Abigail Borah calls out Congress and the Obama Administration's inaction at the UN climate talks in South Africa before being removed by security. credit: Katherine Rainone, SustainUS

Durban, South Africa – After nearly two weeks of stalled progress by the United States at the international climate talks, U.S. youth spoke out for a real, science-based climate treaty.  Abigail Borah, a New Jersey resident, interrupted the start of lead U.S. negotiator Todd Stern’s speech to call out members of Congress for impeding global climate progress, delivering a passionate call for an urgent path towards a fair and binding climate treaty. Stern was about to speak to international ministers and high-level negotiators at the closing plenary of the Durban climate change negotiations. Borah was ejected from the talks shortly following her speech.

Borah, a student at Middlebury College, spoke for U.S. negotiators because “they cannot speak on behalf of the United States of America”, highlighting that “the obstructionist Congress has shackled a just agreement and delayed ambition for far too long.” Her delivery was followed by applause from the entire plenary of leaders from around the world.

Since before the climate talks, the United States, blocked by a Congress hostile to climate action, has held the position of holding off on urgent pollution reductions targets until the year 2020. Studies from the International Energy Agency, numerous American scientists, and countless other peer-reviewed scientific papers show that waiting until 2020 to begin aggressive emissions reduction would cause irreversible climate change, including more severe tropical storms, worsening droughts, and devastation affecting communities and businesses across America.  Nevertheless, the United States has held strong to its woefully inadequate and voluntary commitments made in the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 and the Cancun Agreement in 2010.

“2020 is too late to wait,” urged Borah. “We need an urgent path towards a fair, ambitious, and legally binding treaty.”

The U.S. continues to negotiate on time borrowed from future generations, and with every step of inaction forces young people to suffer the quickly worsening climate challenges that previous generations have been unable and unwilling to address.

Photos are available here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sustainus

Video here:

http://youtu.be/XDQxg7F2j1s

And check out – U.S. Youth Say “2020: It’s too late to wait”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQVpZQ1UlKw

Full text of Abigail’s speech:

I am speaking on behalf of the United States of America because my negotiators cannot.  The obstructionist Congress has shackled justice and delayed ambition for far too long.  I am scared for my future.  2020 is too late to wait.  We need an urgent path to a fair ambitious and legally binding treaty.

you must take responsibility to act now, or you will threaten the lives of youth and the world’s most vulnerable.

You must set aside partisan politics and let science dictate decisions.  You must pledge ambitious targets to lower emissions not expectations.  Citizens across the world are being held hostage by stillborn negotiations.

We need leaders who will commit to real change, not empty rhetoric.  Keep your promises. Keep our hope alive. 2020 is too late to wait.

Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to 2 years in prison today at the Salt Lake City federal courthouse. He was taken immediately into custody, being denied the typical 3 weeks afforded to put his affairs in order and say goodbye to his friends and family.

Federal prosecutors asked for Tim to receive an extra harsh prison sentence in an effort to intimidate the movement that stands with him. They hoped that by condemning him to years behind bars, they would “make an example out of him” and deter all of us from taking meaningful action. But Tim is already an example. He’s an example of the courageous acts that people across our movements are taking to fight for justice and a liveable future. We support Tim by continuing to organize. Our response to this sentence is an affirmation: we will not be intimidated.  What’s your response?

The government’s statement is clear. Tim has been sentenced to 2 years as punishment for his politics; for the uncompromising content of his speeches and organizing in the two years since his act of civil disobedience protected 150,000 acres of land. Ironically, his principled views and motivations behind his actions he took were never allowed to enter a courtroom, due to their “irrelevance.” In a highly political trial, the jury was unjustly stripped of its right to be their community’s conscience and manipulated into making a political prisoner of a peaceful and concerned young man.

Author and activist Terry Tempest Williams said, “To think that a young man in an act of conscience might [do any amount of time] in a federal prison for raising a paddle in an already illegal sale of oil and gas leases, compared to the CEO of BP or the financial wizards on Wall Street who have pocketed millions of dollars at our expense  – and who will never step into a court of law to even get their hands slapped, let alone go to jail, is an assault on democracy.”

She’s right. But we have the power to turn this assault on democracy into a battle for democracy. Today the Salt Lake City community is expressing both their love and their outrage.

Fossil fuel lobbyists knew that Tim would be indicted the evening before it was officially filed, Jury members explained that they were intimidated throughout the process. The fossil fuel industry should not control our justice system.

Unless we decide to respond accordingly, as Tim serves his time, the real criminals — the fossil fuel industry wrecking our planet and our communities — will continue to run free, unaccountable for the countless oil spills, asthma attacks, contaminated waterways, cancer clusters, and carbon seeping into the air we breathe every day. If the justice system is intent on prosecuting the people protecting rather than pillaging the planet, we must confront the real criminals ourselves. With our heads held high, we continue to stand on the moral high-ground – and will do what’s right, despite the consequences. We know that mother nature’s consequences of inaction are far harsher than any imposed by a court system.

But we are not isolated individuals. We come together with our communities as groups of empowered agents of change who know our system is broken and does not represent us. Our communities represent us, and our vision of a resilient, just, and sustainable world that we are fighting for.

Tim’s sentence is a call to action.

For those of us who’ve been following his story fervently, our hearts were broken today. It is a sad moment. But we now have an opportunity and a responsibility to act on those feelings of hurt and outrage. For Tim’s sacrifice to truly mean something, for the spark it ignites in each of us to burn, we all must take action.

2011 has already become a year of peaceful uprisings around the country. As Tim once said, we were never promised that it would be easy. We know it will take courage, sacrifice and a willingness to sustain our resistance in our fight for real Justice. Tim has taken a step and we will take the next thousand.

Here are a few upcoming action opportunities to join:

• On Aug. 4, community members are calling for direct action at BP’s New Orleans offices in protest of the oil company’s continued lack of accountability for the devastating oil spill.
• On Aug. 12, Rising Tide North America and the environmental justice community is teaming up with economic justice and labor groups in St. Louis to fight corporations destroying jobs and homes with economic malfeasance and the climate with coal.
• In late August and early September, thousands are converging and risking arrest over 15 days at the White House in protest of the Keystone XL pipeline.

We’ll see you on the streets,

Peaceful Uprising and Tim’s community of courage.

One year from this week, government leaders, civil society members and representatives of the business community will meet in Rio de Janeiro to discuss the future of the planet. The Earth Summit (also called Rio+20 after the first such global event in 1992) can help lead to a more prosperous world that utilizes natural resources more efficiently and responds to the needs of the most impacted communities of environmental degradation. But only if youth help write the story, and here’s why.

Rio 1992 was a watershed moment for the global environmental conscience. Treaties were signed, commissions created, and action plans drafted. Yet one of the most memorable speeches from the two-week conference was by a 12-year old girl (here’s what she’s doing now).

Now, a generation later, my generation is faced with two seemingly insurmountable challenges: the world is changing at a rate never before seen, and the current governance structures are insufficient to meet even the environmental problems of the 1970s.

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Trustee and former United Nations Development Programme head Gus Speth writes of his “generation of great talkers” in Global Environmental Challenges: “For the most part, we have analyzed, debated, discussed, and negotiated these issues endlessly…On action, however, we have fallen far short…The threatening global trends highlighted a quarter-century ago continue to this day.”

That’s why we’re looking for something different this time around. NRDC is inaugurating our Race to Rio campaign with an initial set of Earth Summit deliverables we would like to see heads of state, business executives and civil society leaders agree to (see more details and climate/energy asks). The criteria are simple, they must be specific and short-term; involve commitments to work together; and have robust monitoring and reporting provisions.

Actions and accountability

Fortunately, as I reported back from the last preparatory meeting, civil society is already focusing on the dual challenges of actions and accountability. This was reflected in submissions (pdf) to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability as well as recent calls for greater ambition.

We as civil society must channel this energy, however, neither wasting precious time pointing fingers at every unfulfilled promise of the last forty years nor demanding that our leaders commit to lofty ideals long after they will be out of office. NRDC President Frances Beinecke thinks we can learn from the Clinton Global Initiative, which has a unique track record for generating real actions on the ground.

As we contemplate what needs to be done in the next five to ten years, though, be sure: from now until Rio 2012 is the most important year. I uncovered a public service announcement from the run up to Rio 1992 calling on every American to send a telegram to the White House asking the U.S. to lead. We need the same passion and pragmatism guiding us toward Rio in 2012.

An open challenge to youth

Our new abilities to tear down planetary boundaries are only surpassed by our tools to tear down cultural and geographic boundaries.

It’s interesting to look at what’s happened in my generation – the generation of billions: we’ve added 1.3 billion new people to the planet (a billion in our cities), two billion Internet users, five billion mobile phone subscriptions, and brought billions out of the worst kind of poverty.

We know that a successful Earth Summit must engage all strata of society, and thankfully we are beyond telegrams and faxes. But, how do we bring the myriad new media tools to bear on the problem of accountability and actions? This is an open challenge for youth to help shape the debate using a new, more effective language. This week, we raise awareness through posts on #earthsummit and #rioplus20, but we need to think beyond.

Some examples already exist. Earth Day Network’s Billion Acts of Green campaign encourages all of us to share our local actions toward sustainability. The European Environmental Agency’s iEnviroWatch app gives local environmental conditions and wants to invite users to submit content. Various youth rapid response networks at UN climate negotiations provide instant accountability to constituents back home.

And youth from Canada to the UK are coming up with creative ways to engage.

These and many more need to be scaled up by Rio next year, because it is obvious to UN leaders that the current way of doing things will not survive another twenty years. Our world cannot wait for a Rio+40 to curb climate change, repopulate the oceans and restore lost forests.

We need to blaze a path forward at the same time we ask our leaders to lead.

RIO+20 Earth Summit: Potential Deliverables (pdf)

Michael Davidson was a SustainUS youth delegate to the Cancun climate negotiations in December 2010. He is the China Climate Fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, DC, where he examines the dynamic U.S.-China energy and environment relationship and supports NRDC’s Earth Summit 2012 campaign. Previously, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Beijing and holds degrees in Physics and Japanese Studies from Case Western Reserve University.

Chevron was found guilty of deliberately dumping over 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadorean Amazon and ordered to pay $9 billion to clean up its mess. But the company has vowed never to pay.

That’s why I’m standing up to Chevron to demand justice in Ecuador. I’ll be attending the protest outside Chevron’s annual shareholder meeting next week, demanding accountability from the company not just in Ecuador, but also in Richmond, California; in Nigeria; in Australia; in Kazakhstan; and in countless other communities around the world that have been impacted by Chevron’s reckless pursuit of profits.

A delegation of Ecuadoreans will be coming up for the shareholder meeting so that they can take their calls for justice directly to Chevron’s shareholders, management, and board members. They’ve just issued a passionate appeal to Americans to stand in solidarity with them. Together with the folks at Amazon Watch, the Change Chevron team at Rainforest Action Network is trying to get 30,000 Americans to sign this petition, one for each of the Ecuadoreans affected by Chevron’s business operations — and we only have a week to do it! Chevron’s shareholder meeting is happening on May 25th.

Check out the “Open letter to America” video below, and sign the petition. The Ecuadorean delegation will be delivering this petition with all its signatures to Chevron’s management at the shareholder meeting.

We can only hold Chevron accountable if we all stand up together. Please sign the petition so the Ecuadorean delegation can deliver your call for justice directly to Chevron on May 25th. And if you’re in the Bay Area, come to the protest outside Chevron’s annual shareholder meeting.

Student and youth leaders are coming to Power Shift 2011 from across the country, and they represent a vast array of environmental issues. This blog comes student activist Talya Tavor, a student leader from Michigan State University.

When I was two years old, I was diagnosed with asthma. I’ve always had anywhere from one to seven different inhalers on me at any given time. I grew up thinking that everyone had asthma, and was shocked the moment I learned otherwise. It was that moment, the moment I realized that asthma was preventable, that without my neighborhood coal plant myself and others would breathe freely, that I became an activist.

Now I study at Michigan State University where we have the largest on-campus coal plant in the country. We are huge contributors to public health, environmental, social and economic problems (to name a few)—a fact that inevitably fueled my frustration and exacerbated my asthma.

When the Beyond Coal Campaign started up on our campus a year ago, I got involved immediately. At first, the majority of students on campus didn’t even know we had a coal plant. Many students’ understanding of energy ended with putting a plug-in an outlet, never knowing what they were breathing in each day.

A year into our campaign, and after countless hours and days of work, we’ve seen an amazing change in the campus mindset. We’ve had over 5,000 students sign petitions demanding a coal free MSU, and over 170 people from all across Michigan attend a Clean Energy Forum we co-hosted on campus. We’ve also established a strong relationship with the administration in our talks about transition to clean energy.

But with all of these successes, and more, we’ve still been unable to get the administration to make a commitment of moving our campus off of coal to 100% renewable energy. And that’s why I’m here at Power Shift this year.

I’m here because I know that as the future leaders of our nation, it is up to us to empower ourselves in order to create a future we’re proud of. I’m here because I know if anyone were ever able to make a difference, it would be a group of 10,000 passionate, dedicated youths at the largest grassroots organizing training in American history.

I believe we have the power to move forward. Power Shift is just the beginning for us, a launching point to make our movement stronger both at MSU and across the country.

Talya Tavor was born and raised in Illinois, and is now a Junior at Michigan State University. She serves as President of the MSU Sierra Student Coalition with the MSU Beyond Coal Campaign and is a leader in the 286 person Michigan delegation at Power Shift.

‘We need to start training young people, not just FOR green jobs, but TO CREATE green jobs. We should start in the Twin Cities this summer.’

Fast-forward three years, and over 250 young people have been trained over three years in Summer of Solutions programs around the country to create innovative and self-sustaining solutions around energy efficiency, green industry, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and smart transportation and design that advance job creation, social justice, and community empowerment. A network of over 70 youth leaders has coalesced to launch a national organization from nothing and develop 2011 Summer of Solutions programs that will support hundreds of youth in creating the clean energy economy in 15 cities nationwide. These programs have expanded rapidly in number, quality, and sustainability over the years without grant support, and with a major influx of funding and leadership in late 2010, we’re just hitting our stride.

As you read on, I’d encourage you to think of any young people (individuals or groups) who might be interested in a summer program based on community-based innovation in the clean energy economy. If so, please invite them to apply to any of our 15 programs nationwide by April 24th at www.grandaspirations.org/apply2sos

In the Twin Cities, where I have been working, the Summer of Solutions has helped launch several initiatives that have been sustained throughout the year:

• Launching Cooperative Energy Futures, a community-based energy cooperative focused on helping neighborhoods create economies of scale in hard-to-reach markets (residential and small business) through community organizing, bulk buying, and cooperative ownership of energy. After a series of pilots around group contracting, bulk buying, neighborhood training, and community mapping starting in 2008, we started focusing on broad-based adoption in the Phillips community of Minneapolis during the summer 2010 while helping provide technical assistance to help the neighborhood understand efficiency and clean energy alternatives to a proposed high-voltage transmission line. With Cooperative Energy Futures now an independent though collaborative entity, this process led us to convene local business, neighborhood, and efficiency groups to form Our Power, a community-based campaign. This campaign focuses first on mobilizing a broad base of young people in the low-income and multi-cultural communities in Midtown Minneapolis to take charge of saving money by saving energy and engaging residents and businesses in doing the same. Starting in January 2011, Our Power has secured a marketing partnership with the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, Minnesota’s oldest minority-owner business and a local weekly paper, and hired youth interns from the local school systems. We have also helped facilitate a series of biweekly meetings pulling together multiple constituencies to create a community energy plan for the neighborhood.
• Building the Alliance to Re-Industrialize for a Sustainable Economy with local labor leaders from the UAW 879, affordable housing and transit advocates, and St. Paul City developers to create a mixed-use development plan for the St. Paul Ford Manufacturing site that will close later this year. Since 2007, we have worked to create and research a net-energy positive, transit-oriented, affordable living and working community that would create more jobs from green industry than the site currently hosts including fiscal impact modelling, analysis of job multipliers, on-site clean energy assessment, housing and transit assessment, and carbon inventories. During a hiatus where the future of the plant was uncertain, we turned this plan into the first draft of a template for how it could be replicated at other old industrial sites in the Twin Cities and in other Rust Belt cities. Now that the fate of the plant is more certain, we’re moving forward on a community engagement campaign to build “Yes In My Back-Yard” (YIMBY) support for the vision while working with the city and recruiting developers, designers, and investors.
• Growing our networks within the entrepreneurial urban farming movement in an effort to create jobs and turn hobby-style community gardens into viable urban farms. We started exploring the field in 2009, but expanded substantially in 2010 by working with the Harrison Neighborhood Association to bring residents in North Minneapolis, a major food desert, together around urban farming. We also started learning urban farm business development basics from Collie Graddick, a leader of the Co-op Project, and experimented in permaculture with other local groups in the Phillips Neighborhood and North Minneapolis. In 2011, we’ll be supporting the launch of Concrete Beet Farmers, a new Phillips urban farm while helping expand urban farming ventures with several other organizations (and maybe exploring urban anaerobic digester options).
• Working to expand access to bike transit in partnership with Sibley Bike Depot. We helped Sibley, a community Bike Shop based on University Avenue in Frogtown. This new program in 2010 helped Sibley develop a listening project among local residents, improve their volunteer training program, increase adoption of their low-income bike loan program, and start a bikeshop session for women and trans-gender people.

And that’s really just the beginning at just one of fifteen amazing programs across the nation. From organizers helping communities create new economies in the coal-fields of West Virginia to the emergence of local food economies in Arkansas to community revitalization in Detroit to neighbor-to-neighbor asset-based carbon reduction campaigns in Oregon, we’re getting to work. You can learn more about each of the Summer of Solutions programs at www.grandaspirations.org/programs

If you or a young person you know wants to join in this summer, please apply by April 24th at www.grandaspirations.org/apply2sos

So what is the Summer of Solutions trying to achieve?

First, Summer of Solutions is about winning the hearts and minds of our communities for whom climate and energy concerns are frequently lost amidst an overwhelming tide of economic uncertainty, job losses, political conflict regionally (like the labor/ state government conflicts in Wisconsin and elsewhere), and global unrest (in the Middle East and Japan) that further threatens to destabilize our economy. Through tangible, on-the-ground solutions that help people see how the green economy allows them to redirect the energy, food, and transportation dollars that they already spend away from the problems and towards the solutions. It allows people to see how being smarter, more efficient, and more collective in our approaches to meeting these basic needs can create more jobs, improve the quality of life, and reduce the cost of living, even as it helps confront big picture problems like climate change, energy depleting, economic dependency, and military conflict. It allows people to see, feel, and trust that a clean energy economy is more than just talk – it’s productive, realistic, and fun.

Second, Summer of Solutions is about building a new generation of leaders who bring people together across differences and both organize and innovate real, deep, and lasting solutions. At a moment when the climate movement needs to be bigger, more networked, and more inclusive than ever, focus has largely remained on a reluctant political system and the backlash that has ensued rather than on building a movement that is big enough, broad enough, deep enough, and solutions-oriented enough to win. We need leaders who can do the dirty work on the streets and face to face, but who can also think strategically on the big picture of how this work transforms development, progress, politics and culture to work towards a change as systemic as the Industrial Revolution. We need organizers with business models who are in it for the long haul and are innovative and resilient enough to sustain themselves and each other regardless of grant funding. And we need tens of thousands of them working in coordinated, distributed action. Green jobs visionary Van Jones said it beautifully:

“Because to win over a wounded and frightened nation, our cause itself must become irresistibly beautiful, vital, healing, and sustainable. Success will come when our networks are practical enough to “organize” hundreds of thousands — and soulful enough to “magnetize” tens of millions. So let us dare to imagine … a movement that celebrates more than it condemns … inspires more than it critiques … and solution-izes more than it problem-atizes. Imagine a movement for justice with its arms wide open.”

The Summer of Solutions is about building a massive swarm of leadership that will create the tipping point that we must see. It’s not about
creating more foot soldiers or organizing mass rallies, it’s about creating a self-sustaining and exponentially expanding network that
sends the seeds of the clean energy economy into every community where it creates visible benefits for all. One of our central theories is what
we can the Dandelion Strategy; that by the end of a Summer of Solutions program, every participant will be ready, willing, and able to:

1. Support themselves (materially, emotionally, etc.) through a sustainable livelihood that they create.
2. Create cascades of sustainable livelihood benefits (income, jobs, lower cost of living, better quality of life, ownership, social capital, skills, etc.) for the broader community through the work that they do.
3. Inspire, teach and prepare others to do the same.

What This Says About Youth Organizing

The power of the millenial generation is not that we have Facebook or that we know how to use it. It’s that growing up in a networked world is allowing us to imagine and equipping us to implement people-oriented coordination of real-world action at a massive scale. At the center of this story is that all of us – regardless of age – are creators, that we have the tools, the ability, and the skill to create beautiful outcomes that had seemed impossible through our coordination. We’re seeing the results start to emerge in the Arab Spring protests led by young people, which built off of the lessons from Serbia’s Otpur movement several years ago. Let’s not kid ourselves, overthrowing an oppressive regime that the vast majority already dislikes is far less complicated than reinventing the foundations of a fossil energy economy, but it’s certainly an impressive start.

Vast, decentralized networks of creative agents are effectively coordinating to achieve simple common goals in the form of either/or choices about how their societies will work. Vast decentralized networks of creative agents have also demonstrated their effectiveness at compiling and synthesizing and vast and complex volumes of knowledge and opinion at record speeds. What we have yet to create are vast and decentralized networks of creative agents effectively coordinating to achieve complex, multi-faceted, and interdependent society-changing goals that require both intense creativity and intense selective pressures for feasibility, scalability, replicability, and sustainability. These systems are emerging, and I believe that they will be necessary to solve problems at the magnitude of the climate and energy crisis.

The Summer of Solutions seeks to create the conditions for that system – thousands of super-empowered grassroots innovator-organizers who know how to create solutions and are able to communicate, coordinate, and synergize their work. In the spirit of the network, we trust that there are many others seeking to achieve the same end. We’re looking to work together – with you.

Chevron is guilty of dumping a massive amount of oil pollution in the Ecuadorean Amazon and a judge has ordered the company to pay $8 billion to clean it up.

Chevron has vowed to appeal the decision, however, clearly intending to pull an Exxon Valdez and stall indefinitely, hoping never to pay its due.

So the Change Chevron team got together with our friends and allies at Amazon Watch, Greenpeace, Global Exchange, and Communities for a Better Environment, headed down to Chevron’s HQ in San Ramon, CA, and delivered a message to the company: Chevron was found guilty because Chevron is guilty. Time to accept responsibility and clean up your oily mess in Ecuador!

Check out pics from the event below. If you want to send your own message to Chevron, go to ChevronIsGuilty.org.

Check out more pics on Flickr.

15 yrs ago I was COVERED with snow

11/24/2010 - Popocatéptl and Iztaccíhuatl. We never knew how much we could learn about climate change from a pair of words that after many, many attempts we still can’t say 3 times fast. But these twin volcanic peaks speak straightforward volumes.

Everyone we ask recounts that these mighty mountains whose glaciers provide the water to the capital and various surrounding states, were once a like white knights of moisture, fighting off drought and thirst between the rainy seasons. The immaculate summits dominate more than the landscape, occupying central space in the cultural sphere as well. Today the volcanoes are still breathtaking, though the glaciers are all but gone. And if you live here, you can’t help but notice. It’s not lost on anyone, and perhaps that’s explains the unanimity of support for our mission since we arrived here. In we visited one of the volcanically filtered pools that bubble up from underneath Popocatéptl and run downhill to feed the valley with fresh water for irrigation and drinking. A taco vendor there recounted how when she was a little girl the water that now rose just enough above my ankles to require some extra pants rolling, once flowed up to her neck in the same riverbed. Incredible. In addition to seeing its source in the skyline, the water runs underfoot and in municipal canals that look like gutters, right there in the open. And it’s the most delicious drinking water you’ve EVER had. It’s got a hint of anise! Forget that adage about not drinking the water in Mexico. If you get to drink from Popocatéptl, do it! With water and its source so visible and central in the landscape and life of the surrounding populations, folks know something’s up when the glaciers melt away in only 15 years. That’s when NAFTA was enacted. Only partially a coincidence…

Water Purísima from Popo-Izta

Now folks are worrying how to deal with increasing scarcity due to global warming. Coping seems the only plan anyone has – coping with even less than these humble folks have already. While we in the U.S. and global north still deny our fault and our debt. Infuriating.Even if many of those we spoke with don’t necessarily understand the issue as human-made global warming as such (though many did), Popo and Izta make it simple. They tell pretty much all that most any of us need is to know about global warming: it’s happening, and folks are going to starve and die of thirst if we don’t reverse it.

Yesterday hundreds of people convened in downtown Pittsburgh to protest the development of “fracking,” a new and untested method of natural gas extraction that is threatening to take over Pennsylvania and neighboring states. Fracking has been shown to pollute water supplies, cause cancer, and destroy the countryside and infrastructure in rural areas. The rally took place during a conference on “Developing Unconventional Gas” which featured Karl Rove. The following is from the Pittsburgh Student Environmental Coalition, who helped organize the rally.

“Thank you Pittsburgh! Thanks to you the rally was a HUGE success. An incredibly passionate and diverse group came out today, young and old, urban and rural, coming from states as far as California and as close as Ohio. We all came together to protect our constitutional right to clean air, pure water, and a healthy environment and to protest the exploitation of our environment and ourselves by the gas companies.

If you weren’t able to make it today then stay tuned because this is only the beginning. There is much work still to be done and yesterday’s election certainly didn’t make things easier, but this an issue that affects everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity, income, or political affiliation and we at PSEC strongly believe that it’s an issue worth fighting for. In the words of Margaret Meade, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

View more pictures at PSEC’s Picasa page.

Watch speeches from the event: by PSEC member Seth Bush and by Gasland director Josh Fox.

Media attention from: The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, University of Pittsburgh’s The Pitt News, WPXI, Pittsburgh Local News Station, West Virginia’s The Intelligencer,