Videos to Watch: Climate week highlights, what's next in int'l talks

Above: Climate advocates are striving to contain growing worries that the December climate talks in Copenhagen will be a bust. In this video made just as the G20 summit wrapped up, Kumi Naidoo, chair of the Tck Tck Tck climate mobilization campaign (and incumbent director of Greenpeace), encourages people to get active in their communities, churches, mosques, temples, and clubs. Naidoo and others believe it's crucial that citizens to contact their leaders and demand that they reach a "fair, ambitious and binding" climate treaty agreement in December.

It has been an inconclusive "Climate Week." The world's major economic powers made few significant moves on curbing global warming, and produced no major public breakthroughs in deadlocked climate treaty negotations.

On the activist side, things were a good deal more inspiring:

The Global Wake-up Call saw thousands of people worldwide performing creative, cheerful street actions and calling their political leaders to support a strong climate treaty. This "Human Countdown" in New York City last Sunday kicked off the week's activist events:

The film "The Age of Stupid" had a star-studded evening opening in New York City. The film takes a black-humored backwards look at our era, when no one acted fast enough to stave off global warming. Gillian Anderson! Moby! Heather Graham! Stephen Baldwin!
[[There, my SEO for the week is accomplished.]]

The Yes Men pranked New York City and the media with their mock "climate change edition" of the Rupert "Fox News" Murdoch-owned tabloid, The New York Post:

"SPECIAL EDITION" NEW YORK POST from The Yes Men on Vimeo.

More activist moments, and the anti-climatic policy roundup, after the jump.

Their individual climate change adapation strategy, the Survivaball, wasn't bad either:

As the media's eyes shifted west-southwest to Pittsburgh and the G20, Greenpeace activists performed a tricky action hanging a banner reading "Danger: Climate Destruction Ahead" off one of the city's many bridges. The group produced this agit-proppy video documenting the action, and the activists' hopes that President Obama will show leadership on taking strong action:

Youth climate activists from DC Action Factory were on-message about the G20's "climate fail" at Friday's "People's March" in Pittsburgh, not far from the site of the G20 summit.

The week's climate policy high points were a good deal more sedate:

Alliance of Small Island States demanded that the world's industrial nations keep the increase in the surface temperature between now and 2100 well below 1.5 deg. C above averages for the mid-1800s -- which would entail slashing greenhouse gas pollution much further than what's being discussed to date. Right now the major economies have agreed, somewhat hazily, to a 2 deg. C (3.8 deg. F)  target.
"At two degrees," says Dean Bialek, U.N. representative for the nonprofit group Independent Diplomat, who is advising and assisting the AOSIS nations in the climate treaty negotiations, "the AOSIS nations will face totally unacceptable impacts." Which is to say, these low-lying islands will disappear from the face of the Earth.

While President Obama's opening address to the United Nations Climate Summit was hotly anticipated, it was Chinese President Hu Jintao who seized the day. He vowed that his nation would curb the growth of its greenhouse-gas emissions by a “notable margin” from 2005 levels by 2020. In his speech before the UN Climate Summit on Tuesday, Hu also said that China would generate 15 percent of its power from renewables and nuclear by 2020, and plant 150,000 square miles of new forest over that same period. He also committed to integrating climate action into domestic economic development plans, and improving energy efficiency. Yes, it's pretty vague. But it was a much stronger and more forward-looking statement than those made by President Obama. Al Gore lauded Hu’s statements, saying “I think that China has provided impressive leadership."

The Group of 20 major economies agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, albeit in an as-yet-undefined "medium term." If they follow through, it will be a significant move -- likely to cut global greenhouse gas pollution by 10-12%, as well as making cleaner (and much less subsidized) energy sources more economically competitive with their dirty cousins.
It was the only climate-specific policy statement to come out of the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh, however, and it fell far short of the hopes of climate activists, who wanted a firm proposal on “climate finance”—G20 aid to poor nations for help in adapting to and mitigating climate change.

Now all eyes turn to this coming week's UN climate meeting in Bangkok -- one of two remaining major milestone on the road to Copenhagen.