To Beat Big Oil All You Gotta Do is Remove Their Sources of Power!

Watch video at: http://youtu.be/wRy6JXZPrKs

If you’re concerned about climate change, you’ve probably thought “How do you take on the fossil fuel industry?!  They have all that money! They have all that power!  All the Republicans in Washington vote their way every time!  It’s IMPOSSIBLE!”

Oh, stop that!  Nothing’s impossible.  Yes, all those things are true, BUT, the people who are stopping climate solutions are not giant ogres with titanic strength.  They’re mostly a bunch of old guys with bad cholesterol.  

Their “power” comes from the people who cooperate with them!  Fossil fuel employees cooperate because they get their paychecks from them. Congressmen and Senators cooperate because they afraid of getting primaried—that’s a new verb—means they’re afraid they’ll seem too reasonable!  And the people who watch Fox News cooperate because they’ll do anything Fox News tells ‘em! “This is Sean Hannity saying “Touch my loins”, “Okay Sean!” “This is Megyn Kelly saying…”  

I’m not listening!  Even I’d  probably what Megyn Kelly asked me!  She’s too pretty I can’t stand it!

And yet, global warming is, literally, destroying the world!  Not just the ice pack that I roam in search of an honest meal, but the ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD! 

Texas: Check. 

Oklahoma: Check. 

Wall Street: Check.

Everyone who denies climate change cannot expect to run off to a blissful kingdom where gentle rains fall and abundant crops grow and rivers run full.  They cannot all escape to some giant Koch Brothers’ Survival Cave under Cheyenne Mountain.  

There’s no refuge!  Climate change is gonna clock them all upside the head forever and always if we don’t stand up and do something about it SOON.

That would qualify as incentive!  The banking CEO who gets Republican lawmakers to vote his way may decide they need to do something about climate change.  The rancher, who loves Fox News, may tell his senator that he and his neighbors are losing everything to the heat. the fossil fuel employee may decide that his paycheck pails in comparison with a livable planet for his kids! 

But how do we get those people riled up enough to help?

Gee, let’s see….If only there was some way we could get them all to realize climate change is not some hoax.   Hmmm…. 

Duh!  It’s gonna be HOT again next summer!  We’ll have more disastrous storms!  Hell, New York City may get hit with ANOTHER hurricane.  It’s happened two years in a row, why stop there?!

But listen, humans, the real challenge is not to change the hearts and minds of the people who DON’T believe.   What’s gonna make all the difference is when the people who DO believe change THEIR hearts and minds.  We need to be strong!  Brave!  Determined!  Active, not passive!  Committed to removing your consent from a system that's slowly but surely killing everything we cherish about the world. 

You need to be more like POLAR BEARS goddamnit!  And I don’t mean nice, gentle coca-cola polar bears, but Pissed-off polar bears!  Nonviolent pissed-off polar bears.  

Alright!  Now, we’re talkin’!

Groouumph! 

Gene Sharp's Nonviolent Method #1: Public Speeches

So at some point this year the President is going to ask us to step up to support his push to do something about climate DISRUPTION.  And we gotta be ready when that happens! 

Currently this movement follows only a couple leaders, and apparently they don’t have the resources to drum up actions more than a couple times a year.  SO, we all need to use our own creativity, resources, and friends to step in and come up with our own Nonviolent Actions.   So you’re gonna need to know all the nonviolent weapons at your disposal!

In Gene Sharp’s book The Methods of Nonviolent Action, he outlines 198 different methods.  Here’s the list.  Good lord!  Those are just a bunch of words!  Just reading that list is kind of a useless exercise for nonviolent activists.

That’s why Sharp included 300 pages worth of examples, which gives you a much more tangible feel of how these things work…and a lot of them could work for the climate movement!

Today, we’ll look at Method #1: Public Speeches.

Now, lots of times public speeches are lame!  The Serbian resistance movement Otpor decided right from the get-go that their movement wasn’t gonna do speeches! 

But they can work.  It depends on who’s giving the speech and when and where. 

For instance, if you stand on a street corner and give a speech about climate change, it’s not likely to be effective.

BUT, if you’re, President Obama, and you go on at length about climate change in your 2nd inauguration speech, that would qualify as surprising and therefore effective. 

I mean, everyone was like “Holy crap, he talked more about climate change than anything else!  My God, he really means to do something about it!”

It was also big news when mayor Bloomberg endorsed Obama after Hurricane Sandy hit his city.  It depended on the moment!

One of the guys Gene Sharp talks about was a Catholic Priest in Nazi Germany named Bernard Lictenberg who told his congregation that he wished to share the fate of the Jews who were being sent off to concentration camps.  That was brave.  And the Nazis did send him off to Dachau, and he did share their fate.  But thousands and thousands of people were dying, and he did the only thing he could.

Now, no minister in America is gonna get killed if they speak to their congregations for action on climate change, but a lot of people in those congregations do NOT believe in it and do NOT want to hear about it.  So it would be a great moral stand for a member of the clergy to do that.

Also, Republican politicians would be really brave and would have an eye-opening impact if they stood up in favor of action.  You know they can’t ALL believe climate change is just a hoax. 

I mean they got kids and grandkids and they need to do the right thing for them.  They don’t want those grandkids to one day say “Yeah, grampa was a senator but I don’t want to talk about him”

“Why not?”

“He was a climate denier dirtbag!” 

“Oh, that’s horrible!  Now America is a dried up wasteland”.

“I KNOW!  Stupid grandpa!”

Seriously that’s how they’re gonna be remembered.  (Polar bears already talk about ‘em like that.  It’s brutal!)

So public speeches can work depending on who gives the speech and when and where. 

Tomorrow we’ll talk about Method Number 2: Letters of Opposition or Support.

“Oh wow!  He’s gonna talk about correspondence!  Can’t wait!”

Well tune in anyway, we all need to learn all these methods.


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