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The very dignified president of our college has grown a beard as a fundraiser for the students who went to this... type of beard depended on the amount of money raised. It was a wonderful way to see the idealism of our college put into action.

Sorry, but there own website is only claiming 2,500 for the protest. OH and they will be protesting against global warming in the snow too. How ironic is that?

You claim to be Mr Ethical? How ethical is it to stop using coal before there is a viable alternative? How ethical is it to stop using a resource that prevents millions of deaths to hypothermia each year?

I am all in favour of alternative green and sustainable energy, but the Green lobby has been incredibly myopic in adopting unproven and dangerous technologies that are more harmful to the environment than the oil/coal that they are meant to replace.

Millions of hectares of ancient woodlands being destroyed pushing many species to extinction so we can use the palm oil. Millions of people in the developing world forced to die of starvation because food crops are used for fuel instead, when Algial fuel is thousands of times more efficient, much greener, has a negative CO2 footprint. The green lobby are more damaging to this planet than the oil companies.

The use of corn oil, or bio-fuel from food crops is evil and is causing more damage than oil.

Additionally the obsession with reducing CO2, a plant food that commercial food growers have to pump into greenhouses at 4 times the current concentration, is preventing REAL and URGENT action on serious environmental problems today. Stopping the global deforestation MUST be the top priority. Finding additional areas of fertile land for the production of sustainable forests that can be harvested is a major problem we must tackle and we should not be distracted by dogmatic nonsense about CO2.

"Now I'm back with a bigger challenge - to save the world! I'm travelling across America looking at how we can stop catastrophic global warming."

By doing NOTHING, the earth is already cooling OH and the sun is very quiet isn't it?

Why don't you do something useful and get DiHydrogen Monoxide banned whilst you are at it?

There is NO proof, evidence or realistic, scientific empirical evidence that the earth is going to warm "catastrophically", NONE!

Still that does not stop the well meaning idiots from jumping on the save the world bandwagon.

purpleDogzz - the Power Shift website says the 2007 rally had 6,000 attending and this year there are twice as many people.

a movement that will battle for action on global warming

If they are rallying behind the cry of 'Global warming' I rather fear it's not the best of starts.

This has rather been discredited as a major motivator. Even the next incarnation, climate change (at least shared by Ms. Tolkan, Jesse or Jessy?), is now being scheduled by some for another incarnation.

I maintain my view that while the message may well be pretty vital, and some elected representatives seem pretty sensible, the number of unelected messengers and their often rather contradictory if not rather 'elitist' 'one of us' (at best) messages does not seem to be moving the masses terribly well.

I wonder why?

Watch it unfurl in the MainStreamMedia.

Protest a war by joining hundreds of thousands of your peers= near zero TV coverage.

Protest global warming by joining 2,500 green activists= I cannot wait to see how this is broadcast.

The coverage will surely be as unbalanced as the presumption that the gas that gives life to the entire biosphere can alter the climate when we add 1 molecule of it to 10,000 others.

Checking out who the chosen one has in turn chosen shows that he is a Marxist and intends to dismantle the American way of life. Browner, Salazar, Chu and Jackson to assist.

Just one tiny, tiny piece of evidence would be too much to ask in the face of the prospect of the billions to be gained from taxation and the power to be gained by rushing through legislation.

The greens are the worst thing that has ever happened to environmentalism. The greater sin is that they are fast becoming the worst thing that has ever happened to the environment itself.

If it gets on the TV news, it would only be because it was in the middle of a snowstorm.

I agree that naming this guy Ethical Man is like naming Bill Clinton Truthful Man.

I recently took a trip to west Texas and saw several hundred wind mills producing electricity along with several hundred pump jacks pumping oil out of the ground. Both are great ways of producing energy. While I was there, I spoke with a friend of mine who lives there who told me that on several occasions he had seen people walking around under the wind mills counting the dead birds that flew into the blades so that they can protest the wind mills. For crying OUT LOUD...Where does this nonsense stop?

Oh yeah...I find it outrageous that parents are sending their hard earned money to pay for college tuition so that the left can teach their children to rally for ridiculous unproven science. It seems to me that they should at least be studying something that actually exists. It is rather UNethical for the instructors to use our inexperienced youth to sensationalize their hidden agenda.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

Anti wind energy campaigners counting dead birds beneath wind generators; worse still, if you can take the joke, is that wind energy smells. The nonsense does not stop so long as the anti-funding flows and undermining goes.

In Britain in the early nineties Nuclear Electric sponsored world class yacht racing with sails carrying the legend "Nuclear Electric: clean energy for the 21st century" - but since it wasn't and it isn't it fell foul of the Advertising Standards Authority and had to retract. Big funding for more powerful misleading images.

On dead birds and other creatures killed by energy production, taken from "History":

18th March 1967 the Torrey Canyon crude oil transporting supertanker (120,000 tons crude capacity) took a shortcut struck a reef and polluted 120 miles of Cornish coast (see south west United Kingdom). The 270 square mile crude oil slick killed 15,000 sea birds.

24th March 1989 the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska.
Between 250,000 and 500,000 seabirds, otters, seals, 250 bald eagles, and 22 orcas died and billions of salmon and herring eggs.

These events happened decades ago but the oil spills have economic environmental cost effects which persist. What apparently did not persist was the accumulative retentive memory of many people in politics and the media who must have felt that their jobs if not their lives depended on (forgetting) it.

Not so the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union which represented approximately 40,000 workers across the USA, who voted to oppose drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) until Congress enacted an energy policy.

George W. Bush created the task force known as the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) with VP Dick Cheney in the Chair to ?develop a national energy policy.

Right. Did they do that? Do we know? Were we told who they were and what they did?

In 2009, the concept that legislation might even be tabled let alone discussed in Congress in terms that address employment, security, innovation and a viable sustainable tax base means that there is somebody else in the White House, Senate, Congress, and large parts of the country, not forgetting the rest of the world, who insist on differing, and work to produce a visible, viable national energy policy on the record. What else could happen, after the last eight years?

Even an interest in a theory that in fact energy efficiency is a health techno-economic thing, not an un-american thing, which seems believable - else how do you get to the moon, but what about daily life on earth?

In this country where there are thousands of worthy efforts supporting and objecting to all kinds of positive progress and economic travesties (now too often fraud) have been part of a valiant mood of well informed convictions, the broadband internet has enabled access and communications to side-stepped the wholly owned and obedient subsidiary mentality media that presses down upon and contains otherwise energetic willing spirits in this country causing frustration, humiliation and demoralization

all of which is hard to live with, when blinded faith is demanding of you loyal unquestioning support and your approval for removal of your freedom. Years of profits where no profits were to be found entitled deregulation

Opportunity cost is what else might be done with the resources available and what might come out of it, assuming all the resources have not been stolen or squandered or lost

So, did people just wake up? Just what does it take? Are these new issues? Do they matter any the less that they are not? The louder people shout that the climate change case is not proven the more reason to ask why the volume, why the resentment and why the expense to avoid debate about all the options and their consequences, not least as costs?

Now it has come to the point where this strange foreign media person from a media company known as the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is over here gathering and reflecting what he finds out.

Why is he here? What will he find? Who will care? Who (here) will even notice or knows? He'll be gone soon enough but what he finds out may not be. At least the positive stuff will appear on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ even if neither it nor the negative stuff appears as news over here.

Let us hope he does not see this country to be bedevilled by division, cut off from causing its own consequences, resentful of all our interest and committed to avoid modern history and future. Worst of all, not interested. It is.

Let me just say this... I come from Austin Texas, and I participated in Power Shift 09.

There is no longer a debate about whether or not climate change is occurring and there is no longer a debate about what is causing it.
YES it is a natural occurrence but HUMANS are intensifying it.
Even if we weren't affecting the climate, why should we not work towards a renewable and sustainable future? Fossil fuels will run out, this is a known fact. We will have to change our ways one day, why not now? Why should we wait until there is no turning back to decide that we need to change our ways??

Powershift was the most life changing experience I have ever had. To know that 12,000 other people thought just like I did, and shared the same passions and same aspirations that I do, was the most amazing feeling in the world.

Even if people refuse to believe that this is an issue, I will still try. I want the next generations to be able to see all the species that live in the dwindling forests today, and why should they have to breathe toxic air and drink dirty water because of our selfish actions.

I am willing to give everything I have for this. Even though, especially in Texas, people who share this vision are small in comparison to the oil and money hungry climate cynics, particularly our senate representatives, but I won't give up, this generation won't give up, and we will do anything to stop the downward spiral that the world is heading to.

Perhaps the best outcome of this protest would be for it to succeed !

Let the Capitol Power plant shut down indefinately, and disconnect from the grid.

A week or two of freezing in the dark with rotting food in the freezers might bring some sanity to the legislators, and no traffic lights, or fuel pumps working, hey, bring it on!!

#12

Is chopping down hectares of rainforest in order to supply 'sustainable fuel' for the cars you used to get to the event
'work[ing] towards a renewable and sustainable future'?
If you ask me I would prefer the rainforest to be left as it is, and to continue to pump oil!
Yes we need to replace oil, regardless of whether you believe in GW or not, but the only way to do that is for Obama and Gordy to get off their arses and invest in a viable alternative i.e. Hydrogen rather than Obama just rattling the cages of congress just to show he can.
Excuse me for being old but I don't think terrorist actions are the way forward. When Muslims protest in this way, we call them terrorists and lock them up, when 'Power Shift 09' do it they are heroes to the people.
How long before these Heroes are doing serious damage by planting bombs in Nuclear power plants?
To quote Yoda
' Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.'

And so it starts, I had high hopes for Obama, but this moves, shall we call it 'The Obama Youth' reminds me too much of another youth movement of the 1922 to 1945 era. They were going to change the world as well.

The cult of Obama starts here.