The Story of Cap and Trade Video

This is a great video. A must see.

Here's a comment I left on youtube:

The wealth of developed nations is based not only on ingenuity and hard work. The wealth of developed nations is also critically based on oppression and violence, including slavery and environmental degradation (greenhouse gas pollution very much included.)

The myth of meritocracy runs rampant in American culture.

It's important to realize that much of our material "success" is based not on merit - but instead on oppression and violence, on expropriation and exploitation.

The video:

The Story of Cap and Trade

The Billionaires for Coal, yahoo!

The Billionaires for Coal: "It's not my problem!


Dispatches from the Coal Finance Day of Action Front (Updated 11-19-07)

SurvivaBall: Gated Community for One

SurvivaBall by the Yes Men

We Face a Stark Choice

Vandana Shiva (Founder of Navdanya):

"Regulating by carbon trading is like fiddling as Rome burns. Governments and the UN should impose a carbon tax on corporations, both for production - wherever their facilities are located - and for transport, which the Kyoto Protocol does not account for directly. Incentives for renewable energy are also essential. We face a stark choice: we can destroy the conditions for human life on the planet by clinging to 'free-market' fundamentalism, or we can secure our future by bringing commerce within the laws of ecological sustainability and social justice." [emphasis added]

How can I live in a way that is truly happy, secure, and peaceful when I know that the ways of human societies are ruining the conditions for human life on Earth and dooming future generations to poverty?

...Earth democracy...transition...put nature first...

...respect and protect wilderness...nurture broken ecosystems, repair them, bring them back to health...restore ecological and economic balance...

Vandana Shiva scheduled to speak in Olympia, October 15: Vandana Shiva visit to Olympia, Washington

Corporate Power: the Ethics of Social and Environmental Degradation

This is a work in progress. Here are few statements that I want to explore, and a few questions that I want to answer and work with in more depth.

1) Statement: Corporate Power - that power which is vested in the biggest and most massive (primarily) international corporations - is doing harm to humanity and to the planet (to animals, plants, rocks, landscapes, mountains, oceans, air, water, etc.).

2) Question: Is it unethical to reap financial profit, from those activities which do harm and cause degradation: whether to individuals, whole societies, or whole systems (eco-systems or planets)? An alternative question is to ask "what are the ethics involved in" the process of reaping financial reward from activities which do harm / cause degradation.

(Yes, moralizing can be difficult, but we have social values and morals and ethics for a reason - to provide for the well-being, and to protect, individual, society, and increasingly more so, the very planet itself.)

Taken to its extreme and ultimate final end product, social and environmental degradation could possibly result in a destroyed planet - i.e. planetary destruction. It's scary to think that humanity may be so advanced "techno'logically'" that it will even be able to escape such a destroyed planet - only to spread a culture of degradation and destruction into other worlds...

EPA Chief Says NO to Environmental Protections

Here's an interesting story about the Bush Administration's opposition to climate saving measures:

EPA Chief Denies Calif. Limit on Auto Emissions
Rules Would Target Greenhouse Gases
By Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 20, 2007; Page A01

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen L. Johnson yesterday denied California's petition to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, overruling the unanimous recommendation of the agency's legal and technical staffs.

The decision set in motion a legal battle that EPA's lawyers expect to lose and demonstrated the Bush administration's determination to oppose any mandatory measures specifically targeted at curbing global warming pollution...

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Warming Caused by God

This just in from Harper's Magazine: Global Climate Disruption Caused by God!!!



This definitely defeats the "One God" theory. I believe that God is the product of our own minds. If the White House has a God (or is a God) that is intentionally causing climate disruption, then I want no part of it. Further I think that they and their God ought to be opposed at every turn.

The moral bankruptcy of this Bush White House casts a pall over the USA. And it is our duty as citizens of this nation to oppose their efforts to undermine the health and well-being of the world's peoples.

Islands Disappearing

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Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island
For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas.
Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports
Published: 24 December 2006

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

It makes sense to take immediate and necessary steps to reduce our impact on climate change. Especially those of us living in highly developed and wealthy societies, such as in the West, where such changes are imminently feasible.