Thanks

Robin

(My sister was born in Guatemala. My other sister and I were born in El Salvador.)

Note: Jim Hansen’s overcoat and hat are not from Guatemala.

As far as threads go…we aren’t going to be needing them in the future as hot as it’s going to be with global warming and as limited as A/C output will be due to energy restrictions. We’ll just need some dental floss and some crotch-concealing cloth. We will need an abundance of eco-friendly sunscreen, though. Will a hemp oil derivative do the trick?

The ones I see are generally open work, and I suspect they are either made from soft inexpensive acrylic or cotton. The ones I’ve seen are often in vivid colors, so I suspect acrylic which retains colors longer.

I have no idea how or why they caught on, but they have been popular a long time. I have no idea if they have any special meaning.

They could be made very quickly and cheaply. They are usually open work, so they wouldn’t be too warm. (Notice we see few worn in the cold of the recent DC event.)

If you ran a strand through the ends, you could also use them as re-usable net grocery bags. (But I don’t know if anyone does that.) If you soaked them in water on a dry day, you could probably get a swamp cooling effect. So… who knows?

As an expert on knitting and crochet, perhaps you can answer a question that has been nagging me for years.

I viewed a number of protest pictures, such as the plethora of them available at zombietime and the many that make the news. A common theme with the extreme left bong and dreadlock set seems to be these crocheted hats.

I’ve seen them worn all seasons. From my viewpoint they are hot and itchy, especially in summer. WUWT?

My question is: why these hats? What special meaning (if any) do they have for these folks?

Or does “hot an itchy” just seem comfortable to them? Or is it just a “me too” sparked from somebody that started selling them at a street fair in Berkeley one year?

These are the questions that haunt our times.

The march to the plant took up about 6 full blocks of a 2-lane road, so make of those numbers what you will. The crowd at the stage (which was probably 1/3rd of the people at various gates) took up the whole street, and was at least 300 or 400 people. You do have to bear in mind that these were all a) people who could take a day off work/school and delay their trips back from the weekend Powershift conference (which had 12,000 registered folks) and b) were willing to risk being arrested. Not to mention the risk of hypothermia :-p

Still, the effectiveness of things like this are judged mostly on their media impact. As far as that goes, it seems reasonably successful.

For the “how much carbon did people emit getting there” crowd, the travel for all 12,000 folks at powershift was calculated (based on a survey included with registration) and offset by retiring credits from the RGGI market which, in my opinion, is one of the better ways to do carbon offsets (since by retiring credits in a compliance market, you are lowering the overall emissions cap).

Michael– I think there were many students from far away states attending PowerShift. That seemed to be a fairly well organized event. Since PowerShifts lobby event ran just before the coal event, a number of people who came to PowerShift may have gone over to listen to the speakers at the coal plant. ( If I were at one event which ended, I’d go over to the other one. So…just guessing.)

Of course, I have no way of knowing how many people were at the other gates.

It was definitely cold out.

Also, I think the electronic doodad you see in the picture belongs to Hansen’s Mobile Media Swarm™ that accompanied him most of the time.

One was the mostly indoor event called “Power Shift”. The other event was the coal plant protest. My post is about the coal plant protest.

If the BBC reported 10,000 students, they were probably discussing Powershift — not the coal protest. Powershift claims 10,000 participants here. Power Shift seemed to take place all weekend, it’s a regular event (PowerShift 08 and possibly earlier conferences have taken place), it doesn’t highlight civil disobedience, and mostly doesn’t seem to involve standing around outside in the snow chanting. Here is their blog: Power Shift.

Powershift did also staged an outdoor event– “lobby day” which took place at 11:30 am outside the Capital building.

In contrast, the coal protest began with a gathering at Spirit of Justice parkt 12:30 pm and continued through the afternoon.

From there, people marched to the coal plant used to heat some buildings at the Capital. This second event is discussed atat capitol climate action.org.

Now for numbers:

I was watching the video of the protest at the coal plant. I would be very surprised if attendance ever approached 10,000, but it was more than 4 dozen. Here’s how the numbers seemed to appear in the video.

I wrote the 4 dozen when I first turned on the video which I discovered through youtube.

Based on the time stamp of 13:30 Central time, that would be a few hours after people marched over from Spirit of Justice Park. Since web pages told people to gather at 12:30 ET, that’s about 2 hours into the the coal plant protest schedule.

At that time, there seemed to be about 4 dozen in front of the camera which appears to have been placed in front of some sort of main stage. The camera moves around, so I can’t be sure. But it wasn’t very many people.

If you examine my post, you’ll see I updated as the event unfolded. (But it’s done in a “hey this is caught my atttention now!” sort of way.)

More people arrived about the time of the update showing the woman in the Navaho blanket. So, after that, there were definitely more than 4 dozen– but definitely not 10,000!

As people at PowerShift may have been sympathetic to the coal protest, it’s possible that a number swung by the coal protest gathering to hear the coal protest speakers (particularly Hansen, McKibben and Kennedy.)

I don’t know how many came to the coal plant in the end– but the news stories I saw yesterday estimated “hundreds”, not “thousands”. There were certainly not “thousands” in front of the main stage listening to the speakers.

That said: I think there were five gates to the coal plant. The cameras never showed all the people. I’ll google a bit today to find out whether anyone came up with a better estimate for the total number of protesters specifically standing out in the cold protesting the coal plant. (As opposed to sitting inside nice warm conferences rooms listending to indoor presentations at PowerShift.)

I’ll look for some even more boring videos for you. BTW–this one included bongos, singing, chanting. Overall, it didn’t seem as fun as Woodstock though.

(OT, Lucia, but each day I dutifully visit your site, desperately hoping for a
premiere of “The World’s Most Boring Video – The Sequel” . But what do I get? Nothing – just another lot of statistical analysis!)

There were some interesting folks there: Hansen, of course, as well as the poet Wendell Barry, Gus Speth, Bill McKibben, and the leaders of a number of different environmental organizations. The protest was split into four different groups, each with different color banners, who broke off from the march to stand in front of different gates. The whole thing was completely symbolic of course, given that the plant had planned ahead and changed shifts shortly before the protest started. There were even 16 or so counterprotesters from the CEI holding “Drill Drill Drill” and “Gore is Evil” signs.

As far as chants go, my running tally was: No coal, oil, gas, nuclear, biofuels, and big hydro. Alas, if only they could power the country on their smug sense of self-righteousness!

Even managed to snag a picture of Hansen and McKibben:
http://twitpic.com/1t5u2

So, at the end of the day it was a cute symbolic effort for what I personally think is a good cause (phasing out coal), though it was rife with the usual utopianism of the left. It got fairly good media coverage (CNN, ABC, USA Today, etc.), though the uncooperative weather gave Fox News a chance for the token snarky “global warming protest snowed out” headline.