How Can We Sleep While Our Beds Are Burning?

This might be the World's First Musical Petition which launches online at 2pm GMT today. Each free download of the re-recorded version of Midnight Oil's '"Beds Are Burning" song will count as a petition signature.  

"Is this 'Band Aid" for the Click Generation?" the organisers ask. Well the only innovation is a downloaded track counting as petition signature/vote.

Although that raises the question that if you make it so easy to register a vote then perhaps the votes themselves become less meaningful. No process of deliberation, real demonstratin of committment, etc. Mind you this is an issue with online petitions in general.

The trick is to go for volume so you can bandy aboout numbers like "25 million people voted by downloading the song is 18 minutes" or whatever and that gets used as a press soundbite which pressures the politicians. But I digress.

'Tis the season for campaigns in general - and quite right too. To call the Copenhagen summit critical, would be an absurd litotes (an understatement for rhetorical effect). (Incidentally, I learned that word in a Modesty Blaise book many years ago).

In other words, it's an acute, urgently-important, climacteric, consequential, crucial, desperate, determinative, dire, exceptive, grave, hairy, hazardous, high-priority, integral, momentous, perilous, pivotal, precarious, pressing, risky, serious, significant, strategic, urgent, vital and weighty event.

So the more mechanisms we have to raise awareness and mobilize public support the more our politicians can feel they have permission, or even a mandate, to cut a legally-binding deal to reduce global CO2 emissions.

TckTckTck is an alliance of people and organisations across the globe who want a "fair, ambitious, and binding climate change agreement" at Copenhagen. "If enough of us stand up", they say, "world leaders will listen."

I confess a soft spot for the idea of using Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning" song for the campaign. I lived in Australia in around 1983 and it has strong associations and happy memories for me. It's also just a truly great chorus.

So go on, sign the petition, tell your mother's brother's lover and everyone else you know to sign it too. Thx.

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