May 17, 2013
After years of being stuck, the national conversation on climate change finally started to shift — just a little — last year, the hottest year on record in the U.S., with Hurricane Sandy flooding the New York subway, drought devastating Midwest farms, and California and Colorado on fire. Lots of people were wondering if global warming had finally arrived, here at home. This week, stories about this new reality.
http://www.democracynow.org – As the carbon dioxide in the air hits 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, some are arguing that the best way address climate change is to use the controversial practice of geoengineering — the deliberate altering of the Earth’s ecological and climate systems to counter the effects of global warming. Supporters of geoengineering endorse radical ways to manipulate the planet, including creating artificial volcanoes to pollute the atmosphere with sulfur particles. Many scientists and environmentalists have raised concerns about geoengineering technologies designed to intervene in the functioning of the Earth system as a whole. We’re joined now by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. Hamilton’s new book, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering,” lays out the arguments for and against climate engineering, and reveals the vested interests behind it linking researchers, venture capitalists and corporations.
Watch the full interview with Clive Hamilton on Democracy Now! at http://owl.li/ldev9. In his new book, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering,” Clive Hamilton lays out the arguments for and against geoengineering — the deliberate altering of the Earth’s ecological and climate systems to counter the effects of global warming. Hamilton discusses some of the key players lining up to profit from geoengineering, and some of the worrying experiments that they’re funding.
TRANSCRIPT
CLIVE HAMILTON: Most corporations are kind of staying at arm’s length from all of this, as indeed governments are, for the time being. But quietly, behind the scenes, you can see them taking interest. There are a number of powerful or wealthy venture capitalists. Bill Gates is the sort of prominent player here. He’s invested in a range of geoengineering schemes. You can go to the U.S. patent office, and you’ll find Bill Gates’s name on a couple of patents for geoengineering. We’re also starting to see the oil companies, even Exxon, BP, Shell, starting to take an interest. They’re sort of pulling people into independent groups to produce reports, advocating research into geoengineering. And you’ve got some kind of rogue geoengineers, sort of cowboy capitalists, who are going out there right now and doing these kinds of experiments in the ocean, for example.
As the carbon dioxide in the air hits 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, some are arguing that the best way address climate change is to use the controversial practice of geoengineering — the deliberate altering of the Earth’s ecological and climate systems to counter the effects of global warming. Supporters of geoengineering endorse radical ways to manipulate the planet, including creating artificial volcanoes to pollute the atmosphere with sulfur particles. Many scientists and environmentalists have raised concerns about geoengineering technologies designed to intervene in the functioning of the Earth system as a whole. We’re joined now by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. Hamilton’s new book, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering,” lays out the arguments for and against climate engineering, and reveals the vested interests behind it linking researchers, venture capitalists and corporations…..(read more).
Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to challenge Monsanto’s bullying of small farmers, influence on public policy, and aggressive promotion of GMOs.
Years ago I was working for a well-known Indigenous environmental and economic justice organization known as the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN). During my time with this organization I had the privilege of working with hundreds of Indigenous communities across the planet who had seen a sharp increase in the targeting of Native lands for mega-extractive and other toxic industries. The largest of these conflicts, of course, was the overrepresentation by big oil who work— often in cahoots with state, provincial First Nations, Tribal and federal governments both in the USA and Canada—to gain access to the valuable resources located in our territories. IEN hired me to work in a very abstract setting, under impossible conditions, with little or no resources to support Grassroots peoples fighting oil companies, who had become, in the era of free market economics, the most powerful and well-resourced entities of our time. My mission was to fight and protect the sacredness of Mother Earth from toxic contamination and corporate exploration, to support our Peoples to build sustainable local economies rooted in the sacred fire of our traditions. ….(read more)
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