Archive for Non-violence

At this morning’s meeting with Canada’s chief negotiator, the first question of the day was taken by a representative of Canada’s youth delegation.  He delivered a strongly worded rebuke to Canada for failing to show any leadership, for insisting on weak targets and extensive loopholes, for failing to work constructively with countries that took the problem seriously, and for failing to recognize and address the terrible pain they were imposing on succeeding generations who would never benefit from the advantages that Canadian government choices made today.  They demanded that Canada stop kowtowing to the oil industry and take a stand for Canadians and the world.  And then they walked out, all 15 or so of them.     Read more »

I’ve never been to a COP before, but I’ve been involved in climate change issues long enough to recognize a very sad trend from fighting to prevent it to squabbling over the money to deal with it.  Far more energy is being spent today to discuss the costs of adaptation, primarily for countries that have had very little to do with causing it.  More and more effort is spent by scientists not in evaluating the broad implications of a warming planet, but in evaluating the much more narrow human-scale impacts it will cause.     Read more »

I was locked inside College Park for an hour this afternoon after rioters smashed the windows there.  There were about 200 frustrated and fearful people with me, including some cranky children and a tearful young teen who just wanted to get home.  What the perpetrators accomplished was to anger a lot of people and justify the massive police presence that until this point had just seemed like an embarrassing exaggeration.     Read more »

This evening I attended the launch of Canada’s climate calendar.  It’s an interactive tool you can see online which compares Canada’s per-capita emissions with those of other countries in the world.  It is horrifying.     Read more »