Monthly Archives: December 2009

by Brian Fitzgerald | December 17, 2009

I’m going hungry

I’m going without food today, for the first time in my life, in solidarity with the seriously hard-core folks doing the Climate Justice fast, some of whom have been more than 40 days on only water and electrolytes.

There was a proposal some time ago for Greenpeace to call for a global fast to ask heads of state to sign a fair, ambitious, binding climate deal, and a long wrangle about the conditions that make fasts effective and the conditions that make them useless. I was opposed to it as an organizational tactic, and I remain so.

What I do today is a personal choice, one which I take out of respect for what the long-term fasters are doing. I’m in awe of their personal committment to the cause of stopping runaway climate change. They’ve engaged me emotionally, and I’ll proudly stand with them for a day with a tiny symbolic shadow of their action.

Greenpeace Board Chair Lalita Ramdas made me think hard when in her blog, she came at it from the angle of personal discipline. Making a choice, and sticking to it. Continue reading →

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to climate negotiations

I wrote this in 2001, at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg which was considering [urgent] action on climate change. I hope, that as Ministers now consider the draft agreement for [urgent] action at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, and Heads of State arrive to begin wrangling, that things will be different.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being a Head of State at the ~~Earth Summit~~ Copenhagen Climate talks

Hi kids! Have you been watching the proceedings of the ~~Earth Summit in Johannesburg~~ UN Climate talks in Copenhagen? Do you wish that YOU too could take bold commitments to save the world and turn them into mushy language full of loopholes, wiggle room, and ambiguity GUARANTEED to ensure you never have to lift a finger to save the planet???

Well now you CAN! Let’s pretend you’re a real world leader in ~~Johannesburg~~ Copenhagen! Here’s what you should do when handed a draft agreement.

Let’s say this draft contains the following statement:

All countries agree to phase out coal.

Isn’t that just awful? So clear and so simple a child could have written it, but it’ll mean a lot of work for you when you get home. It may also make some of those pals of yours a little bit upset. They might not buy you any more elections! So let’s swing into action!

Now, if you’re a national delegate, you can tell the Chairman that you want to put that statement in brackets. Brackets mean you’re not entirely happy with that text, and you’d like to strangle it. Go on. Any country can do it, all by themselves, for any reason at all. Brackets are cheap, so sprinkle them liberally throughout any text that suggest actually doing anything! It’s so easy!!!

[All countries agree to phase out coal.]

Now that you’ve got it in brackets, let’s add some cool inactivating phrases. Personally, I’ve always liked “take measures to.” Watch!

[All countries agree to {take measures to} phase out coal.]

Still, that’s a bit too crisp. So let’s reach into our document hat and find another nifty nugget. How about “have instruments in place”??? Sounds like lawyers will get involved! Now THAT ought to slow things down! Continue reading →

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Filed under Activism, Environmental Issues, Popular

Tagged as brackets, climate, COP15, copenhagen

by Brian Fitzgerald | December 11, 2009

Trackbacks and backstory: Sorry ad campaign

Oh boy do we have a hot potato media hit (BOTH legacy and Social) with our Copenhagen airport campaign of artificially-aged leaders apologizing for their failing at COP15. Over 100,000 Google hits, record breaking blog traffic, more Flickr views than you can shake a usb stick at.

But my current fascination in the digital dorm room f or viral vectoring is twitter and twitter lists. (But you know that, because you follow me, right? right?) In the course of trying to measure how much exposure the ads have gotten there, I stumbled on this great tool, Topsy. It gives you the possibility of measuring something like twitter trackbacks to a URL — in this case, tweets to the Weblog entry where we first broke the images. The great thing is, that no matter which url-shortening service you use, be it ow.ly or bit.ly or tinyurl, the analysis engine unpacks it to show hits to your long url. Previously, to get that kind of URL-specific information you had to shorten with one site, try to make sure everyone used the same link, and you lost measurement of anything that strayed from that. Magic!!!

Now, of course, you’d think that the high-falutin advertising company that we must have dropped six figures on to make this campaign would do the tracking for us, wouldn’t you? Heh heh, well, that’s the thing, see. this was pretty much a home-brew effort from start to finish.

Our communication strategy was to make the summit personal for Heads of State. Push them to go, and communicate that we were holding them personally responsible for the outcome. Our Nordic office had the foresight in June to buy ad space at the airport for the week of the COP, figuring that was one place the Heads of State would all pass through (if we succeeded in getting them to attend, by the way. Tick.) Christina Koll circulated a memo back then saying

*I now invite you to shoot around you like wild cowboys with ideas and wishes for the message on these ads.
Deadline is next week 23. June at 4 PM

Climate Communications Manager Martin Lloyd organized one of his famous brainstorms, and our former publications manager and über-creative Toby Cotton got wind of the challenge in his design kitchen. Toby freelances for us now, which as far as I can tell means he sits in an undisclosed location in Australia and thinks up cool stuff we should do, firing off ideas, well, like that wild cowboy Christina imagined. Due to time zone differences, he was asleep when the brainstorm here in Amsterdam happened, and did a lone wolf, bouncing ideas off his partner Alex.

He knocked up a quick concept sketch and popped it over to Martin, who knows a winner when he sees one, and who then put people, time, and a surprisingly small amount of money into making it happen. Between them and Mike Townsley they wrote the text, Karen Guy here in the office sourced the photos (creative commons where possible), and as with any great creative stew, nobody really remembers who came up with which bit — only that everybody is really really happy with the result.

Toby’s original pitch

I expect Martin will be telling the full story over at his blog eventually, but at the moment, he’s a bit busy with this Copenhagen business. As are we all. OMG, look at the time. Off to work.

Antarctic treaty: lessons for Copenhagen

50 years ago this week, the world agreed to set aside Antarctica as a place of “peace and science,” ignoring national territorial claims and declaring the continent the common heritage of humanity. It was, as a species, one of our finest moments.

Then, in the mid 80s, the oil and gas and minerals companies decided that the “common heritage” bit meant it was theirs to exploit. Greenpeace and a handful of other NGOs launched a campaign to block that — a campaign nobody thought we could win. A campaign that some of us thought, at best, would move the goal posts, but which would in the end fall victim to politically expedient compromise, short-term interests, and the unassailable power of intransigent governments and corporate greed.

Instead, against all odds, we won.

With smart political lobbying, public pressure, an Antarctic base from which we bore witness as only Greenpeace could, and direct non-violent action, we kept the oil companies out of Antarctica.

Here’s a short video which Elaine Hill rather heroically cut over the weekend to tell the story of that treaty, and what it says about persistence, impossible ambitions, and what makes us activists in the face of those campaigns that seem at times unwinnable.