I guess the underlying principle might be, don't make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
Oil companies are radical because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
I'm not sure I'm a very good source of advice since we're kind of making this up as we go along.
Absent the net, we certainly couldn't have organized in 190 countries around the world. It's no substitution for face to face interaction - that's why we have "days of action" where people are in real contact with each other - but it's the cheap (and low-carbon) way to do an awful lot of the planning and organizing. And we can build, for $20k, a website as good as one Exxon can build for $20 million.
There's always the danger that people will simply sign online petitions, the way they used to just mail in checks, and there's the greater possibility we'll just spend our whole lives staring at screens and never get anything done.
All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected.
TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.
It drives me crazy to see so much of this planet's life so casually endangered. The first steps are so easy (drive smaller cars, for instance) that it's very hard to understand why we haven't taken them. But I know that this is the issue our generation will be judged by.
It's our own throat that we are cutting in the end along with everyone else's. We need to be exercising precisely the kind of leadership that might allow us to nudge China and India, say, onto different energy trajectories, in order to improve our own chances of surviving this century.
Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world's poor people depend.
We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.
We have assumed control where once we worked with what we were given.
People in low-lying countries like Bangladesh with almost 140 million people who are managing to feed themselves, whose carbon emissions can't really be calculated (they are a rounding error in the UN's attempts to do national comparisons), and yet, most of whose people are at risk from increased flooding due to rising sea levels.
We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.
... the constant flow of images undercuts the sense that there's actually something wrong with the world. How can there really be a shortage of whooping cranes when you've seen a thousand images of them - seen ten times more images than there are actually whooping cranes left in the wild?
If you consider that there are a million people forced out of their homes by Katrina, multiply that by 150, and then stick those people in countries who, as inconceivable as it seems, are less prepared than we were to deal with the whole thing.
There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don't have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S.
We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
Probably more than anything else, the place that we really see the effects of the power of even the relatively mild temperature increases so far is in the melting of everything frozen on the planet.
Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.
There is basically no one not on the payroll of Exxon Mobil or coal companies who any longer contend that this is not something to worry about.
All the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the [climate] effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.
I think that it is impossible to think of a threat to social justice greater than what we are doing to the earth's atmosphere at the moment.
Permafrost in the soil [is melting], in the boreal and arctic areas in the world, and, probably even more alarming in the last six or eight months, the data on what is happening to the ice shelves in Greenland and the west Antarctic has begun to cause people to radically reassess the earlier conviction that those ice shelves were stable on a kind of century-long time scale.
