this great video has just been released by the New Economics Foundation it has been launched to mark the start of bank bonus season. The new animation is setting out to increase public pressure on government to take on the banks and not sweep reform under the carpet. It asks politicians whether they have a plan to tame the bank, and if not, why not?
The minute-long animation is inspired by Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi’s description of investment bank Goldman Sachs as a giant vampire squid “sucking on the face of humanity”.
The animation is backed by a wide range of influential pressure groups including: nef, Compass, PLATFORM, ResPublica, 38 Degrees, WDM, Positive Money, Tax Research and the Post Bank campaign.
“for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly rebuild resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil and economic contraction) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?”
Many people would view this video as propaganda. They are right. It does however highlight, in an engaging way, the kinds of actions that are being/have been carried out in order to shine a light on the distant crimes being committed in the far flung resource rich corners of the planet.
So that’s why i like it.
My view of activism has developed since the wave march in london last year. We attempted to pressurise our politicians into doing the right thing in copenhagen. It seems to islandradio that the march was relatively and depressingly futile. That is not to say there is not a place for actions like those carried out by greenpeace they have an incredibly inventive media team who expose their actions to great effect (see video). It is their bread and butter and islandradio is very happy to be a member. for the majority of us, taking part in and promoting actions can take up an enormous amount of time and it can be most disheartening to get the impression that precious time has been wasted. This is the root of islandradio’s change of tack. Instead of beating the drum of what is going wrong in the world, I will be hollering about what can be done and what is being done right.
Clarity….it’s transition time. From the negative to the positive. Politicians will sit up and start taking notice once communities start making the decisions for themselves.
Unfortunately, this repost encapsulates the mood of the majority of environmentalists and activists after the shambolic summit in Copenhagen. It heralds in another year of relentless campaigning and action aimed at building the grassroots solution to this top-down failure.
Repost of Greenpeace climate campaigner Joss Garman’s comment in The Independent on Sunday
The most progressive US president in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that could challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation that put a man on the Moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantle of a religion.
Then a Chinese premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Barack Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.
Late in the evening, the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs that they call a “deal”, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them signing it with great solemnity.
“This ‘deal’ is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they will come about.”
Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global-climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball. Before we know it, The New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a “meaningful” accord.
Meanwhile, a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 bloc of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal.
It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now, the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success.
A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a “shitty, shitty deal”. Quite so.
This “deal” is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they will come about. There is not even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2C°. Instead, leaders merely recognise the science behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it.
The only part of this deal that anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now apparent that even this is largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so that poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
I know our politicians feel they have to smile and claim success; they feel that’s the only way to keep this train on the tracks. But we’ve passed that point – we need to go back to first principles now. We have to admit to ourselves the scale of the problem and recognise that at its core this carbon crisis is, in fact, a political crisis.
Until politicians recognise that, they’re kidding themselves, and, more than that, they’re kidding us too.
Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard, on no sleep, for a better outcome; while Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change, and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it), while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began, I was of the opinion that we would know Copenhagen was a success only when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded.
Instead, as details of the agreement emerged last night, we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets.
It’s not just that we didn’t get to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge amounts of ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we Greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we are facing, and you will hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But, really, it is no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as a historic failure that will live in infamy.
In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds. And what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
An open letter to Barack Obama on the eve of his arrivial at the Climate Summit
Posted: 16 Dec 2009 09:35 AM PST
Dear Mr. President,
Now is the time to give hope more than a voice. As you depart for the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, I feel compelled to express my hope and desire for the role you will play when you join the other heads of state in reaching an agreement to avert catastrophic climate change: the role you must play in keeping hope alive for many millions of people around the world.
My Name is Kumi Naidoo, I am the International Executive Director of Greenpeace, I am also chair the Global Coalition for Climate Action (www.tcktcktck.org) and serve as a co-chair of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (www.whiteband.org). But, most of all, like you, I am a global citizen. I am also a child of Africa.
Like so many people around the world, I was uplifted during your presidential campaign. I had great hope as I listened to you speak to the perils of global warming, and about the promise of a clean energy economy. I was delighted by the promise that the US would return to multilateral engagement. After so many years of denial and inaction by the Bush Administration, you restored my hope that a fair, ambitious and legally binding climate agreement was possible. My hope that a deal which would banish the specter of catastrophic climate change could be struck. I believed and still believe you could be the leader to ensure that happens.
As a child growing up under apartheid, I learned that it is possible for a leader seeking change to keep hope alive. I also learned that, sooner or later, transformative leaders must make difficult decisions. Tomorrow you will face such a decision. Your choice could change the course of history.
As you well know, no region or nation is immune to the ravages of climate change. Melting glaciers, blazing forests, and acid seas are some of the well-documented ecological impacts of climate change. But too often, we lose sight of the inextricable link between the environment and how real people are affected. It is now estimated that some 300,000 people, mostly the poor and politically disenfranchised, die every year in our warming world.
Water, food, and habitable land are becoming scarcer, compounding human suffering and multiplying political tensions. The latest figures suggest that if we don’t act now, as many as one billion people will be uprooted by climate impacts by mid-century.
That will inevitably lead to insecurity and conflict. Something an already unstable world can ill-afford. Already climate impacts, such as the drying up of Lake Chad, one of the largest inland seas in the world, have exacerbated the tragedy in Darfur, where water scarcity and competition for land have destroyed the lives of millions. Indeed, climate change arguably constitutes the biggest threat to peace. The costs of inaction will be measured in human lives, and you well know that women and children, as always, will bear the biggest burden.
The poor and voiceless will suffer most; they will be hit hardest and fastest. The unfairness of that pains me. They are the least responsible for causing climate change.
At home, you have taken important steps to make up for lost time by enacting policies which will simultaneously limit greenhouse gas pollution and put Americans to work. From afar, it appears that the ambition of these plans has been stifled by powerful fossil fuel and energy corporations. To date, your negotiators have only agreed to a paltry provisional cut in US emissions of 3 percent on 1990 levels by 2020 – dangerously below the 25-40 percent cut the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is necessary to avert catastrophic climate change. The US has also failed to put a long-term financial assistance package on the table. Long-term cash injections are desperately needed to allow poor countries to adapt to the climate impacts they are experiencing and will experience. They need money to invest in clean energy sources as they develop their economies.
I feel a responsibility to inform you that this lack of ambition has profoundly discouraged many of the same people who were so energized by your promise of hope and pledges to rejoin the international community in this common struggle.
I cling on to hope, because as you have so vividly demonstrated, anything is possible. The prospect of personal leadership at the negotiations allows me to retain some ‘audacity of hope’ that you will have both the courage and the vision to make history.
This is not a simple political crisis: it is a moral crisis. I want to continue to believe in you Mr President. I appeal to your humanity – please don’t condemn the peoples of low-lying island states and the world’s most vulnerable countries to uncertainty. Do not let them be wiped off the map.
You have given the world hope that we will finally put this crisis behind us. You have the opportunity to turn hope into action and into reality.
Those from the most vulnerable states face a clear and present danger, but let us be clear, all of the world’s 6.8 billion people will suffer from the consequences of unchecked climate change. They need a leader with the courage and vision to act. I pray and hope you are such a leader.
I end by reminding you of something you said often during your campaign. You frequently invoked the powerful words of Martin Luther King: “The fierce urgency of now”.
Sadly, according to the science the urgency of now has become even more fierce. I humbly appeal to you to reject the voices of short-term interest, of political expediency and of compromise.
Listen instead to the call of history. Listen to the voices of those most at threat. Listen to the voices of future generations, of our children and grandchildren. Of your children. Of your grandchildren, as yet unborn. Then, please, take the action that you know is needed.
