“Dude, I just want to pass some bold national climate legislation,” said Jake Brewer, Internet Director for the Energy Action Coalition. This was 2 days before Power Shift 09 began. The office was a blur of people banging away on laptops and juggling phones. Thousands of students were already in transit to Washington DC, and a hundred people like me had come to help out in the final months, weeks or days to make the weekend a success, because it needed to be a success.
We are the youth climate movement, the moral leadership of our country, and we are going to stop climate change. We face the most complicated challenge in history while working in the context of wars and terrorism, a plunging stock market and a turning point in America’s history. And through all this, we really need to reduce our green house gas emissions to build a just, sustainable and prosperous society.
2009 is the year. Climate change gives us a deadline of less than a decade to dramatically reverse our rising emissions. Global politics gives us just 7 months to unite the world around a plan to do so. If we miss this opportunity, if the US goes to Copenhagen unable to lead, or is we sign a global treaty that is insufficiently bold, then we fail. Let me repeat that: if we do not make the US a world climate leader this year, we cross a point of exponentially increasing likelihood of ecological catastrophe not seen since the dinosaurs were wiped of the earth.
I say that 2009 is the year for The Climate Campaign. Lets step it up, lets work together, and lets translate the urgency we feel into action.
Every organization in the country that works on climate change knows that December 2009 is our deadline, and every one of them is planning or already implementing their campaign to pressure congress to act. We’re all working on the same thing. Whether we’re forcibly taking our country off coal with our bodies blocking coal plants, or organizing communities to unite around energy innovation, or increasing pressure on congress to get the votes we need for the legislation we need, we’re working on one big movement.
Great crisis calls for great cooperation. As an individual involved in many organizations and campaigns, I demand greater alignment and strategic partnerships. Now is the time to throw aside organizational turf wars and work together.
Hundreds of thousands of people volunteered days, weeks or years to elect Barack Obama. They knocked on doors, called perfect strangers, started political discussions at family gatherings, and empowered more volunteers to magnify their impact. He’s an amazing president, and he teaches us a lot about mobilization, but solving climate change is more important than electing a president. As hard as we worked to get him in office, more of us should be working harder, putting ourselves on the line for this campaign for climate legislation. Are you willing to knock on doors and hit the phones for the climate?
12,100 people attended Power Shift ’09, and every one of them wore a credential that said, “Leader”. That’s who we are, and we need to lead the country with the urgency of our demands. We will reach the other leaders of our country. To every Obama organizer, every friend who’s a staffer on capitol hill, to every family member and every class: we must convey the urgency of this crisis through our actions.
Is Power Shift 09 in your district? The next step is in April, between the 6th and the 19th. Congress is home on break, and we need to meet with them in huge numbers to build on the power we showed at lobby day. Start planning that action now – call your congressman’s scheduler and make it happen. But don’t let this be the only thing you do, not by a long shot!
This needs to happen now. We are the people, now is the time. And we will keep organizing until we win.
YES!!!
I wholeheartedly agree.
As I put it in one of the sessions of my panel “The Big Question: What Does Winning Federal Legislation Look Like”, our position is remarkably similar to that of students and youth organizing with the labor movement for the Employee Free Choice Act. When meeting with leaders of the labor movement and asked if he would sign EFCA, Obama showed remarkable character and honesty. He did not say “this is a business run society and workers have no hope of getting out from under the thumb of multinational corporations” and he did not say “i’m sorry, i’d like to help you, but the right will attack me viciously and call me a socialist and i just don’t have enough political capital to spend on that right now”. He said “you’ve got to make me do it”.
Students and youth in the labor movement are doing right now what they do best – organizing, pushing the debate on their campuses and in their communities forward, building their social power, innovating their actions and campaigns, building a movement – to make him do it.
So do we. We have got to make our visions the political reality. This means building power. The power shift did not end Sunday, or Monday – it is alive right now in these conversations. In the lobbying we continue to do. In the direct actions we continue to do. In the organizing on our campuses for awareness and education. In the campaigns we run to make our universities laboratories of innovation for the coming green economy. In the admirable call you just made for “greater alignment and strategic partnerships. Now is the time to throw aside organizational turf wars and work together.”
This must be accomplished, if we are succeed in our tasks of not only passing the bold climate legislation that we need, but also to make certain that whatever set of legislation and policies are passed puts us on a pathway to meeting 80-95% emissions reductions by 2050. False solutions, corporate giveaways, the next speculative financial bubble – these we do not need and cannot abide.
Greater fealty to a movement and not to organizations will be required. Paradigm shifts in what counts as winning will be required. Clearing our schedules and keeping ourselves healthy throughout the year will be required. What we are tasked with in the next 7-10 months can, and must be accomplished, but will only be done if we not only learn from and celebrate the history of struggling for social justice we have inherited, but we start writing the next chapters in that history.
2009 is the time. The fight is for our future. We are the ones we have been waiting for at this crucial conjuncture in both human and natural history. We have to be the ones that push this climate campaign forward!
With Love,
Dave
With all due respect to all that read this, I would just like to share my thoughts with you.
It seems that we grown-ups (anyone over 35) have done a dis-service to our youth, and I wish there was a way to reverse the damage. Not all, but a huge number of youth in the USA have been used by any number of organizations to help shill their product or position. It has even reached almost all of the places of learning for our youth. From K-12 and on to University, grown-ups with an agenda have been lying to you for far too long.
As an adult, I would like to offer you a chance to read what I’m talking about, then make up your own mind. Please check out the link provided to see how you have been used… http://giovanniworld.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/children-force-fed-propaganda/
Respectfully,
Giovanni Faga
I totally agree Morgan, and your post is an important one, but there’s one thing I feel motivated to point out.
Having talked to numerous student leaders at Powershift this past weekend, I sensed an amazing desire for the sort of action you are describing. Young people recognize that this their future that is at stake and it is their climate to save. Luckily, our generation is better equipped to mobilize for a massive political push than any other in history. We have the networks, the opportunities, and the desire to make our representatives represent us. We have the know how to organize and how to fundraise. My worry is that we don’t yet have the policy knowledge.
Right now, we’ve successfully completed one of the first parts of the climate movement — the “awareness building” part. The variety of people at Powershift with a variety of perspectives on why they want to combat the climate crisis is a testament to that point. So now we’ve moved to the next “part” of the movement — the “political action” part. And for that, we need to know more about the politics and the actual legislation. We need to be able to hold our own in the congressional office buildings and come with a mastery of our position that outweighs even the million-dollar lobbyists paid by Big Coal and Big Oil. We need to become such successful students of the solutions we’re advocating that no one will be able to deny the moral, political, and economic imperative to pass climate legislation this year.
That is why I, and a couple other climate advocates at Middlebury College, are embarking on a project to write a young person’s opinionated guide to climate policy that will demystify what the wonks among us are talking abut with all the policy jargon that gets discussed. At Powershift, numerous would-be lobbyists worried that they wouldn’t be able to successfully talk up the policy points in the Powershift platform. They knew they wanted “80 x 50″ but didnt know whether to advocate for cap-and-dividend or cap-and-trade, what an off-ramp was, and the implications of allowing international offsets. For the bulk of young people, REDD is a color and a “safety valve” is a part of a pipe. I think that in order to become an even greater political force, the youth need to become even more policy literate than we already are.
My question for all readers is whether they think this is a worthwhile endeavor. Do the readers of IGHIH strive for more policy knowledge in order to continue the “Climate Campaign” of 2009? IS there something in specific that they’d like to be covered in specific? Is a massive youth climate lobby truly the next step in securing climate legislation? Let me know!
Thanks so much
peace
Ben
Ben,
I would love to see that. We need to increase our understanding. Take the comment above yours – any youth at Power Shift should be able to point out the errors of the remnants of false climate science. And we should all be able to weigh in on the finer points (or even not so fine) of what a climate policy will look like.
I will add, however, that a complete grasp of the finer points of policy is not required for us to meet with our representatives with force and conviction. Youth are a moral voice as much as anything, and we know that we need bold action. That is as strong a role to play for any potential youth lobbyist as policy wonk. We can learn the policy as we go, but lets not forget the power of being right on the major points.
Ben, please consider applying for the Breakthrough Generation fellowship this summer if climate and energy policy are your thing.
All, Morgan is right that we’ve got to keep this up and keep the pressure on and the conversation going with our elected officials. The April Recess is a key opportunity, and Focus the Nation is there to help you seize that opportunity. They are organizing Town Hall meetings on clean energy solutions in every Congressional district in the country, are offering tools to help you plug into that, and their organizers are ready to pitch in. Check it out. The Power Shift is indeed in every district, and a href=”http://focusthenation.org”>Focus the Nation is there to help.
Morgan, one final note: while the urgency is critical, and setting ourselves deadlines are great, I can’t help but ask: what will we do if we don’t hit the December 2009 deadline? Will we give up? Of course not, right?! So while deadlines are great, let’s simply remember that the only certainty is that inaction will ensure disaster and that acting as quickly as possible will maximize our chance of success. Beyond that, deadlines are great for motivation, but really don’t mean much more (IMO at least).
Great post and great to see you this weekend. Cheers,
Jesse
Yes!
I love the ‘will’ in your language. I think that it’s high time we moved past ‘Yes We Can!’ and onto ‘Yes we will!’
“We are the youth climate movement, the moral leadership of our country, and *we are going to stop climate change*. “…”We will keep organizing *until we win.*”… I love it!
See my article on the topic at http://www.tinyurl.com/BeyondYesWeCan
Check out the ‘Language of Certainty’ part especially.
Ben – I agree with Morgan that we don’t need ALL the details of the finer policy points of current legislation. That’s the job of public servants once we have changed the government’s mandate to them. But we DO need to know the most fundamentally wrong things, that we can apply pressure to. The finer policy details will fall out in the wash after we’ve shifted the biggest blocks. The MOST important thing is that we get bodies on the srteets and into actions and applying pressure to government.
That being said, getting some ‘climate action – policy basics’ guides would be an amazing resource to help us achieve this pressure. Targets, Carbon Trading and other economic instruments, REDD, Adaptation, Captalism, Perverse subsidies, CDM, Climate Justice, Green Jobs, ‘COP15′. These sorts of ‘big picture’ things need to be quite well understood, and the main aspects blocking them. And get partisan about it – highlight was the party policies are any where they are insufficient.
Good luck!