Ch9
1. Where is Blockadia?
2. What stopped the Russian government from prosecuting
Arctic Sunrise protesters as pirates?
3. What's Blockadia's simple principle?
4. Oilwatch International leads a global movement to do what?
5. What's the Catch-22 of fossil fuels?
6. What was the Halliburton Loophole?
7. What was the most disliked industry in America in 2013?
8. What does Wendell Berry say it would take to eliminate sacrifice zones and ecological crises?
DQ
- Is the environmental movement part of a larger movement for democracy? 295
- As a young person "concerned about climate change," are you inclined to "take a pass on the slick green groups" (etc.) and head instead to the "barricardes of Blockadia"?
- Are you "hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails" etc.? 296
- Has "your grandma start[ed] to riot" or is climate activism still mostly a millennial preoccupation? 303
- "Social media has allowed geographically isolated communities to tell their stories to the world..." But is the world listening and responding?
- Have you seen Gasland or other films that have raised your awareness of climate issues? Do such films make a significant difference?
- Should climate activists engage in Earth First "war in the woods" tactics like tree-sits? 310
- How should we confront the Catch-22 of the fossil fuel economy? 316
- Is the environmental ethos in the Pacific Northwest on the cutting edge, likely to spread? Or is it peculiar to that place? 319
- Did the 2010 BP oil spill fundamentally change how people think about the environment and corporate threats thereto? Or is that ancient history, already? Why hasn't there been more outrage over the "significant increase" in spills since then?
- If the oil and gas industry are so reviled, why are politicians still so reluctant to confront it? 334
- Is Wendell Berry right, that there would be no ecological crisis if we all just learned to love home sweet home? 336
- Will Blockadia grow, in the years to come? Does the answer depend on the turn of domestic politics in the U.S. this year?
 | Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) |
Awesome to learn Toronto public schools now begin each day by acknowledging they are on Indigenous territory cbc.ca/1.3773050 |
Obama at the U.N.
...And that’s why we need to follow through on our efforts to combat climate change. If we don’t act boldly, the bill that could come due will be mass migrations, and cities submerged and nations displaced, and food supplies decimated, and conflicts born of despair. The Paris Agreement gives us a framework to act, but only if we scale up our ambition. And there must be a sense of urgency about bringing the agreement into force, and helping poorer countries leapfrog destructive forms of energy.
So, for the wealthiest countries, a Green Climate Fund should only be the beginning. We need to invest in research and provide market incentives to develop new technologies, and then make these technologies accessible and affordable for poorer countries. And only then can we continue lifting all people up from poverty without condemning our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair.
So we need new models for the global marketplace, models that are inclusive and sustainable. And in the same way, we need models of governance that are inclusive and accountable to ordinary people.
I recognize not every country in this hall is going to follow the same model of governance. I do not think that America can — or should — impose our system of government on other countries. But there appears to be growing contest between authoritarianism and liberalism right now. And I want everybody to understand, I am not neutral in that contest. I believe in a liberal political order — an order built not just through elections and representative government, but also through respect for human rights and civil society, and independent judiciaries and the rule of law.
I know that some countries, which now recognize the power of free markets, still reject the model of free societies. And perhaps those of us who have been promoting democracy feel somewhat discouraged since the end of the Cold War, because we’ve learned that liberal democracy will not just wash across the globe in a single wave. It turns out building accountable institutions is hard work — the work of generations. The gains are often fragile. Sometimes we take one step forward and then two steps back. In countries held together by borders drawn by colonial powers, with ethnic enclaves and tribal divisions, politics and elections can sometimes appear to be a zero-sum game. And so, given the difficulty in forging true democracy in the face of these pressures, it’s no surprise that some argue the future favors the strongman, a top-down model, rather than strong, democratic institutions...
==
Risky Business: Hollywood Bets Big on ‘Deepwater Horizon’
In Hollywood, films like “Deepwater Horizon” are not supposed to exist.
When a movie’s production budget climbs past $100 million, the money usually flows to superheroes, sequels or remakes. Not to a film based on the last hours of a doomed
oil drilling rig whose fiery demise led to one of the
largest environmental disasters in American history.
“I give
Lionsgate a ton of credit to bet a large amount of money on a story that is definitely going against the grain of what Hollywood is doing right now,” said
Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the veteran producer who shepherded “Deepwater Horizon.” “It took a lot of guts. And they never blinked.”
But there were plenty of bumps along the way for a midlevel studio like Lionsgate venturing outside its comfort zone, where nine-figure budgets are typically reserved for its proven (book-based) franchises like “The Hunger Games” sequels.
An acclaimed indie director hired for his first big-budget movie was pushed out when the studio and producers recoiled from his kaleidoscopic treatment of the night in question. That resulted in a scramble to find a new director and to finish the film before hurricane season arrived. And the Hollywood studios’ ingrained aversion to offend means that the publicity machine is tamping down one of its more surprising elements — a pointed commentary on corporate greed.
Creative and business decisions like these help explain why, when “Deepwater Horizon” arrives in theaters on Sept. 30, it will be a star-driven disaster film promising audiences a life-affirming experience. When the opening weekend nearly always delivers the ultimate verdict on a big-budget movie’s financial success (or failure), “Deepwater Horizon” offers a case study in why we get the multiplex choices we do. Even for a studio admirably taking an expensive chance, there’s such a thing as too much risk.
On the night of April 20, 2010, a series of explosions ripped through the Deepwater Horizon rig 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, following the blowout of an oil well thousands of feet below. In the ensuing maelstrom, 11 men died and dozens more were injured, while millions of barrels of oil were soon spewing into the Gulf of Mexico... (
continues)
