Awakening a Sleeping Society

Dear Folks,

I am thinking in this period of time when OWS (Occupy Wall Street) is gearing up for a further attempt to awaken a sleeping society, that we must help its leaders consider the many issues that are at stake. Please feel free to comment using the functionality on this blog! 

OWS needs to help people, especially in the South (examples now, Mississippi and Alabama), where l4% roughly of the citizens of these two states believe that Obama is a Christian and over 40% believe he is Muslim. Obama has his problems. However, compared to the nightmare of having another Republican president and a Republican controlled Congress, Obama is a gift to democracy. Free of any more need for monied support if he is elected, he can proceed to act on his authentic values, which I believe are close to OWS. Most importantly, we know from political history that a movement like OWS can profoundly effect the agenda of a president and a national Congress (as well as democratic legislatures and governors in every state)  What is your deepest concern?



Here is my first big concern, next to removing money power from government, which we already know is OWS's biggest concern. This is also the big one for my son Martin who specialized at the University of Southern California on the environment [note from Martin that he studied International Relations with focus on African affairs but as well on environmental and other pressing issues]. He has now been living for 10+ years in Ireland working for an environmental group called Cultivate and also for a University on similar issues.  It is for me, him and many in the world...  the environment (the big concern). It is too easy to forget this agenda and the danger that this presents to all of us, as led by the Republicans and their allies, the l%. I have just read an article in a venerable Catholic magazine called Commonweal (its March 23 issue) entitled "Global Suicide Pact: Why Don't We Take Climate Change Seriously. " The author,  Richard W. Miller is an associate professor of theology at Creighton University and editor of "God, Creation and Climate Change."  I want to first note the following two immediate facts that are pertinent in terms of politics:

    (1) In 2009,  James Hanson, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote a book warning about global warming entitled Storms of my Grandchildren, relating what our grandchildren will be facing even only 20 yrs from now if we don't take action. A quite conservative man from the midwest, he has been arrested several times protesting at strip-mine sites and along with l200 also arrested for an "act of civil obedience at the White House having to do with the Keystone XL Pipeline" and its serious potential earth and climate damage.

    (2) A minority of Americans, 26% who deny that the planet is warming or that humans are the primary cause and have only 2% of scientists supporting their view,  have blocked our involvement in these issues on a world-wide scale. Most republicans in congress and a few supporting conservative democrats have limited our participation in the last world conferences in Copenhagen [and Durban] and Obama has not used his bully pulpit to push a world attempt to hold world warming to no more than 2 degrees C nor to support and also to further an earth-warming bill in the Senate after it passed the House before 2010. Since then "things have gotten worse. In unanimously voting against an amendment to accept scientific consensus on climate change, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce committee have made official what has long been true in practice, that the Republican Party is the only political party in the world that rejects the "settled fact" (the words of the US National Academy of Science) that human beings are the primary drivers of a warming climate." (pages l2, l5)(my emphasis).

 Now for only a few facts about our actual situation. The article reports serious evidences of a serious climatic change everywhere in the world. For example, in 20l0 Nashville Tennessee experienced flooding that killed 26 persons and caused great widespread damage. In the same year, l6.5 feet of rain fell in five days in northwestern Pakistan causing floods that  killed l600 people, leaving l6 million homeless and destroying 6 million acres of crops. In the same year Brazil, France, Sri Lanka,Mozambique, the Philippines and South Africa experienced serious floods. The flood in South Africa led to the smallest wheat harvest in 20 years, and at the same time, in Russia a heat wave caused a loss of 40% of its wheat harvest. That same heat wave caused the death of 56,000 people  and 300 billion dollars in damage to forest fires, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Again in 20l0, China's Shandong Province suffered  its worst drought in 200 years.

 NOW NOTE THIS, ALL THE ABOVE DAMAGE AND OTHERS I CAN'T REPORT FURTHER OCCURRED BECAUSE EARTH WARMING INCREASED BY ONLY  0.8 C ( 1.4 DEGREES F.)
 
 World wide experts seek to limit warming to 2 degrees C. To maintain this limit, the U.S. alone must participate in serious carbon reductions until it is zero by 2050.

 Given the above, (3) Politically there is still time to overcome a disaster that UN Secretary General Ban K-moon calls the "global suicide pact."

 According to Mark Jacobson, a leading researcher in this field, "There are no  technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean renewable energy sources. It is a question of whether we have the societal and political will."

   Only a mass movement of rational voices like OWS will make this possible. Let us hope and pray we will succeed.

- John Giannini