It’s Getting Hot In Here

This is a guest post from Matt Williams, a youth organiser from the UK working with the UK Youth Climate Coalition. He recently helped lead a UK delegation to the Our Opportunity youth conference in Copenhagen, and wrote this report.

All over Europe, young people are mobilising around climate change issues. This was evident at a recent event organised by Energy Crossroads Denmark, at which around 300 European students gathered to discuss the challenges we’re facing regarding energy generation. We were part of a team of 23 British students that attended the 3-day conference of talks, discussions and workshops.

Some of the British youth in Copenhagen. Image courtesy of Conor Reid.

After a 23-hour bus ride (low carbon, dontcha know) across north-western Europe, we enjoyed the final stretch of the Danish coast, lined with elegant stretches of wind turbines. An early highlight of the conference was a mass bike ride on the first day: using Copenhagen’s comfortably (and unusually, for us Brits) wide cycle lanes, several hundred cyclists crossed the center of the city with a full police escort, to demonstrate the joys of bikes. I hope it wasn’t undermined too much by my shrieks of fear as I hurtled along in a most unladylike fashion, on a bike far too big for me with dubious brakes!

Each day we heard from a range of energy and climate experts, including James Hansen from NASA, who has been at the forefront of climate change science for more than two decades. Panel discussions provoked intense and engaging debate, particularly around the issue of Carbon Capture and Storage, which was raised repeatedly over the course of the 3 days. Whilst several of the energy experts seemed to factor in ‘clean coal’ as part of the solution, many students repeatedly refuted this claim and pointed to the need of a mass transition to renewables as well as rejecting of the myth of clean coal.

With the International Science Congress on Climate Change taking place in the same city that week, our student conference was able to pinch some eminent speakers. European climate events suffer, however, of being unable to move beyond the usual suspects – we are yet to hear from those communities who are already suffering the effects of climate change right now, such as the century-old wine producers of southern France or the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia.

For us, taking a group of young people who had not been very active before, it was inspiring to hear how transformational this experience had been. Many said they now felt skilled up and empowered to go and begin their own climate change projects back in their own communities and on their own campuses.

And so the movement grows.