Do you want to stop worrying about climate change and do something about it? The website Beyondtalk.net promises to give you a chance to do so. You can sign a pledge at the site that you will participate in demonstrations and acts of non-violent civil disobedience to help prevent the building of new coal-fired power plants and force political leaders to embrace meaningful controls on carbon emissions. Don’t want to get busted? You can opt for the site’s “action offsets program,” meaning that you pledge to help pay for someone else to receive civil disobedience training or get bailed out of jail. The people behind the site are presently trying to draw the attention of activists to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. They are skeptical that any serious effort to curb carbon emissions will come out of the conference. "We need to make massive emissions cuts now," the site declares. "There's only one way we can achieve that: we need to turn the political heat way up." They add this hopeful note: "The good news is that in today's new political climate, civil disobedience works." They cite the example of recent protests in Washington, D.C., that forced the government to shut down a coal-fired plant that supplied power to the U.S. Congress. Among the supporters of Beyond Talk are those clever pranksters The Yes Men (www.yesmen.org). If you want more info regarding civil disobediance and how to carry it out, visit the web site of the New York chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (Act Up). The site has, among other goodies, an entire civil disobedience manual.
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