Dispatches from the Youth Climate Movement
“Eco Hypocrites Fly in Jets Across Atlantic to Attack AFP in Copenhagen”
A NOTE TO AMERICANS FOR PROSPERITY
(from the ‘eco-activists’)
1. We didn’t come to Copenhagen JUST to attack you, AFP. Don’t be so full of yourselves.
2. Great job admitting carbon pollution is bad (i.e. ‘flying across the Atlantic’)… Seems like you’re beginning to see the light.
Ben and Rachel gettin’ down with animatronic penguins, and covering the Conference of Youth – where 700 youth leaders converged before COP15.
This is a great update on the first day of COP15, brought to you by the folks who masterminded the Australia Powershift 09 Flashdance Video (also shown below):
This piece of art is perhaps one of the best videos of our movement:
Universities are on the cutting edge of solar energy research, but they’re surprisingly laggard when it comes to adopting it.
Only nine campuses have installed systems producing more than 1 megawatt of electricity, and even those system are making only a tiny dent in their campus power supplies. The 1.2 MW system at the University of California San Diego, for one, generates less than 4% of campus energy use. Dozens of other campuses have smaller solar projects, but among them, only 27 top 100 kilowatts.
Compare our nation’s universities with Wal-Mart, and the numbers are pitiful. Wal-Mart has 18 large arrays in California alone, and it just announced it will double that number in the next 18 months.
So why are universities so slow to jump on solar? Continue reading ‘Start-Ups Rise to Push Solar on College Campuses’
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’
Hi all! I want to share an article I recently wrote for SolveClimate.com, reporting on students’ experiences lobbying at Powershift. The thing I was most surprised (and disappointed) about during my research was the high prevalence of students reporting that their representatives (or staffers) didn’t even know the basics about global warming. Huuuuhhhh?
Looks like Lobby Day was also “Education Day” for many congresspeople, who apparently have had their heads in the sand in regards to climate change over the last decade. While my interviews were in no way comprehensive, it’s certainly an interesting look into one aspect of the tremendous impact we had at Powershift 2009.
Here’s the article: Continue reading ‘Powershift Lobbying: A Lesson on Global Warming 101 for Congress?’
Students are adding small fees onto their tuition to make a big impact on the environment.
By Tristan Fowler
December 5, 2008
Wind turbines in Wasco, Oregon (AP Photo/Don Ryan, File)All those environmental studies majors out there should consider getting a minor in accounting or financing, because the future of “Going Green” has become a numbers game. The upfront costs of energy efficient renovations, LEED-certified buildings, and renewable energy credits can be encumbering to the campus sustainability coordinators and staggering to students in the local environmental club. Late last month, Alfred State College installed a 5.1 kilowatt photovoltaic grid intertie system. It cost $45,000. The University of Saskatchewan is replacing 26,000 light fixtures with energy-efficient bulbs at a cost of $1.9 million over three years. So what can a recession-era institution with Ramen noodle-eating students do? Just follow the example of over 25 campuses that are barely raising their tuition rates, and reaping huge benefits.
Rachel Barge, a 2008 grad from University of California–Berkley, has started a consulting non-profit, Campus InPower, which provides large-scale funding strategies and resources for college students. During her undergrad at University of California Berkley, Barge helped run a successful green fee campaign, raising the tuition by $5 per student. The minor fees added up to between $170,000 and $200,000 each year for sustainable projects. A committee of students, faculty and administrators decide how to best use the funds. The funding has paid for educational programming, created a native plant nursery, and built a campus-wide resource monitoring system.
It’s hard times in higher ed – with our universities’ budgets getting slashed, administrators are in hyper hunker-down mode in terms of campus spending. More and more student organizers are turning to new, innovative funding sources to implement the vital campus sustainability initiatives we need. Campus InPower is here to help!
This post is a quick shout out for two new resource pages on the www.campusinpower.org site – they’re for students working to establish Green Fees or Revolving Loan Funds. If you know campuses that are working on either of these initiatives, please send them this info. We also offer direct consulting for campaigns; email rachel@campusinpower.org to get in touch!
On the new resource pages, here’s what we got:
The Green Fees Page:
The Revolving Loan Fund Page:
Continue reading ‘New Green Fee, Loan Fund Resources – Scope It!’
Busta Rhymes laid it out when he rapped, “It’s all about the money, baby”. Whether it’s clean energy purchasing, an awesome bike-share program, comprehensive composting, water conservation, student sustainability internships and more, these projects all need seed funding to get going. That’s where Campus InPower comes in.
Campus InPower is a national training program that gives student organizers the tools to create revolving loan funds, green fee campaigns, and other funding mechanisms to pay for large-scale sustainability projects on their campuses. Check out the website at www.campusinpower.org. I’m Rachel Barge – I created the program, and here’s what Campus InPower has to offer:
1. “Raise The Funds” Action Toolkit – brand-spanking-new funding guide for student organizers, 
co-published with AASHE. In its glorious 54 pages, it features SEVEN funding mechanisms to pay for wide-scale sustainability projects or create large, dedicated sustainability funds on campus. It is free to download at www.campusinpower.org
2. Trainings, Workshops, Speaking – as Director of Campus InPower, I am traveling the country, speaking at sustainability conferences and visiting schools. I have a travel budget, so I can visit any interested school and offer a unique training to their environmental group, student body, staff committee, etc on how they can leverage funds on their campus.
3. Strategy Consulting – I am available as a consultant, advocate and supporter to any group of students or staff who are working to establish a sustainability fund on their campus. That includes campaigns that are already underway, or plans that are still on the drawing board. I arrange conference calls, help perform research, and make personal visits to help advise campaigns.
It’s Getting Hot In Here community: I need YOUR help! I want campuses across the country to know that this resource exists for them to tap into. Please pass this info along to your campus community, alma matter, or friends at other schools who might be interested. Send them to www.campusinpower.org or have them email me at rachel@campusinpower.org With your support, we can help make the existing awesome organizing on campuses even more financiall powerful!
Continue reading ‘Green Fees, Revolving Loan Funds and More, Oh My! Meet: Campus InPower’
“No more pollution…or ocean dumpage. FROM NOW ON WE WILL TRAVEL IN TUBES” -Jack Black
Jack Black, the modern-day musical genius, once said in response to criticism of his music, “I’m tired of all this nay-saying! Why don’t YOU create something!?” This mantra could be perfectly applied to the global energy economy.
Why aren’t we going full force to create some awesome, renewable, scalable solutions rather than blaming democrats for high gas prices, calling for more offshore oil drilling (hello!?), or whining about our ever-increasing emissions? It seems like we’re spending more time naysaying than pioneering the energy solutions we need to solve the energy/climate crisis.
Thankfully there is a growing light at the end of the oil-economy tunnel – and I needn’t look further than an article by Andrew Leonard in this week’s Salon to see it. Continue reading ‘Jack Black: Clean Energy Hero’
Rachel is Director of Campus InPower, a program that empowers university students across the country to design innovative funding mechanisms, from Green Fees to Revolving Loan Funds, to provide the vital monetary resources and administrative leverage for campuses to successfully invest in renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure. Rachel is a 2008 Wild Gift Fellow and Big Ideas at Berkeley grant recipient. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2008 with a degree in Conservation and Resource Studies and Forestry, and was a 2008 Summer Fellow at The Breakthrough Institute. Check out her program's website at: www.campusinpower.org
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