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At last someone in the eco-world is unraveling the mystery, confusion and blatant lies around CAP AND TRADE, the economic policy to solve the global climate crisis.

Annie Leonard, the creator of the fast paced STORY OF STUFF film (click here)  is a wizard at demystifying eco-babble into easy to digest information…I am deeply beholden to Annie for making THE STORY OF STUFF because it unmasks the real culprit in our ecological crisis – namely over-consumption.

Like Dr. Seuss’s THE LORAX, Annie uses animation and a fun narrative to make us look at what is happening to our culture with all this consumption. Consumption far outweighs over-population, simply because it’s NOT how many people are on the planet but how and what we consume that is impacting the earth. Which is why America (5% of the worlds population) who consumes 24% of the world’s resources is the leading culprit in the environmental melt down. It’s been estimated that one American child is equal to 13 third world children in our ability to consume.

In Annie’s new film CAP AND TRADE, she gives a cogent, fact-based outline of the underlying potential for crime by the big business speculatators and her assessments are spot on.

I especially appreciated the humor in the piece – the list of things that our governments are considering for remedying the climate crisis:

1. Find a new planet
2. Act normal
3. Give up
4. Cap & Trade
5. Deny everything
6. Bribe someone

But her most serious points in a nutshell are:

1. The guys behind CAP AND TRADE are the Enron gang, the Wall Street Financiers like Goldman Sachs, and the subprime architects. These financial geniuses are about to develop a 3 trillion dollar bubble using carbon markets.
2. We need to reduce our emissions by 80% or more by 2050 and some are saying by 2020 but the fact is carbon could increase with the Cap and Trade system.
(Although many of the world’s leading climate experts, including James Hansen say we need reductions in carbon of 80% by 2020. Al Gore has thrown down the gauntlet saying we need to get 100% reneweables in 10 years!)
3. Yearly limits of emissions are good – that is the cap but how do they make sure they under the cap?
4. Annie identifies 3 Devils in the details: 1. Free permits (cap & giveaway) industrial polluters will get these permits for free. 2. Offset permits are created when they remove carbon but they can’t guarantee that there will be false offsets (example one company deforested a region in Indonesia and then planted palm trees and actually got carbon $/credit for this. 3. The biggest devil according to Annie – Distraction – instead of investing in the proven solutions, like a renewable economy, we will go off track and loose the tiny bit of time left to turn this titanic around.

As one of my cool planet partners said, “Another aspect of cap & trade is that the trading will contribute to the GDP. How weird is that? It’s like accounting for the cost of cancer treatment as a plus to the GDP, when the best solution for everyone is to avoid cancer in the first place.”

Check out the most vibrant short video on CAP AND TRADE and tell me what you think…

http://www.storyofstuff.com/capandtrade/

In any other profession, Carl Pope (click here) might be considered a “company man.” He has worked loyally and tirelessly in the name of the Sierra Club for thirty years, running the organization – the largest of its kind in the country – since 1992. Van Jones has founded several organizations within the last decade, including The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Green For All. They both live in the Bay Area. They both care intensely about saving the environment. The thing is, they use very distinct methods, although the lines differentiating those methods are blurring as we race further into the 21st century. From the environment to the economy, from old fashioned door-to-door fliers to streaming internet video, Pope and Jones discuss the myriad elements effecting our lives today and the many possible solutions that are nearly within reach.

With Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore Goes For Broke

By Mary Corliss / TIME

“Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.” So wrote Thomas Jefferson to a friend in 1816. Now Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 9/11 took on the U.S. Army, and the entire military-executive-industrial establishment, brings his latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, to the Venice Film Festival. The land of Macchiavelli and the Medici is the perfect setting for Moore’s nonfiction tragicomedy of greed and chicanery on Wall Street, in Washington, D.C., and through the entire economic apparatus. The movie will have its world premiere here tonight, before playing the Toronto Film Festival next week, opening Sept. 23 in New York and Los Angeles and achieving wide release Oct. 2.

Writing on his web site, Moore proclaimed, “The director of the festival [Marco Mueller] said that our movie was ‘incredibly symphonic’ and that he was moved by its epic nature. Jeez, these Italians! Everything’s an opera to them!” The movie is not opera so much as impassioned journalism — a broadside fired at the good ship Free Enterprise, with the hope of altering its course, and dislodging the pirates who have seized it.

Capitalism: A Love Story does not quite measure up to Moore’s Sicko in its cumulative power, and it is unlikely to equal Fahrenheit 9/11 in political impact. In many ways, though, this is Moore’s magnum opus: the grandest statement of his career-long belief that big business is screwing the hard-working little guy while government connives in the atrocity. As he loudly tried to confront General Motors CEO Roger Smith in Roger & Me in 1989, and pleaded through a bull horn to get officials at Guantanamo to give medical treatment to surviving victims of 9/11, so in Capitalism he attempts to make a citizen’s arrest of AIG executives, and puts tape around the New York Stock Exchange building, declaring it a crime scene.

Moore’s admirers and detractors alike will recognize his methods in the new film: brisk, pointed synopses of complicated issues (though even a Harvard professor has trouble describing what a derivative is); sad tales of working-class families evicted from their homes because their mortgage rates ballooned; a snowbank of statistics, such as that worker productivity has increased by 45% since 1980 while average real income is stagnant; and pert clips ranging from 1950s instructional films to that YouTube favorite, “Cat Flushing a Toilet Music Video.” The material is, as always in Moore movies, efficiently and amusingly marshaled to serve the larger theme: that the establishment thrives by cheating ordinary Americans.

How so? Moore eagerly counts the ways. He lays out the “Dead Peasants” insurance loophole by which a corporation can take out policies on their rank-and-file workers and, when they die, reap millions in tax-free payouts. To support his position that airlines are risking catastrophe by underpaying their pilots, he excerpts the Congressional testimony of Hudson River hero Chesley Sullenberger, who notes that his pay had been cut 40% and he lost his pension. In an episode that might have come from a Dickens novel, Moore tells of two Pa. judges who shut down a state-run detention center and sentenced children, some for the most minor of infractions, to a facility run by a private company that kicked back millions to the judges.

The anecdotes are instructive and appalling; and if they meander off the immediate talking point of the trillions the banks took in bailout money last year and the billions they made in profits this year, they bolster Moore’s belief that no one should have been surprised by the collapse of a corrupt system, and the ingenuity with which the big-money boys land on their feet while stepping on ours. He must also have thought that many in his audience would be familiar with the shuttle of heavy hitters between Goldman Sachs and recent Administrations, Republican and Democratic. Moore does summon University of Missouri professor Bill Black, author of the 2005 book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One, to describe Robert Rubin, Henry Paulsen, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner and others as “powerful lobbyists from the inside, and we paid their salaries.”

Black and Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur are Moore’s star witnesses; he gets Kaptur to agree, without too much prodding, that the events of the past 12 months amount to “a financial coup d’etat.” The rhetorical pitch keeps rising until, toward the end, Moore suggests a solution: not from the government down but from the grass roots up, through community groups (like LIFFT in Miami), united workers (like those at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago) and the common decency of elected officials (like the Wayne County, Mich., sheriff who decided to stop foreclosures on his neighbors’ homes).

At the end Moore says, “I refuse to live in a country like this — and I’m not leaving.” But this call to arms demands more than a ringleader; it requires a ring, an engaged citizenry who are mad enough not to take it any more. That’s unlikely to happen. Moore’s films are among the top-grossing documentaries in history because they are pertinent populist entertainments. The question remains: will Capitalism: A Love Story rouse the rabble to revolt? Or will audiences sit appreciatively through the movie, then go home and play the cat-in-the-toilet video?