Dear Energy Action Coalition

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Energy Action Coalition has a meeting with top White House officials tomorrow.  Here is the message I sent them to encourage them to not hold back in speaking truth to power.  If you want the give them a little more encouragement to be bold and courageous, give them a call at (202) 328-1733.

 Dear Jessy and Energy Action Coalition,

Congratulations!   Your meeting with White House officials on the verge of the Copenhagen climate negotiations is a huge opportunity, and one that I’m sure you’ve worked very hard to get.  At that meeting, you will be speaking for millions of young people across the country, all those for whom survival is not negotiable.

We are counting on you to be bold and courageous in speaking truth to power.  As he heads into the defining moment for the battle against climate change, President Obama has already fallen far short of what is necessary to defend a livable future for our generation.  He has set his target as a 4% reduction in emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 while scientists have made it clear at least 40% cuts are necessary.  Many less conservative scientists have said we need 80% reductions by 2020 to have a reasonable chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.  Obama failed to provide leadership for Congress to pass meaningful climate legislation and failed to stand up to right wing tactics of intimidation and misinformation.

There are plenty of mainstream environmental groups who have refused to hold Obama accountable for these failures.  Some of these groups are tied to an institutional model that requires them to pretend like what they are doing is working.  Others are afraid of losing their seat at the table at the Tuesday night meetings in the White House or just afraid of Rahm Emanuel’s wrath if they fail to toe the party line.  We need you to show more courage than this.  As representatives of the youth climate movement, your job is to be the uncompromising moral voice of the movement. 

You represent the people who will not accept half measures and baby steps in the right direction.  We know that halfway to survival is still not survival.  The only thing young people will really fight for is a full solution that will truly defend a livable future.  We have seen this in action over this year.  At Power Shift in February, 12,000 students spent considerable time and money going all the way to Washington, DC to work for a revolutionary change in our society.  A few months later, when you asked those same people to fight for an impotent ACES bill, only a few hundred answered the call.  That energy, empowerment and commitment at Power Shift were not a lie.  Those young people just weren’t willing to fight for a bill that we all knew wouldn’t actually have done anything to protect our survival.

You need to tell that to the White House.  Your PowerVote campaign last year was a significant part of the success of Obama and other Democrats.  All your young people worked on that campaign in the expectation that it would usher in the kind of revolutionary change we need.  I expect you know as well as I do that those young people would not put that kind of effort into a campaign for the kind of lukewarm reforms we’ve seen this year.  If he continues to look for friends on the right, Obama will lose the supporters who got him to this point. 

Students at Power Shift heard a hopeful and empowering message from some of the very same people you will be talking to on Wednesday.  Ken Salazar and Ed Markey thanked us for getting progressives elected and promised that the government would finally work in our best interests.  We were told that we would be listened to and that our leaders would step up to their responsibility to defend our future.  Then we got sold out.  When you outlined four things you wanted in Markey’s bill, not a single one of those requests was met.  It was clear that the profits of the fossil fuel industry were still far more important than our lives.  Young people around the country were outraged at being sold out.  If you don’t honestly represent that outrage when you speak truth to power, those 12,000 angry young people will feel alienated from a group that apparently doesn’t understand them or represent them.

As Energy Action Coalition founder Billy Parish said in 2007 when he spoke to Congress, “We are literally fighting for our lives.”  It is silly to think that if fighting within the system does not work, we will not look for other options.  If our leaders do not do whatever is necessary to protect our survival, we will.  If our leaders don’t reign in the fossil fuel industry, we will shut it down.  Obama and the rest of our leaders have the power to turn this runaway bus onto the smooth road of a clean energy economy.  The rest of us don’t have that power.  All we can do is grind it to a halt before we go over the cliff, and, absent political leadership, it is our ethical responsibility to do so.  If Obama fails to fight for our survival in Copenhagen, he forces upon us the moral imperative of directly shutting down the fossil fuel infrastructure around the country.

The Obama administration needs to know that we are going to do what needs to be done whether he is with us or not, but this doesn’t have to just be a threat.  This is also a promise that if he sets ambitious goals, we will make it happen.  We will rise up to fight the defenders of the status quo and put all of our courage, brilliance and creativity into achieving the vision of a just and livable future that he sets for us.  We are ready to be asked to do difficult things.  If Obama wants to take baby steps, he will have an uninspired baby-sized movement behind him.  But if he wants bold, revolutionary changes, he will have a bold and revolutionary army of young people making it happen.  Let him know that we are a bold and courageous generation, and any leader we fight for must be the same.

Good luck tomorrow!  We’re all behind you as long as you’re in front of us.

 

Sincerely,

Tim DeChristopher