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Pedal Power solutions to petroleum dependence and polluting vehicles: Arcata Library Bikes, Pedal Power Produce, and more!

CAOE - Committee Against Oil Exploration - stop offshore oil drilling to protect sensitive habitats and cut petroleum dependence.

Culture Change through music! The Depavers eco-rock!

Take our Pledge for Climate Protection and learn about the Global Warming Crisis Council.

SEI hometown action!
Arcata city council's proclamation against war on Iraq and Kyoto Protocol proclamation.

Overpopulation has become a reality.  Overpopulation Resources and News Tidbits

Sail Transport Network

Fact Sheets
Interviews
Press Releases
APM
Links

Long Distance


Global Warming Crisis Council

Hot climate news: 

CLIMATE CHANGE WREAKING HAVOC WITH SEASONS
Methane Burp? — Move over carbon dioxide, methane's the biggie
The Arctic is warming much faster
— New report for northern nations.
Global Warming Spirals Upwards
— Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have jumped abruptly, raising fears that global warming may be accelerating out of control.  
An ice age for north Atlantic countries just ahead, or starting now:  The Gulf Stream is in trouble due to global warming.  
Also, species extinction from climate change
is to be about one in four worldwide. 
Read the above and other news stories on climate studies on our science page.

Environmental refugees  Searching for a place under the sun
Hot political news:
 Russia supports Kyoto Protocol  

The United Nations links to Culture Change's international editor Pincas Jawetz's reports in this website (CCLetter #46).  He participated in the United Nations' Climate Change Conference in Milan, Italy, Dec.10-12.  His exclusive reports and commentary by Jan Lundberg are on our UN Climate webpage.

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute has free programs in Washington, D.C. on climate change.  Contact them through the EESI webpage.   EESI, founded by members of Congress in 1984, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting environmentally sustainable societies.

Organic agriculture's answer to climate change
From the Saskatoon Newsroom, Dec. 11, by Sean Pratt (excerpt)

Had the United States signed the Kyoto Protocol, it could have met all of its greenhouse gas reduction commitments simply by shifting to organic agriculture.

That is one finding from a long-running agronomic experiment comparing organic and conventional cropping systems.

Researchers at Pennsylvania's Rodale Institute said organic agriculture could be one of the most powerful tools in the fight against global warming.

A complete metamorphosis from conventional to organic farming would reduce annual carbon emissions by about seven percent from 1990 levels, which is the amount targeted for the United States under Kyoto.

"Besides being a significant underutilized carbon sink, organic systems use about one-third less fossil fuel energy than that used in the conventional cropping systems," said the executive summary of the recently released report.  

To read the rest of this news story, visit

www.producer.com/articles/20031211/news/20031211news19.html

The GWCC listserve is running!  To join in the discussion, email us with the subject as GWCC: info@culturechange.org

The Global Warming Crisis Council was formed in July 2003 with a proposal emailed around the world to over 6,000 people familiar with Sustainable Energy Institute and Culture Change.  [see original document at Culture Change Letter #26, July 26, 2003.]  
    Response was strong, and those wanting to get involved are in touch with each other.  A listserve started running in fall 2003.
    Please email Wanda Ballentine to contact the Global Warming Crisis Council and get on the email list.  Suggestions are also welcome for organizing the council and improving this webpage.  Another webpage on the science of global warming is on this site.  Also see the Pledge for Climate Protection.

Hot flashes
- A giant ice shelf the size of Scotland is melting rapidly in the Antarctic, scientists have warned.  See the Oct. 31st story from The Guardian.
- Global warming kills 160,000 a year already, according to a study by scientists at the World Health Organisation and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  The deaths are from side-effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition, and the numbers could almost double by 2020.  Read the news story.

New webpage: Coal: the dirtiest, most plentiful fossil fuel.  Anti-strip mining campaign is covered by our correspondent on the scene.  Climate-change implications for coal use, and its role in the hydrogen technofix, is at culturechange.org/coal.html

The heat wave in France that killed 15,000 people in August 2003 proved three things:
- Climate change can present lethal challenges anywhere, as the globe warms and causes extreme gyrations in temperature and precipitation
- Nuclear power, that France has so much of,, does not help
- Elderly folk (the main victims of the heat) need to be with family, not alone or with strangers
Reuters reported on Sept. 26, 2003:

PARIS - France's August heat wave claimed around 15,000 lives, more than previously thought, the Inserm national medical research institute said yesterday in a report commissioned by the government.
    
The report said there were a total of 56,000 deaths in France in this year's blisteringly hot August - around 15,000 more than in a normal year.

Read  How to feed people under a regime of Climate Change, by Edward Goldsmith, founding editor of The Ecologist magazine.  This new paper has been sent by the author to contribute to the knowledge of the Global Warming Crisis Council.  Goldsmith, of The Ecologist fame, sent Culture Change his book for funders, Climate Crisis, which points out that research on positive feedback loops that add to global temperatures may result in a rise of 15.8 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.  

New Members: 
- Dale Allen Pfeiffer is energy editor of From The Wilderness
-
Richard Hansis, Coordinator, Environmental Science Program, Humboldt State University, Arcata, California 95521
Curtice Jacoby, Legacy - The Landscape Connection, Arcata, California (letter below)
- Lance Olsen, Ambience Project, Missoula Montana
-
Germain Dufour, President, Earth Community Organization (ECO) and  Earth Government,  Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada
- Eban Goodstein, with www.greenhousenet.org, at Louis and Clark University, Portland
-
Dave Paulsen, permaculture and bioregionalism, Bellingham, Washington www.attractionretreat.org/ECOBell/
- Alder Fuller, ProtoTista, Eugene, Oregon www.prototista.org Chaos, Complexity, Symbiosis, Gaia

Principles of the 
Global Warming Crisis Council

—  The scientific community has acknowledged global warming and its certain devastating but unpredictable risks.
—  Fossil-fuel emissions must be reduced by 80% and deforestation must be halted, in keeping with the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 
—  Massive conservation will accomplish these goals, but more likely through the sinking and replacement of today's global-warming economy. 
—  Industrial society has learned almost nothing since becoming aware of the threat of global warming.
—  A new sustainable culture must be fostered that does not need to warm the globe.  Traditional non-Western cultures offer a model for sustainability.
—  There is a war against nature always going on as background to the headline-hogging issues of the day such as Iraq.
—  Positive feedback loops may take global warming out of our hands for now, but this only heightens the need to stop the "Pollution Economy" sooner rather than later.
—  Energy efficiency — e.g., improving cars' fuel-economy and switching technology of propulsion — are too little and too late to be major solutions.
—  Kyoto Protocol was a start.  Citizens must follow up with deep cuts in energy consumption and live a sustainable lifestyle to the extent possible.  Mutual aid and tribal cooperation can assist in this.
—  A philosophy of inclusion, to work in conjunction with others, such as grassroots groups in London and the World Meterological Organisation, aids the GWCC in its goals.
—  A renewable-energy technofix Utopia misleads the public, as petroleum cannot be replaced overall for the present global economy with today's population size.
—  Overpopulation has been reached globally including in the U.S.
—  Those entrenched interests opposing our saving our world from devastating climate destabilization are not countered by the well-funded wing of the environmental movement and its unworkable technofix agenda.
—  The GWCC utilizes networking, research, providing information, fundraising, and direct action either carried out or advocated.
—  Actions taken to soften the fall of petroleum civilization for the sake of one's own household — e.g., turning a driveway and lawn into a food producing garden — respond simultaneously to the global warming crisis by not engaging in purchasing oil-transported food.  
—  The Pledge for Climate Protection, a project of the Sustainable Energy Institute, offers additional specific steps to slash energy waste and emissions, for a more convivial and healthy society.
     From Culture Change Letter #26 by Jan Lundberg, July 26, 2003.

Climate News
Mt. Blanc, Europe's tallest mountain, is melting and closed for the duration.  Read Jon Carroll's brilliant column from the San Francisco Chronicle of August 26, 2003.

"Green" Congressional revolt against Bush

Salon.com's Glenn Scherer has written of the rising support for the U.S. to respect the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions.  Click here

Congressman Henry Waxman takes Bush Administration to task on corrupting science with politics.  
A host of areas of science have been documented as having been interfered with by the White House.  On global warming, some of the skullduggery is of course sad reading, such as careers and sound policy being derailed by the global warmers.  Click on politicsandscience.org from the House of Representatives.

Global Warming Edited Away by White House
Bruce Johansen wrote in the website Klassekampen, Oslo, Norway, on the 7th of August 2003 an editorial on the censoring of EPA report on global warming.  See 
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/glblWarming.html
 
On the climatic delay factor, by Bruce Johansen above article: 
"We as a species will face and solve this problem because by the middle of this century the penalties of doing too little or nothing will become painfully obvious. The only problem with waiting is that correction will be more protracted and painful. The actual effects on our warming Earth trail our fossil fuel emissions by about 40 years. Thus, we are now facing the climatic consequences of fossil-fuel use during the early 1960s, which were much lower than today...
    "Given this feedback delay, humankind by late in the twenty-first century will face roughly two hot, miserable generations before the fruits of corrective action even begin to show. During those two generations, everyone will become convinced that global warming is the issue du jour. Doing nothing to transform our energy base from fossil fuels to renewable forms (such as solar, hydrogen, and wind power) is a very important issue. It becomes more critical with each passing day." 

Europe blisters under heat wave
Massive forest fires ravage continent
Workers try to cool down nuclear plants

Aug. 6, 2003 -  Four nuclear power plants in Germany cut production drastically to avoid overheating water in cooling towers that empty into rivers.
   
In eastern France, technicians sprayed the inner walls of a structure housing a nuclear reactor in Fessenheim with cold water. They were trying to figure out if the technique helped lower the temperature inside.
   
"The idea is to wet the reactor walls on the side that's most exposed to sunlight," said Joseph Sanchez, the plant's assistant director. "We can't say if it works yet.''
   
Temperatures at the plant rose to 48C, two degrees short of the point requiring an emergency shutdown. REUTERS, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Alaskan Warming is Disturbing Preview of What's to Come, Scientists Say 
Alaska is melting.  Glaciers are receding. Permafrost is thawing. Roads are collapsing. Forests are dying. Villages are being forced to move, and animals are being forced to seek new habitats.  What's happening in Alaska is a preview of what people farther south can expect, said Robert Corell, a former top National Science Foundation scientist who heads research for the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment team.



Global warming has caused the Columbia Glacier to retreat 7 miles in the last 20 years, leaving calves of ice in Prince William Sound. Seth Borenstein, KRT.

For the full story, click on www.commondreams.org

Hans Blix, UN inspector who told the truth on Iraq's weapons, and was deliberately intimidated by the Bush Administration, was interviewed by Charlie Rose on U.S. public television on June 24, 2003, right before Blix's retirement.  When Rose asked Blix what his parting idea would be after his career as arms inspector, he said "More important than the weapons of mass destruction is global warming.  We must have anticipatory defense against global warming..."  
    Let us hope Mr. Blix will not promote nuclear energy as a solution to global warming.

letters to the GWCC 
Hi Jan, 
Regarding the ten detailed steps for greenhouse relief and benefits, I believe that protection of native vegetation should be at the top of the list. This is critical to stem off the extreme high temperatures in a heated up world. To achieve this dampening of the temperature flux we must preserve part of each native plant community. 
    Connecting habitat is critical to ecological health. A linked up landscape allows populations of populations to survive thereby perpetuating each species in a changing environment. Also allowing disturbance (such as fire) to occur with natural frequency and intensity which promotes ecological integrity. Native vegetation is our best bet at weathering a changing world supplying humans with water and a cooler climate. A connected landscape with a natural disturbance regime will ensure that all native species will exist somewhere in their historic range and abundance including humans. 
    Curtice Jacoby
    Legacy - The Landscape Connection, Arcata, California

Dear Jan Lundberg, 
    We receive your emails. The last one took us to the website on Global Warming Crisis Council and Pledge for Climate Protection.
    We subscribe to the GWCC and Pledge for Climate Protection. You will, we trust, agree that the 10 Steps for sane sustainable living may have to be revised to make them more topical to conditions prevailing in the poor countries as well as for the poor people in the highly exploitative affluent countries.  Our voluntary organisations, Save Bombay Committee and Prakruti ( Sanskrit word for nature) work for environment protection and finite resource conservation as well as promote natural living and sustainable agriculture. We oppose public programmes that support motorisation, urban congestion, commercial agriculture  and we work out alternatives for improving the quality of life for all living beings. 
    We are extremely worried about Climate Warming. We are concerned about the recent changes which show that global warming has already arrived. You have referred to the World Meterological Organisation (see July 2 press release). We would like to remain informed on such studies. We try to keep our authorities and concerned citizens informed on studies and forecasts as well as suggest programmes that can reduce strain on the earth. We would be happy to render any help in your efforts from this side. 
Best wishes, Kisan Mehta 
President, Save Bombay Committee and Prakruti 
620 Jame Jamshed Road, Dadar East, 
Mumbai 400 014 India 
Tel: 00 91 22 2414 9688  Fax: 00 91 22 2415 5536

___________________________________________________

Reaping the Whirlwind: Extreme weather prompts unprecedented global warming alert 
The Independent (UK), 03 July 2003 

      "In an astonishing announcement on global warming and extreme weather, the World Meteorological Organisation signaled last night that the world's weather is going haywire. In a startling report, the WMO, which normally produces detailed scientific reports and staid statistics at the year's end, highlighted record extremes in weather and climate occurring all over the world in recent weeks, from Switzerland's hottest-ever June to a record month for tornadoes in the United States - and linked them to climate change... 
      "Global average land and sea surface temperatures in May 2003 were the second highest since records began in 1880. Considering land temperatures only, last May was the warmest on record. It is possible that 2003 will be the hottest year ever recorded. The 10 hottest years in the 143-year-old global temperature record have now all been since 1990, with the three hottest being 1998, 2002 and 2001. The unstable world of climate change has long been a prediction. Now, the WMO says, it is a reality."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=421166


Mike Gann, Humboldt County, northern California farmer

Take the 
Pledge for Climate Protection

Let the beautiful Earth provide

Here are 10 vital steps to slow global warming and climate destabilization. Some of these steps may be difficult at first, but all are fun, save money, and offer exercise and social opportunities. Apparently, government and greenhouse-gas generating corporations are not up to the task of saving the climate. So, let us act for the Earth at this critical time. The world’s transport sector is the worst offender in greenhouse-gas emissions—especially the U.S. car fleet. Waiting for the “technofix” for industry could be ecocide: renewable energy cannot support a huge consumer economy; it is expected to rely on the same unsustainable infrastructure, and dwindling cheap petroleum in its diverse uses cannot be fully substituted.

A climate background section follows the Pledge, and next are the steps in greater detail: guided explanations and their benefits to you, society, and our Earth. Our postcard featuring these steps is available: email us to request postcards (tree-free paper; 25 cents each or $14 for 100).

The Earth lovingly provides its wondrous array of species, food, water and climates for our survival, so let’s save it and be proud and conscious of what we are bequeathing to the next generations.

“I pledge to begin taking as many of the following steps as I can to stave off the worst effects of global warming, and spread the word.  In so doing I will cut fossil fuel use.  I will do some or all of the following:

1.   Cut down on driving my vehicle, or carpool. I will walk or bike, and not buy a car if I do not have one (best of all). I will support and use mass transit. I may work closer to my home.

2.   Cut down on working just for money: I can thereby barter more, and cut down on commuting.

3.   Depave my driveway, or help others’ depave their driveways, or depave parking lots, and grow food in depaved land.

4.   Unplug or retire my television, and perhaps go off the electricity grid. I will reduce energy for heating, and share appliances such as my oven with neighbors, and not buy or use power tools or jet skis, etc.

5.   Publicly oppose new road construction and road widening in my community, to start undoing sprawl, prevent growth in traffic, and halt the spread of forest roads allowing clearcuts.

6.   Take vacations without jet air travel, and avoid career activity dependent on jet travel.

7.   Plant trees, collect rainwater, and avoid overusing municipal water as it is energy-consumptive (and thus may emit CO2, the main heat-trapping gas that fossil fuels release).

8.   Buy local products, buy as little plastic as possible, carry a travel mug. Minimize consumption. Support alternative plant materials to cut down on petrochemicals and trees for paper. Avoid eating animal products especially shipped-in beef.

9.   Not bring more children into the world, or limit my offspring to one, and possibly adopt. I recognize the threat of overpopulation.

10.   Inform my community and the greater national and global community on the need to take action such as the above for climate stability.”

Ten detailed steps for greenhouse relief and benefits

1. Drive your car less, or give it up. Perhaps you can try carpooling or renting a car. Eventually you could move your residence closer to work, or find a job closer to home. Ride a bike, walk, take the bus or the train. Use bike-carts for hauling. Each gallon of gasoline burned means five pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. The U.S. burns over 115 billion gallons a year.

2. Cut down on working just for cash. Personal arrangements reduce commuting and boost community. Garden or farm locally so you can share in the food. Help clean or repair someone’s home, and in return perhaps get your hair styled or get a massage! Do some child care or teaching in your immediate neighborhood so others don’t have to drive their kids, and you may be compensated in the form of getting some clothing, firewood or music lessons. Establish local currency.

3. Depave your driveway or someone else’s. Grow food. Tear up a parking lot. Good soil for growing food is often under asphalt and concrete, except when a bed of rocks was put in and soil scraped away. Narrowing a road (which calms traffic and lowers the “urban heat island effect” of pavement) can allow for all-important tree planting. Create compost with kitchen scraps and garden clippings, for growing depaved veggies. Save urine for fertilizing trees; dilute it for garden plants.

4. Unplug the television and other electric or motorized appliances or toys. Read books, play non-electric musical instruments, and talk with your family. Get news and entertainment from a solar or handcrank radio. Get off the grid: use no electricity in first one room, then others. Reduce heating. Share ovens: Six loaves of bread can bake at once instead of one-this means getting together with neighbors! Go to bed early so as to not turn night into day. Use non-petroleum oil lamps. Minimize outdoor lighting. No motorized recreational toys or two-stroke engines. Push-mow lawns; bring back the scythe to clear fields.

5. Halt road construction at local, state and national levels. More roads and wider roads bring about more car and truck traffic and CO2 emissions, and allow sprawl development which means more electricity-demand and less green space. Roads are the way forests have been clearcut. There should be no compromise: our biosphere is running out of time. Cheap oil is running out too fast for myriad roads to be useful.

6. Reject the jet: Take vacations without air travel. Sail. Go into a line of work not requiring jet travel. Jets are less energy efficient than cars, per capita, comparing a jet full of passengers to one person driving. Forget jet skis too!

7. Plant trees on lawns (including golf courses), and everywhere: they suck up CO2. Vital places for restoration include stream and river banks, and dirt roads that have been closed. (Do close roads; the Earth would approve.) Hope that increasingly violent storms due to global warming will not destroy forests and plants too badly. Collect rain water and use water sparingly for washing, especially cars, as pumping municipal water can use much fossil-fuel energy that adds to global warming.

8. Buy and consume locally: This cuts down on petroleum-based transport. Also, buy smart: little or no petroleum plastic. Reuse paper bags and glass containers. Support sustainable, nontoxic materials-industries such as hemp: it replaces pulping of trees. Buy in bulk. Reuse and recycle everything including kitchen scraps for compost.  Avoid eating animal products especially shipped-in beef.  Consume no factory-farm animal products; the herds create methane and demand great quantities of electricity and petroleum. Earth’s petroleum—oil and natural gas—will be virtually gone before 2050. Growing food organically does not use fertilizers made from natural gas or pesticides from oil.  To improve diet for health and localization, look into www.living-foods.com.

9. Reduce population growth: Adopt a child instead of reproducing, but bearing one child is better than adding two to the population. Fewer consumers especially in the highest per capita energy-using nation (the U.S.) means lower global-warming emissions. Why bring another life into an overpopulated, greenhouse world? Instead of “More Jobs” for more people, what about less people? More “jobs”=more CO2 emissions.

10. Community action: Aim it toward governments and big corporations. If today’s level of outcry against genetically engineered food and the excesses of world corporate trade were combined, that might be enough to get the ball rolling. So, write letters, demonstrate in the streets, form boycotts, and attend city-council and county-supervisor hearings. Use the Internet to email this, and link websites to www.culturechange.org. Take loving action to discourage fellow citizens’ climate-changing habits. Good luck to us all; we are all one.

***

The Beautiful Earth Provides

by Jan Lundberg

Our world is wondrous and still is mysterious. May it always contain and nurture development of species, and rocks too, in all their amazing variety and function, as vital to the whole. Simply because civilization recently came along and allowed overpopulation of one confused species (most of us by now), does not mean we should give up hope for resuming our evolution in an accepting, joyful fashion.

As daunting as today’s problems are—that we have foisted on the future as well—we are fortunate to be here and alive. In our time on the Earth we need to love one another and our common home, for our own happiness and peace of mind, as well as for securing for the future the beauty of this little third stone from the Sun. Our achievements can be said to be awesome, but perhaps the best of them return our attention to the original state of abundance shared by all: “Please don’t destroy these lands/Don’t make them desert sands.” (the Yardbirds, mid 1960s)

What you may have already known:
Greenhouse gases are building up due to human activity. The result is a measurable rise in average global temperature of one degree Fahrenheit from one hundred years ago. That is amazing in geohistory, and the trend is accelerating. The hottest seven years since record keeping began have been in the 1990s. The resultant distortion of the planet’s sensitive climate system is now bringing on sea-level rise and new patterns of drought, affecting crops and fisheries. More intense storms are part of rapid global warming; this phase has begun. Four-fifths of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is from fossil fuels combustion. Meanwhile, industry propagandists (fossil-fuel lobbyists and corporate news-media commentators) spin myths that more carbon is good for plant growth, and that there is scientific debate on global warming. The grains of truth in those concepts are more than offset by the reality of deforestation and loss of fertile soils that are drying and eroding as never before. Desertification has accelerated, but is nothing new as a by-product of civilization.

What you may NOT have known:
Current climate change from global warming is happening more rapidly than expected by scientists and their computer climate-change models, because the models do not incorporate the effects of humans’ actions such as deforesting the Amazon rainforest. Climatologists warn that if the Earth loses much more precipitation-regulating forests, then warming and droughts could rapidly intensify. Ice caps are melting, most glaciers are in retreat, and huge chunks of Antarctic ice shelves are breaking off, promising to boost ocean temperature and sea-level rise several times more than the models forecast. The U.S. had its warmest spring on record this year, which followed the warmest winter on record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said this year the climate is warming at “an unprecedented rate.” If cooling sulphur emissions and aerosols—which may cease in production, and do not linger long in the atmosphere—are taken into account, global warming is significantly greater than calculated.

What we are putting into the atmosphere today will not be felt or detected in terms of global warming for another 50 years or more. The discernible warming today due to fossil fuel burning comes from prior to 1950. Not to slow global warming now is madness.

Positive feedback loops mean that carbon or methane “sinks” become greenhouse gas sources (emitters), and rising temperatures cause more release of the gases, causing quicker global warming which releases more gases more quickly, and so on—the runaway greenhouse effect. The Arctic’s permafrost is melting, releasing CO2 and methane contained there; ocean temperatures are rising which kills phytoplankton that soak up carbon; ocean water expands when heated and would engulf more land, killing vegetation that releases CO2. Meanwhile, bodies of water hold heat while ice reflects it away. Vast amounts of frozen methane on sea bottoms can be released, contributing to oceanic and atmospheric warming. Species are being driven extinct at a rate of perhaps over one hundred a day, before much global warming has even hit.

Individual and mass action is clearly required now; we must not wait to see what Al Gore would do. He supports more highway building, which increases motor vehicle use. U.S. automobiles are the single biggest contributor to greenhouse-gas emissions. If non-petroleum fuels were the new propulsion for vehicles, the amount of CO2 emissions would increase with electric vehicles charged up on a fossil-fuel electric utility grid. But most emissions from cars are from the mining and manufacturing of the cars and components.

The Kyoto Protocol, a United Nations-spawned proposed treaty adopted in 1997, calls for the U.S. to cut greenhouse gases by 7% of 1990 levels. The Senate has not yet ratified it. Meanwhile, emissions have risen, to over 11% beyond 1990 levels. So, emissions are supposed to go down by 18% between 2008-2012, assuming they stopped going up now. The revised goal for arithmetic accuracy by then may have to be 25%, although that is less than half of what the climate needs—assuming other nations came through too. Unless this happens, the result may be the runaway greenhouse effect. Scientists with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in 1995 that the world’s fossil-fuels emissions reduction must be 60-80%. In Kyoto, Fossil Fuels Policy Action was advised that transport is the sector accounting for the rise in greenhouse gas emissions in the 1990s. To offset this means no new roads globally. It means retiring cars as Cuba did upon losing its Soviet oil. It means massive birth control. It means neighbors sharing the use of ovens to cook meals, and more.

In June 2000 the San Francisco Chronicle referred to the “Global Warming Debate” in a headline. This adds to confusion and prevents needed action. The reality of climate-change is not getting through, despite the alternative media. The U.S. government demands cheaper gasoline from the oil companies and more oil from OPEC. With that kind of leadership, when it knows full well what global warming is doing, our choosing lifestyle change on the individual level is what the Earth demands. In the process of a mass movement we will save money and improve health and sociability.

Due to heatwaves at present, perhaps due to global warming, energy shortages exist for electric power. This seems like the best reason and time to implement Kyoto-type cuts in consumption to cut emissions.

The “technofix” hope, pinned on renewable energy, can be a misleading dead-end when we consider dwindling oil’s unique applications, and we face existing overpopulation propped up by cheap petroleum. The technofix is well supported in the environmental movement’s literature because the industrial approach gets well funded. The inefficient, overbuilt infrastructure that the technofix would attempt to preserve relies on oil’s non-energy uses: e.g., asphalt, tires and plastic.

This document’s list of steps to take is limited. Be creative! Eventually, a natural balance can be restored, and we will along the way achieve local food-supply security through non-petroleum farming and non-oil transport and trade. The steps in the Pledge for Climate Stabilization would aid the grassroots movement to fight climate destabilization.

Legislation and court decisions limiting secondhand smoke was possible through active respect for individual and public health. To pass and enforce laws against motor-vehicle exhaust is harder than fighting tobacco companies, because the national and global economy would collapse without ongoing sales of new motor vehicles. Some would welcome collapse, but society is already challenged to adequately care for stockpiles of nuclear weapons and radioactive waste.

There is hope in grassroots, nonviolent direct action. It is peaceful when people in the opposition—those in denial—are thought of as lacking information or in experience in using courage. Shutting down the WTO meeting peacefully in Seattle last fall proves people can be motivated to turn off the televisions and computers, get out of their cars, and make a long-term difference.

See Culture Change's United Nations Climate Change Conference page.
Check out the website of the Campaign against Climate Change/Rising Tide  
and The Independent's report on the alarming findings of the World Meterological Organisation
Climate change could be next legal battlefield: Climate Justice Programme 
The ABC's of global warming from Environmental Defense, Inc.
Hear Have a Global Warming Day by The Depavers
See City of Arcata's adoption of Kyoto Protocol's goals  
For general global warming information visit www.earthisland.org and www.theecologist.org
Climate Crisis - a Briefing for Funders,
a book by the Climate Initiatives Fund, is available on request by contacting Jon Cracknell at jon@climatefund.org or Simon Retallack at simon@climatefund.org.
See SEI's/Culture Change's Donate page 

Back to Home Page

Are you ready for the FALL OF PETROLEUM CIVILIZATION?

Articles of interest:
Measuring and controlling the actions of governments 


Anti-globalization protest grows, with tangible results. 
WTO protests page

Tax fossil-fuel energy easily
by Peter Salonius 

UK leader calls War on Terror "bogus"

Argentina bleeds toward healing by Raul Riutor

The oil industry has plans for you: blow-back by Jan Lundberg

It's not a war for oil? by Adam Khan

How to create a pedestrian mall by Michelle Wallar

The Cuban bike revolution

How GM destroyed the U.S. rail system excerpts from the film "Taken for a Ride".

"Iraqi oil not enough for US: Last days of America?"

Depaving the world by Richard Register

Roadkill: Driving animals to their graves by Mark Matthew Braunstein

The Hydrogen fuel cell technofix: Spencer Abraham's hydrogen dream.

 

Ancient Forest Protection in Northern California. Forest defenders climb trees to save them.

Daniel Quinn's thoughts on this website.

A case study in unsustainable development is the ongoing crisis in Palestine and Israel.

Renewable and alternative energy information.

Conserving energy at home (Calif. Title 24)


Culture Change mailing address: P.O. Box 3387 , Santa Cruz , California 95063 USA
  Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax)
Web: http://www.culturechange.org
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Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.