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	Advancing the skills, tools and techniques of rights advocates by Tactical Technology Collective   The Tactical Technology Collective is a international NGO working to enable the effective use of information for progressive social change. Its work is informed by the principles of freedom of expression and freedom of information and a commitment to the need for transparency and accountability.   The group seeks is to advance the skills, tools and techniques of rights advocates, by empowering them to to be better able to use information and communications to help marginalised communities understand and effect progressive social, environmental and political change.   Underlying their work is a belief that when people have full awareness of the potential and perils of information and are able to create and share information effectively, they are better able to bring about positive social change on the issues that matter to them.   Tactical Tech has offices in Germany, India and regional staff in South Africa, the UK, Jordan and the Philippines. Many of their projects are carried out in close collaboration with partners, usually human rights groups and local, issue-focused NGOs.   In recent years activists have been collecting information to monitor and report on the state, corporations and powerful social institutions. They"ve experimented with tactics like visualising evidence, culture jamming and remixing to expose the absurdities of official speech, and radical forms of organising and mobilising that the digital environment makes possible. This website aims to document these recent trends and developments in information-activism through stories of advocacy and campaigns from around the world.   10 Tactics Remixed is also a new iteration of 10 Tactics for Turning Information into Action, a project and a film that Tactical Tech launched in 2009 to document how information and information technologies were being used in activist campaigns around the world. Now "Remixed" reflects on some of the key campaigns, debates, and politics which have emerged in the field of information-activism in the last two years.   10 Tactics Remixed is organised in terms of tactics being used by information activists; each tactic is circumscribed by a sampling of recent "snapshot stories" from around the world. We"ve also included longer articles that draw out some bigger political questions emerging from each tactic and the use of information technologies. Each of the snapshot stories and longer pieces come with a list of further reading, videos, links and images to help you delve in further and learn more.   Exposing the Ridiculous is about playing on the absurdities of institutional power through the skillful remixing of popular culture. It explores how activists are experimenting with, challenging and reframing what it means to be political through some of the sharpest tools in the activist"s toolkit – humour, irony, satire, parody and lampooning. Culture jamming is a tactic that embodies these and more: scathing critiques, clever reversals, hijacked official versions, subverted language, re-appropriated visuals. To jam is to interrupt the flow of information controlled by governments, corporations, the advertising industry, media corporations, fundamental religious leaders and other powerful groups in society. In doing so, the lies, deceptions and sheer absurdities in their speech are laid bare. Exposing the Ridiculous is a glimpse into some smart new campaigns and activists putting into practice what the philosopher Hannah Arendt once said, “the greatest enemy of authority is contempt and the surest way to undermine it is laughter”.   Exploring the truth looks at how data and evidence are used to monitor corruption and violence and demand accountability. There are, as we"ve always suspected, many facets to the "Truth" and now more than ever activists and advocates are revealing what these facets are. There is a sense of dismantling the elaborate concoctions of "official versions" by reclaiming how stories themselves are told. This reclaiming lies in the increased use of data and evidence in journalism, advocacy and activism by everyday people, and sometimes at great risk. New communities of people are taking on roles of activists: researchers, journalists, even army soldiers. By sharing, exposing, collating, aggregating data and evidence (and in some cases using smart and incisive visualisations of them) the reality of public corruption, the manipulative power of doublespeak and abuses of public office at all levels of government are being exposed.   Mobilising for Action is about challenging and being challenged by how information functions; it is about negotiating the nature of information in mobilising globally and locally. The idea of online organising has itself had to undergo revision considering how mass mobilisations in the Arab revolutions, the Tea Party, the Occupy movements and the global network called Anonymous have been conducted. They"ve all demonstrated the rise of a new kind of articulate public that is tactical, well coordinated and flexible in a manner that traditional top-down organising has not been. Mobilising for Action evaluates the various claims made about social media and takes on troubling questions about the dynamics of information flows.   http://informationactivism.org/en   http://www.tacticaltech.org/act/project Visit the related web page
	Climate change at the heart of “age-defining” struggle against the old elites by John Ashton Extract from speech at the Asahi World Environmental Forum 2012   Business as usual died in 2008. Publics understand that. Elites, on the whole, do not.   In the UK, our economy is now almost one sixth smaller than economists were saying five years ago it was going to be by now. Young people understand that they are the first generation for over 300 years who, as they look at their future, see a prospect that might well be worse than the one their parents contemplated a generation ago.   People know that something has gone seriously wrong. We need a new growth model that is less vulnerable to shocks; that rebalances from excessive debt and casino finance towards the creation of value in the real economy; and that greatly reduces the stress that a growing and increasingly affluent population puts on the resource base including the climate.   This is not a minor adjustment. It demands a substantial redesign of the economy and of the system of power relations that underpins the economy.   That is not how things look to many elites around the world. Some profit too much from the old system to countenance the thought of anything different. Others are imprisoned within an economic theory that under current conditions has lost its power to make useful predictions.   The struggle between incumbency elites and those who see the need for change will be the defining struggle of our times. It will demand a monumental effort to build a new consensus between those who govern and those who are governed; between the over 40s and the under 30s; between those who said “trust us” and those who are no longer willing to take it on trust that elites must know what they are doing. Going back to 2007 is not an option. Either we will strive successfully to build something better or we will suffer something worse.   Climate change and the response to it will be at the heart of this struggle.   Climate change is all about energy, and energy lies at the foundation of the economy. After all, the industrial revolution that gave rise to the modern economy was driven by a new found ability to harness the energy stored in minerals to satisfy our needs and desires. Transform the energy system and you transform the growth model.   A successful response to climate change will require the most far-reaching transformation of the energy system since the industrial revolution itself. It will be a story of electricity. We will need to use electricity in smarter ways to meet more of our needs, especially for mobility and heating. We will need at the same time to build an electricity system that is essentially carbon neutral in not much more than a single generation.   We know how to do this. We have the technology now. We have the capital now. And we can do this in most countries in ways that, far from doing short-term harm to the economy, will support rebalancing, modernise infrastructure, boost competitiveness and reduce our vulnerability to volatility and shocks in oil, food and other resource prices.   Insecurities over food, water and energy are coming together in a nexus of systemic risk. And the risk multiplier is climate change. In a high-carbon world locked into fossil energy, this nexus will become unmanageable. In a low carbon world, there will be less climate stress on food and water supplies, less competition for limited hydrocarbon resources and more political space to deal through diplomacy and cooperation with the tensions that remain.   Dealing with climate change, staying within 2°c, is not something that is desirable for the environment. It is imperative for security and prosperity. In that sense, climate change has never been an environmental issue and we have lost a great deal of time deluding ourselves that it is.   How are we doing? The truth is that, by the only measure that matters, we have not even begun. In the real economy, we are locking ourselves further into carbon dependency faster than we are building a path beyond it.   Looking back, the approach to the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 was the high point so far of political momentum. The tide has now gone out. Since then, the attention of leaders has been further distracted by the economic crisis and by big political transitions in some countries. I have never known a time, in 15 years involvement in the politics of climate change, when it has received less political attention than leaders are giving it today.   Nov 2012   Activists challenge current institutional responses to changing climate.   The World Bank should take its own advice on climate change, by Simon Butler.   The World Bank delivered a brutal warning about the dangers of runaway climate change and called for rapid action to cut greenhouse gas emissions in a recent report.   The bank released its Turn Down the Heat report on climate change on November 18. Subtitled “Why a 4 degree warmer world must be avoided”, the report said the world is headed for a 4°C average temperature rise by the end of the century, and possibly as soon as 2060.   On today’s trends, a 4°C world is almost certain — even if all nations were to meet their current targets to cut emissions. That is, the existing pledges to cut emissions made at recent international climate talks are not enough to make a difference.   The report makes clear that a 4°C world would be a global calamity. The World Bank said a 4°C temperature rise would lead to average summer temperatures about 6°C higher in North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North America.   The higher temperatures will also mean “a dramatic increase in the intensity and frequency of high temperature extremes”.   These extremes, such the unprecedented Russian heatwave of 2010, would become “the new normal summer”. The Russian heatwave caused more than 10,000 deaths and wiped close to $15 billion off the country’s GDP.   The big rise in CO2 levels would also cause a 150% rise in ocean acidification by 2100, something probably “unparalleled in Earth’s history”. This would spell the end for the world’s coral reefs but also wipe out global fish stocks, which the WWF says are due to collapse anyway by mid-century from overfishing. Today, at least a billion people worldwide rely on fish as their main protein source.   Sea level rise will be an enduring crisis in a 4 degree world. The World Bank estimates sea levels would rise by up to a metre by 2100. But even a 2°C temperature rise could cause a 4 metre sea level rise by 2300. In 2010, the World Ocean Review estimated that “more than 200 million people live on coastlines less than 5 metres above sea level”. It said that figure will rise to at least 400 million by 2100.   A 4°C temperature rise would also signify a species extinction crisis, “surpassing habitat destruction as the greatest threat to biodiversity”.   The report noted new research rules out hopes that a warmer world could lead to greater food production. Instead, the “results suggest instead a rapidly rising risk of crop yield reductions as the world warms”.   The World Bank report also warned that these predictions very likely understate the dangers. Climate change does not affect the planet in a linear, straightforward way. Its impacts are nonlinear — the gradual build up of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can cause abrupt changes to the Earth’s ecosystems.   This year’s summer Arctic ice melt, in which more than 2 million square kilometres of sea ice vanished, is an example of nonlinear climate change in action. In turn, the melting of the Arctic ice opens the door to the passing of other climate tipping points, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of huge reserves of methane frozen on the Arctic seabed.   The World Bank said as global warming approaches and passes 2°C of warming, “the risk of crossing thresholds of nonlinear tipping elements in the Earth system, with abrupt climate change impacts and unprecedented high-temperature climate regimes, increases”.   It said one of these critical tipping points was “the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet”, which would lead to “more rapid sea-level rise than projected in this analysis”. Another tipping point would be a “large-scale Amazon dieback drastically affecting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy production, and livelihoods in an almost continental scale”, which would add “substantially to 21st-century global warming”.   The Turn Down the Heat report concluded: “The projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur — the heat must be turned down”. Yet strangely, it offered no suggestions or proposals for how this could be done, other than a call for “early, cooperative, international actions”.   In practice, World Bank investments in fossil fuels around the world are turning the heat up.   For example, the bank is funding a new brown coal-fired plant in Kosovo. Brown coal is the most polluting fossil fuel. In 2010, the World Bank loaned $3.75 billion to build a giant 4.8 gigawatt coal-fired power plant — one of world’s biggest — in South Africa. That year, the Bank Information Centre said the World Bank’s funding of coal hit “a record high of $4.4 billion”.   NGO Christian Aid said the bank’s funding of coal had increased 40-fold over the previous 5 years.   A July report by the NGO coalition Jubilee South Asia Pacific Movement on Debt and Development said the World Bank was “tainted by a history of financing projects that produce or heavily use fossil fuels”. The bank has financed 745 such projects over 61 years in the Asia Pacific region, at a cost of $70 billion. About $20 billion of this was invested in the past 10 years.   Last month, the World Bank announced it would provide insurance for a new project in North Africa: a huge expansion of Egypt’s oil and gas sector.   The bank is also spending billions helping agribusinesses buy up farmland across the global South. Because this replaces climate-friendly small scale farming with fossil fuel-reliant industrial agriculture, the bank is helping create new sources of greenhouse gas emissions.   Given its continued financing of polluting industries, there is no reason to think “the World Bank has found common cause with Greenpeace”, as The Guardian reporter John Vidal said on November 25.   Rather than an indication it will change its ways, the bank’s Turn Down the Heat report has more to do with a public relations drive in the context of the new round of United Nations climate talks, which began in Doha, Qatar, on November 26.   Two years ago, the Cancun UN climate conference appointed the World Bank as “interim trustee” of the multi-billion dollar Green Climate Fund, meant to help fund sustainable, low emissions development — especially in the global South. The details of the fund will come under higher-than-usual scrutiny during the conference.   A permanent trustee for the fund won’t be appointed until 2015, but there is little doubt that the World Bank will put its hand out for the prize. To do this smoothly, it needs to bolster its green credentials to counter the opposition of climate action groups worldwide. In 2010, more than 90 NGOs and activist groups sent an open letter to UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, protesting the World Bank’s role in the Green Climate Fund.   The groups said: “In spite of the climate and economic crises, the World Bank continues to finance fossil fuel projects at an alarming rate, promote false solutions to the climate crisis, and use funding instruments that increase the indebtedness of developing countries.   “Thus, the World Bank is not suited to advise in the design of a fund that must ensure fair and effective long-term financing based on the principles of environmental integrity, equity, sustainable development, and democracy.”   http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/27-9   http://350.org/en/about/blogs/open-letter-governments-and-their-negotiators   http://www.globalissues.org/issue/28/third-world-debt-undermines-development
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