Kickstarter

The International Climate Wars: Economy and Ecology at Rio+20 is a film about what promises to be the most consequential public sphere struggle of the 21st century—the conflict over climate governance and thus the future of carbon-fueled industrial globalization. Is there a way to carry on industrial development without snuffing out planetary ecology, thus raising standards of living for the presently less-developed countries?—or should the already rich and powerful nations wall off the developing world and consign it to the costly fate of extreme climate change? At the UN' s upcoming Rio+20 conference [otherwise officially called the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD)], there will be a convergence of the world's peoples, labor and environmental movements, all intent on confronting the UN, the sovereign nation-states, and the multi-national corporations over what rights should be institutionalized in the UN structure and inserted into the international climate negotiations over the course of the 21st Century. Should the UN formalize a right to clean water and sanitation? What about indigenous rights to keep using indigenous lands and practicing indigenous lifeways?—even on lands and in forests that nation-states and multinationals covet for use as carbon-offsets and for Clean Development Mechanism/ carbon credits for sale on carbon markets? Should there be internationally recognized rights to unionize and bargain with employers, or instead a global Right to Work regime obstructing effective unionization?

At Rio+20 representatives of social movements from all over the world will come and address the powerful, law-making United Nations—and with your help I will be there with my new HD video camera turned on, documenting the conference proceedings and interviewing both rank and file social movers as well as official NGO and national delegates to the UN conference: what is at stake in these international negotiations? whose voices are heard and whose are excluded? and whose ideas best hold up under the scrutiny of the UN's commitment to the public use of reason?

I will arrive in Rio on June 12 and start making contacts, setting up interviews, and visually documenting the entire official conference setting as well as the space reserved for the Peoples Summit (the civil society organized counter-summit of social movements and NGOs). I will then participate in the 5-day-long Peoples Summit running from June 15 - 20)—this is the counter-summit representing the autonomous work of thousands of interested citizens of the world hoping to shape the process of globalization and sustainable development. The official UN conference will be held June 20-22 (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday).  I will remain in Rio for several additional days filming follow up interviews and return on the 25th of June.

I am accredited to attend the UNCSD as an official NGO delegate representing the University of California, under the auspice of the Scripps Institute's Revelle Program on Climate Science and Policy (with which backing I attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 2011 Conference of Parties 17, in Durtban, South Africa).

While in Brazil I will shoot everything with my new Canon Vixia HFM1 full HD videocamera (shooting frame rate 24p, res. 1920x1080p, data rate 24 mbs) and Audio-Technica acoustic hand held microphone (model AT822). At home in Santa Barbara the film will be color corrected and edited in Final Cut Pro 7 on my Quad-core MAC PRO tower (4 intel Xeon chips with 8 GB 667 MHz DDR2 F8-DIMM RAM).