A call to action for a lifetime

This past weekend at Powershift, the proverbial gauntlet for every American young person was thrown down. Hard.

On Saturday night, Tim De Christopher — a renowned climate activist in jail for defrauding a land auction for oil and gas development (he outbid all attendant energy companies despite not having the money so that they would not be able to expand their portfolios) — challenged young people to step up their commitment to the climate as they never have before.

In order to do this, Tim had to establish the extent to which we are losing this fight on big energy, consumerism, consumption and scientific intransigence. In the past two years, environmentalists have seen their hopes for energy reform and climate regulation dashed as Congress continues to sell out the global climate and the American economy to big oil, gas and coal corporations. In waiting for the United States, the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases, to act, international negotiations on climate change have barely recovered from their collapse in Copenhagen, and the world continues to burn — 2010 was the hottest year on record, closing out the hottest decade on record.

With powerful rhetoric, Tim turned these harsh realities into an inspiring and resounding call to action. Invoking the waves of civilly disobedient anti-segregation activists who were arrested day after day in the early 1960s, he demanded a total, youth-led assault on mountain top removal mining. He demanded that day after day after day, hundreds step up to shut down mountaintop removal (MTR) sites across Appalachia until President Barack Obama was forced to either shut down the destructive process — in which mountaintops are literally blown off and dumped into rivers to gain easy access to coal — altogether or send in federal troops to enforce its continuance.

Tim’s fight is bigger than MTR mining, and ultimately, is precisely the direction in which a large of this movement needs to head. As young people, we desperately need to communicate the extent to which we are dissatisfied by a government so deep in the cavernous corporate pocket it can no longer hear the cries of progressives nationwide. We need to demand the speedy arrival of another world; a world in which the long term prosperity of all provides the very foundations of the political and social economy.
But Tim is wrong about a few things. His call for mass arrests and raised commitment came at the potential sacrifice of college degrees and entire careers. His cause is so urgent he no longer believes that it can “wait ’til graduation” or that future employment prospects can take precedent over getting arrested today.

Tim is forgetting that we are in a lifelong fight driven not only by political will, but by what is materially possible; what resources the Earth can offer us and in what ways. If we shut down MTR today, I would be hard pressed to say that we could replace that energy with alternative forms. Natural gas was recently labelled dirty — possibly dirtier than coal. Solar, wind and nuclear energies, meanwhile, are far too costly as they stand today.

We need people to sign up for this movement for life. We need people with college degrees and holistic minds who can help us to figure out how we will coordinate the largest social, economic and political overhaul of all time. Decarbonising society is paramount; arrests today will no doubt help increase political will, but unless we maintain the wherewithal to simultaneously develop concrete, achievable solutions, we will be doing nothing short of running “no” campaigns — “no” to coal, “no” to oil and “no” to carbon. To what will we say “yes?”

Do not get me wrong; we need people to start getting arrested today and not to stop until the cry for justice is so loud that money can no longer muffle it. Young people have too much to lose. While we are re-building this house from within, it looks like we might need the older, more established generations to throw rocks from without. Who wants to ring up their grandma first?