The climate change debate in America appears hopelessly stuck. The major opposition party not only resists taking action but questions the science compelling us to act. If the US is to have any chance to break the stalemate, young people must get involved and force their voice to be heard, said a panel of activists convened by Climate One on Wednesday, March 9 in San Francisco.
For Alec Loorz, the 16-year-old founder of www.Kids-vs-Global-Warming.com, change will come because his generation and those that follow demand it. What's needed, he said, is "revolution"one that "ignites the compassion in people's hearts so that they realize that the way we are doing things now is not right and it doesn't live with the survival of my generation and future generations in mind.
Loorz is organizing the iMatter march, planned for this spring, which aims to mobilize 1 million young people in all 50 states on the same day. "Youth have the moral authority to say to our parents, our leaders, and our teachers, "Do I matter to you? Does my future mater to you?" he said.
Mark Hertsgaard, journalist and author, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, welcomes the activism of youth because the forces arrayed against them are so powerful. Let's remember, he said, that oil companies "are the richest business enterprise in the history of humanity. It is not surprising that they have enormous political power. The only way that you overcome that kind of entrenched money power is through sustained and very determined people power."
Scott Harmon, sustainability advisor to Boy Scouts of America, is mobilizing youth by harnessing the power and reach of the world's largest youth organization: scouting. There are 100 million young people active in scouting worldwide, he noted, with 70 million in China alone. Until now, however, scouts hadn't done much of anything about sustainability, despite the importance of nature and the outdoors being enshrined in its founding document.
Scouts may march, Harmon said, but even more important is "to get them educated. I want to get their hands dirty doing projects that teach them about the solution." He wants youth to do two things: wake up the parents and, when they enter the workforce in five or ten years, force their companies to become more sustainable. "We're not going to get it done in our generations, even your generation probably [to Alec Loorz], so we better get the next generation, and the one behind that ready, otherwise we're really toast," he said.
"I really do think that youth standing up and showing the ruling generation we care about this will be more powerful than any lobbyist or government agenda or multi-billion-dollar fossil fuel corporation," said Alec Loorz.
-- Justin Gerdes
Bio
Greg Dalton
Gregory Dalton is chief operating officer at the Commonwealth Club of California and Director of The Club's Climate 1 Initiative. He previously was international editor at The Industry Standard magazine, an editor for the Associated Press in New York, and a correspondent in China and Canada for the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper.
Proficient in both Mandarin and Cantonese, he is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Scott Harmon
Scott Harmon is the sustainability advisor for the Boy Scouts of America.
Mark Hertsgaard
Mark Hertsgaard, an independent journalist based in San Francisco, is the author of five books that have been translated into sixteen languages. He covers climate change for Vanity Fair, The Nation, Time and Die Zeit and has written for many of the world's leading newspapers and magazines.
Mark Hertsgaard is the author of five books that have been translated into sixteen languages, including Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future and On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency.
A correspondent for Link TV and The Nation and L'espresso magazines, he has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, The Guardian, Die Zeit and other leading publications around the world. His next book is called, Hot: Living Through the Storm: Surviving the Next 50 Years of Global Warming.
Alec Loorz
Alec Loorz is founder of www.Kids-vs-Global-Warming.com.
Increase in the global average surface temperature resulting from enhancement of the greenhouse effect, primarily by air pollution. In 2007 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasted that by 2100 global average surface temperatures would increase 3.2–7.2 °F (1.8–4.0 °C), depending on a range of scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, and stated that it was now 90 percent certain that most of the warming observed over the previous half century could be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities (i.e., industrial processes and transportation). Many scientists predict that such an increase in temperature would cause polar ice caps and mountain glaciers to melt rapidly, significantly raising the levels of coastal waters, and would produce new patterns and extremes of drought and rainfall, seriously disrupting food production in certain regions. Other scientists maintain that such predictions are overstated. The 1992 Earth Summit and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change attempted to address the issue of global warming, but in both cases the efforts were hindered by conflicting national economic agendas and disputes between developed and developing nations over the cost and consequences of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
This 16 year old kid is going to be the answer to the Global Warming problem. Forget the older folks. This fight will have to be taken up my his generation and they will have to demand action.
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