theClimateers

Dear President Obama,

The science on climate change is overwhelming, and the momentum from the climate movement is at full speed. Don’t resign to postponing climate action just yet! We’re not just asking you to attend Copenhagen in person, we’re asking you to be at Copenhagen with all the dedication, energy, and diplomatic grace that you have demonstrated so many times before.  We want to see you come home  having made progress — real progress! — on climate negotiations, not pat yourselves on the backs and say, ‘The timing wasn’t right, but let’s certainly do this again later.’

Time is running out! It’s true; we may not feel the repercussions of unabated climate change in the same way we feel the backlash of this economic recession right now, but we have already made irreversible damages to our earth and it is imperative that we act now to prevent too many more from happening.

In solidarity,

Your friendly, neighborhood Climateers

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Dear all,

Most of us are not as lucky as Valida and hundreds of other youth to be able to voice our opinions at Copenhagen in person, so here are a few things we can do at home to make sure we let President Obama and the Senate know we don’t intend to let them off the hook on this one.

1. CALL YOUR SENATORS! You have two of them, and while sometimes it might not seem like it, they work for YOU, so let ‘em know what you want!

2. Attend a climate justice action on November 30: http://www.actforclimatejustice.org/ – happening all over!

3. If you are in DC, help 1Sky and CCAN deliver art to the White House on Dec. 4!

4. It’s not all petitions and protests! Think of something creative! Valida and I wrote 350 songs; Berlin held a silent climate parade; DC released dozens of beautiful, floating lanterns at the White House during Obama’s trip to China — what can you come up with?

5. Send Obama a message or sign a petition – no worries about sending two, or three, or four! The larger the volume the better!

http://www.whitehouse.gov/live |  www.itsgametimeobama.org |  www.climatecountdown.org

Here’s a possible list of things to ask him to do:

- Attend Copenhagen in person

- Put pressure on the Senate to pass a strong climate bill — no watery bills wanted

- Meet with the youth leaders who have been working so hard at the grassroots level on environmental issues

- Address the country with a public, televised speech on the importance of climate and energy legislation so to tell the world that this is a top priority on his agenda

Louise

It’s an interesting time to be living as a student in Berlin, though certainly not as interesting as it was 20 years ago today when the Berlin Wall was suddenly opened. The various retrospectives and anniversary events all around the city celebrate not just the end of Communism, but also the beginning of a new era of economic and social interconnectedness. This interconnectedness that has evolved since 1989 does not stop at Berlin’s city limits or at Germany’s borders.

The Berlin Wall was the first of many obstacles to be torn down between peoples of this world. The rise of globalization in the economy, in civil society networks and in ideological groups engendered a host of new transnational issues that reshaped the security landscape. No longer could national leaders focus security efforts only on threats from other nation-states.

A new conceptualization of security began to underscore the importance of human security – the safety and well-being of people within states – as a major shaper of national security. Low standards of safety and well-being in a particular country or region can lead to instability. This instability is today perceived as an international threat to security, because of its capability, even tendency, to cross borders through increased participation in international terrorism and drastically amplified migration flows.

Today, twenty years after the fall of the wall that sparked this paradigm shift, the biggest threat to human security, and thus to national security, is climate change.

Heat-trapping gases from fossil-fuel-driven economies are leading to an unnaturally fast rise in average global temperature. If we don’t change course immediately, it’s not a hotter world alone that we have to worry about (in fact, some regions would see dramatic drops in average temperature), but rather disruptive changes in the flow of water around the globe as a result of warmer ocean currents.

Subsequent increases in frequency and intensity of natural disasters, changes in arable land and potable water distribution, and rising sea-levels swamping coastal cities would create pockets of instability that threaten to erupt into mass migration, armed conflicts, and public health calamities – all potentially grave security concerns.

It is hard to predict the exact timing and placement of such changes, in part because of complex feedback loops. This uncertainty, however, does not detract from the threat to security, but rather amplifies it as it makes specific threats harder to anticipate.

Due to its overarching nature and potential catastrophic effects on international social, political, and economic structures, climate change has been noted as one of the greatest threats to American security by the Pentagon, the State Department and eleven retired three- and four-star admirals and generals.

The risk is real and the time for action is now. World leaders will be meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December to negotiate greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets and funding for adaptation to climate change impacts that are already threatening the well-being of people around the world. In the next year, the agreement reached in Copenhagen will have to be fleshed out into a legally binding treaty to minimize the impacts of climate change in the most just manner.

In the case of the fall of the Berlin Wall, international negotiations and political leadership were major players, but the heavy Iron Curtain could not have been pushed down without the pressure from citizens on all sides. Everyday people like you and me have a responsibility to future generations to hold our leaders accountable by keeping international focus on the most fundamental issue of our time.

A short exchange I had with Louise over GChat on Tuesday about more or less ignoring my school work in my masters of environmental management program here in Berlin:

Me: November = Climate Activism Month
Louise: I know, but really, every month is climate activism month.
Me: Yea, but theres a million things to do before COP. There’s no time for other stuff. This is it.
Louise: Yea.

It’s November. The pressure is on. It’s on all of the negotiators in Barcelona. It’s on US Senators. It’s just all around on. I keep seeing countdowns and hearing tcktcktck in my head. With all this pressure, I’ve been feeling pressed for time. I started logging my time, to make sure I am spending an appropriate amount of time on any one area (be it socializing, doing school work, writing blogs/op-eds, or filming/editing climate videos). Time is definitely on my mind… all the time.

So I wanted to carve out just a tiny bit of time to reflect on some important time/timing aspects influencing climate change negotiations. Let’s break it down into past, present, and future.

Past

The most important timing factor to consider here is the length of time that industrialized have been pumping man-made greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. About seventy percent of the current stocks of greenhouse gases can be attributed to historical emissions from industrialized countries. China took the title for the greatest yearly emissions about two years now when it surpassed the US. But if we look at cumulative emissions over time (or per-capita emissions), the US is still a clear leader (U-S-A, U-S-A). Sadly this is nothing to cheer about; but it is something to rally around. I’m reminded of my years of playing soccer: everyone put their hands in the middle and we chanted, “Be Agressive, B-E Aggressive, Got to B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E, Aggressive, Let’s go!”

Present

That leads me to present time. It is now time for all of us – in the sense of countries or individuals – to come together, to put our hands in the middle, and be aggressive. Countries have got to be aggressive in Copenhagen to get a bold, binding, and just climate deal (even if it is first finalized in the year after COP-15). While leaders in the Senate and around the world have pushed off the time pressure, it is still time time for us, as individuals or collectively as civil society, to be aggressive in relentlessly hounding our politicians to go for the fair and binding treaty. We can lament that a legally binding deal likely won’t come out of Copenhagen, or we can look beyond COP, and see that now we just have more time to keep building pressure. We’ve been working to build that pressure in the US for the past few years, but we’ve got to keep working to make sure that everyone knows that, given our past, it’s time for the US (again, both as a state and as individuals within that state) to step up as true leaders, as the team captain leading the rallying cry to be aggressive. We’ve got to be aggressive if we’re to eek out a win for the future of our world.

Future

To pull in a cliché here, we could say children are our future – that we’ve got to be aggressive for the sake of our children. Beyond new generations, it’s hard to say what the future will bring. One thing is fairly certain, though: what we do today affects the kind of future we will one day see and the future, past our own lifetimes, that we will never see. Our actions today affect the future of the world ecologically, our future socially as a human race, our economic future, and beyond. That’s why we can’t set a fixed discount rate to determine whether climate change mitigation action is economically worthwhile. Rather, we’ve got to move on the science-defined risks and on an ethical belief that we can’t put the world at such a high level of risk, even if we ourselves will no longer be around to see the potential, dreaded outcomes of inaction or insufficient action.

As Lord Nicholas Stern said at the Technical University of Berlin yesterday, we can’t wait ten or twenty years until today’s students, who Stern called “better educated” on climate change issues, are the world’s policy-makers. We just don’t have the time to put off securing our future against dramatic climate change.

*buzzer*

And so our little time-out has expired. To tackle climate change, we’ve got to

• diffuse the threats we can already foresee by providing adequate funding for adaptation (with concrete commitments of at least 50 billion USD/year starting by 2015 and at least 100 billion USD by 2020);
• take control of the game by setting binding targets;
• create a system to transfer technology, know-how, and funding (another 100 billion USD/year by 2020) to make sure that developing countries are also valued players in the team’s mitigation efforts.

Just because world leaders (ahem, US) are pushing off a legally binding climate treaty to 2010, does not mean that our work in Copenhagen (once again, referring here both to state delegates and to youth and other climate activists) is any less important. Now it is time to carry this game plan into the last minutes of the fourth quarter to ensure we’ve got the momentum and plans necessary to secure an overtime win in 2010 for the home team – for our home, the earth.

Ready, break!