It’s Getting Hot In Here

Avec environ 11,000 étudiant(es) et jeunes à Powershift 2009, un centaine des étudiants canadiens au conférence se demandent “Où est notre PowerShift?”

L’énergie ici à Washington c’est inspirant. C’est le premier fois que ce nombre des jeunes se sont mobilisé pour cet enjeu – l’enjeu qui est évidemment l’enjeu principale de notre génération. Au cours du conférence, les 11,000 étudiants participent à plusieurs ateliers et tables rondes au sujet des questions sociaux, économiques et écologiques qui font partie du plus grande question du changement climatique.  

Continue reading ‘Où est notre PowerShift?’

Tonight, Power Shift ’09 is coming to you live from the Walter E. Washington Conference Center in Washington D.C. Live streaming video by Ustream

You will be impressed and inspired with addresses from youth climate leaders including the Energy Action Coalition Executive Director Jessy Tolkan, Josh Tulkin, Christine Irvine, Dominique Hazzard, and Marisol Becerra.

Power Shift ’09 keynote addresses will be presented by Bill McKibben, Rep. Ed Markey, Rep. Donna Edwards, Jerome Ringo, Enei Begaye, Elliott May, Maisha Everhart, Wahleah Johns, Adam Gardner and live performances by The Roots and The London Souls.

By Jesse Jenkins, reporting for the Energy Collective and WattHead – Energy News and Commentary

I grabbed a few minutes amidst the buzz and activity of Power Shift 2009 with Jerome Ringo, the President of the Apollo Alliance. As 12,000 young people come together for the largest gathering of citizens on climate and clean energy solutions in U.S. history, Mr. Ringo discusses progress made, challenges ahead, and the unique and critical role young people play in securing a clean energy future.

Jesse Jenkins: Jerome, as President of the Apollo Alliance, you are a leading advocate of a new, clean energy economy. The Apollo Alliance has spent years incubating the vision of a future run on clean energy sources that once again provide good jobs for America. You must be pretty happy to hear President Obama move that effort to the center of his agenda with his Joint Address to Congress last week.

Jerome Ringo: The Apollo Alliance has been working for years to frame the issue of green jobs and how they can help both the economy and our environment. Luckily, we now have a president who gets it.

The green jobs programs and initiatives promoted by the Apollo Alliance are an answer to the nation’s economic issues. But it goes beyond that … to address the greatest environmental issue we’ve faced in a generation, global warming, as well as the national security issues we face, as we watch body bags coming back from where we’re fighting to defend oil interests on foreign soil.

Investment in green is a win-win-win-win for America and for our communities, and we are fortunate to have a president that gets that. Continue reading ‘Power Shift 2009 is Reactivating Activism, Says Jerome Ringo’

This morning Jake Brewer (PowerShift09) and Michael Silberman (1Sky and Echo Ditto)talked about new media strategies to enhance campaigns and online activism. It did not go unnoticed that they gave their presentation, the topic of which centered on Web 2.0 technologies, without a slideshow or any other form of audio-visual aid. It was an “old school” group discussion.

One of their main points was that the key to any online organizing is having a simple message — something you can tell someone and they’re excited to pass along to the next person they talk to. We can engage all of the exciting new online communication tools in the world to get our message across, but if the message itself is weak or overly complex, it compromises our ability to spread the word.

Not to say that the new technologies aren’t extremely powerful. As Van Jones said last night in his keynote speech, if you or I had cell phones or personal computers 20 years ago, we would have been viewed as a god. Googling information on anything in the world in milliseconds, or talking through a tiny cell phone and being understood by someone else all the way around the world — these are powerful tools. Let’s use them to communicate our urgent message.  Let’s use them to mobilize our friends, families, and communities to actively support our bold federal action on clean energy and climate change.

Straight off the red eye from Seattle, I find myself bleary-eyed, looking around at the crowd of 11,000+ youth gathered in DC for Power Shift 2009. I am trying to find the briefing room for Lobby Day Trainers.

I look at each of the credential tags of the thousands of energized young people crowding the halls of the DC Convention Center to see if someone can help direct me to the room. I see that a young woman standing by the escalator has a badge around her neck that says “LEADER” in bold block text. Before I make it two steps toward her, my eye catches the same bold block text on the badge of the guy standing next to her and then, suddenly, I realize every person milling in the lobby space has on a set of credentials that says “LEADER” in bold block text.

At Power Shift no one is just a participant. In a time when bold climate action cannot wait, the movement needs leaders. Here at Power Shift a transformation is taking place. Participants are being transformed into leaders and on Monday when 5000+ sit down with their members of Congress, it will be clear that our country’s future leaders are not willing to wait for our present leaders to take bold action on climate and clean energy legislation.  We are all leaders at Power Shift 2009!

A guest post from Nate Loewentheil, Executive Director of The Roosevelt Institution.  Nate is liveblogging from Power Shift ’09.

I’m sitting at a panel at Power Shift 2009 on “Getting to the Truth: Pulling the Curtain Back on False Solutions to Our Energy Crisis.” The panel is an overview of various myths in the environmental movement and how we can best combat them: the true cost of nuclear, the utter absurdity of claims for “clean coal” and the dark side of carbon offsets.

But there are deeper questions at stake. Most people at PowerShift would agree that climate change is urgent, action is needed and any step in the right direction is worth exploring. But some steps are better than others, and not all of them take us in the right direction.  Julian Drix of Rising Tide opened the panel with a critical insight: before we know if we’re taking a step on the right path, we need to know where we’re going. And if we don’t have a destination in mind, we’re going to get mighty lost.

Some options are clearly wrong while others may appear promising; we need to think clearly of all of the costs involved in a given technology or strategy before embracing it. We can smell out these “false solutions” with five criteria, according to Drix; solutions that appear to be move us forward might be:

• Environmentally and racially unjust
• Disguised corporate strategies
• Not actually effective in reducing carbon emissions
• Not scalable
• Encouraging of destructive behavior

Continue reading ‘Getting to the Truth: Pulling the Curtain Back on False Solutions to Our Energy Crisis’

At PowerShift09, I attended the session: Healthier Planet, Healthier People – The Dual Fight for Health Care and Climate Change Solutions. I’m very interested in both public health issues and climate change, so I though this session would be a good mix of both topics. The speakers were Cindy Parker and Anna Gilmore Hall of HealthCare Without Harm; and they spoke about how climate change has, and will continue to have, a dramatic impact on healthcare and how we need to fight both issues simultaneously. The session room was completely full, clearly many people are interested in these issues.

Cindy focused her remarks on how climate change is affecting health. She spoke about how climate change is affecting our food supply, causing droughts and floods, and increasing the risk of infectious diseases. She used the example of West Nile Virus, which as she said, came to the US because of globalization, but spread rapidly because of climate change. When mosquitoes infected with West Nile first arrived in New York City, there was a drought, which cause animals to gather at the sparse water sources. This made it much easier for the mosquitoes to infect others and spread the disease. This was certainly a great example of how climate change really is affecting the diseases that we are now fighting. Continue reading ‘Healthier Planet, Healthier People – The Dual Fight for Health Care and Climate Change Solutions at PowerShift09′

A national poll by Ipsos Reid at the Dominion Institute shows that 43% of Canadians think we should deal with the economic recession before we move any further on climate change.  57% still think, since the last poll before the economic crisis in the fall, that action on climate change is unprecedented, even if it means higher deficits for Canada.

The Globe and Mail (Canada’s national news paper) reports:

Three-quarters of Canadians say we should only adopt stimulus measures that are environmentally sustainable, while 71 per cent say it’s more important for the government to focus on jobs than climate change.

“They’re saying maybe we can have the best of both worlds,” Mr. Simpson said. “Maybe instead of creating jobs in the tar sands we can create them in the environmental sector.”

Maybe, Canada, maybe. Who would have thunk. Continue reading ‘Canadians Want Environment either a) OVER Economy, or b) AND Economy’

Ya tengo dejado intentar de buscar una persona que conozco en un montón de jóvenes. Más de 11,000 personas están en el Washington Conference Centre y en vez de buscar un rostro familiar… decidí de blogear y hablar del movimiento y la locura positiva que es PowerShift ’09.

I have already given up trying to find anyone I know in the middle of 11,000 swarming youth. Speakers, event staff, event volunteers, and Power Shift attendees are running around the Washington Conference Centre and instead of searching for a familiar face…I decided to Blog and share the craziness and excitement that IS PowerShift ’09.

Continue reading ‘El Segundo Dia de PowerShift ’09… The Second Day of PowerShift ’09′

Two girls walk past me with plaid scarves wrapped around their necks discussing whether they should go for the greening your school or the organizing on campus seminar; a young man with a dapper step jams to his iPod with a “Green the Ghetto” shirt; another young man with long blond hair whisks past me taking two steps at a time, clearly focused on making the next panel; volunteers in green-and-white shirts speak into their headpieces to make sure rooms aren’t double booked, volunteers are on hand and everything is going smoothly. Crowds of young students buzz and huddle outside the conference rooms of the D.C. Convention Center; a whole line of students throw open the glass doors and pour in, a rush of cold February air blows past…

This is PowerShift09. Continue reading ‘(com)passion in politics: PowerShift09′