Citizen Power

The writer of this blog (me) is certainly not at the G20, (which is starting next week) but plenty of protesters are out there trying to bring awareness of global economic insecurity and climate change to the world.    Thousands are marching for jobs, and justice, and environmental awareness and action.  People don’t often think of economics and climate change as being related, but they very much are. Everything is ultimately related to our climate, the atmosphere, and the weather, as that all affects food supply and jobs and the economy.    As global warming progresses there will be more droughts,  more severe storms, and more severe weather in general. This will lead to more food shortages, more displaced people, more refugees, more homelessness, more unemployment, more social unrest, and more division of the poor from the wealthy.  It may also lead to more wars for resources, disguised as “liberating” people.

I’m a big fan of street protests even though most of them are ignored by the media. But when the G8 meets or the G20 or any group of the wealthy who determine the fate of the poor meets, protesters will be there.  For many protesters it’s just about having a voice and having a say in their fate and futures.  Protesting has always been the ultimate free speech, the empowerment of the average citizen.   In London alone it is estimated that 35,000 people will turn out to protest the G20 economic summit.  The photo above is of the actual protest in London and is from The Guardian.

What are they protesting? Lack of jobs, lack of control, lack of power — what people always protest.  In this case, they are also trying to bring awareness to the need to remake the way the world does things, really and truly fix the economic crisis, and seriously deal with our climate crisis.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the Beijing Taiyanggong Gas-fueled Thermal Power Co., Ltd. (Taiyanggong Power Plant) of the Beijing Energy Investment Co., Ltd. in Beijing, capital of China on February 21. She also visited the Chinese president the same day, especially to reassure him that China’s investments in the U.S. were safe (that must have been a hard sell) and that we will work together to makes our economies strong again, according to a report by the CBC.

Clinton said she had “very good meetings” with Chinese officials during her visit, which she called the beginning of “a new era” of China-U.S. relations characterized by positive cooperation. China owns a lot of our economy so they were mainly interested in meeting with Sec. Clinton on economic matters. The purpose of Clinton’s visit was to work on general relations with China, economic issues, and climate change/energy issues.

“BEIJING, Feb. 21 (Xinhua) — China and the United States on Saturday agreed to establish a dialogue on strategic and economic issues and pledged to work together to tackle the global financial crisis and climate change. The agreement came out of a flurry of meetings between Chinese leaders and visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday. “Now it is more important than anytime in the past to deepen and develop China-U.S. relations amid the spreading financial crisis and increasing global challenges,” Chinese President Hu Jintao told Clinton. Saying the relations were “among the most important bilateral relations in the world,” Hu proposed both countries work closely to address international financial crisis and tackle climate change and other global challenges so as to seek a sound and smooth growth of bilateral ties. . . . . . “

We’d better hope China is enthusiastic about working with us on climate issues. Last year, Science reported that China’s C02 emissions could equal the whole world’s emissions today, by 2030. They were constructing new coal plants at the rate of about two per week in 2008, with no serious signs of stopping in 2009. According to the journal Science in 2008: “China is completing two new coal plants per week. That power is being used to drive an enormous manufacturing expansion. China has increased steel production from 140 million tons in 2000 to 419 million tons in 2006, the authors report.” The U.S. has basically stopped opening new coal plants and the EPA’s decision on new coal plants and whether to tie them to the Clean Air Act is expected before April 2nd. The news source Xinhuanet also reported:

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Watching President Obama, I’m always struck by how calm and sure of himself he seems. Tonight’s press conference was no different. He said the recession has left the nation so weak that only the federal government can “jolt our economy back to life.”

“And he declared that failure to act swiftly and boldly “could turn a crisis into a catastrophe.”

He said the country could be in better shape by next year, as measured by increased hiring, lending, home values and other factors. “If we get things right, then, starting next year, we can start seeing significant improvement,” Obama said.  With more than 11 million Americans now out of work, Obama defended his program against Republican criticism that it is loaded with pork-barrel spending and will not create jobs.

“The plan is not perfect,” the president said. “No plan is. I can’t tell you for sure that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hope, but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis as well as the pain felt by millions of Americans.”

Let’s pretend for a minute that this stimulus package passes (and isn’t completely gutted, which might still happen). What if President Obama is wrong and this package doesn’t do enough to create jobs even if it does pass? Paul Krugman of the New York Times thinks this bill won’t go nearly far enough and he is dismal about the prospects for our economy if it doesn’t. From his blog yesterday:

“Because what’s coming out of the current deliberations is really, really inadequate. I’ve gone through the CBO numbers a bit more carefully; they’re projecting a $2.9 trillion shortfall over the next three years. There’s just no way $780 billion, much of it used unproductively, will do the job.”

Two-point-nine-trillion-dollars is a lot of shortfall. Since no one knows for sure what will happen, and since it sounds kinda bad so far, let’s also pretend that the stimulus bill doesn’t work and that we go into severe, worsening recession, maybe even a “Depression”.

Rather than worry about civil unrest, riots, societal breakdowns, etc., (which we have no serious reason to assume will happen because they didn’t happen the other 3 times this happened) everyone could instead be thinking of ways to protect themselves and you know, survive. By that I mean you can take some tips from Dmitri Orlov (below) and you can also take responsibility for yourself and learn what it will take to get through the worst of economic times. Do you live in a house you can barely afford? You should sell it and move. Do you have bills that are too high? Drop some things like cable TV. Do you drive a big car? Park it and ride your bike. Things like that can train you to get used to less, because we might all have to do that at some point in the near future.

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“We as human beings have a tendency to confuse the unprecedented with the impossible.
The exceptions can kill you.”

Al Gore spoke today to the Senate committee on foreign relations. He had a more receptive audience than in the past, and he again called for swift action. This testimony was tied to the Obama administration stimulus package appeal, and Al Gore emphasized the need to pass it. If you care about climate change and taking the first steps in dealing with it, please call your Senators and get them to support the new stimulus package! This is not a bank bailout, this is a job creation bill that will be our first step in dealing with the problems of the near future, including climate change. There were some surprises at the hearing. Republican Senator Corker even agrees with a carbon tax versus a cap and trade system because he feels it is less of a “transfer of wealth” from taxpayers to business. And it is.

Below are Al Gore’s opening remarks as prepared. From listening to it, he deviated from these remarks somewhat and talked a lot more after them, which you can watch here. It’s about 3 hours long, which I am recording and will make available as a podcast by tomorrow, because it is very much worth hearing. Senator John Kerry said he is going to have the entire testimony printed and distributed among the senators, and I hope I can get a copy of that because it will include Gore’s new graphics. They are much more frightening than the graphics in his original slide show/movie. As Gore states, this is a planetary emergency. We have never dealt with anything like this before. Issues with climate change have moved along quite a bit since Gore’s move came out, but there is still a lot of work to do to convince the public of the enormity of this problem. For a good start, watch this congressional testimony, or listen to it when I provide the link to the podcast. This is not a regular issue where we have a lot of time to debate.

Statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

The Hon. Al Gore

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

We are here today to talk about how we as Americans and how the United States of

America as part of the global community should address the dangerous and growing

threat of the climate crisis.

We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home – Earth – is in grave danger. What is

at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have

made it hospitable for human beings.

Moreover, we must face up to this urgent and unprecedented threat to the existence of our

civilization at a time when our country must simultaneously solve two other worsening

crises. Our economy is in its deepest recession since the 1930s. And our national

security is endangered by a vicious terrorist network and the complex challenge of ending

the war in Iraq honorably while winning the military and political struggle in

Afghanistan.

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Every winter when it gets cold somewhere the climate change deniers come out of the woodwork and claim we are headed for a new Ice Age and that the usual cold weather proves global warming is bunk. This happened Tuesday night on the Lou Dobbs show on CNN. Lou Dobbs had two climate change deniers on his show along with one environmentalist. This form of presentation disguised as logic is meaningless, but the media loves it because it gets people to argue (and American media is now mostly all about fights, not debates). Dobbs began this segment asking if we are entering a new Ice Age and said that 2008 was one of the coolest years on record since 1998. (A very misleading thing to say). His first speaker was Joseph D’Aleo, co-founder of the weather channel, is a climate change denier. He said 2008 was the 14th “coldest” year on record (not true) according to “satellite data” which in his mind is more accurate than any other kind of data. Naturally, he didn’t explain why.

Then Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute said he is of the Fred Singer school of thought (that global warming isn’t real) and that sunspots cause most of our warming. And because sunspot activity is down, he said he felt we were in a major cooling period. He was on the show to warn Congress not to pass legislation regarding climate change, like pollution standards, cap and trade, and what he called “dramatic legislation”.

Dobbs asked if we should be concerned about our carbon footprint, and he was answered by his third guest, Alex Wissner-Gross of C02stats.com (see my Green label from them at the top of the left-hand column). They seem to be a good organization, but Alex admitted that to him, “efficiency is most important, carbon footprint second.” He’s a professor at Harvard, so I think he should know better and maybe he did; Dobbs only let him talk briefly.

Dobbs then brought up a good point — we should be reasonable stewards of the planet even if global warming is real or not, in his opinion. This got an agreement from Joe and Jay. Joe said yes, we need conservation whether it continues to cool or warm, warming being in his mind a “far less dangerous scenario”, and to him, throwing in whatever he could before his time was up, he said that includes “nuclear, coal . . . and whatever it takes.” He just wanted to get “coal” in there. Tell me, how does a person start the Weather Channel without knowing a darned thing about science? Maybe he just likes storms.

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Dear Auto Makers:  we would like some seriously fuel-efficient cars for 2009.

Like a lot of people, I’m interested in new cars, in part because I don’t have one and I would like to buy one. However, the only cars I would consider buying right now are hybrid, or electric. So this year’s Detroit Auto Show is interesting to me because I want to see how the car companies we gave all those billions and billions and billions of dollars to so their businesses could survive are going to pay us back. Will they pay us back by giving us good fuel-efficient cars we want, or the usual flashy and/or mammoth junk we don’t want? You see, most Americans just want to get from Point A to Point B without polluting the planet and causing the end of endangered species, including humans. We don’t need to impress anyone, really, we don’t.

I know people who are really into cars and even they just want something more practical and affordable to drive around. Many of those people “get” climate change, but not quite enough of them. Car manufacturers could help with this. Even if they don’t, they need to give us cars that are incredibly fuel efficient, since we are past peak oil and gas is already going up again and will continue to rise now into the stratosphere, and climate change marches on. After President Obama urges Congress to increase CAFE standards and work on climate change, asking us to sacrifice as I expect him to, do they only expect rich people to be able to drive? Rich people won’t be rich anymore if the peons can’t afford to get to work.

The good news is that this year at the Detroit Auto Show we have the debut of some electric cars including the Chevy Volt and some hybrids like the giant Ford Escape plug-in pictured above. I would call these two vehicles “good starts”. We need to make a lot more progress than this, however. And oddly enough, though the car show was mostly without dazzle this year, Volkswagen did something kind of unusual: “Volkswagen Uses Breakdancers, Child Labor To Show Off New Car”. (I think that was meant to be humorous).

Here is some actual progress– an electric Cadillac, joining the “Volt” fleet of GM cars. About time!

Read about it here. OK, OK, let’s tone it down a bit for the rest of us. Toyota debuted an electric car, and so did China’s BYD car company. It will give the Chevy Volt some good competition as it’s expect to cost around “$ 30,000 - $40,000″. I have news for them. If they want the average Joe or Jane to buy these electric cars, and that’s who drives cars the most, they better lower the price. With prices like these, it looks like I’ll be riding a new bicycle instead of driving a car this year. Even so, this new Chinese car is sounding pretty good. If I wait a year, the price will probably go down, or I’ll buy a used one. Here is the BYD F3DM electric vehicle (EREV):

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Could you survive really tough times if you had to? If you have ever gone camping you know a little bit about survival skills. I don’t mean camping in an RV where you pull up on a slab of concrete and watch a tiny TV for a few days while you cook in a tiny kitchen. That’s not camping! I mean the kind where you bring a tent into the woods and have to build a fire with wood you gather yourself. You could go further than that and some people do, even living off of whatever edible stuff grows nearby, but that’s not really necessary to know (yet) if you are a good planner, even if something unexpected comes up, which I’m sure at this point you can easily imagine yourself. Maybe it will be caused by an economic disaster or a man-made climate disaster. Either way, it does no harm to plan a little.

Some day people might have to get used to living completely differently than they do now and that’s where some camping skills will be useful. A survival scenario might include eating lots of dried food, hiking long distances, carrying heavy packs, dealing with bloodthirsty insects, etc. If you have ever had to go a week or more without a shower and feel your back will never be the same from sleeping on a rock, you know what I mean by real camping. I have been to lots of state parks and camped in relative comfort, but I’ve also camped in places with no trace of civilization– including hearing wolves at night, being attacked by bats, and I’ve gotten very lost and dehydrated too. I also camped in the Badlands of S.D. last summer in a place with 65mph wind gusts which nearly tore my tent apart. I was literally inside holding up the walls while hoping to be able to sleep at some point. You have to be ready for anything, especially with potential wild weather coming due to climate change. Living outside, even for a little while, is not something to take lightly.

What if the worst case scenario hits and we all have to fend for ourselves somehow? That might include getting out of the city or leaving the area of where you live. I’m not the only person thinking about this, there are many groups and clubs devoted to survivalism, and there are also podcasts like Radio Ecoshock (and Civilianism) that have talked about how people should learn some basic survival skills. This is from Radio Ecoshock’s broadcast last week — some good tips no matter what happens, or doesn’t.

“Tools for Tough Times” is simple gear for an emergency, Depression or system breakdown. You may need these tools, due to a storm, civil disruption, banking failure, flu outbreak, or just a lost job and looming poverty on government hand outs. Get your gear.
Here is a short list!

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