It’s Getting Hot In Here

From St. Louis and Philadelphia, to Columbus and Denver, Focus the Nation‘s Clean Energy Town Halls bring youth, community members and elected officials together to find clean energy solutions and plan sustained action.

Forget Seattle and Berkeley. Move over Portland and Boston. When it comes to deciding America’s energy future, it’s place like Akron and Pittsburgh, St Louis and Detroit that deserve the spotlight right now. While many leading cities in the traditionally green bastions along America’s coasts are showing what’s possible, the American ‘Heartland’ is where the nation’s clean energy future must be built. What’s more, the Heartland is where the political fate of climate and clean energy legislation being debated in Congress will be decided.

It’s good timing then that Nationwide Town Halls for Clean Energy Solutions are happening all around our country right now. In community centers, college lecture rooms, and church halls all across the nation this week and last, elected officials from all levels of government are joining young leaders and community members to focus on what it will take to build a clean and prosperous energy economy and tackle climate change. The ongoing Nationwide Town Halls for Clean Energy Solutions are sponsored by the youth-empowerment organization, Focus the Nation, and organized by hundreds of committed community leaders both young and old.

Focus the Nation events have been held in over 165 Congressional Districts, including dozens of town halls across Heartland states like Missouri, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Ohio.

The nationwide town halls kicked off on Monday, April 13th in Philadelphia, where swing Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) joined Drexel University students, community members, and business leaders for a discussion on tackling climate change and seizing the opportunities of the new energy economy.
Continue reading ‘Focusing the Heartland on a Clean Energy Future’

I was recently surrounded by family at a cousin’s wedding which is always interesting, especially in the past several years as my environmental activism has picked up speed.   Something happened that made me even more sure that the Trek to Re-Energize America and events like it need to happen a lot more often.  My family comes from a wide array of political thought, from my raving liberal Aunt Patty to my Fox news die hard Grandpa.  A few years ago when I admitted to my grandma that I was a vegetarian, she replied with, “Nonsense, John Paul.  If you like it, eat it.”

So it was with trepidation that I replied when asked about my current employment in the lobby of a country club before the wedding.  I currently work for the Sierra Club as an organizer with the Beyond Coal campaign, working to make the Pacific Northwest the first zone in the nation to go coal free.  That explanation didn’t set well with my grandpa, a traditionalist who has worked in the banking and real estate world for much of his life.

Later that night after the vows had been said and the cake eaten he asked me a few more questions about my work and he made a comment that really stood out to me.  He told me that instituting a cap and trade system in the U.S. would cost the average American family $3,000.  The fact hit me like a brick, not because of the cost, but because I knew it to be false.  The erroneous number started its life with the Republican Party and quickly made its way to Fox news and the rest of the media.  The number came from a report by a few MIT professors and when they were contacted regarding the number they roundly rejected it as false and a gross distortion of the $30/family number their report had actually stated.

It was fascinating and horrifying to see how a simple lie made its way out into the public and down the vine to my Grandpa.

It made me realize how important the Trek really is.  By visiting communities across the nation we will present ourselves as real, caring people, not as talking heads on cable news.  Our future has become an unnecessarily partisan issue, due largely to our own politicians and the biased media that feeds off of them.  We need to start presenting climate change, sustainable farming, clean energy, all of it with a more unifying message to wrest control back from the partisan media. I know it’s not easy, but the more we can have honest, one on one conversations about the base concept of a healthier future, the easier our work will be in the long run.

ANCHORAGE – Hundreds of indigenous people from around the world are gathering in Anchorage this week to discuss climate change and solutions to a warming planet. The Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change, a five-day United Nations-affiliated conference, will run through Friday, with about 400 people from 80 nations expected to attend.

On the first full day of the conference on Monday, reports on climate change will be presented covering seven regions around the globe.

“Indigenous peoples have contributed the least to the global problem of climate change but will almost certainly bear the greatest brunt of its impact,” said Patricia Cochran, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an organization representing approximately 150,000 Inuit of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Chukotka in Russia.

The council is hosting the event. While indigenous people are often “on the front lines” of the problem, Cochran said their voices are often not heard when discussing climate change. The summit intends to change that, she said.

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[written by Kendra Kallevig and Matt Maiorana from SustainUS]

Just days after returning from the UN climate meetings in Bonn, Germany, State Department Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern made it a priority to address young people, congratulating us on our work so far, and asking that we keep it up. It is clear that youth pressure will be essential in building support for domestic legislation and securing a strong international agreement at the UN climate talks this December in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Youth have made it clear over the past month that we are stepping up to the plate. At the recent Bonn climate negotiations, a group of 20 passionate youth from around the world came together to take action, just as thousands are currently doing in their home communities. This is truely a global movement with amazing people working at every level.

Continue reading ‘An Eye Towards Copenhagen…’

Guest post from Congresswoman Doris Matsui. Cross-posted from www.focusthenation.org.

As a member of the House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee, I just wanted to take a moment out of the hearings we are holding today to discuss the comprehensive climate change bill, and give you a quick update about what is happening here in Washington.

In the last few days alone, more action has been taken on climate change than in the entire eight years of the Bush presidency. On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the findings of their scientific review, which recognized that global warming threatens both public health and public welfare, and that greenhouse gas emissions are influencing everything from crop failures to more intense heat waves that we are seeing in my hometown of Sacramento.

Yesterday, we started hearings in the Energy and Commerce Committee on the comprehensive climate legislation put forth by Chairmen Henry Waxman and Edward Markey. When passed, the American Clean Energy and Security Act will allow our children and grandchildren to live in a country that is more sustainable, more economically viable, and more efficient than the country we live in today. Continue reading ‘Earth Day Update on Climate Bill Hearings from Congresswoman Doris Matsui’

Monday in Charlotte, well over 300 people made their way through downtown Charlotte to Duke Energy’s headquarters for a peaceful civil disobedience. 44 were arrested in the civil disobedience.

Duke Energy is building a coal fired power plant in Cliffside NC (between Charlotte and Asheville). Beyond expected air and water quality problems it creates, the plant will emit 6 million tons of CO2 every year for the next 50 years. And on top of that, North Carolina is the largest consumer of mountaintop removal coal (after Georgia).

Plants like this are why we’re mobilizing the No Coal movement.

There are a lot of news articles and blogs out already, but I wanted to capture some of my thoughts about the past couple of weeks organizing here in Charlotte. So, last night I typed up some stuff:

1. Building a diverse coalition– This action was organized in Charlotte NC, a place where on and off for over 20 years I’ve visited alot (lots of old friends there). Charlotte doesn’t have a typical activist base or alternative scene, but in recent months it showed me that it has an engaged populace that is determined to fight for environmental and social justice. The majority of people at this rally were not the typical activist base that I work with–they were elders, clergy, soccer moms, western NC hippies, students, physicians and a lot of middle class people not typically seen at San Francisco or DC protests. Marchers included Bank of America employees and Duke stockholders. The ages of the arrestees ranged from 19 to 85. It touched me like I haven’t been touched in many years as an organizer. It was really a broad-based group of people that came out.

We’re seeking to build a movement outside our traditional base and this action was it.  Continue reading ‘There was Something Different and Inspiring about the Cliffside Action’

The discussion on climate legislation is heating up in DC. This week, the hearings on the American Clean Energy & Security Act starts, and we have got to make sure our voices are heard.

Call Congress TODAY and demand a clean and just energy economy!

Here are a couple of simple steps:

1. Find your Congressperson here.

2. Call 1-877-666-3393. This line will give you a brief message and connect you to the Congressional switchboard.

3. Deliver this simple message:

“My name is ___ and I live in ____. I’m ___ years old and I vote. I am calling to ask Rep. XXX to pass bold legislation that creates a clean energy economy and makes polluters pay.”

4. If you want more specifics or talking points, check out the Power Shift policy principles here: http://powershift09.org/resources

Check out our live coverage from Day 1 at the hearings.

Maybe ask them to stop financing Big Coal……? 

Congratulations, you own a gigantic multi-national bank! The American public now owns 36% of Citigroup–one of the leading financiers of dirty coal (like Duke Energy’s Cliffside plant).

The American public now owns 36% of Citigroup–one of the leading financers of dirty coal.

Now that you’re an owner you can write to the bank’s Shareholder Relations department and tell them to stop funding the expansion of coal. Continue reading ‘Now That You Own a Bank…’

As the House Energy & Commerce Committee prepares to vote on a comprehensive clean energy plan, the League of Conservation Voters launched a pre-emptive campaign against Rep. Roy Blunt for his stated opposition to the bill, which would build an American clean energy economy.

The nonpartisan campaign is built around a hard-hitting TV ad, “Believe,” which urges people to call on Rep. Blunt to believe in America and our history as a “can-do” nation again.

“Rep Blunt is siding with Big Oil and saying no to millions of new clean energy jobs, and no to making America a global leader on energy. Why does he seem to have so little faith in American ingenuity and know-how?” said Gene Karpinski, President of the League of Conservation Voters.

Meanwhile in Blunt’s district, Lindsey Berger of Missouri State University headed up an effort to bring Missourians from across the state together for a solutions-oriented forum on energy solutions, one of 103 similar events co-sponsored by Focus the Nation, which 50 members of the House of Representatives and 20 Senators participated in. “It’s usually our leaders who call town halls on pressing issues,” said Lindsey Berger, an organizer at Missouri State University. “This time we’re inviting them to our Town Halls because our generation knows we don’t have time to wait to build a clean energy future.” Continue reading ‘LCV: Does Roy Blunt Believe in America?’

In a little under two weeks, Middlebury College will be hosting the first “Getting to 350″ Conference on campus in Middlebury, VT. Featuring a keynote address from Dr. James Hansen of NASA (interactive via video feed – yay cutting carbon emissions!), the conference will focus on the strategies we must employ to actually achive that great number in the sky that we’ve all been talking about: 350 parts per million. This conference will be a great opportunity for youth leaders to discuss their ideas with climate movement vets and some of the most brilliant scholars working on these issues today. These conversations will feature leaders like From Crisis to Opportunity’s (and former Greenpeace exec. director) John Passacantando, the Indigenous Environmental Network’s Kandi Mosset, and youth leaders like EAC’s Jessy Tolkan and Breakthrough’s Jesse Jenkings (both IGHIH contributers) among many, many others,  Don’t miss your chance to help transform our future, go to our website today to register for free!

Continue reading ‘Free “Getting to 350″ Conference to be held May 1-3′