At 648 pages, the “discussion draft” of the Waxman-Markey climate bill is a behemoth – I’d personally rather walk on hot coals than have to synthesize that beast. But the endless page-count and dry legal jargon isn’t stopping young climate advocates from reading every inch, nor promptly picking it apart.
To get a handle on what they’re thinking, and how their congressional “asks” differ from colleagues one generation removed, I talked with a number of young climate policy experts intimately familiar with the Waxman-Markey legislation. I wanted to understand their take on the bill, the political war-zone it has to fight through, and where they see young people contributing in the policy debate.
The loudest message I got was that our nation’s savviest young climate advocates are calling for a complete reframing of the climate debate, in two major ways.
The first deals with rhetoric around the cost of the policy. When Republicans say, “It costs too much,” and Democrats respond with, “We’ll make it cost less,” they’ve already lost the argument. The debate needs to be around “how much it can help” – how much will it stimulate the economy, how many jobs will it create, how secure will it make us, etc. And inversely – how much will a weak bill, or inaction, cost us?
The second framing critique deals with the climate movement’s unfortunately schizophrenic disconnect between our messaging and our policy prescription.
For years, we’ve been hammering the following point: climate change = red alert global catastrophe, it threatens all life on Earth and the future habitability of our planet. Yet our policy solution is nowhere near the red alert level, it lies somewhere between Velveeta cheese and Taco Bell hot sauce in terms of punch.
By asking for slow-moving emissions reductions targets far into the future, we’re sending a completely inappropriate and ultimately disempowering message for our cause – that solving climate change isn’t urgent, we’ll deal with it sometime later, and it won’t require much change from the status quo since we’ll transition so gradually. Two percent reductions per year – easy, right?
Wrong, say young advocates, whose personal future is at stake. We’ve got to go full steam ahead and transition off carbon fuels as fast as possible, with our goal not 80% by 2050 but “maximum effort”, as Holmes Hummel likes to describe. And because this bill appears to be our only shot at climate legislation this year, youth are in no position to compromise.
Continue reading ‘Young thinkers say “Shift the paradigm” on Waxman Bill’
This morning, the 
Maria Gunnoe of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition has been awarded the 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize–Congratulations to Maria –and everyone working to end mountaintop removal and fight dirty coal! 
