Copenhagen has passed and the Action Factory has packed up, moved out, and dispersed. This just might be the last post on our blog for a while.

In the end, we did not get nearly what we had hoped for — neither a US Senate climate bill, nor a binding international climate treaty.

BUT…

…perhaps we can claim just a little credit for helping push Obama to go to Copenhagen? After all, we did give him a plane ticket for his birthday. And we gave him some flack when he went there to try to get the Olympics.

…Or how about for influencing Arlen Specter’s far-from-certain EPW committee vote after we chased him in a SurvivaBall herd, all the way from the capitol into the Hart Office Building?

…Or for making Jack Bonner of Bonner and Ass. look like a real idiot when we shook his hand while wearing Astroturf suits at a House Commitee hearing, much to the delight of Congressman Ed Markey…

…And there was also that time we crashed a press conference being held by Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravestahl prior to the G20 summit at the National Press Club. Before the G20 summit even began, we dominated the media cycle by asserting our first amendment rights and demanding strong climate action from world leaders. Then we continued to make news once in Pittsburgh with our Global Climate Wake-Up Call (the first link is hilarious, btw)

… And finally, I suppose we can claim credit for the defection of a major paper company from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It happened just 1 day after we successfully pulled off an elaborate spoof press conference with the Yes Men in which we temporarily reversed the Chamber’s backward stance on climate policy. We may have even provoked the Chamber to dig itself into an even deeper hole and sue some of us… gee, that would make them look real bad… hmm…. oh wait, we did. The Chamber also sent a letter to Senators Boxer and Inhofe not long after our stunt, trying to play nice guy and directly assert supposed (feigned?) support for climate legislation, an act which Senator Kerry suggested would be a “Nixon to China” moment, if the Chamber really meant it.

All in all, we had a lot of fun and made a lot of friends. We generated hundreds of media hits highlighting the dire need for climate action, and these were undoubtedly seen by hundreds of thousands. We hope that through our actions, we have inspired and will continue to inspire many, many more actions.

Here are three nuggets of DC action wisdom:

1. Crash other events for media attention

2. Being ridiculous is fun and can actually put pressure on elected officials

3. The bottom of the reflecting pool is slippery – enter boldly, but carefully and everything will work out fine.

The Action Factory may be over, but our work is far from complete. In the final hours of the Copenhagen conference, a handful of countries – including Tuvalu, Bolivia, and Venezuela – made statements strongly opposing the undemocratic accord, which is essentially a death sentence for many low-lying countries. When one nation’s “unprecedented breakthrough” is another’s death sentence, something is clearly not right. That’s why in 2010 many of us will stay engaged with battles and creative actions in the Coal River Valley, within the US Senate, at the US Chamber of Commerce and elsewhere. Avaaz as an organization will take on the Chamber directly. We hope you will join us for the long haul — not just because it matters, or because the future of our planet depends on it, but because it is FUN.

Thanks to all of you who have been along for the ride – it’s been a pretty wild one. See you in the streets.

Yet some guilty parties are actively trying to mess the process up instead of just not doing enough: powerful fossil fuel and business interests are working against the interests of the people in the struggle for a senate bill and in the negotiations for a treaty. As Ricken Patel from Avaaz said about Copenhagen: “one group was cracking open the champagne – the polluting industry lobbyists.”

Even before the dust had settled or the last negotiations had stopped, the DC Action Factory used its last few hours as a group to deliver Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming to every single senate office and Roland Burris (D-IL) in person. Maybe we didn’t do enough to expose the dirty energy campaign to hijack the senate, but hopefully final hours as an Action Factory are a sign of big things to come.

Mr. Burris probably shouldn’t have stopped to talk to us, because it didn’t make him look good at all. Even without knowing what an astroturf suit with a coal lobby name-tag symbolizes, you would think any senator with an instinct for self preservation (all of them?) would be wary. Instead, Julie said we had a book for him about how dirty industry has spun the science on global warming.Burris  saw the coal lobby name tag on David’s astroturf jacket and said, “You know, we have a lot of coal in Illinois, and we need to burn that coal.” Ouch.

AcFac’r Tom Owens, from western PA, jumped in at this point to say that he came from a mining town that exemplifies how the coal industry is taking the miners out of mining. If Senator Burris thinks that coal is going to create jobs in his state, then he has clearly fallen for the lies perpetuated by industry PR campaigns.

Burris left us with some words of thanks for being idealists and doing the important work, but we left him with something more powerful: A book that screams scandal from the cover to the last page. Even a 5 minute glance at Climate Cover-Up will show all but the most jaded corporate hack that global warming science has been mutilated by fossil PR spin.  It details how citizen opposition to climate legislation is bought and paid for the same way they convinced people cigarettes were harmless. Burris, I hope you enjoy your holidaze, reading about how you and the Senate were duped by some of the dirtiest industries in the world.

The Avaaz Action Factory has pushed back on corporate trickery, helping to expose astroturf operations and raising awareness about the dire threat posed by dirty industry. When Bonner and Associates got caught forging letters to congressmen before the key house vote, the AcFac showed up the same afternoon calling out their fraud and putting them on the front of HuffPo (not in a good way.) Ed Markey (D-MA) hauled Jack Bonner before a congressional panel to grill him and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity on their lies and deceit. The AcFac was there in astroturf suits, even shaking Bonner’s hand for all the great astroturf work he’s done.

But its a lot bigger than that. Bonner’s firm is small fry compared to the forces behind the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries and more.

I was thrilled to read Avaaz’s email today, sent out to its 3.6 million members around the world.  It captures the anger that I feel about COP15, and clearly lays out the next steps.  Avaaz is going to take the Chamber of Commerce and other powerful industry loggies head-on.  For a teaser, they closed with this:

In our journey together as the Avaaz community, we’ve taken on dictators in Burma and Zimbabwe, promise-breaking politicians in Europe and North America, and the forces of extremism in the Middle East. But the Chamber is in some ways the most powerful and dangerous opponent we’ve faced. Some have advised Avaaz to stay quiet about this, to protect our own organization. But with danger comes opportunity, and if people power can defeat even the most powerful corporate lobby in the world, we’ll send a much broader message, that a new world, the one we all seek, is on its way.

Acknowledging and fighting corporate power where it directly blocks the change that people want is crucial.  We can remove the roadblocks to climate action, build powerful alliances between people’s organizations of all kinds, and really get at the root causes of our unjust, polluting system.

Lets brainstorm some actions to target corrupt corporate lobbyists and hit the ground running next year.

We at the DC Climate Action Factory teamed up with a delegation of irate Danish anthrofishies and hit the frozen streets of K and I: global corporate lobby ground zero. It’s from here that climate criminals and climate profiteers staged their war to infiltrate and cripple the climate legislation that so many saw as the lynchpin for progress towards a real deal at the COP. Naturally, this place is home to the Angry Mermaid Award winners.

First stop we hit it was API, the American Petroleum Institute. API came in at 3rd place in global interweb polling of over 10,000 homo sapiens sapiens and mermaids. API’s lobbying war chest weighed in at $4.1 million this year. Beyond the beltway, they fielded a mercenary astroturf army, lobbing lies at congresspeople and directing climate coverage in corporate media. All to perpetuate the fossil fuel economy that’s devastating the planet and threatening mermaids, humans, and everyone else who depends on natural temperatures and stable ecosystems.

Apparently someone tipped them off, because we arrived to find the API entrance caution-taped. But nay, no length of ribbon could thwart our MERMAID FUNK ARMADA. We triumphed in delivering a 5ft. Angry Mermaid award inside the building despite heavy resistance from the astroturf army sentinels who tried in vain to blockade the entrance.

But that’s all for another video. And so is our daring ascent up the highest steeple in the Church of Shell Oil, Jorma Ollila’s sustainable tar sands spa. Yes, we bested them too, the 2nd place winners. But that is also for another video. This is a 3-part series.

What we can share is this: Exclusive footage of a daring fin and foot dance attack on Monsanto castle, 1st prize winners. We were victorious in our goal of decorating Monsanto’s terrific genetically modified Christmas tree with a life-size Mermaid trophy. But, alas, there were casualties on our side. Chalk another up for the murderous behemoth that is Monsanto.

Monsanto is at the head of the corporate climate profiteers‘ counter-evolution, undermining sustainable technology by lobbying for false solutions to the CO2 emissions crisis. Monsanto’s prime false solution is leading the proprietary GMO biofuel monoculture empire. Similarly, Shell and API champion Carbon Capture technology and unconventional extraction like the Alberta Tar Sands project.

Alongside the false solutions scam, the Angry Mermaid winners feed from another common trough: government subsidies for carbon-intensive economic sectors. All three winners benefit from fossil fuel, factory-farming, and military-industrial subsidies. The related industrial sectors, transport, industrial agriculture, dirty energy, manufacturing, and war, comprise the greatest emitters in the second-worse emitting country in the world.

As people who depend on the land and water ecosystems in the United States and depend on the same oceans and atmosphere, we share in the rage of the angry mermaids. Thus the uncompromising beat of our global MERMAID FUNK ARMADA. We are unstoppable. And as with all things unstoppable, more action is on the way.

The Angry Mermaid Award is organised by ATTAC Denmark, Corporate Europe Observatory, Focus on the Global South, Friends of the Earth International, Oilchange International and Spinwatch.

Here’s another DC Delivery by the Organic Consumers Association

Climate Action Network – International chose the US for today’s award for two reasons:

1. The US has made no commitment to long-term financing for developing countries, a major shortcoming that could sink the Copenhagen talks altogether
2. Despite being the biggest cumulative emitter of global warming pollution, the US has among the weakest emissions targets of any major developed country. Given that the science calls for 40%+ reductions below 1990 levels by 2020, the US goal of just 4% cuts by 2020 is laughable

While the formal Fossil award ceremony took place inside the Belle Center in Copenhagen, we showed up outside the White House in dinosaur costumes and sang the Fossil of the Day jingle (to the tune of the Jurassic Park theme song).

US negotiators in Copenhagen seem to be more concerned about representing the fossil fuel lobby than about standing up for the millions of Americans who want a real deal by the end of this week. Today the international community is blaming and shaming the US for their fossil-like negotiating position at Copenhagen.

A crowd of approximately 100 weathered the cold this evening to gather by the bow of our now-complete 60-foot-long replica of Noah’s Ark for a short rally and candlelight vigil. Copenhagen is half over and our message is loud and clear: The World Wants a Real Deal.

The normally picturesque reflecting pool on the National Mall was witness to a grisly scene today, as we floated fake corpses face-down in the shallow water. A water-borne banner reading “Obama, Climate Change Kills / Earn Your Prize in Copenhagen” floated amongst the bodies, symbolic of the 300,000+ annual climate-related deaths estimated by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s think tank.

CO2 Kills-Obama Earn Your Prize

The mass of bodies was nothing short of what appeared to be a devastating climate change induced crime scene.

The United States is posturing to take on more global responsibility with Obama now attending the final days of the Copenhagen climate talks [instead of just when it's convenient to also receive a Nobel Peace Prize]. While the conventional wisdom leading up to Copenhagen suggested that this climate conference was doomed to failure, Obama’s change in travel plans shed a new light on the potential for greater success.

As David Roberts with Grist commented, “Coming to Copenhagen at the climax of the talks, specifically to push negotiations “over the top,” as the White House statement says, is a risky move for Obama. He’s got skin in the game now; he’ll look foolish if he rides in at the last minute and fails to broker an agreement.”

Nobel Peace Prize Send Off at the Reflecting Pool

The move was attributed to recent climate commitments from China and India, and signals that a Real Deal is a possible outcome of the conference.

Unlike the casualties of climate change in the reflecting pool today, the treaty negotiations in Copenhagen are very much alive.

As you may have heard, the Copenhagen talks kicked off yesterday with an invigorating speech from Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, rumors that the EU might announce a stronger carbon reduction target, and of course, the first round of Fossil of the Day Awards for the greatest obstructionists.

First place went to all the Annex I countries for generally trying to weaken a deal. Annex I countries are developed countries that are most responsible for climate change. They are the countries that were supposed to make emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol (only some did). No surprise here – the FOTDA judges simply decided to kick off Copenhagen Fossil of the Day but calling out wealthier countries that are perpetually dragging their feet when it comes to getting a Real Deal.

The second place award, however, was a bit more of a shock. Austria, and its Nordic neighbors Finland and Sweden were awarded second place for an outrageous attempt to hijack the REDD mechanism for their own benefit. REDD (which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) is an already precarious offset scheme that gives developing countries carbon credits to keep their forests standing. It is meant to give poorer countries an incentive to reduce their emissions. It is certainly NOT for fully developed wealthy nations like Austria who need to make REAL cuts in their emissions rather than get paid to protect forests they were going to protect anyway.

Even though we’re busy building an Ark and planning other big actions, a few of us made a quick trip to the Embassy of Austria today and attempted to deliver the prize. Much to our dismay, the embassy was closed (closed? in the middle of the day on a Tuesday?) But we got some great photos, which we think are enough to say: SHAME ON YOU AUSTRIA. SHAME, SHAME, SHAME. AND SHAME ON YOUR NORDIC NEIGHBORS TOO!

Stay tuned for additional fossil awards presentations over the next few weeks. While we don’t have time to delivery fossil awards every day, you can check out all daily winners on the official Fossil of the Day Award website, which even includes a live video stream of the award ceremony in Copenhagen. We also encourage you to deliver a fossil award yourself if you’re so inspired. Shoot us an email at info -at- actionfactories.org and we can give you some tips, and maybe even a pre-made trophy!

If you build it, they will come.  When we set out to build a huge ark on the national mall to illustrate what we’ll need if we don’t get a climate deal, we expected to make a splash.  What we weren’t prepared for was the response from concerned folks from all different corners of DC who want something to do to help.

In just the past week that we’ve worked on this, we’ve gotten props from international clean energy leaders like Bill McKibbon, and gotten tons of volunteers signing up to wield a hammer.  (If you want to help, sign up here!)

Copenhagen starts today.  There are 10 days of negotiations.  10 days for the years of campaigning to turn into a real deal.  Ac Fac says, it better be good enough, because this ark isn’t going to be big enough for too many of our friends to join us.

Believe it or not, the Copenhagen summit begins in just 3 days. As far as we can tell, activists, organizers, government officials and, unfortunately, business lobbyists, are beginning to pour into the city. Everyone is bracing themselves for what is sure to be a busy, unpredictable, and historic two weeks.

So are we. While many of our friends are on the ground in Europe, those of us here at the DC Action Factory are preparing for an action-packed 2 weeks right here in Washington. After all, most of the people and corporations we’ll want to blame and shame for the shortcomings and failures coming out of Copenhagen have their headquarters right in our backyard.

If you’re interested in helping out with any of our actions, please click here to sign up. Here’s a sneak preview of what we have in store:

1. We are building a Giant Ark on the National Mall! In a matter of days we will begin constructing a giant boat designed to represent ‘Climate Plan B‘, the alternative to a fair, ambitious, and binding global treaty in Copenhagen. The Ark evokes the great flood, a realistic portrayal of the climate destruction already underway and the waves of destruction yet to come, especially if the world fails to reach a binding agreement.

2. We are holding a rally and candlelight vigil at the Ark on December 12 at 4pm, right at the half-way point of the Copenhagen talks. The event is part of “The World Wants a Real Deal” a global day of action, being organized by the TckTckTck campaign. Before the vigil, the event will feature a diversity of prominent climate activists and leaders.

3. We will present Fossil of the Day Awards to the countries who perform the worst during the climate talks. This will include high-profile deliveries to embassies throughout the city, as well as to the state department and selected members of the Senate. Who will you blame?

4. Surprises! You’ll just have to wait and see what else we have in store. Make sure to join our Friends of Avaaz Action Factory email list if you want to get rapid response action alerts.

Stay tuned and please join us for some fun action during these crucial two weeks!