It’s Getting Hot In Here

Crossposted from Funding Our Future, the Campus Progress blog promoting policy that provides economic opportunities for our generation.

Is there any doubt left? The website where I found this cool image has more of these great visuals demonstrating the vast scientific consensus around climate action. As Van Jones said at the 2009 Campus Progress National Conference, if you went to 10 doctors because of a pierced lung and one of them (a Psychologist) told you you were fine while the other 9 said you desperately needed surgery, what would you do?

Did you ever wonder where It’s Getting Hot In Here came from?  I mean beyond the Nelly song, which is now a distant relic of early-2000s pop culture.

Here’s that story.

It’s Getting Hot In Here, the blog, was founded at the United Nations climate negotiations in Montreal in 2005: COP11/MOP1.  Just that year Russia ratified the Kyoto Protocol, meeting the requirement that countries producing at least 55% of global emissions signed on for Kyoto to take effect.  Montreal was the first meeting of Kyoto Protocol signatories. It was also the foundation of the International Conference of Youth, the body that brings youth from around the world together to develop a common platform, strategy and story.

The atmosphere in Montreal was both hopeful and frustrated.  The Kyoto Protocol had finally come into effect, the first ever international treaty on climate.  This was a major step forward.  And yet, the United States and Australia, two of the world’s largest emitters, had refused.  While delegates met to discuss making the Kyoto Protocol stronger and how to improve implementation, parallel negotiations began to discuss a new framework to replace Kyoto after 2012.  It was in this context that I found myself thrust into the international climate movement.

Continue reading ‘Climate Generation: From Humble Beginnings To A Global Movement’

Cross-posted from theClimateers.org.

Youth Energy Reverberating during COP Prep

Many of us who were at the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen from December 7-19 went through a period of hibernation in week following the conference. I, for one, slept for more than 32 hours in the 48 hours that began at 12:00 p.m. on December 20th. I’d been burning the midnight oil for fifteen straight days at that point, constantly jumping from one task to the next throughout the 18-hour workdays. It was actually no great hardship to sustain such working hours during the conference; the bubble that we lived in – that of the UN conference and, more so, that of our own international youth climate movement within the conference – was teeming with energy. We fed off the energy, passion, intellect and creativity of one another to make up for lack of sleep or caloric intake.

This is nothing new. Our movement and social movements in general have acquired great strength from the way inspiration bounces around from activist to activist, sparking or re-igniting motivation. But to experience this at COP-15 in a tiny microcosm of the greater movement was eye-opening for me, particularly in the final hours as we walked away from the negotiations without the fair, ambitious, and legally binding treaty that we’d been pushing so hard for.

A fitting and galvanizing quotation just came through on my Twitterfeed: “Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged people who kept on working.”

While I believe it to be true that we can trudge through the lowest of lows and achieve great highs, I know it is a difficult task. Some of the farewell conversations I had with brilliant, effective young activists in Copenhagen were filled with a such a preponderance of negative emotion that, at least in the initial shock of the blow taken at the end of the negotiations, these new friends seemed to be leaving with a debilitating sense of defeat. Continue reading ‘Re-Powering the Movement: To Healthy Growth in 2010′

Crossposted from Funding Our Future, the Campus Progress blog promoting policy that provides economic opportunities for our generation.

I typically hate these cheesy, often-pretentious, holier-than-thou new year’s resolution lists of things people should commit to doing if only they were smart/benevolent/disciplined/healthy enough. I promise that this one is different.

When 2009 begun, it seemed to many of us that all cards were stacked in our favor. We had a President and congressional leadership that fully understood the problem of the climate crisis and had plans to do something about it right away. But after one year of running against the wind and getting all of our progressive hopes and dreams shattered by ConservaDems and suicide-pact-signing Republicans, we need to send a message to Congress that young people don’t just turn out to vote for a charismatic president, but we turn out for the issues that define the survival of our species.

As Brad Johnson from the Wonk Room says, it took 30 years for the radical right to make their issues something few moderate politicians would ever dare oppose (i.e. eliminating the right to choose, allowing just about anyone to carry weapons, etc). Electoral engagement isn’t a one-time fling that was cool last year cause we elected a charismatic dude, it’s a long-term effort to make our issues something that most candidates can’t get elected without supporting.

So here are my top 5 Green/Sustainability/Climate Resolutions for 2010 that have the highest effort-to-outcome ratio: Continue reading ‘Green New Year’s Resolutions Must Be Electoral’

In a previous post I expressed a vision in which we organize to elect ourselves to local government. It’s a daring idea, one which some like us have previously embraced on their own, running for candidacies from both sides of the aisle.

Now is time to expand their success to a broader constituency and elect ourselves to local public office.

If the progressive youth movement is going to get itself elected to local positions we’ve got to start now. We must rapidly address and neutralize divisive distractions such as personality politics and disparate ideas. We’ve got to be pragmatic now: we have a world to save.

The effort to elect ourselves to local office needn’t interfere with current efforts on other fronts: there are enough of us to accomplish many goals at once. We are a vast army, and there are untapped constituencies to enlist.

Further, as Jessy Tolkan stated, if we’re going to shift society’s momentum, we need grow ten times larger. That means embracing and cooperating with similar movements. There are many that share complementary goals with the sustainability movement.

In this moment we must cooperate, highlighting our general agreement regardless of our particular ideals and without regard to our personal self-promotion. We should model the Continental Congress, who reasoned through their differences without deviating from their expressed goal: a general movement based on their common struggle, common frustrations and common good. Continue reading ‘Elections 2010 FTW’

Written by Yiting Wang, a member of China Youth COP15 team

Yes things did not turn out to be as fair, ambitious and binding as we all hoped for upon the conclusion of COP 15. Yet in many lights, it was inspiring, constructive and everlasting. I want to share several little a few serendipitous moments when I was struck by what I said, what I heard, what I was part of and what I think it now.

In the wake of Wednesday 16th riot, the police had pushed back the crowd. I was walking toward Bella Center trying to get in, a guy with a little video camera stopped me and asked me to say a little something about what I think the solution [to our climate crisis] was. I replied, in gasps, that I think we need to put ourselves in each other’s shoes. We need to understand that we are one people in different forms;our lives connected. He asked me where I was from. I said China. He waved one of his hand whiling the other still holding the camera, “thanks for the Chinese wisdom.”

I don’t know if it is particularly Chinese. I just always remember a peacemaking guru who only sleeps for four hours everyday, once said that we are all one. I just cannot agree more. Continue reading ‘Drops during COP 15′

This post is meant to kick off an actionable dialogue about where the U.S. climate movement is headed in the new year.  Please use the comment form to suggest additions, flesh out points, propose alternate ideas, etc!  Just remember that this blog is a public space, and the goal is positive action to move us forward.  Also– while this is a post about the US, this remains an international blog chronicling a global movement.  Many  of these steps apply to, or would benefit from the perspectives of, allies outside the US as well.  In random order, steps are as follows:

1) Learn to lineback

2) Make leadership feel good

3) Build personal accountability in leaders and decision makers

4) Assume a diversity of positions of power

5) Run for office

6) Move from the youth movement to our late 20s, 30s, and beyond

7) Become global citizens

More on what these look like in practice after the jump.

Continue reading ‘Happy New Year, Welcome Back: Seven Proposed Next Steps for the U.S. Climate Movement’