Climate change festival in Auckland

Written By: - Date published: 12:25 pm, May 21st, 2011 - 7 comments
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If like me, you’re are in Auckland today and not at the Labour election year congress in Wellington* – here is something interesting to do. There is a “Festival for the Planet – A Peoples Assembly on Climate Change” at midday – 5pm the Town Hall.

Looks interesting apart from having Te Radar as the MC. But James Hansen and Jim Salinger stand out for me. I’ll amble down to have a look at the workshops.

This showed up in Facebook today – first I’d ever heard of it. So it has already started – but this way I get to miss the opening speeches

* I’m avoiding doing too much travelling at present for medical reasons

7 comments on “Climate change festival in Auckland ”

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  1. lprent 1
    21 May 2011 at 2:23 pm

    Town hall is a bit short of seats for James Hansen. Interesting that in a hands show, the majority heard about by word of mouth

  2. ianmac 2
    21 May 2011 at 3:11 pm

    Te Radar says spiteful things. And in spite of his TV conservation self sufficiency program, was one of the frontmen rubbishing the shower hot water conservation for Smith before the last election.

    • g_man 2.1
      21 May 2011 at 6:04 pm

      Someone complaining about a person saying spiteful things?

      On The Standard?

      .
      .
      .

      (Must … control … impulse to say “Pot, meet kettle” …)

  3. Macro 3
    21 May 2011 at 10:11 pm

    Good event and the racing commentary was brilliant!
    James Hansen again make the case loud and clear for a carbon tax at source which would be redistributed on a per capita basis thereby encouraging individuals to seek more efficient alternative energy solutions. Leave fossil fuels in the ground. I thought the interview was surprisingly good.
    It was always part of the James Hansen tour and advertised on greenpeace, 350.org, etc, websites.

  4. RedLogix 4
    22 May 2011 at 4:37 pm

    And while we futz about on the margins:

    http://globalsymposium2011.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/The-Stockholm-Memorandum.pdf

    The truth is that govts will not act unless compelled to do so. The ‘world’ as we know it is not configured to respond.

    Therefore it will have to ‘end’. This obviously does not mean anything like the rapture nonsense pedalled by literalists and fundie nutters. It means the end of the political and economic world as we know it.

    If you asked an educated person of the Victorian era to imagine what their sci-fi vision of the future would look like it would be something like steampunk. Their vision, however far-reaching, would have been constrained to the materials and methods they could imagine. Quantum mechanics and electronics would have been impossible to conceive, their consequences unthinkable.

    Our own future is equally unknown. But history does not so much repeat as revolve in great spirals, each cycle similar in nature to the previous, but acting in a different domain. The first great era of globalisation from the mid-1800’s to WW1 ended when it ran into the limits of it’s political paradigms… the great Empires collapsed on the contradictions of their tyrannies, inequalities and inability to adapt to new technology.

    The second great era from the mid 1900’s to the current time will end when it too runs into the limits of it political paradigms. The same pattern will repeat, the same tyranny, inequality and inability to adapt is apparent. But this time the new technology is going to be in the life sciences; genetics has laid the foundation for a wholly unimagined set of life technologies that will demand humans become the guardians of the planet rather than it’s abusers. (I’m not limiting this thought to the very primitive GE technologies we currently play about with, rather I’m trying to imply something much broader and more subtle.)

    And as the Edwardian era came crashing to a close (heralded if by nothing else than the sinking of the Titanic and all the social contradictions it exposed), so too is our own. This time the heralds are trumpeting in massed, seried chorus; even the deafest of us suspect something is up.

    In 1914 the world was effectively governed by a tiny handful of monarchs and elites, holding largely unchallenged sway over vast swaths of empire for hundreds, if not a thousand years. By 1918 the world began transforming in a way few would have imagined possible. They imagined steampunk… instead they got the iPad2.