Mowing While Rome Burns

So yesterday I Skyped into a "Keystone Strategy Session" hosted by 350.org to see what the plan was to save the planet from climate chaos. The plan, according to Bill Mc Kibben, is, I quote, "to keep mowing the lawn". Underwhelmed? Oh baby. Because Keystone keeps popping back up (like grass) apparently the only thing to do is to keep mowing into perpetuity ( and sending them money). If any of the other "climate movement leaders" on the call were troubled by this Non-Profit Preservation strategy they didn't pipe up. Michael Brune from the Sierra Club threw down the gauntlet by threatening to sue the government, to litigate to the death. The Native American from South Dakota was asked whether another camp was going to be set up and he suddenly got very vague. One suspects the last thing they want is a clusterfuck Woodstock with thousands of white wanna be's and hippies playing flutes to the sunrise.

And the scariest thing is, all these folks act as if they are winning. Brimming with confidence. Which brings us back to disavowal; they know they are getting their ass kicked ( 406 ppm with rate of emissions accelerating) but they act AS IF they don't know it. The biggest hope was placed in the Market, with the "competitiveness" of renewables. The energy market which brought us this crisis will now save us from it. They all sounded like Obama.

Then Mc Kibben was asked about the role civil disobedience would play going forward ( the question I sent in) and he said it was "one tool in the toolbox, but like any tool, if you use it too often it gets dull." Of course the other "tools" they were promoting like signing petitions and writing letters and holding marches and rallies and fighting court battles, these apparently never get dull. And then there is the whole pretense that this was a participatory strategy designing session when it was obvious everything had been pre-decided in the "leaders" closed door meetings. When someone listed the six or eight different fossil fuel infrastructure proposals out there, they just said mobilize around each one, whack-a-mole style. When someone mentioned the failure of stopping banks from investing, they said" try harder", double down on the failed strategy.

Actually, they didn't all sound like Obama Clinton. There was one indigenous Canadian gal who dared to mention colonialism and capitalism as the roots of the problem but she was dismissed with nervous laughter. Those darned Canadians!