theClimateers

Today, I had a debrief with SustainUS to reflect on personal and organizational experiences in Copenhagen. At one point, I was asked why I went to Copenhagen and if I had specific goals for my involvement there.

I was able to answer the question, but not as eloquently as I would have liked. It is often easier for me to answer questions by telling someone else’s story. During the debrief I was also asked why the China-US Youth Forum on Climate Change that SustainUS helped organize was a highlight of my time in Copenhagen; I couldn’t find the words to explain why or how the event moved me, so I said, “watch the film I put together.” Sometimes I find that even someone else’s creation conveys my feelings better than I can: just this morning, I told friends on Facebook that this video from the UK youth explains my experience in Copenhagen better than I’ve been able to so far.

But my friend Morgan’s post on It’s Getting Hot in Here today reminded me of the importance of being able to tell my own story (and not just through video, though I find that method important in its own right). Ironically, this concept of sharing our personal stories – between US and Chinese youth and then back to our home communities about the power of doing so – is probably what made the China-US Youth Forum so special to me.

So while I take some time to find the words to tell my story, my question to you is, what is your story? Why are you involved? When did it all start? What drives you? What initially sparked you and what renews your spirit in the movement? Why are you a climateer?

Many of us who were at the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen from December 7-19 went through a period of hibernation in week following the conference. I, for one, slept for more than 32 hours in the 48 hours that began at 12:00 p.m. on December 20th. I’d been burning the midnight oil for fifteen straight days at that point, constantly jumping from one task to the next throughout the 18-hour workdays. It was actually no great hardship to sustain such working hours during the conference; the bubble that we lived in – that of the UN conference and, more so, that of our own international youth climate movement within the conference – was teeming with energy. We fed off the energy, passion, intellect and creativity of one another to make up for lack of sleep or caloric intake.

Youth Energy Reverb during COP Prep

This is nothing new. Our movement and social movements in general have acquired great strength from the way inspiration bounces around from activist to activist, sparking or re-igniting motivation. But to experience this at COP-15 in a tiny microcosm of the greater movement was eye-opening for me, particularly in the final hours as we walked away from the negotiations without the fair, ambitious, and legally binding treaty that we’d been pushing so hard for.

A fitting and galvanizing quotation just came through on my Twitterfeed: “Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged people who kept on working.”

While I believe it to be true that we can trudge through the lowest of lows and achieve great highs, I know it is a difficult task. Some of the farewell conversations I had with brilliant, effective young activists in Copenhagen were filled with a such a preponderance of negative emotion that, at least in the initial shock of the blow taken at the end of the negotiations, these new friends seemed to be leaving with a debilitating sense of defeat.

We are all working hard for a sustainable future, but how do we move forward using our own energy sustainably? How do we make sure we aren’t losing power as people fall out of the movement as they become too tired or too discouraged?

In the wake of COP-15, there are many facets of the international climate movement that need to be re-examined, strengthened or freshly innovated, and many great ideas have already been put forth. As we power back on after Copenhagen, let us take this opportunity to consider not just how to grow this movement but how to do so healthfully. The strategy to cultivate a healthy movement will provide the foundation for our strategies to deliver what the world needs on the US Senate floor, in Mexico City, and on the ground in communities around the world.

Generally in my blogs, I throw a set of bullet-points in right about here with my thoughts on the next steps. To be honest, I’m still a little lost and I don’t have a strong background in organizational psychology to make up for it. So let’s make a deal: I put in my 2 cents and you respond with some more ideas in the comments. Consider this a brainstorming session about some things we might want to reflect on as we burst into 2010.

1. Let’s be vocal in giving one another encouragement. The day-in-day-out fight for climate justice has its darker days (and not just in Copenhagen in December!). We not only need to highlight positivity through messaging around solutions and encouraging our leaders who are taking the right steps as Phil Aroneanu and Meg Boyle suggested, but we also must remember to share heartening words with each other. Look at the hundreds who came out of the woodwork to voice their support of the youth sit-in at the Bella Center on December 16. Showing one another that kind of love on a regular basis, after triumphs of all sizes, lifts the souls of the participants and organizers of each action. This indeed lifts the collective soul of the movement.
2. Let’s continue to recognize that everyone in the movement, whether they’ve attended one local 350.org action or three COPs, is an important player. Not everyone in the climate movement can dedicate his/her whole life to climate work. Not everyone concerned by climate change is even part of the climate movement (yet). These current and future members of the movement, however, should not just be numbers to be counted on one-off days of action, online petitions, or small fundraising drives. Our movement relies on our energy and inclusiveness; our work is not for minority rights but for the rights of all people and all life on this planet. We need to reach out, embrace the fresh ideas and engage the capacity of everyone who shares our concern for the climate.
3. Let’s remember to take care of ourselves. As COP15 prep ramped up this fall, I found myself shedding other commitments and hobbies and putting most of the rest of my life on hold until January. With the urgency of the need for global action on climate change weighing over us, it is easy to feel like climate work must always take priority. But hey, there’s still going to be work to be done after Mexico City, no matter how great the outcome. Diversity of interests and activities is healthy, and healthy members make a healthy movement. Plus, participating in other activities and taking up new hobbies opens us up to new networks (see “future members” referenced in 2). Win-win… and third win.

After writing it all out, all of these things strike me as fairly obvious, but clearly sometimes I forget to take note of them. If that’s the case for you, I hope these points were welcome reminders; if not, I hope to read your ideas on how to foster a healthy movement in 2010 in the comments.

Some initial, relatively raw thoughts of where I stand in the International Youth Climate Movement after COP-15, followed by a lil video of the head shave.

It is hard coming out of the bubble of COP-15. It is strange to not be surrounded by inspiring young activists 24/7 anymore. It is stranger to try to comprehend that Christmas is not about climate change, that friendships and school and the rest of the life I’ve been building in Berlin will still be there when I get back, and that they will not all be based around the international youth climate movement.

My understanding of time is also severely screwed up. My birthday, just 11 days ago, feels like at least a month ago, if not two. I cannot yet comprehend how I will manage time when I get back. I feel a time pressure that is perhaps even stronger than the pressure I felt during my 18-hour days in Copenhagen.

I worry I may not be as effective as I need to be while living in Berlin. In terms of my personal capacity and also the comparative potential (and need) for change, I think I’d be better suited continuing my work Stateside. I will need to do some serious reflection and strategizing on how to be more effective from Berlin.

In less than an hour, I’ve got to head down to central Copenhagen to catch my train back to Germany. I’m going to welcome the rails after the bumpy ride on the emotional rollercoaster that my time in Copenhagen turned out to be.

I go through stages of fright, in which I fear we won’t be able to make the changes we need to make in time. But then I also know we have the power and the passion to do it. And I swing back and forth, hitting all kinds of other highs and lows on the way.

But I am thankful for the opportunity to meet such committed people and to see their inspiring work. And on top of it all, these people are also just straight up awesome – even when you disregard their amazing work in the youth climate movement.

So that’s it, time to put the last pieces of stuff into my overpacked bags and get on my way. I leave with a cold head from the failure of COP-15, but with a warm heart from the relationships and new networks formed in the IYCM.

Cross-posted at It’s Getting Hot In Here

I spent months helping prepare policy briefs on adaptation, plan how the SustainUS communications team would interface with policy and actions, and set up a framework for the international youth communications and media production teams to work within at COP. My personal (unaffiliated) involvement in yesterday’s unapproved sit-in inside the Bella Center was a transition into a new activist life outside of the COP-15 conference center.

In the end, we held our sit-in for nine hours. At around 2am, we walked away voluntarily (in some senses of the word), because the UNFCCC Secretariat and the security guards communicated an ultimatum to us: if they had to physically remove us, all 300 NGO observers (reduced from 7,000 allowed in on Tuesday and Wednesday) would be banned from entry. Three hundred is a paltry sum compared to the total number of accredited NGO observers (around 20,000), but it is far better than zero.

We were concerned about the silencing of civil society voices, and considered being arrested to show this concern. However, we agreed that to silence our voices further would hurt, not help the chances for a fair, ambitious, and legally binding deal. We were holding our sit-in to share this ask, signed by over 12 million people now, with negotiators and press in the Bella Center. We were therefore not willing to further reduce the already small chances for success in achieving this real deal in Copenhagen by allowing the UNFCCC to use our sit-in as an excuse to shut out civil society completely.

Our procession out of the Bella Center was bittersweet, mostly bitter. The sit-in had been a great success in some ways: gaining tons of media attention, engendering more smiles and thumbs up than we’d seen in the last 10 days in the Bella Center combined, and giving all of us an uplifting feeling as we realized we were not only supporting something we believed in but were also concurrently supported by millions of people including friends in the youth climate movement back in the US, official country delegates, and of course John Kerry. But as we left, we knew our impact inside the Bella Center was over, and with stalled negotiations over unacceptable texts, it felt like we hadn’t achieved enough.

But today was a new day. I woke up rejuvenated after five and a half ours of sleep (I’ve been averaging around six hours/night – better than I’d expected). This movement is still growing. Although we’re closer to tripping over climate tipping points with each delay of a binding, science-based treaty, this movement is going to continue. With added urgency to mitigate climate change and added need to help affected communities adapt to changes we can no longer avoid, the undercurrent I’m feeling among (my mostly new) friends here is that it is time to bring this movement to a new level. International Youth Climate Movement version 2.0.

Today, I fasted in solidarity with three Climate Justice Fasters who are now on day 42 (!!!) of a water-only fast. This cleanse is also a symbolic clearing of my system as I prepare for a new kind of involvement in an improved movement.

Tomorrow, I will continue (that is, unless I chicken out) down this path of a symbolic restart by shaving my head with a group of other activists in front of the Bella Center. Other things shaving my head could possibly end up symbolizing include: the ugly negotiating process, the bad decisions made by negotiators, or the catastrophic changes that unabated climate change could bring about. Those are risks I’m willing to take, though, because if the shave does turn out horribly, it will be, as the Climate Justice Fast was explained to me, a form of penance for being a part of the problem and not effective enough as part of the solution til now. At the same time, though, my shaved head will provide a promise of new growth – personally, in the movement, and for the world – to help us rise up above the challenges we have created for ourselves.

Life goes on and we will not let it pass us by. We won’t just sit and wait for a fair, ambitious, and legally binding deal. We will make it happen.

Hello! I am one of about 20 youth currently in our fifth hour of a sit-in in the Bella Center at the UN Climate Change negotiations in Copenhagen. Check out our preliminary video from when we had about 50 youth – some were dragged away and one was kicked out.

At one point, someone came by and said “thank you for all that you’re doing” and I looked up and it was Senator John Kerry. I reached out my hand and said “thank YOU!” and he continued down the rest of the line of us shaking everyone’s hand.

Later, we saw Dessima Williams, the Chair of AOSIS from Grenada. She told us that in 1998 she took part in an 8-day sit-in at the Commission on Social Development to call for reductions in military spending right here in the Bella Center!

I’ll sign out for now – check It’s Getting Hot in Here for live-blogging from our awesome support crew sitting at the tables behind us!

Helicopters. Danish Police. UN Security. EVERYWHERE.

Most of the SustainUS delegation are currently inside the Bella Center, where the UN climate change negotiations, COP-15, have been taking place despite increasing limits on civil society involvement at the talks.

Outside, the Reclaim Power march reportedly has 5,000 or so marchers headed towards the Bella Center. Accredited NGOs Friends of the Earth, AVAAZ, and TckTckTck have had their accreditation suspended and were removed from the Bella Center. This may be related to a peaceful demonstration that was carried out in the Bella Center yesterday without the approval of the UNFCCC Secretariat, but the details are unclear.

Meanwhile, some folks leaving the Bella Center reportedly have been arrested pre-emptively in case they are planing to join the Reclaim Power protest. And there’s rumor that the Youth Convergence space, a workspace for accredited youth outside of the Bella Center, has been visited/raided/??? by the Danish Police. What!?

I don’t know what is going on, but this is all ridiculous.

Last summer, Louise asked me one night in the middle of a July week to write and record a rap song about 350.  After a little pestering, I complied.  I wrote, recorded, and edited the rap all together in about three hours that night.  I uploaded it, tweeted about it, and pretty soon 350 caught wind of it.

All along, I said, “This is just a demo. I’m going to re-record it with a real band. I’m going to make a music video.”  Ok, so life caught up to me (hey, I moved to from the US to Germany and started a master’s program over here…) and I just got around to the music video part after skipping the “working with good musicians” bit. After missing the October 24th Day of Action as a video premiere date, I wanted to be sure to get it out before Copenhagen.  So without further ado, the 350 Rap music video (which premiered yesterday on N30):

Dot .- (read aloud: “dot dot dash”) is my rapper moniker. Right. I don’t think I need to write anything more to explain the title of this post.

Oh, and if you like my work (heh), please consider donating $10 or $24 to my Copenhagen Fund.  My expenses ($130 train, $500 hostel, $$$ food, etc.) are adding up as I’ll be serving as “video queen” for the SustainUS delegation and I am covering several hundred dollars of equipment costs for microphones and a tripod and all that good stuff myself. I look forward to providing you with high quality video updates from the negotiations, which will almost certainly involve more interviews and less rap (but hopefully a lil bit of rap makes its way in there as well), but I also hope to have enough money to eat!

Today, apart from going to a planning meeting for 350 October 24th Day of Action event in Berlin and preparing this post for Blog Action Day 2009, I also bought my ticket to Copenhagen. This has been a long time coming, as I’ve been considering the dual implications of my travel to COP-15 on climate change and on my pocketbook.

Image credit: http://www.magic-mural-factory.com/

Knowing that flying accounts for 2-3% of global CO2 emissions, I’ve been rather anti-flying in recent years.  To get to Germany, of course, I had no other choice (smuggling myself onto a freight boat or getting up to Alaska and then taking the trans-Siberian train across two continents weren’t really feasible… and molecular transport does not yet exist). Once I got here and had a bit of vacation time, though, I reverted to my anti-flying ways and I decided not to fly to visit a friend in Bosnia, but to carpool to Poland for a short trip instead.  Carpooling with a guy who was going to drive from Berlin to Krakow no matter what was fine:  I was just cutting out a share of his emissions.

Last week, in planning my trip up to Copenhagen for COP-15, I wanted to undertake some more serious analysis of my travel options since there seemed to be no easy answer regarding the best way to get to COP.

Here’s the dilemma:

• I wanted to spend as little money as possible;
• I wanted to minimize my CO2 footprint, as always, with a little added fervor since I’m going to Copenhagen for just that reason; it would be rather self-contradictory to not consider the greenhouse gas emissions of my travel.

This of course mirrors pretty much all problems we have with transitioning away from our dirty energy economy: $$$ vs. Environment/Ethics.  I wish I could always go with the option that made me feel the best, but alas, I too live in a world limited by the money I possess. (Side note: hopefully someday in my lifetime, solar flying is real and affordable.)

From Berlin, Copenhagen is just about 300 miles away or so, depending on the route you take. My options for getting from Berlin to Copenhagen (and back) with initial time & cost estimates were

1. Carpooling, 6-8 hours, $60-100 (In Germany, you can search for “carpool opportunities” online and then pay the driver a fee to ride with him/her to your final or intermediate destination.)
2. Flying, 3 hours (incl. transport to airport & check-in time etc.), $80-100 (incl. checked bag fee)
3. Training – 7 hours, $200-350
4. Busing – 7.5 hours, $60-95
5. Hitchhiking – 8-10+ hours, $0
6. Biking – unfortunately I’m not that fit and couldn’t miss any more days of class before the 4th of December

To be honest, when I was preparing this post last week by beginning to calculate CO2 costs, I was hoping that the math would help me justify a cheap, fast plane trip, or at least fortify my commitment to not flying with some hard numbers.

Luckily, today I found a great deal on a train ticket, just $128.44 at today’s exchange rate. This saved me from dealing with the “fuzzy math” of trying to adding up the global warming potential of radiative forcing from NOx and vapor trails from flying or the full CO2e emissions of charter buses compared to personal cars. I’m quite pleased with this outcome; train travel is widely heralded as the best form of rapid transit when it comes to environmental and climate friendliness. I don’t have to feel bad about my rather unnecessary carbon emissions from flying 300 miles and I don’t have to feel bad about not having any money for food in the world’s third most expensive city. A win for cost-consciousness and environmental-consciousness! Not to mention train travel is far more comfortable than any other form of travel that I’m familiar with.

P.S. In my search for comparative GHG emissions data for the various forms of transport, I found this great website, www.ecopassenger.org.  (Unfortunately it is only really handy for trips within Europe at this time.) Here is the info they gave me regarding energy resource consumption and CO2, particulate matter, NOx, and non-methane hydrocarbon emissions.

The graphs above assume European average number of fill seats on European train and plane trips and two passengers in the car; if I up the number of passengers to three, the CO2 and Energy Consumption figures of car travel begin to be more comparable with train travel and become smaller than train travel at four or more passengers. 30 miles of ferry travel is not included in the car mileage, helping make this car trip a bit more competitive with train travel than on other routes.

Really big side note on additionality

The question here is, if I select one of these options, will the CO2 emissions from the other choices disappear? Or would my travel with those options not really be “additional” – that is, if I chose not to travel with any of the above choices, will those same CO2 emissions still exist?

Whether I fly, hitchhike, train, or bus, these people are going to be sending their vehicles off to Copenhagen no matter what and the CO2 of all options will almost certainly exist whether I’m there or not (carpool being the only possible exception). At first glance, I should not be too concerned with my CO2 impact. Sadly, it’s not so simple. I also have to consider if my choice to take (or not to take) one form of transport will increase or decrease future emissions. It’s all conjecture, but I think my decision probably has a larger impact on commercial firms (airlines, trains) than on someone who picks up a hitchhiker spontaneously. Actually, those who are driving regular carpools as a profit-seeking endeavor are likely the most affected by my decision. Since they are smaller operations, one rider makes a bigger difference; they might not make a trip at all if they don’t get a carpooler (me).

Still, you might not think that my one decision can really make a difference in cutting carbon emissions. If I don’t fly, the plane will still go to Copenhagen and still pollute approximately the same amount (very slightly less without the weight of my body and bags). When I excitedly told people yesterday about having purchased my train ticket at a price almost comparable with flying, several people asked my why I didn’t just fly, since it was still cheaper. Their reaction was based on a belief that my impact, the purchase of one seat on a train instead of one seat on a plane, wouldn’t really make a difference in the grand scheme of climate change. So why not fly and reduce the pro capita emissions? Well, I’d be giving my money (as little as it is, grr!) to the commercial airline, helping them continue to profit off of highly polluting practices. If we all say, “screw it, the plane is flying, so am I,” we find ourselves faced with a tragedy of the commons.

From the opposite perspective – the the bright side, collective action implies that if enough of us take our environmental ethics to heart and steer clear of short flights, we could perhaps reduce the demand enough to economically stimulate the airline to cut down from two Berlin-Copenhagen flights a day to just one. Such a 50% reduction in supply might raise the price of a flight to something more fitting with the amount of pollution it produces. This would likely further cut the demand as consumers look more towards other means of transport, this time out of cost-consciousness rather than environmental-consciousness. And that, dear friends, is why I chose not to fly to Copenhagen.

I’ve been watching and reading about everything happening in Pittsburgh all week, and it’s been a little disconcerting to hear what various people have been saying about it around here in DC.  I’ve got a few friends there protesting for climate action and have been hearing firsthand reports of the police crackdowns.

I’ve heard a lot of offhand remarks about the protesters from various people this week, about how the protesters are totally missing the point of the G20, how it’s stupid and useless to be out there, how the protesters don’t even know what’s going on, and so on.  It makes me glad I know people there—smart people who care about issues—so that I can (hopefully) change their minds about the types of people who are down there.

This kind of mentality worries me: where’s the optimistic spirit and desire to effect change? Protests have been on the vanguard of so many important historic social movements, and as long as there are still issues to fight for, protests are still relevant.

I read a wonderful interview with Jim Hansen (the first scientist to back the 350 ppm target), and felt re-inspired.  He talked about civil resistance as an integral part of the democratic process when voting and traditional means of influencing politics fail.  Check out the article.  Jim Hansen embodies the kind of involvement and leadership that the climate movement needs: someone who understands the scientific facts, but is not afraid to do advocacy work, and has no qualms with working both within and outside of the political machine.