IPCC 2009: Memories of times past and time lost

In 2009, I had the privilege of working with Donald Brown, who has a new book and also writes of Dr. Robert Brulle's new study documenting the immorality of climate deniers and their funding, Chris Cuomo and others on the press release of the Ethics Committee that was delivered at COP15 in Copenhagen for the IPCC, when I was a formal observer for the University of Colorado. The following iteration was one of the versions I worked on then. Shortly afterwards, as I blogged in the High Tide COP15 Project, the Danish government went into full panic mode. Police attacked peaceful demonstrators. They shut down the conference, and everyone went home.  The global fossil fuel industries went to work on smear and disinformation campaigns against activists and scientists alike. The world has squandered precious time and lives while climate change has accelerated. J'accuse the fossil fuel industry for their frantic, amoral scramble to amass ever greater profits at the expense of the entire world.

                                  Press Release

Press Conference on Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change

Friday, December 11, 2009 9:30 am, Press Conference Room

The Crucial Missing Element in the Climate Change Negotiations: Duties and Responsibilities, Not Just Narrow National Economic Interest.

Ethics is a practical issue. Tuvalo’s demand for a binding agreement illustrated the Ethical challenges of the negotiations. To make climate justice operational, ethics issue must be included in the text. Ethicists from around the world call on those nations opposing meaningful commitments. Do you deny duties and responsibilities to:

- Tens of millions of Africans whose food and water supply is threatened by increasing drought

- Small island states who see their very existence jeopardized by rising seas

- Much of central Asia faces losing their fresh water supply as the Himalayan glaciers melt

  

Many parties continue to justify their positions in climate change negotiations based on their economic interests alone. Climate change is a matter of justice and morality. COP15 commitments must take responsibility, to protect the poorest peoples and richest ecosystems, who will suffer the direst consequences of climate change.

The COP15 is struggling with the gap between commitments and implementation. Previous failures have created a lack of trust in the process. Parties need to agree on how to make climate justice operational in the text. This press conference examines how nations must negotiate if they acknowledge their duties and responsibilities

-   to prevent dangerous climate change

-   to pay for harms caused by high levels of greenhouse gas emissions

-   to prevent deforestation programs

-   to enable transfer of sustainable energy technologies to poor nations.

This press conference will assist the media in understanding how some parties are taking ethical responsibility while others employ naked self-interest to justify their negotiating positions.    

The press conference has been called by the Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (EDCC. EDCC is a program comprised of 17 institutions around the world working on climate change ethics and whose secretariat is the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University. Other members of the EDCC include the IUCN Ethics Working Group, the Bahai, etc, etc, and individual ethicists from around the world working on the ethical dimensions of climate change. Interested individuals can contact EDCC program coordinator Don Brown at dab57@psu.edu or Dr. Nancy Tuana, Director of the Rock Ethics Institute  at Penn State University at Ntuana@psu.edu

The future is us

Tomorrow, I head to Memphis to begin on the site research and conversations for Fish Story. Meanwhile, I continue to edit my dissertation, with the expectation that I will be done in March. Each page edit is a drawing and another opportunity to consider how to model change in the face of uncertainty.

Page of edit notes from dissertation

In 2010 for the eartotheearth festival http://www.eartotheearth.org/ in NYC, I did one of a series of performance events on fracking, experimenting with how embodiment might be part of the solution. Now, I am coming to the end of my dissertation work and between working on my dissertation, am moving along on Fish Story. These have been experiments in how to model community solutions to climate change.

Memphis, TN., is my next trigger point research site. I am going to meet folks with whom I might work on Fish Story for May, to walk along the river banks there and think about how Memphis might be a trigger point at the center of the North American world: sited between the species loss, fires, droughts, floods, dead zones, factory farms and the Arctic opening of the grand anthropocene, where polar bears are going extinct. I will present a PPT about Fish Story in a Pecha Kucha @ Crosstown Arts http://crosstownarts.org/ in Memphis Thursday night and meet with people from Ducks Unlimited (DU) http://www.ducks.org/ Friday morning. I plan to sing in one of the local churches Sunday and get to Graceland before heading home. At DU, one of my interests will be to study their extensive GIS work.

Yesterday, Chandler Blackington, on Vinalhaven island, Me., where I'm a legal resident, posted in his town blog, that Governor LePage defunded climate change studies for the state. I wrote him, cc: to our town manager, "As far as the climate change issues you referenced and the Governor has abandoned, thank you! I think this is very serious stuff and foolish to ignore. A couple years ago (after COP15), I suggested we start a town committee to deal with how we might be affected, on the advice of NOAA, with whom I'd spoken in Copenhagen.  I offered to serve on that committee. In 1994, the town parking lot was flooded to the Post Office and waves broke under my studio. That scenario might be much worse next time. My proposal was voted down by the Town Selectmen as "not necessary." I sincerely hope this is taken up again and would still be happy to serve. I think it is VERY NECESSARY prudence, even more so than in 2010 because we are now in the cumulative "fast phase" of climate change. I appreciate you bringing it up publically. It was my observation during COP15, that future needed change would not come from policy makers. It will come from people like yourself."

The future is us.

Since Dec 18, 2010, there have been some dark times on this planet. Yesterday, I participated in a  panel, "Culture trashes nature," at Sideshow Gallery http://www.sideshowgallery.com/, with Ruth Hardinger and Jonathan Goodman. One of our threads was about how you fight this environmental war (with unscrupulous corporations and the policy makers that support them) from a sane position of generosity and with the power of art? Not easy, eh? But as I stated last night, as I believed in 2010, and believe even more firmly now, an answer is in social networking and linked platforms: us.

Dec 18, I will be home and it will be exactly three years since I left the IPCC http://www.ipcc.ch/climate change United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen. That was the day I wrote my last post for my blog at the time: High Tide COP15 project http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3532459556869820195#allposts. I posted after the Danish police attacked demonstrators, threatened participants at the Bella Center and closed the doors to official observers, including myself, leaving me shaken and angry.

Right after that, the fossil fuel corporate industries launched 2 devastating campaigns. One campaign was a blitz of disinformation to confuse the alerted public and lull them back to silence. The second campaign was to launch drilling for natural gas: fracking, which is endangering water supplies world wide. fracking would enrich those corporations at the future expense of all life on this planet. We need us to have a future ...  that's why I'm headed for Memphis.