What youth do better than anybody

Refuse. Resist. Disrupt. Disturb.

The energy behind the climate change awareness and action movement right now is kind of electrifying. Reports, blogs, and videos are pouring out of COP15 showing that youth have marked climate change as the issue of our generation and, it seems, for generations to come. It is grounding us and elevating our ideals and goals to bring about a revolution that centralizes global human economic, social, and cultural welfare and maximizes non-human life's welfare. We are coming to see a groundswell of systems thinking, ethical awakening, and meaningful action.

And some of that action is to simply disrupt nonsense like that held by so-called climate "skeptics." What that term really means is climate change denialists, people whose entrenchment in the status quo and business as usual places blinders on them. Unfortunately, they have been so heavily funded by big polluters like ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and others that they have gotten a mountain of press in the past. Their glory days have waned. Now they try to hold little counter-meetings at COP15 that deserve no attention, outright ridicule, or a nice shutdown.

Check the shutdown.



I love that Lord Monckton and these free market fighters are calling this "childish." I wonder what they've had to say about the gun-toters at the health care townhalls around the U.S. this past fall. Just a thought. And then the bit about them being "crazed Hitler youth" might be one of the mightier overstatements of all time. If you can't win an argument or aren't getting what you want, make a Nazi reference. It will either win the argument or make you look like a someone struggling desperately for any rhetorical strike. We report. You decide.

Luckily for us, the U.S. delegation is no longer owned by these denialists. Our government is no longer hiding or casting aspersions at reports like the one just released by the World Meteorological Organization saying that 2000 to 2009 was the warmest decade on record, warmer than the 1990s which were warmer than the 1980s. The report also notes other "extreme" weather events consistent with climate science's predictions including droughts, heatwaves, and the third lowest measurement of Arctic sea ice in recorded history. The EPA just released it edangerment ruling, as of yet unenforced, that CO2 and five other greenhouse gases (GHG) present dangers to human health and welfare because of their climate altering natures. It looks as though the Obama administration, unlike its predecessors from George Bush, Sr. on, will do something about the United States' unequal contribution to climate change.

Certainly, if the youth have anything to say and do about it, he will. While the youth sack denialists at Copenhagen, sack the editorial and opinion pages here, talk about it with friends and family, write to and meet with your representatives, senators, mayors, and planning commissioners, your farmers, your...well...you get the picture.

Refuse. Resist. Rethink.