BTW, this is a good example of how motivated reasoning works and how hard it is not to do it. Sorry again Bill.

Come on we’ve got haiku, drummers, chanting and strange dancing. Did you forget to call the giant puppet people? Or the Gitmo detainees? Gotta have them.

CNN or MSNBC would have covered it but for the giant puppets.

At the planned civil disobedience at the coal plant, Wendell Berry delivered a brilliantly brief speech that communicated that because he had tried everything else, it was time for CD. Robert Kennedy shared about what his kids said to him as they drove down through the snow storm from NY to be arrested, James Hansen had to inference what the science is doing to the 350 number in his speech, because (perhaps) Bill McKibben had earlier lead the 350 chant as part of his speech and said nothing about what the trend in climate modeling science is doing to that number.

As Joe has blogged here, that trend more than suggests that the cap and trade approach, which is now the default approach to a politically expeditious means of achieving C02 reduction, is likely, while better than nothing, too little, too late.

If I am getting the post CD (NOT) strategy/affect correctly, such a ramped up feel-good “baby steps” approach to the “hope” that is being pursued (stabilizing the climate) is little more than motivated reasoning. It feels like good thinking but it is not.

Reading Bill’s comment last night after hearing his speech and his exaggerating twitter post after it, inspired this haiku:

when all ‘s said and done,
feeling hopeful, feeling right,
neither stops the night.

IMHO, whoever, and whenever the decision was made to not facilitate the planned CD, the failure to make that clear at the outset at Greenpeace’s Rolling Sunlight truck and stage made a ruse, not a success, out of this event (planned action). Moving forward, a failure to forthrightly address such a perception will constitute a major vulnerability to future efforts.

BTW, I had contemplated doing a solidarity action at the 370 Megawatt coal plant owned by Dynegy here in the mid-Hudson Valley that provides the electricity to my community. I concluded it was both too late and too soon (as I knew too little; had no dialogue successful or otherwise to base an action on. Given the ruse (or whatever) and the resulting media coverage, I am glad that I trusted my gut and reasoning. Given what was (not) done at the DC coal plant I could not have made much sense of my action to a reporter, to say nothing of an editor.

Given your role at GWEN, I would value your critique of the context for a strategy I advocate at the following link. I believe it realistically addresses the economic and environmental crises both concurrently and comprehensively. http://is.gd/lJRy

Having been there, along with thousands of others, I can assure readers of this blog of several things: 1) As Bill says above, there were people of all ages involved, and, I would add, from all walks of life; 2) The video posted above gives only a small glimpse of what was a very well organized and executed event (go to http://www.capitolclimateaction.org for more video, photos and news links); 3) Actions such as this one are going to spread because Americans are finally waking up to the fact that accelerated climate change requires urgent attention, and that we must encourage our leaders to take bold action now! (And it’s not just because of a rapidly changing climate, but also because of peak oil, ocean acidification–and more–that we need to transition away from fossil fuels.)

Stay plugged into the network for more actions such as this one. Then go. Experience shows that our elected officials find a path forward much more quickly when concerned citizens take to the streets to show the way.

When you stop pointing the finger at weather as proof of global warming, we will be less likely to laugh at your snowed on parade.

Negative feedback at the societal level.

[JR: No, the AGW crowd has read the scientific literature and made the observations that say AGW helps make a variety of extreme weather events more likely or more intense. We talk about those extreme events and especially the statistically measurable increase in them. Now it is certainly true that one prediction of global warming theory is an increase in winter precipitation. But in any case, one snow day is quite irrelevant either way.]