The Age of Stupid: Coming soon to a theater near you

[FayeforCure]

Sometimes it takes the emotional punch that only a big screen feature film can pack to move people to take action on a long term crisis like climate change.

That's the kind of emotional punch that 'The Age of Stupid' will deliver when it comes to a theater near you. We're proud to partner with the producers of this dynamic new film that will premiere in the U.S. on September 21st.

Find a screening near you and buy your tickets for the September 21st screening today:

http://www.ageofstupid.net/usa

'The Age Of Stupid' is an enormously ambitious drama-documentary-animation hybrid from the director of 'McLibel' and the producer of the Oscar-winning 'One Day In September'.

The film stars Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite ('The Usual Suspects', 'In the Name of the Father') as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching "archive" footage from 2008 and asking: why didn't we stop climate change while we had the chance? It takes viewers through a world-wide journey that explores the roots of the crisis and our failure to confront it in this fictionalized (but all-too-possible) future. Watch a trailer of the movie at AgeOfStupid.net.

U.K. newspaper The Guardian has called it "the first successful dramatization of climate change to hit the big screen." Find a screening near you and buy your tickets today:

http://www.ageofstupid.net/usa

I hope you'll support this important film that could not only raise greater awareness of the perils of climate change, but also move people to take action!

[untarded]

The site is down.  Anyone know if/where this is playing in Jax?

[FayeforCure]

In Florida:

Altamonte Springs Altamonte Mall 18 Imax
Aventura Aventura Mall 24 Imax
Boca Raton Shadowood 16
Brandon Regency 20
Coral Springs Magnolia Place 16
Delray Beach Delray Beach 18
Estero Hollywood Coconut Point 16
Fort Myers Belltower 20 Ft Lauderdale Cypress Creek Station 16
Gainesville Gainesville Cinema 14
Jacksonville Tinseltown Usa, Regency Square 24 With Imax
Lake Buena Vista Pleasure Island 24
Lakeland Lakeside 18 Cinemas
Merritt Island Merritt Square 16
Miami Dolphin 19 Cinemas, Movies @ The Falls 12, Sunset Place 24 With Imax
Miami Beach South Beach Stadium 18
Naples Hollywood Stadium 20-naples Oldsmar Woodland Square 20
Orange Park Orange Park 24 With Imax
Orlando Pointe Orlando With Imax, Waterford Lakes Stadium 20 With Imax
Palm Beach Gardens Downtown At The Gardens 16 Cinemas Royal
Palm Beach Royal Palm Stadium 18
Sarasota Hollywood Stadium 20-sarasota, Sarasota 12
Tallahassee Governors Square Stadium 12 Tampa Citrus Stadium Park Mall 20

Time for our legislators to pay attention!!!!

[FayeforCure]

Lol.  Faye, isnt that a little militant for a movie?   I mean, can't us regular folks go see it first?

Or is it legislators only?

Well, you know, most of us already know the deal and aren't that beholden to short term corporate interests that we can't see a need to save our planet.

[Deuce]

This looks cool!!

[buckethead]

I like the way it makes allies and influences skeptics by calling them stupid.

It should be fun to watch!

[untarded]

Could be part of a cool MetroJax readers meet and greet.

[FayeforCure]

Ill go see it just because it looks like a great film.  

But I suspect that its going to take a lot more work to get legislation.

Yeah, just like in healthcare reform, we still have corporatists in trying to dominate the debate:

Greenpeace uncovers "astroturf" campaign to challenge US climate bill
Leaked email reveals that American Petroleum Institute is planning a series of rallies to protest against Waxman-Markey bill

James Murray, BusinessGreen, 17 Aug 2009
The scale of the challenge faced by the Obama administration as it seeks to secure support for the Waxman-Markey Climate Change bill was again underlined late last week. It emerged oil and gas industry lobbyists are planning a nationwide campaign designed to create the impression of widespread grassroots opposition to the legislation.

A leaked email obtained by Greenpeace USA reveals that the American Petroleum Institute (API) is preparing a series of "Energy Citizen" rallies over the next few weeks, intended to heap pressure on key senators ahead of the crucial Senate vote in late September.

Greenpeace accused the API of engaging in "astroturfing" â€" the controversial tactic of creating the illusion of a largely spontaneous grassroots protest that has in fact been organised by corporate-backed groups. The practice has been widely accused of undermining President Obama's efforts to pass universal healthcare legislation and environmentalists are increasingly concerned that his climate change programme could face a similar fate.

In the email, API president Jack Gerard urged the group's member companies to encourage staff to attend the planned rallies and to also extend invites to " all vendors, suppliers, contractors, retirees and others who have an interest in our success".

He stresses that attendees will have to do little more than turn up, explaining that API will provide all the "up-front resources" and has appointed "a highly experienced events management company that has produced successful rallies for presidential campaigns, corporations and interest groups" to manage the events.

The email also calls on member companies to not disclose details of the planned events, urging them to "please treat this information as sensitive and ask those in your company to do so as well… we don't want critics to know our game plan".

The plans will be of particular concern to the Obama administration as the API includes several members of the US Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a business group that supports the Waxman-Markey bill and had managed to sign up a number of influential oil and energy firms.

In a letter to Gerard, Greenpeace USA executive director Phil Radford requested clarification on the extent to which those API members that are also committed to US-CAP were involved in the development of the Energy Citizen rallies.

"It would logically appear that the Energy Citizen campaign's objective is to defeat climate change regulation," he wrote. "This goal runs contrary to several prominent API members' public support for climate action, namely Shell, BP America, ConocoPhillips, General Electric and Siemens. These companies are all a part of the pro-cap-and-trade US Climate Action Partnership, which has publicly supported the Waxman-Markey bill… Can you explain the contradictory objectives of supporting cap and trade on one hand and working to defeat it on the other? And also reveal if any API members opted out of the Energy Citizen effort?"

ConocoPhillips has already distanced itself from US-CAP, however, and a spokesman for Shell told the Guardian newspaper that it would not be taking part in the rallies.

The revelations further highlight the intense battle on Capitol Hill surrounding the climate change bill and come just days after it emerged a Capitol Hill lobbying firm, Bonner & Associates, had been involved in sending fake letters to legislators protesting against the proposed legislation.

They also follow new research from the Center for Public Integrity, which found that 460 new business and advocacy groups began lobbying on climate chan ge issues in the run-up to the House vote on Waxman-Markey in June. The surge in interest took the total number of registered parties lobbying around the bill to more than 1,100.

http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2247933/greenpeace-uncovers-astroturf

[Burn to Shine]

When is it coming to Tinseltown?  Did I miss that somewhere?

[FayeforCure]

When is it coming to Tinseltown?  Did I miss that somewhere?

Burn to Shine,.....should be Sept 21st in Tinseltown theaters:

Find a screening near you and buy your tickets for the September 21st screening today:

http://www.ageofstupid.net/usa

[Overstreet]

I have visions of people staring into screens with blank expressions being programed. Kind of a George Orwell kind of thing.  I'm going out in the sunshine ..................er............... rain.

[FayeforCure]

Wow, that is quite the movie. I learned a lot I didn't know,..........expecially that we only have till 2015 to turn around our carbon emission levels, to stay under a 2 degree rise in global temperature.

Apparently if we rise more that 2 degrees, we set off a rapid escalation to a six degree temp rise, after which all life on earth is destroyed.

Here are some websites to check:

http://www.tcktcktck.org

http://www.notstupid.org

10:10 and the politics of climate change
Andrew Dobson, 17 - 09 - 2009
A new climate-change project lacks the political focus that the scale of the problem now demands, says Andrew Dobson.

(This article was first published on 16 September 2009)
17 - 09 - 2009


On 1 September 2009 a new climate-change campaign called "10:10" was launched at the Tate Modern gallery in London. The campaign aims to commit individuals, organisations and businesses in Britain to a 10% reduction in Co2 emissions by the end of 2010. 10:10 is the brainchild of Franny Armstrong, director of the climate-change film, The Age of Stupid.

Andrew Dobson is professor of politics at Keele University. Among his books are Citizenship and the EnvironmentPolitical Theory and the Ecological ChallengeGreen Political ThoughtRoutledge, 4th edition, 2007). His website is ( (Oxford University Press, 2003), (as co-editor) (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and here.



"A politics of crisis: low-energy cosmopolitanism" (22 October 2008) - with David Hayes

Why 10%? And why 2010? The 10:10 campaigners' reasoning is that "Britain is committed to an 80% cut by 2050, and at least 34% by 2020. But scientists say it won't be possible to meet these targets without the right action now - and that means cuts of around 10% in the very near future."

The umbrella campaign

Two things about the initiative - heavily promoted by the Guardian newspaper - are immediately apparent. The first is that it has managed to attract great support, and from across the political spectrum. Within two weeks of its launch, as many as 15,000 individuals, 600 businesses, 100 educational institutions and 220 other organisations had signed up to its aims. These bodies include Cambridge University's Conservative Association, the Danish embassy in London, Downham preparatory school, a north London branch of the Trades Union Congress, the British Medical Association and Tottenham Hotspur football club.

The backers also include prominent members of the three main political parties. The Guardian announced on 3 September that "the entire cabinet" (in effect the Labour government as a whole) was now in the 10:10 camp; the Conservative Party's "shadow cabinet" soon followed, and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg was close behind.

Franny Armstrong celebrated the near-instant wave of support : "It's amazing that within forty-hours hours of the campaign's launch, the leaderships of the three main political parties have committed to cut their 10%. Who said people power was dead?" Indeed, a campaign that has managed so quickly to gather such an eclectic range of interests and viewpoints under a single, seamless banner is an impressive achievement.

This is a clue to the second notable aspect of the project: it is fundamentally apolitical. This is true in the trivial sense that it "transcends" party politics, which is why the leaders of Britain's three major parties (Labour‘s Gordon Brown and the Conservatives' David Cameron as well as Nick Clegg) can sign on the dotted line without demur.

But 10:10 is apolitical in a more profound sense too: in that its adherents are not required to act politically. Its core citizenship appeal is about lifestyle not agitation. The campaign advises individuals to fly less, drive less, wear more jumpers, eat better, and stop wasting food and water; and corporate bodies to focus on reducing electricity consumption, fuel-use, road-transport and air-travel. The focus of its efforts is to win a commitment from (mainly) individuals to make different personal choices rather than demand of governments and other power-structures that they change the conditions under which those choices are made. 10:10 is about changing lightbulbs rather than changing society.

The step-change model

There are good ideas, intentions and energies here. But the way the campaign is framed also builds in limitations. The extraordinary wastefulness of current habits and social practices makes it relatively easy for most households to achieve a 10% reduction by the end of 2010 (as indeed the campaign organisers themselves say). True, the difficulties in organising a collective response across the space and time that corporate bodies tend to occupy gives them a harder task (and the tendency to "free-ride" on the actions of others reinforces the problem of ensuring a positive outcome).10:10 campaigners recognise this too in saying: "For most businesses 10% is ambitious but achievable. It's the low-hanging fruit: eliminating waste, increasing efficiency, that sort of thing."

The (inadvertent?) use of this phrase raises the question: what happens when the low-hanging fruit has all been plucked? Much can be done in eliminating wanton wastefulness, but what is expected to happen in the next stages of the campaign reveals the limits to such lifestyle-changes.

By autumn 2010, the individual and organisational signatories will be asked to report on their progress. There will be no independent auditing, so a certain amount of creative carbon-accounting - and perhaps even a few over-fulfilled quotas - can be expected. It is likely too that at that stage the campaign will be declared a success. Insofar as there will have been some carbon-reduction as well as some consciousness-raising - so far so good.

The next stage will presumably be to change the shape of the campaign - to move from 10:10 to 15:11 to 20:13...and on to the ambitious, declared aim of 34:20. These next steps will become progressively harder - for as the buffers represented by systemic carbon irrationalities are approached, the returns on the effort put into behavioural shifts become smaller. No matter how hard individuals try, the way modern (and trying-to-be-modern) economies function guarantee a continued infrastructural residue of carbon-emissions. (Many carbon-calculators for individuals assume a two-tonne carbon-emission load whatever life the individual leads in a developed early 21st-century country - with one tonne generally regarded as the fair annual emission-level for sustainable living). At this point the limits of a campaign aimed at reducing carbon-emissions through individual lifestyle-change are unavoidable.

The 10:10 advocates could in principle accommodate this critique by emphasising the positive benefits of their campaign: that it is empowering, is an antidote to the despair engendered by the enormity of the problem, and gives individuals something to do rather than always wait for someone else to do something. They might even argue - touching more directly on the perspective offered here - that the problem must be tackled step-by-step: lifestyle-change and efficiency gains followed down the line by political action.

The danger, though, is that everything gets stuck at the first step. The Guardian's campaign launch included a centre-spread "eyewitness" montage photograph of dozens of individuals, each holding a piece of paper inscribed with their 10:10 carbon-commitment: fly less, cycle more, buy fewer clothes. If the 2015 photograph looks the same it means that little real progress will have been made towards dealing with catastrophic climate change.

The test of the times

What then should be done? It's almost certain that the required 80% reduction by 2050 will need transformative social and political - collective - change that in scale far exceeds the lifestyle-shifts envisaged by 10:10. The time for that to begin is the present. To that end, the celebrity authors, designers, artists and sportspeople who champion 10:10 might supplement their private pledges with some public ones:

* join and campaign for the party with the most progressive and coherent socio-environmental policies in the next general election (even if it's a small party)

* argue for a more holistic measurement of the health of an economy than is suggested by its gross national product (GNP) - as in the reports of the French-government-sponsored "commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress"

* attend the next climate camp

* oppose the privatisation of public spaces and public services.

This last pledge is fundamental. Climate change is a public bad, and there is an urgent need for citizens both to reimagine the public good and to relearn how to work together towards it. In current conditions, every new private solution to a public problem is a nail in the earth's climate-coffin.

The fight against catastrophic climate change can succeed only if it forges a permanent link with social-justice campaigns; if it is prepared to commit to an absolute reduction in the material throughput of modern economies; and if it accomplishes a comprehensive shift in political conditions and social relationships. The poor and vulnerable, within societies and across the world, contribute least to climate change and suffer most from it. The 4:1 ratio - the optimum high-to-low wealth balance in an environmentally and socially healthy community - should be as important as aspiration as any other. Any serious climate-change project today must rise to these challenges, or risk wasting the good ideas, intentions and energies that inspire it.

   

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/10-10-and-the-politics-of-climate-change

[buckethead]

A movie predicting gloom and doom? Heavens! Let's get to work!

[FayeforCure]

A movie predicting gloom and doom? Heavens! Let's get to work!

No, a movie that points out opportunity that we cannot afford to ignore.

[DavidWilliams]

uhhh...yea. The title sounds fairly appropriate  .