Raising politicians' awareness (I hope)

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is hosting the Climate Summit to engage leaders and advance climate action [...] to reduce emissions and strengthen climate resilience and mobilize political will for an ambitious global agreement by 2015 that limits the world to a less than 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperature.

That is a quotation from the Climate Change Summit website. The preliminary meetings will take place in New York next week, and although I'm not travelling to New York to take part in the People's Climate March there tomorrow (100,000 people expected), I did get on my bike(!) last Thursday, to participate in a demonstration in Ottawa. A photograph of this, our local demo, is going to be projected in New York by Avaaz, one of many such photos from all over the world. The idea is to impress upon the politicians that they must act now to restore the health of our beloved planet, recently so jeopardized by man-made pollution. As I write this 2,100,976 people have signed a petition calling on our "national, local and international" leaders

... to keep global temperature rise under the unacceptably dangerous level of 2 degrees C, by phasing out carbon pollution to zero. To achieve this, you must urgently forge realistic global, national and local agreements, to shift our societies and economies to 100% clean energy by 2050...

"The Elders" and their spokesman Kofi Annan are passionate supporters of this cause and beg us to vote in our elections accordingly:

Let us send a clear and unequivocal signal that failure to act will have consequences at the ballot box for politicians and for the bottom line of businesses. If leaders are unwilling to lead when leadership is required, people must.

Going up the steps

The people who turned up on Parliament Hill in Ottawa were a predictably left-wing bunch, the most prominent being the people with banners or the ones (some of them children) carrying symbolic green hearts. All the generations were represented. Ottawa's "Raging Grannies"––of whom more below––looked very colourful. A pretty girl in a green T-shirt leading the team of organisers rallied the supporters through a megaphone and told us all to "Go up on the steps and look like as many people as possible!" for our photo opportunity. A couple standing behind me were talking in Mandarin Chinese. As we stood on the parliament steps in the warm sunshine, a young man took possession of the megaphone and told us that as he had crossed Canada on a unicycle to promote the message, he'd been greatly encouraged. Everywhere, people are supportive, he said; all it takes is will power. At least that was the gist of what he said. He spoke in English, very fluently.

Ending subsidies to oil and gas corporations is, I think, something that’s supported on paper across partisans lines, and hasn’t happened. Same thing with regulations on oilsands. We don’t have a national energy plan. There’s a couple key pillars that are pretty simple policies, but without those we can expect emissions to keep rising and rising.

Then five of the Raging Grannies came forward to sing a protest song and we were all encouraged to join in the chorus:

Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my planet to me!

Another choir of activists sang another couple of protest songs. Then after the group photo we came down from the steps and marched around the Eternal Flame in its ornamental pond. After that we could disperse.

The bottom line of all this is that some of us are willing to pay more taxes if that's what it takes to save the world.

There was a pertinent article about the threat to climate change action in the Guardian this week

The right-wing denialists [...] often call themselves conservatives. They are not. At the heart of true conservatism is the belief that each new generation forms the vital bridge between past and future, and is charged with the responsibility of passing the earth and its cultural treasures to their children and grandchildren in sound order. History will condemn the climate change denialists, here and elsewhere, for their contribution to the coming catastrophe that their cupidity, their arrogance, their myopia and their selfishness have bequeathed to the young and the generations still unborn.

In the face of extinction

A third of all animals and plants on earth face extinction -- endangered blue whales, coral reefs, and a vast array of other species. The wave of human-driven extinction has reached a rate not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But there is a plan to save them -- a global agreement to create, fund and enforce protected areas covering 20% of our seas and lands by 2020. Right now, 193 governments are meeting in Japan to address this crisis. But without public pressure, they are likely to fall short of the bold action needed to avert the collapse of ecosystems the world over.

This has been written on Avaaz' front page on the Internet this week, encouraging people to sign the following petition (admittedly there's a split infinitive in it, but to point that out is not to denigrate the passion behind the words):

"To all parties of the Convention on Biodiversity:
One third of Earth's species face extinction. We call on you to urgently agree to create, execute and fund the protection of 20% of our oceans and lands by 2020. Only bold and immediate action will protect our planet's rich diversity of life."

(my underlining)

Tomorrow is the day that the petition will be presented to the summit conference in Nagoya and it looks as if it will have well over 600,000 signatures. Whether that number means anything in comparison to the billions who don't care remains to be seen, but what impresses me (I signed on Tuesday) is the rate at which the signatures are coming in, thirty per minute or more by my estimation, the names of "Recent Signers" appearing briefly on the sign up page in real time, and the variety of places from which people are signing. Consider the time zones from which they're signing, too! I have been watching this page with fascination, on and off, for the past couple of days and just now, out of curiosity and for the sake of this blog post, jotted down the different countries represented on the screen during a 10 minute span. They were Singapore, Congo, Uruguay, Brazil (lots of people from Brazil), the UK, Canada, the Bahamas, Peru, Guadeloupe, France, Greece, Honduras, Bolivia, the USA, Mexico, Switzerland, Australia, Chile, Argentina, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Venezuela, S. Korea, India, New Zealand, Italy, Columbia, Germany, Ireland, Costa Rica, Spain, Austria, Poland, Nicaragua, Belgium, Burkina Faso and Fiji.

The writing on the wall

AVAAZ, meaning Voice, is "the world's largest on-line advocacy network" with 20,000 new members joining each week, apparently, most of us having heard about it from a relative or friend; it was my daughter who persuaded me to join about a year ago and I, along with thousands of others, mostly hopeful, have just sent a message of encouragement to Barack Obama on a "virtual wall" that AVAAZ has named The Obama Inauguration Hub. Messages are being posted at a prodigious rate from all over the world, so that mine dropped off the bottom of the screen within minutes. I wonder who will read them (I doubt if the President will have time, although I think people have decided to participate in this are under the impression that he's open to suggestion) apart from the like-minded members of this organisation. An even more imaginative ploy by AVAAZ was to erect a real wall for writing on, in a very public part of Washington, when Mr Obama was first elected.

I don't know whether this sort of action changes minds, but at least the impulse is there and it's indicative of a worldwide longing for change. Some of the people writing on these walls are immoderately emotional and many say "Don't let us down, Mr Obama!"—a terrible burden for the man. It's interesting to see that very few messages relate to the colour of his skin. I've just taken another look at the Hub, and someone has posted:

Obama please talk about compassion as a new weapon.