The Story of Stuff Project

If you’re like me, an increasing amount of your worries these days focus on the rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and the resulting potential for devastating climate chaos.

Years ago, when I first heard about climate change, I figured someone else would work all that out while I kept plodding away with my work on consumption, pollution and waste. Well, guess what? They didn’t work it out; in fact, the climate situation is far worse today than even recent scientific predictions. And guess what else? It turns out that climate and consumption are actually the same issue.

You see, most of the greenhouse gases countries emit come from our materials economy: the way we make, use, transport, and throw away all the stuff in our lives. As Boston College professor (and one of my favorite authors) Juliet Schor said “Global consumerism devours resources like there’s no tomorrow. And unless we address how much we consume, we won’t succeed in averting disastrous climate change.”

A majority of scientists now say we need to significantly reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere if we want the planet to resemble something close to what it is like today, supporting the kind of life that it does today. To do this, we simply have to use less Stuff – especially oil and coal. We have to rethink, redesign and rebuild a lot of things. We have to figure out different modes of transportation, growing food, building buildings, and having fun that don’t require endless new Stuff. It’s very possible to make these changes, but they won’t happen on their own. We need to get started.

Unfortunately, most of the world’s leaders and big businesses are instead promoting policy approaches that don’t bring us anywhere near the level of change that climate scientists say is needed—let’s call these “false solutions.” And there’s another problem with these policy approaches: the details are so technical and policy wonkish that it’s often hard to figure out what they are even talking about.

I wondered if it would be possible to explain the leading false solution, Cap and Trade, in a clear compelling way so that more of us are inspired to join the conversation. Working with Climate Justice Now!, the Durban Group for Climate Justice and Free Range Studios, we produced our new short film, The Story of Cap and Trade, to do just that.

We hope you like it. And more importantly, we hope it inspires you to get involved in the most important conversation of our lives.

Those of us in the U.S. are wrapping up our work weeks today to spend tomorrow with friends and family, gathered around big home cooked meals and giving thanks.

Yes, I know that the history of this particular holiday is not nearly as charming as our children’s schoolbooks portray, but for many, the gathering isn’t about participating in a fabricated historical tale, but is about pausing in our hectic lives and honestly sincerely giving thanks for those things which make our lives sweeter throughout the year:  our friends,  our family, our community and our work to make world a better place.

Unfortunately, many people across the country leave their home Thanksgiving night to sleep in cold parking lots and line up at stores to participate in the consumer frenzy known as Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. Retailers know that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the only weekday that many people will have off from work until Christmas, so they widely advertise rock bottom prices to lure people away from their friends and families to go shopping. Adbusters has declared November 27th in the U.S. and 28 November internationally Buy Nothing Day and calls upon us all to restrain from holiday shopping, or from any shopping as well as to unplug our TVs, leave the cars in the garage, and  “from sunrise through sunset, we’ll abstain en masse, not only from holiday shopping, but from all the temptations of our five-planet lifestyles.”

Last year’s Black Friday hit a new low.

Jdimytai Damour, a 34 year old man from Haiti, was working as a temporary worker at a Wal-Mart in New York State.  At 5:00 am, when the store was scheduled to open, the crowd of shoppers who had been waiting in line in the cold for up to 8 hours, stormed the door and trampled Jdimytai to death.

I think of Jdimytai with every advertisement that I’ve seen urging me to go shopping early on Friday morning. And I’ll be thinking of him as I instead linger around our dinner table, crowded with friends, and when I spend a welcome Friday off of work playing board games and making art projects with the kids and doing any number of things that will be infinitely more fun than sleeping in a cold parking lot to be first in line at the mall.

I hope you’ll do the same.

Happy Thanksgiving.