Largest climate march in history
September 8, 2014 2:41 PM   Subscribe

Disruption is a 52-minute film by 350.0rg as a promotion for the upcoming People's Climate March billed as the largest climate protest march in history, on September 21. Major cities include New York, Paris, Berlin, and Rio de Janeiro though there are over 1000 others. The march is calling for immediate action on the climate and is directed at the U.N. Climate Summit in New York City on September 23.(via)
posted by stbalbach (24 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh, I saw a flier for this today in Durham, NC. There are buses mobilized to take interested participants from the triangle area up to NYC for $80.00.
posted by oceanjesse at 2:45 PM on September 8, 2014






Ack, those two comments should have been in reverse order.
posted by homunculus at 4:02 PM on September 8, 2014


"Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal" is a great piece. All it takes is 5% of the raw gas to leak and fracking becomes worse than coal (for climate change).
posted by stbalbach at 5:20 PM on September 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Doesn't matter either way. We're at the mercy of the half dozen or so guys who still have enough money to invest to make a difference, and they already went all-in on fracking because they're too stubborn and prideful to learn from their mistakes.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:31 PM on September 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


So people who believe that this damage was inflicted, by human development, over hundreds of years somehow imagine that immediate action on climate change is going to do, what, exactly?

Let's apply fixes -- the impact of which we don't even know -- on a thing we barely understand, and let's do it immediately! Even though immediate action will make no bloody difference, it will make us feel like we did something!

Yay!
posted by gsh at 7:47 PM on September 8, 2014


Let's apply fixes

Yes, lets do that to a system where the Sun also goes though variability in its output along with ejected matter from volcanoes which can also cool the planet.

Or perhaps just wait for an uptick in the Sun's output to be higher than "normal" and see how warm things get?

Either way - someone's hand will be in your wallet taking money for profit to the investment bankers. Overhead and profit-taking in the carbon offsets system eats up about 70 percent of what is spent on carbon offsets Your heartfelt effort for change is their profits.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:14 PM on September 8, 2014


If given the choice between bankers making money and a climate acting within historical norms or bankers making money and the rest of humanity ravaged by drought, famine, disease, and habitat loss, I'll go for the former.
posted by one_bean at 8:30 PM on September 8, 2014 [8 favorites]


I wonder how many of the American cities will react like ferguson or the political conventions, or occupy protests. I remember going to marches with my mom when I was as young as five, but given the scary police presence anytime a group of Americans tries to be heard, I sure don't feel safe taking my kid to one.
posted by dejah420 at 9:00 PM on September 8, 2014


immediate action on climate change is going to do, what, exactly?

This march is in the context of the UN meeting in NY leading up to the main one in Europe later this fall where it's hoped new global treaties will be signed to start reducing CO2 emissions over the next 20 years or so. The "immediate action" is to pressure politicians to take action at the UN meeting with policy, not to take action immediately in an engineering sense (seeding the ocean with iron etc).
posted by stbalbach at 9:07 PM on September 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


stbalbach: "This march is in the context of the UN meeting in NY leading up to the main one in Europe later this fall"
The "main one" is not until next year (and it's in Paris, by the way). This year's summit is in Lima and is to prepare for Paris so we don't get the same failure we saw in Copenhagen in 2009.
posted by brokkr at 3:34 AM on September 9, 2014


gsh: "So people who believe that this damage was inflicted, by human development, over hundreds of years somehow imagine that immediate action on climate change is going to do, what, exactly?"
Start reversing the trend so we don't end up in the BAU scenario. Last projections I saw meant we need to have sum zero or possibly even negative carbon emissions from now until 2100 to keep below 2°C warming.

The later you wait to start turning the behemoth around, the farther it's going to continue on its course.
posted by brokkr at 3:37 AM on September 9, 2014


It's hard to take McKibben or 350.org seriously when they won't even consider next-gen nukes as part of an energy mix.
posted by Camofrog at 8:53 AM on September 9, 2014


Let's apply fixes -- the impact of which we don't even know -- on a thing we barely understand, and let's do it immediately! Even though immediate action will make no bloody difference, it will make us feel like we did something!

We're not helpless. We meticulously planned our current level of development and infrastructure and executed our plans to get us where we are today with the help of long-term policy at the local, state and federal levels. Long term planning got us here, and only long term planning will get us out.

But in order to do that kind of planning seriously, we have to provide the right incentives to people to make those efforts not just in the moment they become most critical but long before they do--long term problems require anticipating and shaping events, not merely responding to unexpected crisis after crisis. All that requires changing policy.

We made the policies that got us here. Why can't we make the policies that could get us out? Answer: We could. But in the short term, that would be very costly to a lot of powerful people in our society who are invested in the industrial side of the economy. Those parties are used to revenue flowing in the other direction, from the public coffers into their private stores, and aren't eager to see their power base eroded just because it's for the public good and might save all of us a lot of cost, worry, and human tragedy in the long run.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:04 AM on September 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


> We meticulously planned our current level of development and infrastructure and executed
> our plans to get us where we are today with the help of long-term policy at the local, state
> and federal levels.

Policies that supported progress to our present level of development were policies in support of things for which there was, in addition, massive non-governmental pressure to happen anyway. European invasion of the new world, for instance, would have happened with or without Ferdinand and Isabella, or even the U. S. Cavalry.

There is a significant difference between, on the one hand, standing on a river bank and yelling "Go, water, go! Flow downstream!" and doing all the other policy-type things that can be done to help, like dredging channels; and on the other hand yelling "Back upstream, water! Flow back upstream!" Even with any and every sort of incentive that policymakers can invent to encourage upstream flow, I expect what would appear most clearly is the weak hand that policy is actually playing if it must, as the saying is, stand athwart history and yell not just Stop! but Go Back!

Policy will recover its apparent effectivness whenever de-development becomes what's happening for other and greater reasons (e.g. global warming shit really does get real, sea level rises a fathom or so, and all the world's coastlines are where they would be if that happened.)
posted by jfuller at 11:19 AM on September 9, 2014


I don't think we can go back either. But we need to go forward in a completely new direction , with different goals and different ways of planning and thinking about development. We need to use science and technology to the best of our abilities to build a new kind of infrastructure, to support the more sustainable development practices we want to see in the future, just as we built the roads, telegraph networks, train tracks, interstates, refineries and oil fields of yesterday. Public planning and governmental policy made our energy sector and most every other aspect of modern life possible in the first place, so it's not that "policy" inherently isn't up to the challenge as is sometimes suggested. Where we are today in terms of our industry and infrastructure is not in any realistic sense accidental--it continues to take incredible amounts of deliberate planning. But we need to start planning for different goals. And that's what isn't really happening because it conflicts with the interests of the existing economic winners.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:34 AM on September 9, 2014


Omnivore: The Anthropocene or peak humanity?
posted by homunculus at 12:20 PM on September 19, 2014


This thread seems dormant, but I just want to put this here for the record: there were, by conservative estimates, 310,000 of us out there today.
posted by minervous at 2:49 PM on September 21, 2014 [5 favorites]




Today's Democracy Now was all about the climate march.
posted by homunculus at 1:07 PM on September 22, 2014








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