps, the end of most life on earth.  Yet most industrialized humans, to date, remain largely unaware and only marginally concerned.  This is a remarkable puzzle, and were we to solve it perhaps we would take a major step toward addressing the climate catastrophe.

I offer you a key puzzle piece:  The end of all that we have known is an unthinkable thought,[1] as are so many unprecedented abrupt and catastrophic events.[2] When a thought is unthinkable, it is invisible even when writ large -- we simply can't see it, even when we have reason to try.[3] If we do see it, it quickly falls from awareness.  If, finally, we accept it, perhaps after months or years of getting used to the idea, we find that we're alone, mostly talking to ourselves.

Then, when the reality strikes us all irrefutably, undeniably, without mercy, we are completely unprepared, asking incredulously, "Why didn't somebody tell us?"

And what hasn't been told?

To date, most of our arguments about the reality of global warming have been data-driven, psychically tepid litanies of climate science and industrial "solutions," peppered with the heartstring-tugging of cute polar bears and sad stories of people in distant lands whom we don't care about very much (well, of course we care, but we don't know them and there's nothing we can do to help anyway, except perhaps changing lightbulbs).  Coastal insalination rendering vast swaths of farmland useless, houses plunging into the sea as permafrost melts, even wildfires threatening the City of the Angels, to name just a very few -- these are far, far away and don't really affect us.  Or we don't see it.  (Yet.)

We climate activists are the ones who aren't saying what needs to be said.[4] Our silence is not the lack of words, it is the absence of an essence in urgent human relationships, an essence with power to break the bonds of unthinkable thoughts:

Passion.

To illustrate, I would like to reproduce for you an excerpt from one of my favorite speeches of the 19th century.  It is entitled "What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July," and was delivered by Frederick Douglass before the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society on July 5, 1852 (he refused to speak on July 4, for reasons that will quickly become apparent).  Douglass, as you may remember, was one of the great political thinkers and orators of that horrific era, an escaped slave who taught himself to read and went on to become an erudite, articulate, and passionate abolitionist, a writer, a sought-after speaker, and a guest of President Lincoln.

Here are his words:

Well ...

Today we are addressing the end of the world we know, quite possibly the extinction of homo sapiens and most other species on earth, and we can do little more than cite statistics?[5] Surely an unravelled web of life, miserable ends for countless creatures great and small, and mass death of billions of human beings, mostly innocent, should call for "scorching irony," at the very least. 

Where are our fire, thunder, ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, stern rebuke?  Why are we so polite?[6] Why are we so obedient?  What are we thinking?  What aren't we thinking?  What are we doing?  What aren't we doing?  When do we start? [7]

I have a proposition for you.  Try your hand at a letter -- to an editor, or to a friend, or to a lover, or to a child -- availing yourself of all the passion you can muster as we hasten blindly toward world's end.  Post it here for all to ponder -- then we'll send the collection to everyone we know, far and wide.

When do we start?  Now's the time. 

Quill and ink (or keyboard) in hand, summon your muse and write for our lives!

---

Endnotes:

[1] Timothy C. Weiskel, "Selling Pigeons in the Temple: The Danger of Market Metaphors in an Ecosystem," Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values, Harvard Divinity School, July 6, 1997.  "In democratically organized societies thought is not overtly censored. We are not forbidden to think about particular topics, but thought control manifests itself nonetheless in the far more subtle form of self-censorship. It is not what it is forbidden for us to think, but rather what it does not occur to us to think, that establishes the bounds of publicly acceptable thought in democratic society."

[2] These could be natural disasters, such as unforeseen volcanic eruptions, hurricanes or changing climate; or the result of human activity such as the overshoot and collapse on Easter Island or the invasion of Europeans and consequent sudden disruption and/or extermination of indigenous peoples and cultures.  Prior to such occurrences, few if any members of the affected societies would have been able to envision the outcomes, and if told would likely have given short shrift to such "conspiracy theories."

[3] John A. Livingston, pioneer environmentalist, preservationist, teacher, and writer, described his experience in addressing the challenges of giving voice to the realities of nature in our technoculture: "It is not that audiences disagree with us or resent our argument or are offended by it: it means that they cannot perceive it [emphasis is Livingston's]. They literally do not know what we are talking about." The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, in The John A. Livingston Reader, McClelland & Stewart, 2007, p. 61.

[4] The scientists' job is to be dispassionate analysts and observers, and they are doing it full well. The climate activists' job is to put the science in the context of real lives, real communities, real future, and communicate with all the means at our disposal. So far, we have screwed it up, but good.

[5] For example, parts per million carbon dioxide is an obsession; necessary fundamental change in the ways we live on earth hardly merits a whisper. And by fundamental change I don't mean switching to 35 mpg -- or even 350 mpg -- vehicles. That's another obsessive and meaningless statistic among the many.

[6] Symptomatic of our wayward rationality is the data-driven response to climate "skeptics," neo-classical economists, and other toxic relics of an unsustainable culture. They are paragons of delusion and dishonesty, unworthy of scorn and disdain, yet we respond to them as if we were having reasonable conversations with reasonable people. Not everyone will wake up (just ask ark-craftsman Noah), so let's not waste our time, and spend our energies on the vast majority of people who are concerned about the future and willing to face it -- if only we get around to starting a conversation about planetary realities.

[7] Of course there are some passionate writers who stir us beyond wind turbines and photovoltaic panels, but they are, to date, few and far between.

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Courtesy

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Starting on Oct. 9, the Energy Action Coalition is kicking off 11 Power Shift youth summits across the country, where young people will gather to demand climate action from President Obama and Congress and get training and inspiration for on-the-ground activism.  In November 2007 and March 2009, there were big Power Shift confabs in the D.C. area, but these upcoming gatherings are spread all around to get people involved on a local and regional level (and, as it happens, cut down on carbon emissions from long-distance travel).  Is there a summit near you?

Follow PowerShift09 on Twitter (see below), and follow #powershift09:

Get involved in the fight against climate change.

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On Oct. 2, 140 years ago, Mohandus Gandhi was born in Gujarat province in India. I didn’t learn this from the New York Times, CNN, or any other mainstream media source. I didn’t learn about it from progressive media outlets, although it is very possible that one or more of them publicized it and I missed it.

I learned about this as a result of being invited to speak yesterday at William Patterson University in northern New Jersey by a professor who organized a program about Gandhi’s relevance for today. Thanks to Balmurli Natrajan, Director of the Gandhian Forum for Peace and Justice, I’ve spent the last few days reflecting on this question.

When I was asked this question directly at yesterday’s forum, what came to mind is this: Gandhi is important, is of continuing relevance, because he wasn’t just a great, if imperfect, leader of India’s successful struggle for independence from colonial Britain. He is important because he understood that it was necessary for him personally, and for his people, to be about the process of personal and cultural change if they were to have a chance of truly lasting, truly revolutionary change, in the best sense of the term.

Gandhi did his best to live a life which reflected the values of justice and love which he understood were central to the teachings of all great spiritual leaders. He went on fasts that were directed not just against the British but for his own people, calling upon them to refuse to mimic English violence and repression in their struggle for independence.

The words of Gandhi that I have used most often over the years are these: “Fasting is the sincerest form of prayer.” I’ve used them as I’ve learned their truth, as I’ve learned about prayer, during long fasts that I’ve undertaken in connection with the campaign to free Leonard Peltier, against the Iraq war and for strong government action to address the climate crisis.

There’s another fast very much in the Gandhian spiritual and political tradition that will be taking place about a month from now, a Climate Justice Fast. This is a fast initiated by young people in Australia, Europe and elsewhere specifically directed at the leaders of the world’s governments as they move toward the Dec. 7-18 international meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark to try to come up with a stronger climate treaty than the Kyoto Protocol. As I write, things are not looking good at all that they will do what is needed.

Anna Keenan, youth climate activist and one of the initiators of this fast, wrote yesterday about Gandhi. She began with a quote of his, that “the world has enough for everyone’s needs but not for everyone’s greed.” She went on to “share another great Gandhi quote: ‘Under certain circumstances, fasting is the one weapon God has given us for use in times of utter helplessness.’ In just over a month, on the last day of the Barcelona [climate] talks [Nov. 6], I and other activists around the world will be beginning the Climate Justice Fast and continuing until Copenhagen [over 40 days, on water only].

“While the concept of the fast may shock some, it will be a non-violent, morally forceful and peaceful action, and is perhaps one of the few types of action that we have available to us that is capable of deeply communicating the gravity of the situation that we now find ourselves in, both in terms of the profound disaster of unchecked climate change and the profound opportunity provided by the Copenhagen summit.”

I know that there are many climate and progressive activists who have problems with the idea of fasting. It’s too bad this is the case, because I have learned that fasting isn’t just one of a number of tactics that we need to keep in our quiver to use as we struggle for a world based on love and compassion.

Fasting is a form of action that is very valuable in building the internal discipline and the deeply-felt understanding of what’s really important in this world that we individually need to stay true to our best ideals. When you fast for more than a few days, especially on a water-only fast, you are forced to think about the reasons for your fasting, why you are putting yourself through this. You spend time thinking about all of the people all over the world who “fast” involuntarily because of an unjust world order which is dominated by a relative handful of billionaires and multi-billionaires. When on a fast related to the issue of climate, you think about the almost-certain catastrophic droughts, famines and other disasters affecting not millions but billions later in this century if we don’t rapidly make a shift away from the burning of fossil fuels and earth-destroying practices.

It is difficult not to feel helpless in the face of the timidity and resistance of far too many of the world’s government leaders to doing what clearly must be done. It’s maddening knowing that a serious commitment to the enactment of a clean energy revolution can be the decisive shift that opens up all kinds of possibilities for a very different future as the nations of the world work together to clean up the environmental mess capitalism has created.

In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed because of his leadership in the anti-Nazi German resistance movement, “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” Yes. Yes. Now and always.

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December 19th

Prelude to COP15: Climate Justice actions sweep the US before Copenhagen talks

Courtesy Climate SOSGlobal warming activists endorsed by the preeminent climatologist James Hansen are working to defeat the climate and energy bill in Congress, and they’re using some provocative stunts to spread their message.

Briefly:

At least three groups worked together on last week’s events—Climate SOS, Rising Tide North America, and “Greenwash Guerrillas,” which pied Thomas Friedman last year. They all hold a “no compromise” philosophy on climate-change action, opposing carbon markets that allow polluters to buy and sell pollution credits and arguing that larger environmental groups such as NRDC have compromised too much in working with businesses and Democratic lawmakers.

“It’s an awkward position to be environmentalists working on climate change but opposing a climate bill,” said Climate SOS organizer Rachel Smolker, a Vermont ecologist and author. “Especially with a new administration that we want to support. But we felt we need to take a really strong position because this [bill] is so inadequate.”

The campaign is awkward for “establishment” green groups too. They’ve been preparing to battle fossil-fuel interests over the energy bill introduced in the Senate this week. Now they must figure out if and how to respond to this attack from the far left.

“It’s troubling,” said Daniel J. Weiss, director for climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank with close ties to the Obama administration. “No one believes that the clean energy bill that will come out of Congress will address the threat of global warming in a single step. But we have to start.”

“The real enemies are Big Oil and Big Coal and the right wing attack machine,” he said. “For them to mock [Gore] in the way they did shows that they don’t understand you need to attack your enemies and not your allies.”

Hansen’s involvement is especially troublesome. The director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wasn’t involved in the New York stunts, but he endorsed Climate SOS’s recent tour against a climate bill. The $2 trillion bill includes his statement that a cap-and-trade program “would be worse for the environment than doing nothing.”

The opposition by Hansen and Climate SOS is unlikely to influence Washington policymakers, in Weiss’s opinion, but it’s got the potential to make everyday Americans think the situation is hopeless.

“If they hear from such a respected scientist as James Hansen that what Congress is doing won’t matter, then why would they bother to call their senators to say ‘Act on this’?” he said.

Climate SOS activists at NRDC's headquartersCourtesy tanukiAside from the stunts last week, other moves by the “no-compromise” camp are downright perplexing. Last week Greenwash Guerrillas launched a website in response to Cleanenergyworks.us, a three-month-old diverse coalition supporting a comprehensive energy bill. The similar-sounding Cleanenergyworks.biz was a replica of the real Clean Energy Works site, with two notable changes: The phone number and email address for spokesperson Josh Dorner had been changed. His name was left the same. The site changed to a more innocuous version over the weekend and is currently down. (Have a screen grab? Send it in and we’ll post.)

Dorner had no interest in speaking about the site that took his name. “I don’t send too much of my day worrying about a website,” he said Thursday. “There are considerably more important tasks before us to get this bill across the Senate floor.”

NRDC spokesperson Michael Oko shared Dorner’s reluctance to give attention to the stunts. “There are a lot of different groups out there,” he said in regard to the banner hung at NRDC’s office. “Everybody has the right to express themselves.”

About the replica website Oko said, “Frankly, I was a little confused about what their intention was.”

Smolker of Climate SOS said the idea was “to provide a spoof, to reveal the emptiness of the claims Clean Energy Works provides. For them, it’s green jobs and clean energy and everything’s a smiley-face, you know? Our goal is to tell people to look deeper and take the smiley faces off.”

At Environmental Defense Fund.Courtesy tanukiShe said she contributed ideas for the mock site, but individuals from Greenwash Guerrillas, who did not want to be identified, created the idea.

The 51-year-old Smolker has seen firsthand how environmental groups can evolve, professionalize, and grow in wealth and influence. Her father was one of the founders of Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), another group targeted by Climate SOS last week. EDF met in her childhood home when it was still a “ragtag group,” as Climate SOS is now, she said. (Smolker, who works for Biofuel Watch, declined to give funding information for Climate SOS but said all members were volunteers.)

“We’ve played that compromise game for a long time,” she said. “There’s too much at stake right now.”

The compromise question—whether to sacrifice what is ecologically necessary for what seems politically possible--has been around as long as the green movement itself. The naturalist-and-mystic John Muir and the politician-and-forester Gifford Pinchot clashed over the same tensions in the early 20th century.

As for Hansen’s “worse than nothing” remark, there has been plenty written about the failings of the House climate and energy bill—it gives away too much to dirty-energy backers, it even protects coal-plant pollution from further regulation. But there is 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, as Democratic strategist Paul Begala notes.

“If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist,” writes Begala. “Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start.”

Most progressives, including many major green groups, would gladly embrace an imperfect climate bill as a start.

“Those who see the House clean energy bill as somehow tainted by deals, and therefore want a carbon tax, have to understand that no tax proposal would ever emerge from Congress as we know it without similar or worse deals being made,” said Weiss. “Unfortunately the moral high ground of ‘we must act for our children’ is necessary but not sufficient for our political process.”

Smolker said Climate SOS would continue on a different tack, insisting on an acceptable bill from the get-go. She expected the group would pause to take stock of the bill released in the Senate this week, then regroup.

Here's Cap'n Trade delivering his message to Danish climate and energy minister Connie Hedegaard:

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The guest post below is by my CCAN co-worker, Keith Harrington.

This past week, on the heels of “Climate Week” and attendant Copenhagen preliminaries in New York, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a nice article in the New Yorker in which she mused over what it would actually take for the US to show real leadership on climate change. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/10/05/091005taco_talk_kolbert.

None of the suggestions Kolbert offered at all resembled the Senate climate bill Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry unveiled Wednesday. While an improvement over the Waxman Markey bill, overall the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act falls far short of the high bar of climate leadership the US needs to clear and reminds us that the question we should be asking right now is not what US leadership should really look like. I think we already know the answer to that. No, the question we really have to address is, what is holding US leadership back, and how do we overcome it?

In a word, I think the answer is capital. Oil and coal have deep pockets and they use them well to finance the crippling of federal climate efforts. They’ve been outspending us in the climate fight. And the truth is the only way we’re going to win is by beating them at their own game. Simply put, if we want a stronger climate bill, we’ve got to “buy” it.

And we can do it. We the American people have far deeper pockets than all of the big oil and coal companies combined. While most of us fail to realize it, each one of us, by right of being a democratic citizen, has access to inexhaustible stores of a currency far more potent than the dollar. This currency is one which our leaders ultimately depend upon to hold office, run the country, and pass laws that truly reflect the public interest – political capital.

Unfortunately, unlike the oil and coal companies, we’re pretty stingy with our riches. We don’t lavish nearly enough of it on Uncle Sam. Most of us in fact only open our checkbooks every four years when Presidential elections roll around and we step into the voting booth. We figure that the big lump sum donation we collectively make to our leaders is enough to keep them in the black for the next four years. But we’re wrong. It turns out that running a government of the people, by the people and for the people is a really politically expensive proposition. Without a constant influx of new donations in the form of lobby meetings, phone calls, emails, protest marches, rallies and town halls, the well of political capital from the election quickly dries up, and that’s when the real capital starts flowing in to make up the deficit. It’s a pay to play system. Legislation needs to be paid for. And if we don’t do it with democracy dollars, corporations will do it with the real stuff.

And that’s exactly what’s happening with the federal climate fight. We’re not spending enough.

So we shouldn’t be so shocked when, instead of the Cadillac of climate bills we were hoping for, Waxman, Markey, Boxer and Kerry have given us something that more closely resembles a Model-T. The sorry reality is the bill is the best thing that we the American people could buy for the limited amount of political capital we’ve fronted our political leaders on this issue. Sure, a lot of us have been doing some spending – a lobby meeting here, a phone call there, the occasional poorly attended rally. And to be honest a lot of people have been forking over every penny they have. But all totaled it simply hasn’t been enough. At the most its amounted to a small stream of political capital – a stream that’s grown from a trickle in the past few years to be fair, but still a stream.

Of course, what we really need now to get bold climate solutions is a flood: A constant, gushing, rushing, flow of political capital from the American people to our leaders in Washington, one strong enough to finally and unequivocally break down the dam of obstructionism that the forces of the status quo have erected between us and a clean energy future. What we need is an inexorable torrent of democracy dollars: a deluge of demonstrations in every city and town, a surge of non-violent civil disobedience actions at every coal plant, a flood of calls and emails to swamp our congressional representatives’ phones and inboxes. And it should all start with an absolute tsunami of a rally in Washington DC on October 24th, The International Day of Climate Action. http://www.350.org/dc

That could and should be the moment when the high tide starts rushing in. In political terms big rallies produce the same results as huge charitable donations of real dollars from tycoons like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet: not only do they go a long way toward financing a cause, but because they make headlines, they can inspire others to follow suit and start donating. Thus if enough of us show up at the White House on October 24th with political checkbooks in hand we can help unleash the deluge. It could be a turning point for our movement.

If on the other hand those of us who care about climate change fail to show up in sufficient numbers at the DC march on the 24th, and then the government passes a weak climate bill, or worse, no bill at all, we shouldn’t point the finger at the oil companies and their dirty money, or the politicians that take it. The blame will belong to us. We’ll have had the chance to make that big donation when it was really needed and have chosen not to do so.

So if you care about climate change, don’t be a cheapskate this fall. Your political capital is the answer to what’s holding the US back on climate change. Now is the time to go on a spending spree. Together we can “buy” back our government and “purchase” a better climate bill and a better tomorrow. Help us make the down payment this October 24th in Washington. RSVP for the DC October 24th rally today. http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/campaigns/campaign_detail.cfm?id=135.

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