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The Uprising grows. And any power gained by The People in the coming months will be equal to their determination to meet potential State violence with joy and resolve. If authorities do use violence, it will be for the purpose of inciting retaliation. Because the real battle is not really over power, but over legitimacy. If We The People allow violence to define our battle, they will win. If they use violence and it is met with nonviolent determination, they will lose their legitimacy. And we will win. So let’s win.
Thousands of people have descended on Wall Street in New York City, and they are going to stay there. For more info and ways to help, click here.
What does #OCCUPYWALLSTREET have to do with climate change? Connect the dots:
We need to drastically reduce carbon and other heat-trapping gasses from entering the atmosphere, and we need to do it yesterday. The fastest way to do that is to pass a tax on carbon. To pass legislation like that, we need politicians who aren’t beholden to the interests of corporations, which requires the reversal of the recent Citizens’ United Supreme court ruling, which allows corporations to give unlimited amounts of money to candidates they like. We’ll never get that by asking for power. We’ll get it by rising up and taking power. And the beginning of that looks something like what is happening on Wall Street right now.
But we musn’t just take power like Revolutions in the past. We must transform it. We have a chance to create a better world–right now–and if we fail to seize this opportunity, we will fail to evolve. And it could not be more obvious that the human species, as it ushers in it’s own great extinction, as it teeters on the precipice of killing our planet, must choose to evolve. Now.
The power in this country still belongs to you. To me. To We The People. The problem is, we are letting others use it, and the people we handed our power to don’t care about us. Consider: your money paid for 50 million dollar bonuses to the CEO’s of banks that are evicting you or someone you know from their home. Every other dollar of our social contribution is spent on war waged to keep the global economy, (which, like cancer, can only grow and spread) supplied with oil. Of course we don’t have to put up with that. But we have been. Now, with our lives on the line, and our children dying from industrial deregulation and institutionalized poverty, the question becomes: Can we put up with that.?
Look at the Uprising Calendar for more occupations and actions coming up in the near future. Like plans to occupy DC beginning October 6th and The People’s Congress next spring.
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300 million people in the USA, with 75% of them connected to municipal wastewater (sewage) treatment plants, produce tons of CO2 each day.
…mechanical treatment systems are net CO2 producers because they rely exclusively on fossil fuels for operation. As a rule, mechanical treatment with different operating efficiencies, approximately 2.65 kWh of electricity for every kg of BOD that is treated. For each kWh of electricity consumed – 0.97 kg of CO2 are released from the power generating plant. This of course doesn’t include the CO2 produced from the sewage breakdown itself.
The New England Waste System’s VSB or VSF (Vegetated Sand Bed or Vegetated Sand Field) can reduce CO2 emissions from sewage to near zero while contributing significant quantities of oxygen to the atmosphere. http://newswet.com
A hypothetical 4,100 m2 VSF produces 17,117 kg/yr of dry matter in year and it removed 24,990 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere, which will almost completely offset the 26,767 kg of CO2 that is released from the wastewater being treated. And that only includes the above ground biomass produced by the plants. When root biomass production is added in, the CO2 offset is greater than 100%. A VSF not only provides a 100% carbon offset, but each year it also produces 18,258 kg of oxygen that is added to the atmosphere.
300 million people represents more than 30 billion gallons of wastewater effluent each day that gets “flushed to the sea”. If we add in another 1400 gallons per capita per day for agricultural and industrial consumption the numbers become staggering.
VSFs are typically designed as “green space” or “eco park” areas where the water can be recycled onto the land, and where the plant product can typically be used as animal food. If the nations wastewater effluent went to corn production we might even be able to convert sewage to ethanol.
VSBs are an American invention – (they even clean up mining slag) download the PDF and let your people know – there are solutions to CO2 emissions.
http://www.priscillajudd.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/TheCarbonFootprintofWastewaterTreatment.pdf
I did not mean to be offensive. Darn it though, 4-20 thousand people a year will die – mostly children and elderly – because Obama lied about implementing smog standards. The stakes for national security, our economy, our health, and our future are high. This incredible ignorance about what a carbon tax is by Renee involves just making up nonsense.
We have been polite for far too long and it has gotten us nowhere. Indeed, we are further behind in peoples’ beliefs because we don’t get angry and people who are proudly ignorant do get angry. That is why a “Peaceful Uprising” is the only path we have left.
The “occupation” of Wall Street is just the peaceful beginning of what I fear will become an all out war. The former middle class is in deep trouble and the government is doing nothing about it. When the people become desperate enough and angry enough there will be violence. Sadly, there are few other options available to them.
Ends and means are indivisible. Unless we want an unfolding world of violence, we had best do the work it will take to unfold a world of peace.
I suggest that OWS at wall street and everywhere make non-violence a central focus of its discussions and deliberations in all its working groups, and just as it is actively spreading the practice of direct democracy, it must also actively spread the practice of non-violence.
“The problem is, we are letting others use it, and the people we handed our power to don’t care about us.”
The above statement reveals your problem. “We” did not hand power to anyone. The corporations own and control the corrupt electoral process with its incessant political theater. You have no power, and as long as you believe in and participate in the electoral scam you only serve to validate and legitimize your own oppression. You deserve to be oppressed.
What is needed is massive peaceful election boycotts as a vote of no confidence in this crooked corporate government.
And shun the cops and politicians who smilingly beat you and terrorize you. They are not your friends and neighbors, they are sell out slugs that sell their ‘morality’ for a paycheck.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
hmmm. if you pass a tax on carbon you have just created a tax for the right to live. we are carbon based. if you think that wont happen then your not thinking. we all emit carbon. what about animals? they do as well. computers, breathing, electricity, all carbon.
You are either joking or truly an idiot. I do not believe anybody would be so ignorant as to what a carbon tax is.
Now, now. Name calling is not necessary.
And in general, Ed Griffith, I think we need to be seriously careful about overestimating the general public’s understanding of these issues. We rightly assert that the lies coming out of the private sector’s mouth pervade almost every aspect of public and personal life, but when we meet someone who has been lied to, and who has, maybe through no fault of their own, believed those lies, our response is one of blame and insult. Counterproductive, to say the least.
Renee, I would refer you to this very (surprisingly) informative and detailed description of how a carbon tax functions to combat the disastrous and costly effects of relying on fossil fuels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax.