NEWSCLIMATE SECURITY

This Mother's Day weekend and into next week, kids and their moms will march together all across the country and all across the world to demand politicians protect the Earth for the next generation.

The iMatter March will mark a moment when the next generation — the kids today who can't yet vote or, for that matter, can't yet donate vast sums of money to influence lawmakers–makes the moral argument demanding our nation take meaningful actions to stem global warming and protect their future.  It's not too late to join a march. They want everyone—kids, moms, dads, uncles, grandparents, and anyone who cares about the health of the planet for young people today— to join. You can check out this site to find where a march near you will take place.

What's awesome is that the kids aren't only making a moral argument. They are also getting an early schooling in our legal system. Alec Loorz, the impressive 16-year-old who is leading this movement, is working with other kids and a legal team to file lawsuits against the U.S. government for its failure to act in every state in the country. They have gained a massive amount of media attention for their plans, which is based on the legal theory that "the government has failed in its duty to protect the atmosphere as a 'public trust' for future generations."

Editor's Note: What follows is a guest post from Alec Loorz, the 16-year-old visionary of the iMatter campaign and founder of Kids vs Global Warming. A climate change activist since he was 12 years old, he has spoken to nearly 200,000 people in over 200 presentations, keynotes, and panels. Representing his generation, he advocates for and inspires youth to lead the way to a sustainable and just world.

Join the iMatter March he is organizing starting this Mother's Day weekend, and sign and comment on his petition to the right of this blog post to support the lawsuit he describes below.

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By Alec Loorz

I am 16 years old. Yesterday I filed a lawsuit against the United States of America, for allowing money to be more powerful than the survival of my generation, and for making decisions that threaten our right to a safe and healthy planet.

Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation have created a problem. They’ve developed a society that depends on burning fossil fuels, like coal and oil, to survive. They never realized that there were any huge consequences to running our lives with fossil fuels. But now, we do.

Our addiction to fossil fuels is messing up the perfect balance of nature and threatening the survival of my generation. If we continue to hide in denial and avoid taking action, my and I generation will be forced to grow up in a world where hurricanes as big as Katrina are normal, people die every year because of heat waves, droughts, and floods, and entire species of animals we’ve come to know disappear right before our eyes.

Whatever your age, the world's inaction in combating global warming is frustrating.

But for kids, doubly so. This is the "future generation" that academics and politicians so often speak of in the abstract when they talk about climate change. It is the generation of people, who, in the coming decades, will be left to clean up the mess left by today's adults.

That's why Alec Loorz is organizing an uprising. He is 16 and has already spent all of his teenage years educating his peers about climate change. He founded the organization Kids vs. Global Warming as a sophomore in high school last year.

On May 8th (Mother's Day in the U.S.), that uprising will begin.

The iMatter March will be a day for youth to take to the streets in cities around the world and demand their governments protect their future by reducing greenhouse gas emissions today. Older folks—including mothers concerned about the welfare of their children—are also welcome to join.

Before Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she was running for President.

Before Paul Elliot became chief DC lobbyist for TransCanada, he was national deputy director of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. TransCanada is the company seeking the State Department's approval to pipeline up to 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest oil on the planet from Alberta through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas to reach Gulf coast refineries.

Could this be a problem?

A few environmental groups fighting against the proposed 2,151 mile-long pipeline think so. This week, the coalition, including Friends of the Earth, the Center for International Environmental Law, and Corporate Ethics International filed a Freedom of Information Act request [PDF] seeking disclosure of the contacts between Elliot and the State Department.

Kenny Bruno, director of Corporate Ethics International's No Tar Sands Oil campaign, has been blogging on Change.org for months about the environmental disaster this pipeline threatens—and the long slog these groups have been through in making sure the State Department pays heed. Right now, the coalition is concluding a 2-week ad campaign as the State Department weighs approval. And recently, Plains Justice, a non-profit group based in Montana, detailed in a report lax pipeline regulations (witness the summer's Enbridge spill in Michigan and Chevron's recent pipeline disasters) and oil spill planning that would make America's heartland and its water supplies vulnerable.  The pipeline was certainly a huge topic of discussion at the "International Tar Sands Resistance Summit," held in Missoula, Montana in November to foster organizing and civil disobedience against this dirty form of fuel.

If you have anywhere near my level of financial literacy, and "Retirement Plans for Dummies" is above your reading level, then it's likely that if you do have a 401K or IRA plan, it's investment portfolio is something of a black box.

That should change—if not for the sake of your own financial health, than at least for the sake of the planet's.

Investors hold tangible power when it comes to influencing corporations to adopt eco-friendly policies, sustainable sourcing criteria, and transparent disclosure practices (i.e. how much greenhouse gas emissions do their factories produce, or does a company have lots of factories in vulnerable flood zones, etc., etc.). And that means you may have real power in holding corporations accountable.

CANCUN, Mexico—Climate change is supposed to be a problem that we (the present) must solve for our children (the future). But at the global climate talks here in Mexico this month, the voices of the future were very much clear and present.

An estimated 1,000 "youth" are in Cancun this year, both in and around the conference center, representing a growing force that official delegates from 194 nations must reckon with. Coming with youth alliances, non-profits and universities around the globe, from Nepal to Fiji to the U.K. and the U.S,  many have visibly joined forces in wearing blue t-shirts that read: "You have been negotiating all my life. You cannot tell me you need more time."

Jess Leber is Change.org's environment editor and is writing from COP-16 in Cancun this week, where 193 nations are meeting from Nov. 29-Dec. 11 in their yearly attempt to forge a new international treaty to tackle the global warming crisis.

Among the many benefits of being rich is that you can afford to make mistakes. Neglected an impending financial collapse? No problem, simply bailout the banks afterward.

For the U.S. and many other well-off nations, the same applies in the climate debate. We know we are headed headlong into a difficult future, but we are a little less worried than is rational. Why? Because we are comfortable. We know that at the very least we have they money to ride the wave of a collapse (or in climate speak "adapt").

The same cannot be said for poorer nations, or those most-vulnerable to the whims of the global climate system.

Over the summer, you may remember we wrote a lot about the unprecedented string of extreme weather events that affected the globe. From floods in Pakistan and Vietnam to drought in Brazil and China, many of the regions affected are of course the least able to recover from this scale of catastrophe. Russia's severe droughts prompted it to stop exporting grain, prompting a rise in global grain prices that hit poor nations where it hurt. This week, Oxfam International put a number to the horror: 21,000 people died due to weather-related disasters in the first nine months of 2010, more than double the entire death toll in 2009.

Jess Leber is Change.org's environment editor and is writing from COP-16 in Cancun this week, where 193 nations are meeting from Nov. 29-Dec. 11 in their yearly attempt to forge a new international treaty to tackle the global warming crisis.

A surreal air surrounds the global climate talks. That air is cloaked in diplomatic floweriness, impenetrable acronyms, and conditional language—the total effect is to ensure no nation takes responsibility for much at all. But underneath that cloak are some scarily bold statement by omission. By diplomats not saying—and not doing—what needs to be done to slow global warming is in fact an overt decision to consign humanity to a perilous future.

These are the general sentiments expressed by 350.org's Bill McKibben, who spoke at a side event of the COP-16 meetings yesterday. The man is a walking dose of reality, but more on that in a bit. I'd like to first tell you about another dose of reality I experienced here yesterday

Far from the conference center on the Plaza De La Reforma, in front of Cancun's city hall, residents of this city yesterday joined together to say a prayer for the earth (Una Oracion Por La Tierra) and prayer for a successful outcome of the talks they are hosting.

Jess Leber is Change.org's environment editor and is writing from COP-16 in Cancun this week, where 193 nations are meeting from Nov. 29-Dec. 11 in their yearly attempt to forge a new international treaty to tackle the global warming crisis.

CANCUN, Mexico—To listen to Antonio Lima speak is to understand why climate change is not only the environmental outrage of our time, but also the moral one as well.

Lima—an ambassador of Cape Verde, a group of West African islands—was among the delegates here at the Cancun climate negotiations today representing the interests of the "Alliance of Small Island States," a coalition of 43 nations fighting for their lives against a tide of rising seas.

“We are facing the end of history," Lima says. "We don't want to be the sacrificed countries of the 21st century. We want to survive," he implored yesterday.

“…a key part of our clean energy future."

When a government source in Ontario, Canada, recently uttered this quote, it wasn’t about solar energy. Nor was it about wind or geothermal power. It was about (drumroll, please) the extensive repair and construction of nuclear reactors.

Wait…what?

In Darlington, a city outside of Toronto, the Ontario government’s $26 billion bid to repair 10 old nuclear reactors and build two more has largely been pitched on the idea that nuclear is a nice, clean source of energy. But while many have jumped on this bandwagon (including, alarmingly, the Obama administration), there is ample evidence that nuclear is far from a successful recasting as the environment’s BFF.