27 November 2015, The Conversation, Out of step: marching for climate justice versus taking action. This weekend, tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of people in cities around the world will take to the streets to protest against governments’ inaction on climate change. Past experience suggests media coverage will be largely sympathetic, if cursory, and (many) politicians will say that they hope the Paris climate summit that begins immediately afterwards represents a turning point. We have been here before. Quite often. There have been demonstrations at international climate meetings since at least 1990. However, “sympathy” marches in places far removed from the climate talks – such as those planned this weekend – are less frequent. So, can they make a difference? Read More here
Category Archives: Communication
11 November 2015, Other Words, Who Can Follow This Climate Leader? President Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline while backing increased oil, gas, and coal production. Remember that scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy hits a fork in the Yellow Brick Road? As she stands there stumped, a friendly character who will accompany her to the Emerald Palace pipes up. “Pardon me, that way is a very nice way,” the Scarecrow advises as he points in one direction. “It’s pleasant down that way too,” he adds, now pointing in the other. Then the Scarecrow crosses his straw-stuffed arms and unhelpfully declares, “Of course people do go both ways.” President Barack Obama’s climate leadership is as hard to follow as the Scarecrow’s directions. After seven years of waffling, Obama finally rejected the Keystone XL pipeline. If completed, this conduit would have moved more than 800,000 barrels a day of filthy oil mined from the Canadian tar sands through Nebraska and five other states to refineries along the Gulf Coast. Rejecting the $8 billion pipeline early in his first term would have been bold. But Obama dallied. He only stopped it once the thing made no financial sense because of low oil prices and similar infrastructure that rendered the project unnecessary. Making this move now, on the eve of global climate talks in Paris, was merely expedient. He made his choice sound like a bigger deal than it was anyway. “America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change,” he asserted. “And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership.” So, what’s the state of that leadership? On the one hand, the Obama administration has taken steps to reduce the nation’s reliance on oil, gas, and coal. Its Clean Power Plan will step up the ongoing retirement of coal-fired power plants as it cuts carbon pollution. The federal government is also phasing in higher fuel-efficiency standards while throwing some weight behind renewable-energy initiatives. All the while, this White House has also leased a growing amount of federal land to coal-mining companies and encouraged the nation’s spiking oil and natural gas production. Obama’s inherently contradictory “all-of-the-above” energy policy supports the dangerous practice of hydraulic fracturing — commonly known as fracking — that pumps vast amounts of toxic chemicals underground, imperiling drinking water. Read More here
10 November 2015, Renew Economy, VISIONS 2100: A better way to talk about climate change. The complex issue of climate change is one that our race is struggling to address. The solutions are not beyond us in any way. Technological solutions exist, scientific knowledge is plentiful, the world can afford the transition but still significant action eludes us. Rational arguments for rapid action abound. We do not need any more of those. What is needed is a different way of communicating that inspires and attracts the widest possible group of humans towards wanting to travel on this same journey. A global project to change the way climate change is communicated will be launched this week in Brisbane. It provides an opportunity for everyone to write and share their vision of a better world. The VISIONS 2100 Project is set to redefine how to engage communities on important but slow moving issues such as climate change and poverty eradication. It has been launched because the vast majority of environmental communication to date has failed to engage the wider community, something that is critical to achieve to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. Read More here
6 November 2015, The conversation, Citizens, arrests, and 7-metre dinosaurs: the history of UN climate summit protests. Here’s a scene that will be familiar to anyone who has watched media coverage of a major geopolitical summit: “By mid-morning the main entrance to the UN’s Palais de Congres, and its side entrances, were ringed by Swiss and German citizens, chained together. The blockade was total, if symbolic. Diplomats came and went, but had to duck under the chains. A barrage balloon floated in the sky over the Palais, urging delegates to “Cut C0₂ Now”. Boiler-suited Greenpeace activists swarmed over the roofs of the Palais, clutching placards bearing the same message.” That was 25 years ago this weekend, outside the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva, as recounted (p.21) by British author and activist Jeremy Leggett. Leggett also noted the “uncharacteristic leniency” of the attendant riot police, which he claimed was down to the Swiss government’s wish “to be seen to be under citizen pressure” to help enact its proposed carbon tax. What this episode shows – besides the wearying persistence of the same issues a quarter-century later – is that the climate protest movement predates what many people think of as the formal beginning of the United Nations climate process: the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Nor was it the first such protest. An estimated 10,000 people rallied outside the 1972 Stockholm Environment Conference, the UN’s first ever environmental summit – albeit over a wider range of issues and at a time when climate concerns were the preserve of only the most well-informed. Read More here