It’s Getting Hot In Here

There is actually a youth climate summit happening this weekend in Texas! Yay! The Re-Energize Texas Summit, Feb 8-10^th at the University of Texas – Austin. After starting off with just a dozen young climate activists four months ago, we’re getting ready this weekend to host a few hundred students coming from all over Texas for the biggest global warming summit ever in the Lone Star state. We have some fantastic speakers including Mayor Will Wynn of Austin, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Peter Illyn, IPCC author Dr. Camille Parmesan, Ted Glick, Br. ChiSing, Tom “Smitty” Smith, Stonyfield Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg and Jim Hightower. We also have an incredible line up of workshops and trainings touching everything from spiritual practice in sustaining activism, climate change and national security, faith and climate, cutting emissions on campuses, green jobs, environmental justice and environmental racism, health and climate, anti-coal and anti-nukes campaigning and more!

Check it out at www.ReEnergizeTexas.org

As evident in Ken Caldeira’s New York Times article, “How to Cool the Globe”, there seems to be widespread misdirection about the end goal of this climate change movement.

As I understand it, we are working to address climate change to maintain a natural environment that has the very basic conditions necessary for each of us to even have a chance of achieving happiness, namely a global environment that is safe-yes, safe-ecologically-healthy, and livable for at least human beings (if not all beings). We are currently in a period of time where the unsustainable ways of living advocated by the West, now blindly adopted by much of the world, have led to the phenomenon of global warming. We need to be clear, however, that the underlying problem is not global warming itself - global warming is merely the outcome, or symptom, of a serious disease that is afflicting human civilization - the consumerist, capitalist, individualist, unsustainable ways of living advocated by the West. These lifestyles, along with the effects of global warming, are the biggest obstacles in humanity’s path towards having a safe, ecologically-healthy and livable environment. What needs to be addressed, therefore, is how we can change our ways of living and thinking to remove the disease from it root causes, not what type of interim solution we can implement such as pouring sulphate particles into the stratosphere, underground carbon sequestration, bio-fuels or nuclear power, all of which are likely to cause even more problems.

Continue reading ‘Solving Global Warming is Not the End Goal’

On October 20^th, 15 youth leaders from across central Texas attended the first Texas Youth Climate Summit at Austin Community College in Austin. The meeting led to the birth of Re-Energize Texas, the first youth coalition working to address global warming in Texas! The gathering had 15 student leaders with representation from UT Austin, UT San Antonio, Austin Community College, Baylor University, South Western University, and St. Edwards University. With some delicious Ethiopian food to sustain the spirit of action, students had an opportunity to:

• Establish new relationships and learn about each other’s work
• Attend workshops on global warming science and policy, campus solutions to global warming, and strategies for climate organizing, and finally
• Plan some major projects and actions for a youth coalition in Texas to stir up the state to climate action!

Follow and support the students on their mission on http://www.climatechallengetexas.org/ and at Power Shift 07!

The youth gathering was organized by the National Wildlife Federation’s Campus Ecology Program and Public Citizen, with support from the Sierra Student Coalition and the Austin Community College.