climate denialism as hysteria?

(Posted simultaneously at Immanence.) Dipping once again into the public debate around climate change science — today it’s in the responses to MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel’s op-ed in the Boston Globe, to which no less than 15 comments were added in the couple of minutes it took me to write these first couple of sentences [...]

Read Full Post »

COP-15: a change in the climate of democracy

What makes COP-15 a turning point is that a new set of connections are being forged in the heat of the confrontation of active citizens from around the world with the reality of global political-economic power structures. Paul Hawken’s “largest movement in the world,” the movement of movements made up of environmental, social justice, and indigenous rights civil society organizations — which isn’t a movement yet until it begins to move and act in a coordinated manner — and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “multitude” — the multiple and internally differentiated force that is, or that can become, capable of acting in common toward a global democracy — are both being born today, in the stark meeting of global justice activism with ecological reality. While the mass media portray COP-15 generally as a struggle between the rich North and the poor South — sometimes, depending on their political preferences, singling out either the US or China (and to a lesser extent India and Brazil) as self-interested bully nations who don’t want to be equal partners within a global climate deal (and with the climate deniers as a weird side-show at the scene) — the message of grassroots global activists is that “a new world is being born.” That message has new slogans and now new images to go with it. And it is filtering down to the places around the world where it will resonate most deeply.

Read Full Post »

Latin America in the climate negotiations

Latin America faces severe threats from climate change impacts. However, these countries have faced difficulties in making their voices heard in the recent climate negotiations. Is this a communication problem? What can we expect in the upcoming Copenhagen meeting?

Read Full Post »