(Part 1) Indigenous Oil – The Glass Bead Game. A Sussex Global Podcast Series

Episode 2 The Meaning of Climate Change 1st December, 2015 (Part 1) Indigenous Oil . Combining anecdotal experience of indigenous groups on the front line of Canada’s environmental conflict with academic research. Produced and directed by Will Hood.

This episode explores the role of story in our on-going relationship with energy, ecology and economics.

This episode features:  Chief Billy Joe Laboucan Massimo Chief of the Lubicon Cree Band, Little Buffalo, Alberta, Canada;  David Attenborough Broadcaster, UK;   Ernie Gambler Indigenous Musician from Calling Lake, Alberta, Canada;   Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez Indigenous Scholar at the University of Alberta, Canada;   J.B. Williams, Tsawout First Nation Flood Story Narration (with music from Elder May Sam);   Makere Stewart-Harawira Indigenous Scholar at the University of Alberta, Canada;  Peter Newell Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex

Episode Extras: Oil On Lubicon Land: A Photo Essay

Source: (Part 1) Indigenous Oil – The Glass Bead Game

World powers lead frenetic final push for climate accord

Le Bourget (France) (AFP) – World powers led a frenetic final push Friday to seal a UN accord aimed at averting catastrophic climate change, as sleep-deprived envoys battled in Paris over trillion-dollar disputes blocking a deal. The 195-nation conference in Paris had been scheduled to wrap up on Friday, delivering a historic agreement that would brake global warming and ease its impacts. But weary negotiators braced themselves for a third straight round of all-night haggling after ministers wrestled with a myriad of deal-busting rows. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said he would submit a proposed final agreement on Saturday morning, and declared he was “sure” of success. “We are almost at the end of the road and I am optimistic,” said Fabius, who is presiding over the talks that began nearly a fortnight ago with a record summit of more than 150 world leaders. Many leaders billed the talks as the last chance to avert disastrous climate change: increasingly severe drought, floods and storms, as well as rising seas that would engulf islands and populated coasts. The planned accord would seek to revolutionise the world’s energy system by cutting back or potentially eliminating coal and other fossil fuels, replacing them with renewables such as solar and wind. The Paris talks have largely been free of the fierce arguments that have plagued previous UN climate conferences. But the biggest disputes over funding the climate fight, worth trillions of dollars over the decades to come, remain as potential deal-breakers in a draft accord released on Thursday night. – Success not guaranteed –

Source: World powers lead frenetic final push for climate accord

FATAL EXTRACTION

Australia is a giant in African mining, but its vast — and in some cases deadly — footprint has never been examined.

Australian-listed mining companies are linked to hundreds of deaths and alleged injustices which wouldn’t be tolerated in better-regulated nations.

The stories that follow are from people across Africa, rarely heard outside their own communities.

via FATAL EXTRACTION.

Future Goals and Options in NZ Land Management – A Transdisciplinary View

Great post by by Chris Perley

Thoughtscapes - Reimagining

A brief argument from some years ago to rethink land use in New Zealand

“If we go through a list of some of the main problematiques that are defining the new Century, such as water, forced migrations, poverty, environmental crises, violence, terrorism, neo-imperialism, destruction of social fabric, we must conclude that none of them can be adequately tackled from the sphere of specific individual disciplines. They clearly represent transdisciplinary challenges[1].

To Max-Neef’s quote you could also add that the solutions for one place don’t necessarily apply in another. The world is complex, adaptive (especially where people are concerned), indeterministic (any particular state cannot be necessarily reduced to underlying laws or rules), highly connected, and contingent on time, place and history. Which is why land is so interesting.

Reconciling the environmental, the social, the cultural, the economic

Goals in land management should not relate just to the biophysical. If you…

View original post 1,967 more words

Our Renewable Future Post Carbon Institute

Or, What I’ve Learned in 12 Years Writing about Energy

(7000 words, about 25 minutes reading time)

Folks who pay attention to energy and climate issues are regularly treated to two competing depictions of society’s energy options.* On one hand, the fossil fuel industry claims that its products deliver unique economic benefits, and that giving up coal, oil, and natural gas in favor of renewable energy sources like solar and wind will entail sacrifice and suffering (this gives a flavor of their argument). Saving the climate may not be worth the trouble, they say, unless we can find affordable ways to capture and sequester carbon as we continue burning fossil fuels.

On the other hand, at least some renewable energy proponents tell us there is plenty of wind and sun, the fuel is free, and the only thing standing between us and a climate-protected world of plentiful, sustainable, “green” energy, jobs, and economic growth is the political clout of the coal, oil, and gas industries (here is a taste of that line of thought).

via Our Renewable Future Post Carbon Institute.

Meet the Merchants of Doubt: The PR Firms Giving You Cancer, Causing Acid Rain and Killing the Planet – The Daily Beast

A new documentary, Merchants of Doubt, shows how you’re being lied to.

Wei-Hock Soon doesn’t appear in the new documentary Merchants of Doubt, but he might as well be its poster child. That’s because director Robert Kenner’s film, which opens in select cities on March 6, is about how the tobacco, fossil-fuel and other industries hire so-called “scientific experts” to refute charges that their products are dangerous. Soon, a scientist who claims that variations in the sun’s energy, not greenhouse gases, can explain climate change, was recently discovered to have received over $1.2 million from fossil-fuel companies to fund his research. He has reportedly failed to disclose this conflict of interest to the journals that published his papers—and seems to be the latest in a long line of scientists and spokespersons paid to cast doubt on independent scientific research.

Some of these doubters are “ideologically committed, some are just in it for the money, some in it for the attention,” says Naomi Oreskes, co-author (with Erik M. Conway) of the book on which the film is based.

Merchants of Doubt shows how the tobacco industry realized smoking caused cancer as early as the 1950s, but stonewalled the issue for decades by hiring PR firms to refute legitimate scientific research. “This whole strategy was created and raised to a fine art by the tobacco industry,” says Oreskes. “And once they developed this tool kit, they spread it. They tried to develop allies in other industries who also felt threats from inconvenient science. That you couldn’t trust science, and what was needed was ‘sound science.’”

This strategy, which Kenner’s film traces through the tobacco, dioxin, asbestos and fossil fuel industries, involves several key elements:

Paying scientists to do research that will support the industry’s claims.

Setting up organizations with names like Citizens for Fire Safety and Americans for Free Enterprise, which purport to be legitimate advocacy groups, but are really just shills for corporate interests.

Creating a class of media savvy “experts,” who may or may not be scientists, but whose basic function is to debate, and cast doubt on, the work of legitimate scientific researchers.

Making these experts available to journalists, to provide “balance” in the reporting of these issues, even when there is no real scientific debate about the subject.

These last two elements are key to the merchants-of-doubt approach, and make use of journalistic ethics about providing “equal time” to opposing viewpoints. They also play into the scientific community’s basic inability to explain difficult concepts. “Scientists are trained to do science, and it’s hard enough to do the science,” says Oreskes. “And now you’re saying you have to be an effective communicator as well? It’s not their job.”

via Meet the Merchants of Doubt: The PR Firms Giving You Cancer, Causing Acid Rain and Killing the Planet – The Daily Beast.

Architecture of doom: DIY planning for global catastrophe.

The new survivalism..
In fact, something like the survivalist dream has become a compelling vision of sustainable future living. Environmental concerns, rising power prices, and the progress in alternative technologies have seen a growing number of people opting to disconnect and live “off grid”.This trend often shares a common picture of the ideal retreat; including, for instance, micro-hydro power, methane digester, water tanks, passive solar design, and avegetable garden.Rawles has suggested that his SurvivalBlog has “an increasing number of stridently green and left-of-centre readers”. Off grid housing is even being talked of as the “new normal”.This can be read as liberating moves towards sustainability, personal autonomy and self-determination. Survivalists also tend to privilege privatised, self-regulated, individualist modes of living.The Australian off-grid advocate Michael Mobbs has recently suggested rethinking the state’s responsibility for sewage. He argues that “mature citizens” should take care of their own waste.If it becomes the “new normal”, what could this sort of thinking mean for the way we live together?Common services and cooperative social institutions have helped form the city as a public good. When looking at the overlapping discussions of being “prepped” and “off grid”, or “resilient” and “sustainable” we should perhaps be wary. Who has the capacity to be off grid and who remains dependent?

via Architecture of doom: DIY planning for global catastrophe.

Canada more at risk from environmentalists than religiously inspired terrorists: RCMP | Vancouver Observer

The de-radicalizing of the world….

My hope is that we may all become radicalized, that we become radicalized in hope, that we become radicalized in love – for our Mother Earth, for the future of our children, for one another, for peace and for justice, and for all our relations.

 

“The Canadian law enforcement and security intelligence community have noted a growing radicalized faction of environmentalists who advocate the use of criminal activity to promote the protection of the natural environment,” alerts the document written by the RCMP’s infrastructure intelligence team. The 22-page report from 2011 was only recently released.“It is highly probable that environmentalists will continue to mount direct actions targeting Canadas energy sector, specifically the petroleum sub-sector and the fossil and nuclear fueled electricity generating facilities, with the objectives of: influencing government energy policy, interfering within the energy regulatory process and forcing the energy industry to cease its operations that harm the environment,” the report adds.Criminal activity associated to environmental extremism can include “unlawful protests, break and enters, mischief damage to property, sabotage, arson, and use improvised explosive devices,” according to the report.Normalization of monitoring environmental groupsFor Carleton University instructor Jeffrey Monaghan, who obtained the document, the report demonstrates how normal it has become for national security agencies to monitor environmental groups.“This report is another indication of the wide net of surveillance, and allegations of criminality, targeting environmental groups,” he said in an email interview.Organizations under watch by the RCMP include Idle No More, ForestEthics, Sierra Club, EcoSociety, LeadNow, Dogwood Initiative, Council of Canadians and the Peoples Summit, the Vancouver Observer reported in 2013.Disruption of business a concernBut not only environmental groups have been in the RCMP’s radar lately. Last year, news reports showed how average citizens participating in protest activities have become targets of surveillance by the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service CSIS. Montreal’s La Presse, for example, reported in January that the RCMP was watching a group of shale gas opponents on the belief that anti-fracking activists might one day become “radicalized.”

via Canada more at risk from environmentalists than religiously inspired terrorists: RCMP | Vancouver Observer.

‘What’s Possible’: The U.N. Climate Summit Opening Film | TakePart

Presented to world leaders at the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit in New York, this short inspirational film shows that climate change is solvable. We have the technology to harness nature sustainably for a clean, prosperous energy future, but only if we act now. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, What’s Possible calls on the people of the world to insist leaders get on the path of a livable climate and future for humankind.

Learn more about climate change and take action at takepart.com/climate.

What’s Possible was created by director Louie Schwartzberg, writer Scott Z. Burns, Moving Art Studio, and Lyn Davis Lear and the Lear Family Foundation. It features the creative gifts of Freeman and composer Hans Zimmer.

via ‘What’s Possible’: The U.N. Climate Summit Opening Film | TakePart.

This Is Lateral Power – Jeremy Rifkin

A brilliant and inspiring summation by Jeremy Rankin

Image As Voice

View original post