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Video of Monbiot & others at recent climate change public meeting

kriptick | 15.11.2007 00:28 | Climate Chaos | London | World

Thursday November 8th saw the Friends Meeting House in London packed out for a tremendous Public meeting organised by Campaign against Climate Change.
 http://www.campaigncc.org/
Speakers were George Monbiot - author and journalist, John Sauven - Director of Greenpeace UK, Sophie from the Camp for Climate Action and Phil Thornhill - National Coordinator of Campaign against Climate Change.



For those who wanted to attend but couldn't, here's the videos of the event on Youtube featuring Monbiot's speech and some of the questions and answers afterwards. Much interesting information was discussed including Monbiot's belief that micro-electricity generation power schemes are maybe not such a good way forward. A more robust plan would be able to cope with an entire country temporarily experiencing zilch renewables available, eg: Britain in freezing fog, by having huge renewable-energy solar and wind farms spread around all the different continents and linked together in a global grid by very long distance DC power lines. Such a bold scheme would of course entail massive global cooperation - somewhat hard to envisage on this warring, greed consumed planet.

 http://uk.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E20B7F6B5E814E7D

kriptick
- Homepage: http://www.campaigncc.org/

Additions

Editing

15.11.2007 11:50

Having looked at the videos, I'm a bit confused by the editing.

The editor obviously has a bit of a thing about Monbiot (each to their own :-) and this has led to a set of clips that misrepresent the meeting.

In particular, Sophie Cooke, on behalf of the climate camp, talked for quite a while on the importance and potential effectiveness of direct action, the social justice aspects of climate change (globally, the rich caused the problem and the poor are the first already suffering its effects), and the need for radical social change to deal with the causes. A lot more relevant than Monbiot's fantasy techno-solutions. She got a great reception.

But here Sophie gets one tiny clip taken out of context so it seems to say that direct action can be left to experts - the opposite of the thrust of her talk that argued direct action can and needs to be a mass movement. Was there a bias in the filming here?

Or has she just been edited out because she was the only woman on stage putting a point of view?

Elephant Spotter


interesting editing..

15.11.2007 12:18

Thanks Elephant Spotter,

I'd just checked out the video thought I'd have rather been cut out completely than just that small comment, in direct response to Phil saying that people marching on the streets should be supporting direct action, acknowledging that there will be a few out there not able to take some kinda of action and that they can support & and be part of direct action in a number of ways..

*sigh*

But way more exciting is that it seems every time I log on to indys around the world someone seem to be shutting down power stations or blockading coal ports.. now that's far more interesting news than what a bunch of us said in a room in London last week...

Sophie

the Speaker from Climate Camp


editing of Nov 8th meeting

15.11.2007 16:11

Elephant spotter and Sophie: you are both right, it does not reflect what was said at the meeting. I uploaded Monbiot's speech straight away and then tried to put the 90 minutes or so of Q and A into 2 x 10 minutes. Given that there is so much interest (pretty surprised), I'll replace the 2 x 10 minutes with a longer 3 x 10 minute version that gives more time to the other speakers.

John Ackers


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