Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Last week, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, Al Gore suggested that young people should engage in civil disobedience to stop the building of new coal power plants “that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”
I sympathize with Gore’s intent. Coal is the most polluting of the fossil fuels, and if we burn more of it there is little hope of averting catastrophic climate change.
But is carbon capture and storage (CCS) a solution?
“Young people are turned off by the doom and gloom that comes with haggling over the peak date and imagining how difficult and different life will be on the other side of Hubbert’s curve. We believe you when you say it’s going to peak, and those who don’t will when it’s properly explained. We don’t need to be converted, we need to be motivated.”
States, provinces have plan to cut emissions
Gore urges civil disobedience to stop coal plants
Coal, a tough habit to kick
NY State Senator Klein to meet with No Impact Man about making NYC streets livable
A Speech for the Next President
Self-doubts paralyze activists
These are the slides and text for a presentation given at the ASPO-USA conference September 21-23.
In these ten minutes, I’d like to provide a context for the discussion. I’d like to paint a broadbrush picture of where we were, and where we are going. It will be from the viewpoint of someone inside the movement looking out.
From the grassroots, rather than from the media.
Palin’s Petropolitics
Speth: Progressive Fusion
A crisis that could make the US election a cleaner contest
Slow Food at full speed: they ate it up
Eric Schlosser: Slow Food for thought
Univ. of Calif.: Causes and consequences of the food price crisis
Meet the urban sharecroppers
[In] much of the alternative/protest movement… we take up a position outside of mainstream culture, use language, dress codes, behaviour and forms of protest which at best bewilder and at worst enrage mainstream society, yet we expect them to see the error of their ways and the validity of ours and embark on a radical decarbonisation. What failed to come through in [these approaches] was any sense of humility, any sense that the answers might be found anywhere other than in their fondly held beliefs.
This US election year an unprecedented number of voters will likely head to the polls to cast their ballots in an exercise that should take just a few minutes to complete. But what about the rest of the minutes left in the year? Author and activist Chris Carlsson has some suggestions for social change beyond voting in Nowtopia, a new book about modern day rebels who, in his words, “aren’t waiting for an institutional change from on-high but are getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old.”
Rob Hopkins on “transition towns” and peak oil
Don’t be scared, be prepared
(review of “Just In Case”)
The limits of volunteerism
Beyond voting: guerrilla gardeners, outlaw bicyclists & pirate programmers
“Stuffed & Starved” by Raj Patel – a review
An interview with Bob Waldrop
Cambodians eat rats to beat global food crisis
Why urban farming isn’t just for foodies
“We, the undersigned, believe that a healthy food system is necessary to meet the urgent challenges of our time,” begins the final draft of the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture. Initiated by Roots of Change and half a year in the drafting, it will be released August 29 at Slow Food Nation (SFN) at San Francisco’s City Hall.
