THE AGE OF STUPID?
Have you seen The Age of Stupid yet? The film stars Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: "Why didn't we stop climate change when we had the chance?"
I don't think it has as much to do with stupidity as with selfishness - I would be interested to know what you think. Check the Age of Stupid website for screenings near you, or how you can organise a screening in your neighbourhood yourself.
The Avaaz Wake-Up call, that I mentioned last week, was a bit low key in Birmingham. I felt a bit conspicuous as the only grey haired person amongst a large group of young Oxfam volunteers. However, overall, the event was a great success: there were more than 2,600 events in 135 countries. Gordon Brown became the first major world leader to agree to the demand to attend the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, where he will press for a fair and effective climate agreement.
In a phone call to a demonstrator in Parliament Square, Gordon Brown acknowledged that organised pressure from the public does make a difference, and "...what people think is impossible can become possible".
The next date for our diaries is December 5th, when Stop Climate Chaos has organised a human wave of support in London, for action on climate change, before the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Transport information can be found on the Wave website.
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Esther Boyd - Esther Boyd is a qualified architect who is dedicated to making Moseley environmentally friendly. She is secretary of local green group SusMo.
There are showings of "Age of Stupid in Kings Heath all day on Saturday October 3rd. They are from 12 noon to 8pm in All Saints Church Hall. It is free but encouraged to give a donation.
Well done to Kings Heath for putting it on.
I don't really agree with Esther's thought that climate change is due to our 'selfishness'. CO2 is a colourless and odourless gas. Most of the time we don't know we are emitting it. People just switch on lights, wash clothes, get to work, they are not choosing to emit CO2. But every-day activities are connected up to huge coal-fired power stations, built in the 1950s when we didn't understand the problem. Now, we have to re-engineer society and deploy rafts of new technologies at rapid speed. For this, we all have to co-operate and share a clear vision of where we need to go. My criticism of the 'Age of Stupid' approach is more that it encourages anger, blame, finger pointing - and we don't have time for that.
Dear John, Erm, if by now you don't know you're emmiting CO2 when you do things like turn lights on, then you've been in a cave for a long, long time and therefore non of this climate change stuff is any of your fault, so your pretty much blameless.
Seriously, we all need to accept blame, liability, responsibility and move on.
Dear Fred
i very much agree that this is now very much a problem about action. The planet really doesn't care whose fault it is, who's stupid, who's unjust etc etc. Every tonne of carbon emitted anywhere is now bad, every tonne captured or not emitted by whoever is good. This is all our descendants will care about. What did we do? I think our education system and the media prepare us to argue about everything. Meanwhile, the world will probably be saved by plumbers, electricians, gardeners and other people of little status in this society, because they actually have the practical skills we need to cut the carbon.