Midd-kids march on Montreal

Author: Derek Schlickeisen

Approximately 120 Middlebury students spent much of last weekend making their voices heard at the United Nations conference on global warming in Montreal, Canada. The trip's sponsor, the campus climate-change organization Sunday Night Group (SNG), hoped to increase awareness of climate issues at Middlebury and influence U.S. energy policy.

According to SNG member Emily Erwin '08, the Middlebury students sat in on portions of the conference as "official observers" and participated in a 40,000-person march on Saturday afternoon that coincided with dozens of other demonstrations worldwide. Said William Bates '06, who helped organize the trip, "The energy of the demonstration and the message it conveyed were truly awesome. This march was a phenomenal and unprecedented moment for the climate change movement."

On the agenda for the U.N. conference, in which 189 countries are taking part, is the next phase of the landmark 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. According to the agreement, of which the Bush administration backed out in 2001 citing economic reasons, participating nations would take steps to cut seven percent of their greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. One of the Montreal conference's primary aims was to convince the United States and rapidly-industrializing China and India to commit themselves to their own emissions caps.

This aim, however, has met with little success. The lead American negotiator at the conference, Harlan Watson, has come under fire from national environmental groups for his close ties to the energy industry. As first reported by The Washington Post, Watson, whom President Bush appointed to the lead negotiating job in 2001, was a favorite of oil giant ExxonMobil to be Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and spent years working in the energy extraction and automotive industries.

The trip's organizers said they hoped their efforts would help counter these political obstacles to U.S. involvement in stopping climate change. "While the Bush administration is turning its back on global warming, citizens - especially students - are taking their own steps to work towards a healthier future," said SNG co-founder Jamie Henn '07.

Henn and Bates emphasized the importance of both the conference and the students' involvement. "Global climate change will define our generation," said Henn. "We know the problem, we have the solutions and we need to take action now." He emphasized that tackling global warming represents a moral challenge to the United States. "We took action not only to demand technological changes, but changes that would help deal with economic and social inequalities as well," he said. "The effects of climate change will impact people in the developing world and low-income people in our own country the most."

Citing a statistic favored by environmentalists and progressives in Congress, Bates said that the United States emits one quarter of the world's greenhouse gases and argued that it should be held accountable for this comparatively high impact on the global climate. "The United States must join the world in establishing and enacting coordinated international efforts to stop global climate change," he said.

The Middlebury group met last Friday night with other student activists from around the world who had also made the trek to Montreal. The next morning, they joined others at the U.S. Consulate to deliver petitions containing over 600,000 signatures demanding that the Bush administration join the Kyoto accord. Like many others at the conference, the Middlebury group made camp at the Youth Climate Justice Center, a site created especially for activists taking part in activities at the conference.

Henn said that he and three others remained in Montreal for a Monday afternoon publicity event called "Fiddling While the World Burns," a collaboration with the youth group Energy Action and puppeteers from the Montreal Marionette Collective. "The action," said Henn, "compared President Bush to Emperor Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned." The event garnered coverage from Reuters News Service, the Canadian press and Channel 4 News in London.

Organizers described the trip as a "tremendous success" because of both the number of Middlebury students involved and because of the attention the demonstrations received. The trip "provided bodies, energy, support and leadership for the actions and events that occurred in Montreal," said Bates. "It demonstrated even to other activist groups the potential for increased participation [in that] no other school or youth organization brought 120 members. This trip was one of the most exciting experiences I've had during my time as a Middlebury student."

In addition to the SNG, student organizers credited the Political Science Department, the Environmental Affairs division of the administration and the five commons offices for helping to fund and organize the trip.