Maybe it’s the unseasonably hot San Francisco weather today, but this NY Times blog has got me all hot and bothered.
Basically, Gingrich has gotten over 1 million people to sign a petition entitled (I’m not joking) “Drill Here, Drill Now” to encourage Congress to open up restrictions on off-shore oil drilling and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
There are clearly lots of things wrong with this. You know, the fact that we really do seem to be a nation of totally out of control drug addicts that will go to every length to get more of a drug (oil) that we know is killing us but we aren’t doing ANYTHING to try to get of it and get healthy again.
No. What got me is that they have 1 million people signed on to it. As some of you know we launched Power Vote a month and a half ago with the goal of getting 1 million more young people involved in the youth climate movement and to demonstrate to our elected officials that the voice for clean, just energy is strong and powerful. So far, we’ve got a few thousand signed on to the Power Vote pledge and only a couple of dozen signed up for our mega camp to develop real leaders to grow our numbers and become a powerful force.
What’s the deal people? We talk about how amazing the youth climate movement is but we can’t seem to mobilize anywhere near the numbers of Gingrich and the other dirty energy pushers.
I’ll admit that when I first heard about Power Vote I wasn’t that excited. I am very wary of the political process and find most national level political pushes to be exclusionary and super disempowering. I believe in my heart ( and every bit of organizing experience i have) the Audre Lorde phrase that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
That said, we need our numbers to be SO much larger if we want a movement that will create real and lasting change. We need tens of millions of people we can call on when BS things are introduced so we can squash them in a second and get back to the work of transforming our communities. For every dangerous Gingrich move like this we need hundreds more positive ones where in the drop of a hat we can have 10 million or 100 million demanding (and getting) millions of green jobs, cutting off the billions of dollars in subsidies currently being given to dirty energy, immediate and just responses to every community suffering from the impacts of dirty energy and climate change today, and on and on.
Anyway, that’s why this lady signed the Power Vote pledge. Not because I think our government is actually going to do what it should to enact a clean and just energy revolution. But because we need the numbers that will build a movement to fill in every one of their gaps on a community level and make them at least start being as accountable to us as they are to Big Oil.
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Brianna, I feel that and I appreciate you. Let’s do it…we don’t have any other choice.
YES! This is the call to action that we need! It’s time to organize, folks. We need to stop feeling the safety of being one, small, righteous voice and instead cast ourselves as a big and powerful player, because we know we are.
He’s a better organizer only in the sense that he can afford to buy ads on Hannity and Colmes and get a million anti-environmental Fox News viewers to sign his petition.
This is a golden opportunity to prove that people power trumps expensive partisan advertising.
Sign Up Now and pass to your friends and contacts. We can do this easy!
Right on. Momentum takes time to build. Two thousand signatures in the middle of the summer is pretty good for a month. I suspect it will be thousands more very quickly if we work at it. And come September when high school and college students go back to school, there’ll be no stopping us!
“He’s a better organizer only in the sense that he can afford to buy ads on Hannity and Colmes and get a million anti-environmental Fox News viewers to sign his petition.”
Sparki makes a good point here. Even though we are the most online generation in history, there is still something to be said for using other mediums. We obviously don’t have the means to buy up all sorts of ad time, but making sure that media opportunities such as campus newspapers, facebook banners, etc should always be hit up.
What about passing around an anti-militarist/anti-Iraq style “Pledge of Resistance” sign up to Bush’s attempts to lift the offshore drilling ban.
Plus how often do you think Newt Gingrich appeals to supporters and contacts to sign such pledges? He’s got the novelty going for him. Energy Action sends out pleas for signatures often enough that
it’s no longer special.
So yes, Newt is a better organizer in the sense that people don’t see him as an organizer and so are more likely to respond to him.
It’s not that Newt is a better organizer- it’s that people are desperate for energy solutions at a time when gasoline costs $4 a gallon and electricity rates are rising. Put out a national petition for electric vehicle production subsidies, or high-speed rail, or a new direct-current electricity grid that can take better advantage of distributed solar and wind power production, and we could probably get a similar response.
In the offshore drilling debate, we need to do a better job of reminding people that this administration has opened up unprecedented amounts of federal land to ONSHORE drilling - and it hasn’t done a damned bit of good for anyone except oil company shareholders.
The offshore drilling gambit is a piece of populist bullshit, and just like the gas tax holiday proposal, I think that people will generally be too smart to swallow it once we get the facts out. You might find a million fools willing to sign a petition in a knee-jerk anger, but if we engage people and talk more about real solutions, then we can expose this as the pointless gimmick it really is.
I certainly agree that Newt’s pledge is a gimmick, and I would have to echo what Ruth said about the novelty of his request. The other thing he has going for him is his name recognition; I sometimes worry that the volume of progressive groups out there works against us. People don’t know which organization to regard as leading the clean energy movement, and are consequently reluctant to commit themselves. Attaching a name like ‘Newt Gingrich’ to something inspires confidence (for some), at the very least because they believe it will be taken seriously in Washington. So the concreteness of drilling for lower fuel prices is part of it, but I think that there is a credibility element as well.
Alternatively, I think a potentially effective response might be something sponsored by, say, Al Gore (or Arnold Schwarzenegger, or, hell, Leonardo DiCaprio), called “Your Money, Your Pockets” (trying to match the pithiness of Newt) that advocated ending oil subsidies and tax breaks to energy companies and returning this money to consumers so they can weatherize their homes (or reinvesting it in subsidies for hybrids, or taking everyone in the country out to brunch… you get the idea). This is just an example, I’m not necessarily saying that that is a good policy (though the brunch idea has some serious potential). However, I’m trying to demonstrate how the clean energy movement can use the formula that others have been so successful with.