http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz2j3BhL47c

I was encouraged to take in the audiovisual presentation of “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, wherein Adam Curtis demonstrates what appears to be a lack of understanding regarding failure in the financial markets. Most foundational year ecologists can tell you that systems are self-correcting, that virtual bubbles get popped, that hubris gets torn down, that over-population gets underfed. Rabbits and foxes. Owls and mice. George Monbiot’s “War On Slugs” because of missing hedgehogs and thrushes. It all depends on the natural resources available to feed the participants in the game. The global economy can only accelerate growth so much before it implodes. There are Limits to Growth. Curtis could be said to be expressing his suspicions that the fake “Knowledge Economy”, the Asian “Shock Doctrine” and the Property Crash were an artefact of a secret evil cabal formed from the vaguely impressed followers of Ayn Rand – but the rest of us all know that’s silly. She was a lovely, sensitive, principled woman, although she could have done with a little more kindness in her life to inspire altruism in her worldview.

Adam’s next splurge is going to try to tear down the foundations of environmentalism itself, and I think somebody should take him to one side and challenge him about his stance – apparently trying to annoy the Greens and the social action movement collectively, all in one over-energetic Guardian “grudge” piece :-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts

He can’t seem to bear the thought that people, as Ayn Rand advised, should act on their own free will, their enlightened libertarian self-interest, and form associations around causes that they believe in. I’ve taken part in enough democracy to know that UK Uncut is the closest thing to pure people power since Climate Camp pulled together. You cannot fight the imposition of social injustice with a massive, slow-moving bureaucratic organism – you need runners and movers and shakers to get out there and nudge like crazy.

People need to take responsibility for their actions, and we have to trust them to have thought long and hard about the ethics of their intentions and intended actions before they take part in public life in any way. Personally, my political action does not include the destruction of private or public property, nor the harming of other people, animals or other lifeforms. My non-violent direct action is as non-violent as it can be. I would certainly recommend this path to anyone, but I know some people find it hard to take this kind of advice on board. Adam Curtis has to be included in the set of people who act through violence, in my view, poking a big stick in the faces of the peace-loving philosophers of Nature.

This is what democracy looks like : a group of individuals – really individually unique individuals – not pigeonholed segments of an market audience – get talking about what’s wrong and fixing on one thing that they can all agree needs to be opposed – or built – then going out and doing something about it. The best organisations have an almost completely flat hierarchical structure, with small cells of between 5 and 13 people, with equal rights and remuneration, cooperatives, taking on their own tasks, and using interconnecting information people to keep the cells working together. This is a model of organisation drawn directly from Nature, and can be seen in everything from the self-teaching human brain with its delegated centres of executive control, to the way that birds fly in formation.

I don’t agree with everything from James Lovelock’s internal picture of the Gaia universe, but I will agree on this – the ways that people work together best are based on models drawn from the carefully studied ecosystems around us, and our own physical make-up. It’s natural, and it’s efficient. Each person has a task that’s unique to them, that is their personal interest and is the focus of their own individual attention. This is how we get democracy done. By behaving like a self-organising, self-correcting ecosystem. And this is how both Social Change and Climate Change can be addressed – by small, local groups doing action, education, training and political engagement at the grass roots level, or rather, the tree roots level, above which we can grow a strong new trunk to hold our New Low Carbon Nation together. Al Gore spoke of his gameplan as a series of one-to-one conversations. This is a model of political and social influence we can all follow.

Image Credit : Funk the Cuts

http://www.youtube.com/cop15

There is an unelected, shadowy organisation in the United Kingdom; a cultish community of thousands, and their minions, that plots to dictate the leadership of the whole world, starting with the minds of the central Government.

You’ll see them at work in the run-up to the General Election, possibly suspicious figures masquerading as angels of light in brightly coloured costumes and carrying jokey banners; meddling in democracy at every level – leafletting, holding meetings, putting posters in their front windows and holding consciousness-raising green-fests in their local Town Halls.

These people will propagandise the nation, wearing stickers and tee-shirts in an eerily ominous pink. They will wangle their way into live broadcast television shows, issue Press Releases, force candidates for Parliament to commit themselves to seemingly impossible, unreasonable pledges; on record, too.

Their campaign bus will tour the marginal wards, where floating voters still waver; their children, hypnotised by fervour will sing strangely beguiling songs in school assemblies. This conspiracy will enter into what could be construed as an underworld pact with political activists of every hue, embracing business people and Climate Camp hippies alike.

These people are quite possibly frightening; they will colonise your communities, thrust themselves onto your favourite radio shows, throw down the gauntlet to sceptics, and cause immeasurable disturbance to the proper process of voting by doing one solitary thing : raising the question of Climate Change.

They will ask you to write electronic mails, you know, e-mails (or emails) to your Member of Parliament and local party political networks; they will invite you to mass meetings, to media events, to scratch letters, to give your views on your websites, to bring up the subject of Climate Change at your local branch meetings, in your workplace, at your children’s schools.

They will sneak the Climate Change question into Local Authority Council debates, into local newspapers, into viral advertising campaigns. They will ask us all to pledge to do something for their campaign. They will market positive visions of a nauseatingly-squeaky-clean green new world.

Climate Change must be the number one voting issue of this General Election. It’s too important to get strangled by the unhealthy Economy and the budget-stressed public services.

What we need to do to fulfil the demands of the Climate Change Act is too critical to be left to the wiles of mandarin policy-writers.

Climate Change is me and you : it is our future and our destiny to live in a Climate Changed world, to adapt to the changes and to prevent further disaster.

Within our lifetimes, Global Warming will haunt Europe, bringing damages we cannot compensate for, on the land, at sea and in the weather.

This is not a trite environmental cause : this is not about saving Polar Bears – it’s about saving humanity. Our politicians need to know our demands, and they need to represent us. Stop Climate Chaos are campaigning for that very outcome.

When a Parliamentary Candidate of any Party comes knocking on your door, hold up your pink speech bubble and Ask the Climate Question : what are you going to do about Climate Change ?

http://www.stopclimatechaos.org/

Ask the Climate Question.

I learned a lot more about the poor state of international negotiations, how disadvantaged peoples and nation groups were not heard, how the official news feeds were edited, how attempts to communicate from the public assembly at the Klimaforum into the Bella Center using video streaming were met with empty delegate seats, how the elite negotiating teams from the industrialised world failed to collect enough support for their position, how people got left queueing in the freezing cold…

I also learned that Polly Higgins read the whole of the official Copenhagen Treaty for the first time and realised that it was all about pushing Carbon Trading into the very heart of the negotiations. Her reaction : “Stop the trading”. She was also inspired to launch the Planet Earth Trust.

Since I got to the meeting late, I had the teensiest feeling that I looked like I was turning into a Tasmin Omond fan club member, as hers was the first presentation made. She talked of highly organised numerous Police forces in Denmark. She talked of “direct action” thwarted by divide-and-rule strategies. She talked of how not even the Non-Governmental Organisations who had official access to the Copenhagen UNFCCC venue could get useful messaging or communications done.

Tamsin passionately urged us to talk to the people around us about Climate Change and what it’s going to mean for us all. She mentioned family more than once. We care, and so we should not be silent.

An energy bubbled up inside her that made her visibly shake. She knows we cannot fix Climate Change easily. She knows that members of the general public are labelled “protesters” and dismissed if they don’t grovel their way into the official venues, the official meetings, the official huddles, the official documents.

Her anger and frustration matched that of a Christian Aid officer I met earlier this week as she gave her own de-briefing of Copenhagen. The final “Copenhagen Accord” was negotiated amongst a select group of wealth-supported nation delegates, and was entirely unrepresentative of the wider voices of the nations, even those they claimed to deal on behalf of.

Someone this evening put it well : Copenhagen failed.

Polly Higgins used the analogy of William Wilberforce when he set about to outlaw slavery. He didn’t say “make a little less use of your slave”, like the ActOnCO2 campaign encourages us to make a little less use of our cars. (I don’t own a car by the way, I’m just using the collective term “our” as a stylistic device.) He knew that around 300 companies were responsible for the slave trade, and that they needed to be stopped.

Around 300 companies today are directly accountable via their products for 78% of the world’s excess Carbon Dioxide emissions, said Polly. We have to cut the subsidies to dirty Energy, render the use of Fossil Fuels illegal, and subsidise Renewables and Low Energy options.

Then we ate. Vegan, of course.

Then we had a workshop, using “Open Space Technology”. “It’s not a technology”, I reminded people.

We had small group breakout discussions about what the people want from the next global Climate talks : how to move money to the best things, how to engage younger people, how to use new language for the “population problem”, how to identify false solutions like BioDiesel, how to increase democracy given that all the systems in place in our society don’t work : the Media is broken, Education is broken, Government is cracked…

A small group of us floating around the venue started to talk, as we all knew each other from different settings.

We discussed how 1.5 degrees C as a target is better than 2 degrees C. How it’s a shame that people are moving over to talking about 350 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere as the right target, but not using the 1.5 degree C target as well.

I said people can understand that 350 figure, as they can find out that the current atmospheric concentration of CO2 is over 385, so that gives us an opportunity to talk about how CO2 in the air could fall some way if we drastically reduce net emissions to air.

We talked about time lags in the Climate system. How the current 0.7 or 0.8 degrees C is from emissions from decades ago having their impact. How the emissions we have made in the last 30 years or so will add another 1.2 to 1.4 degrees C globally.

We have basically overshot the 2 degree C target, it’s just that we haven’t seen it arrive yet. The Earth faces something like that warming even if we stop burning Fossil Fuels and cutting down trees tomorrow.

There’s not much point in having a target if you have no mechanism to implement it, we agreed.

I said that what the temperature target means, whether the 1.5 degrees or the 2 degrees C of the Copenhagen Accord, is this :-

No new net emissions from now on.

That should be our target.

It’s not a number or a concentration or a formula or a wish or an aspiration.

It’s a boundary. A limit. A measure of success that can be counted on the fingers of no hands and no feet.

Zero is the number. Zero net emissions to air.

Nobody understands temperatures or Gigatonnes of Carbon. But zero is a concept that people can grasp.

No car travel that cannot be calculated as being your sustainable share of emissions. No imported food that does not qualify as within a sustainable limit. No heating or lighting if that takes you over your own personal Earth-sustaining budget.

No more licence to burn. No more free licence to mine as much Fossil Fuel as possible. No automatic right to trade in Fossil Fuels. No automatic right to burn Fossil Fuels for the Electricity we need. No free licence to make cars, plastics, any kind of consumer goods.

Zero is the aim, and that requires radical, immediate change.