Thousands Gather In Trafalgar Square For Our Planet

[RestoreGore]

By Jeremy Lovell
1 hour, 2 minutes ago
LONDON (Reuters) - More than 20,000 protesters rallied in London on Saturday ahead of international talks on climate change in Kenya, demanding that world leaders act to curb global warming. The event included a march from the United States embassy in protest against U.S. President George W. Bush's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on cutting climate-warming gases from fossil fuels. It was held at the end of a week in which a British government-backed report published on Monday painted an apocalyptic picture about any failure to act on global warming.

Police said the crowd reached 22,500 people, packing out Trafalgar Square in the capital's center."We are reaching audiences today in a way that was impossible a year ago," Ashok Sinha, director of organizers Stop Climate Chaos (SCC), told Reuters."We are getting people to look at the total carbon emission of their lives and to start making adjustments, because every single bit helps. We are talking about personal actions but it is also building up pressure on governments to take action to stop the destruction of the planet."

United Nations climate talks involving 189 nations start next week in the Kenyan capital Nairobi to negotiate a successor to the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.Reaching a deal is expected to take up to three or more years. The British report by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern warned of economic collapse if the world failed to pay the comparatively smaller costs of tackling climate change.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061104/sc_nm/britain_environment_dc
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Did we have 22,000 people gathering in this country as a whole today, let alone in one place? If only. I handed out about fifty flyers on climate change this morning. I had one good conversation with someone about ethanol and other alternate energies, and there seemed to be more people in tune with this than when I went out to do this just when An Inconvenient Truth was coming out. Hopefully, little by little the people in this country will take this issue as seriously as people across the ocean do.

I also had a sign on my backpack I made with a picture of the Earth in the middle with the words "Respect Your Only Home" around it that got some good feedback. So as this article shows, progress on this important issue is not just going to come from Washington DC (if at all), London, or any other place or one person. It has to come from US. God, looking at this article made me feel so good, it brought tears to my eyes.

[Dissenting_Prole]

1. Ethanol = death

" I had one good conversation with someone about ethanol..."

I hope you mentioned that corn is food, not motor-vehicle fuel.

[RestoreGore]

2. You bet I did

We concurred that solar is the way to go. Thanks for responding. I was beginning to think no one cared that thousands of people showed up for this planet. You would think Americans really didn't care after all.(snark)

[Dissenting_Prole]

3. Found in this morning's reading material

Based on this article, it seems that the famine should begin almost immediately.

Exploding U.S. Grain Demand for Automotive Fuel Threatens World Food Security and Political Stability

Lester R. Brown

Now that the year’s grain harvest is safely in the bin, it is time to take stock and look ahead. This year’s harvest of 1,967 million tons is falling short of the estimated consumption of 2,040 million tons by some 73 million tons. This shortfall of nearly 4 percent is one of the largest on record.

Even more sobering, in six of the last seven years world grain production has fallen short of use. As a result, world carryover stocks of grain have been drawn down to 57 days of consumption, the lowest level in 34 years. The last time they were this low wheat and rice prices doubled.

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update60.htm

[RestoreGore]

4. climate change and drought,,,

Along with limited water resources due to privatization and overpopulation will surely make this more difficult. I wonder now how greed, uh, I mean, "demand" for ethanol ( especially E85 that still allows oil companies to reap profit and think to call themselves environmentally concerned) will come into play with the moral issue at hand regarding feeding a world already in pervasive and persistant hunger? It isn't as though corn based ethanol is NEEDED, it just makes those involved in it more money. Matter of fact, there are far more viable ways to get alternate energy and feed people, but again, once you allow corporations and governments to stick their greedy hands in, morality flies right out of the window.