I guess there is something about "nonviolent civil disobedience" that liberals find irresistibly attractive. Don't like logging? Bring it to a halt. The losses your conduct causes won't rest on you anyway. Hate coal-fired power plants? Shut 'em down. There may be a couple dozen brownouts and a few appliances that burn out as a result, and you may increase costs by a few cents per kilowatt (for billions of kilowatts, of course) but who cares? The more important thing is your own personal heroism in hurling yourself into the belly of that infernal machine.

I respect the abilities of defense counsel who obtained acquittals for these defendants, but the defendants themselves are vile. Too bad the plant was not started up when they were in the chimney.

The bad news is that liberals still haven't decided what energy sources, if any, we will be allowed to have yet.

Protest coal all you want. Come up with a solution that produces as much power in such a compact space. Don't want nuclear power, either? Then STFU.

. . . until the riot police pepper-spray the protesters right in the face, taser them until their bowels release & haul them off to jail for 72 hours in the drunk tank. Don't kid yourself, the increasing militarization of the police force is the corporate response to nonviolent civil disobedience. It's ugly now and it's only going to get worse.

If the liberals are to be accused of trying to kill anything with the use of nonviolent disobedience, then how do we explain that it is those on the political right of our nation (the american anti-abortion wing), along with other fundamentalists around the world, who have decided that the only way to kill anything is with violent disobedience?

Try eating less beef and dairy. According to the FAO,

[Livestock production] accounts for respectively 37 percent of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO2), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 percent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.

Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of the global arable land used to producing feed for livestock, the report notes. As forests are cleared to create new pastures, it is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 percent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.

I am constantly surprised by the number of environmentalists who won't even consider cutting down on their meat consumption.

@tsheils

Your logic is brilliantly myopic. The pro-life movement was shut down from this kind of action by the courts. The few that went so far as to take the law into their own hands do not define the pro-life movement any more that the evils that a few liberals do define liberalism. Your logic is badly flawed. Read some books, join a debate club, join Toastmasters and learn to make logical presentations, learn logic. It will free your mind and allow you to have more friends.

Gee Spark, with friends like you who'd need any more. I think you could soften the blow and get further.

As for a free mind, I agree, but some are using what sounds like simply a discounted model, not a free one. My point, lost upon you (sorry to insult a movement you are obviously committed too, it was simply a simple example for my purpose), was to demonstrate the lunacy of such thinking as is demonstrated in the first posting, by the guy who hates non violent liberals.

Have some fun, listen to some good music, share a meal.

Cheers

...nonviolent civil disobedience may be our best hope to counteract global warming

But don't forget, we're salonistas, . . . if angry people start shouting at democrats conducting town hall meetings, then a different set of rules apply.

Every person who read this article read it on a computer screen. Powered by electricity.

Go ahead, shut all the coal plants down right now. And freeze in the dark. It won't be just a few brownout; if you understand the power system (I've been in the business for 30 years, work in a natural-gas plant, so closing the coal plants would be a financial boon for my employers) the impact of dropping all the base-load coal plants would be devastating to the economy. As in bye bye nice peaceful civil disobedience, hello nice violent civil disorder.

This whole process has got to be gradual. We've dug ourselves into a hole here. The coal plants need to shut down someday (as do the natural gas plants like the one I work in). But shutting things down via mob action will make us all worse off in the long run. Mob action is usually the worst way to solve anything.

just so you can continue to be contrarian and "open minded"?

I want to shut my local water treatment plant. There's no earthly reason why 'people' should get preference.

Everyone understands that in 2009, burning coal is essential to keep our power on.

The point is that the way the coal is mined and burned is incredibly destructive to the local and global environment, at the same time that it's hugely profitable to the energy companies.

Now, despite what a lot of people here claim, the left has nothing against profits either. But we have a lot against theft. By raping the environment and passing those huge costs onto the rest of us, the energy companies are stealing from us. That's not capitalism, that's theft.

Take some of those monster profits and use them to mine responsibly and scrub the results of the results of the burning. Invest some of those monster profits into greener technologies.

In the place I used to live, at least, cops were already doing stuff like that. People would chain themselves hand-to-hand to trees to protest logging; the police held open the eyelids of the protesters and swabbed pepper spray into their eyes with a q-tip. Which totally improved relations between the two groups and killed the passion of the protesters. Not.