It's Getting Hot In Here

Are you working hard on sustainability – somewhere, somehow, in your school, town or work? The White House wants to hear your story.

Today – that’s Thursday, May 24 – from 3:30-4:30, join a Twitter Town Hall with Nancy Sutley and Jon Carson at #EarthDayEveryDay. Nancy Sutley Chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and Jon Carson is Obama’s Director of the Office of Public Engagement. They want to hear what you’re working on and share successes from the Administration.

Still got more to say? Make your point even more loudly with the White House’ Sustainability Video Challenge.

Hey climate movement, you know what I missed about us that Power Shift pumped right back into me last week?

The awesome.

Yeah, flashmobs, pranks, swiftly organized warroom tweetups, late-night dance parties of 15,000. Remember that rebellious side of us, that “we won’t take the past for an answer” side of us? Remember that “join us because this is awesome and you’re invited” side of us?

Politics is personal identity built into popular movements. The Tea Party is powerful because it ready-makes an identity for those who feel left behind by the 21st Century. It’s a safe space in a post-9/11, post financial collapse, peak-global-hegemony America. And the Tea Party’s done well wiping up a messy identity crisis by defining what they’re afraid of.

We’re also proud to define ourselves as what we’re not: we are cooler than the fossil forces of the past. They rail on chalkboards; we rally with giant puppets in the streets. They are talking heads for septuagenarians; we are sneaking into shareholder meetings and embarrassing giant fossil fuel companies. They are snarking about crosshairs on Facebook from defensive compounds in Wasilla. We are 10,000 lithe young people fighting for our future while a crotchety old pitbull like Tom Donohue screams to get off of his front yard at the US Chamber of Commerce. We are in the West Wing interrupting the President of the United States of America to remind him that energy shouldn’t kill.

But the past is where we leave the comparison. Those fearful forces haven’t got much vision for the future, and we sure do: we are identity awesome. We are the people not afraid to build something better than the assumptions handed to us.

Other American generations have staked their identities on propositions equally grand – rebelling from tyranny, beating back fascism, defending the world from communism. Our generation is staking its identity as the people responsible enough to face climate science for what it means, and political corruption for what it is. To build a cleaner, leaner, more durable and more prosperous way of life on our full tide of vibrant energy. The people smart enough to put our moral muscle to work.

But we need to remember how to have a blast doing it. Where’s the rebelliousness, the youthful energy pulling more pranks to call out our opposition? Remember when the Yes Men and the Avaaz Action Factory staged a mock press conference on the US Chamber’s “sudden” climate action? Remember when Tim DeChristopher tied on his bandanna and marched into the fray of a corrupt shareholder process? Remember when young people lay down on the train tracks against tremendous new coal facilities? (That hasn’t happened yet, but it should.)

We mustn’t abandon tried-and-true organizing tactics, nor our hard-earned insider game. And if we do rebel our way into a better world, we do so on the shoulders of giants: after all, we’re now defending the Clean Air Act that our foremothers first passed, celebrating Earth Day last week because our forefathers founded the first four decades ago. And we need the scientific white papers still, because after all, we’re fighting for a political reality that keeps pace with the chemical reality of the atmosphere. This is a movement of the young and young at heart – if you are awesome, you are in.

Crossposted from The Wonk Room,  WeArePowerShift.org, Climate Progress and Climate Solutions.

Crossposted from the Climate Solutions blog.

Watch out – using energy is a risky business.

At any moment, clean energy might spill across your neighborhood – wind! Or explode from the sky – sunshine! Or roll along our coastlines on an extremely predictable schedule in waves and tides. And energy efficiency (opportunities) are lurking behind every dark and drafty doorway.

Sure, clean energy sources carry a few risks, especially as we’re perfecting our new abilities to harness these age-old sources. Rural wind turbines have thrown a blade in heavy storms. Solar concentrators can zap a bug in the desert. Early geothermal techniques have genuine seismic effects, and tidal arrays add to the bay buoys that fishermen’s nets must navigate. And efficiency, hoo boy – don’t squirt that caulk in your eye!

But strangely, no clean energy source spills, explodes, melts down, or crumbles and entombs our miners and our mountains like oil, natural gas, nukes and coal. And history is littered with violence, repression and genocide fueled by oil and atomic bombs. But clean and efficient energy? I dare you to name the nation or paramilitary arming for war with caulking guns.

To build a cleaner energy economy is to shield ourselves from risk, not only because the sources are durable and tame, but also because they’re spread out. Commercial nuclear has to be giant to be viable, as do oil and gas refineries and coal mines. That means when a deepwater well blows a gasket or a tsunami overtops a nuclear reactor, we’re not just looking at rolling black waves or rolling blackouts. We’re looking at an existential threat.

But clean energy sources do best if they’re more evenly distributed across our geographies. A local dairy farmer’s biodigester can power a rural town of 500 homes. Community solar arrays on neighborhood rooftops can power the local grid. Downtown, a manufacturer’s waste heat can warm dozens of office buildings. Whatever risk clean energy sources pose, they automatically spread it out.

It’s been an awful few years for anything exposed to risk – financial markets, job security, gas prices, global security operations, political fault lines, seismic fault lines. But turning on the lights doesn’t have to risk explosions or war. It’s time we built a cleaner energy economy.

Bonnie Frye Hemphill is the Business Partnerships Associate at the northwest advocacy group Climate Solutions. She is also pysched for PowerShift.

Tags: Japan, solar, wind, wave, tsunami, Japan, earthquake, efficiency, war, security, risk, insurance, distribute, Climate Solutions, PowerShift

It takes a singular dedication to cowardice to keep seeking America’s energy future in dark, explosive holes controlled by multinational mafiosos. But my future is not under a razed West Virginia mountain. My future is not under a mile-deep Gulf gusher. My future is not mired in Canadian tar sands, not in a Chinese coal mine’s labor camp, and not in the clenched fists of Mid-East desert warlords.
 
I’m talking, of course, about the US Senate’s decision on Thursday to give up on comprehensive climate and clean-energy leadership. “Just for now,” they say to placate those of us who aren’t Big Oil executives.
 
Is the US Senate afraid to look up at the wind and sun for America’s energy future? Afraid to build an economy that doesn’t boil our global atmosphere? Afraid to build an economy that can compete in the global race for clean-tech innovation against China, against India, against Denmark, Germany, Ireland and Spain and Portugal and Brazil and Lichtenstein? All we hear are Senators whine that it’s hard to price climate pollution; that it’s complicated to annul Big Oil’s annual billions in tax breaks; that it’s too tough an economy to create millions of jobs in energy efficiency and clean-energy ingenuity. But the rest of the world’s managing all that, and so has even the US House. So it sounds like me like the Senate’s talking points are feckless whimpering from 99 of the world’s most powerful individuals.
 
Leaders of our land, grow up: prove to me that you’re better than feckless and cowardly. I have organized students, church groups, farmers, local governments, and hundreds of business leaders to build climate solutions in their own ways and their own communities. I have led marches of hundreds across entire states to demand stronger clean-energy policies. I have led rallies in the streets of far-flung UN summits, on the summits of far-flung mountaintops, and thru the halls of Congress to help citizens make their own heartfelt cases for climate solutions, clean-energy competitiveness, and for energy security.
 
I’m 24. What the hell are you doing to build America’s clean-energy prosperity today?

When was the last time you found yourself partying because our federal government is acting on climate change? Oh right, not really ever in our lives. Well, friends, the time has come.

As you may have heard, President Obama has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to act on the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision. In that watershed case, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare according to the Clean Air Act, and that EPA must therefore regulate carbon dioxide.

EPA didn’t move on the decision until President Obama entered the White House, but now they’re moving quickly: first up, the Agency must solicit public testimony on federal climate regulation. They’ve set up hearings for all comers in two cities this week – Arlington, VA, on Monday, and Seattle on Thursday – and according to top EPA officials, public response to the hearings has already been “overwhelming.” Continue reading ‘Time to celebrate your EPA’