It’s Getting Hot In Here

Power Shift on Saturday was so incredible and so draining. Echoing the words of other bloggers here in the past day or so, I have never met so many intelligent, environmentally-conscious youth leaders in one place. I’m not sure I’ve met this many environmental activists ever. Literally, you walk around the University of Maryland campus, and most conversations you hear are about the same important issues you think about. It’s so awesome.

A few thoughts from the day:

• I went to the panel called “Breaking the Rules: Climate Communications for a Planet in Chaos”, and met Blogmaster Richard for the first time in person (seems to be a theme). It was an absolutely phenomenal panel, with lots of amazing information on how to effectively frame climate communications. Richard already wrote a little about it, but I’d like to offer up a few more tidbits. The most important question I heard all day was asked during the Q&A session: “How can we make environmental action sexy?” Well, looking around Power Shift, (and this point was made at the panel) we’ve made it sexy; the youth environmental movement is sexy. So rock on, y’all. Another thing about “making it sexy” was a quote from Kert Davies, Research Director for Greenpeace, that “dead polar bears are not sexy;” doom and gloom doesn’t win people over. You have to meet people where they are. Finally, there was a great story from the moderator (sorry, I didn’t catch your name!) about getting visible and getting laughs at the LA auto show. Essentially, some folks from Global Exchange, camouflaged in suits, came up on stage after the GM head finished preaching his company’s environmental commitment, took the mic, and smoothly asked him to put his money where his mouth was. It took the reporters a moment to catch on, but they all laughed, and it sounded like a rollicking good time. Except, perhaps, for GM.
• The Career Fair was so intense! There were so many booths, from so many wonderful organizations, so many petitions being offered, so many pamphlets, so many people all looking to spend their life doing this stuff.
• My friends and I went to the packed-to-the-walls (”If we’re gonna create a fire hazard, let’s create a really big one!”) panel by Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, where they discussed the themes presented in their new book, Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Their main thesis is that the environmental movement until the present has been positioned as incompatible with economic prosperity, and that version of environmentalism has to die for any real progress to be made. Schellenberger and Nordhaus advocate a new focus on massive investment ($30-50 billion/yr) in clean energy technology. This will, they predict, drive down the cost of green energy to the point where it is competitive with dirty, brown energy in the US, but more importantly in China and other rapidly developing countries. They also think the wrong sorts of questions are being asked about current carbon trading bills in Congress. The important questions are A: how much money will be made by selling pollution credits? and B: how will that money be spent? The main thesis of this talk, hearkening back to the duo’s controversial 2004 essay, The Death of Environmentalism, was that, in the past, there has been an opposition between environmental thinkers and economic thinkers, and this has been disastrous to the cause. Now, it seems, they instead perceive an opposition between positive thinkers and negative thinkers, with themselves in the former camp and catastrophe-focused folks in the other. They had a good quote about different kinds of environmentalism, and I’ll end with that for tonight. Michael Schellenberger characterized the first method thusly: “There’s this big fire-breathing dragon coming to kill you and all the other villagers…now here’s a compact fluorescent lightbulb.” Then another new method: “There’s still this big fire-breathing dragon coming to kill you and the other villagers, and we’re all going to have to reduce our quality of life.” And that’s the sort of thing they say Al Gore tells people in An Inconvenient Truth. Unfortunately, they didn’t extend the metaphor, but you get the idea.

These two talks had a lot in common, I think. The message is this: communicate a positive, optimistic message. We need to effect all these changes, why? Because there are clearly so many benefits from making them! We can do this if we work together! Let’s go! More Power Shift-age tomorrow!