A common refrain in political rhetoric is that “the children are our future.” The Consequence Campaign exists because youth aren’t just the future, we are the present. Our generation is mobilized and ready for action. Whether Washington is ready for it or not, we will not sit idly by as critical decisions are made. It’s our future and we are going to create it.

Consequence is the largest coalition of youth organizations ever assembled to call for congressional action on clean energy jobs and global warming. This is OUR fight. Youth have the most to lose from the impending climate catastrophe, and the most to gain from a new clean energy economy. In 2008, our decisive effort on the Obama campaign proved our political might. In 2009, our collective voice can be the deciding factor in the battle for strong clean energy reform. Standing together we cannot — and will not — be ignored.

Consequence Campaign partners are already running bold grassroots campaigns in every state in the country. In the posts below, you will hear from several of these partners in their own words about why they are involved in this effort and how you can take part.

It’s our time to lead. Together we will create our clean energy future.

Power Shift is a campaign organized by Energy Action Coalition and fueled by young people across the country to DEMAND BOLD ACTION on CLIMATE AND ENERGY. We are urging President Obama and the Congress to pass a strong and comprehensive climate and energy plan that creates millions of new jobs, ends our dependence on dirty energy, brings America lasting security and reduces harmful global warming pollution.

We are inheriting an economy and climate in crisis, and if Obama and Congress don’t act NOW, WE will be the ones who pay.

After 9/11, we volunteered to help those affected and we served in uniform. After Katrina, we spent our vacations rebuilding homes and served back in our own communities. And in ’08, we volunteered for campaigns, filled polling booth lines, and rocked the political establishment. Now, WE are the ones struggling to pay our bills, find decent jobs, and pay off our loans. And if we don’t act soon on climate change, WE will be the ones who will pay the price for more storms like Katrina, more wildfires like California, and more resource wars like Darfur.

If we act NOW, we can re-power our economy with clean energy jobs…But Obama and Congress can’t do it alone.

As the nations of the world prepare to meet in Copenhagen this December to negotiate a binding global climate treaty, Obama and Congress have the chance NOW to pass a comprehensive climate and energy plan for America, and they need our help. We can turn our schools into thriving centers for energy innovation, education, and workforce training. We can put America back to work weatherizing every home, installing solar panels on every roof, and slashing our nation’s electric bill. And we can send President Obama to Copenhagen this December with the commitment of America to lead the world toward a fair, ambitious, & binding global climate treaty.

So here’s our game plan: Tell Obama & Congress we want a clean energy jobs bill NOW, and remind them THEIR jobs depend on it.

The dirty energy industry has spent millions of dollars and countless hours lobbying, wheeling and dealing. Luckily, more young voters turned out in 2008 than ever before, and nothing can silence the voices of an entire generation. It’s our jobs, our future, and OUR time to speak up. We’ll set up phone booths in our campus & town squares and flood every Congressional office with calls until every phone is ringing off the hook. We’ll put the heat on our Senators in their hometown newspapers with an explosion of Letters to the Editor. And across the country, we’ll rally at Power Shift Regional Summits and show our leaders the strength of our movement.

Join the campaign NOW at www.WeArePowerShift.org

Power Shift is a project of the Energy Action Coalition. Founded in June 2004 by youth climate leaders, the Energy Action Coalition unites a diversity of organizations in an alliance that supports and strengthens the student and youth clean and just energy movement in North America. The 36 active and 14 supporting partners of Energy Action Coalition work together to leverage our collective power and create change for a clean, efficient, just and renewable energy future.

53.4%. That is the percentage of unemployed millennials (who are not currently in school), and that number is what the Campus Progress Economic Opportunity campaign is all about.

Our generation came of age at a turbulent time faced with the failure of conservative economic, environmental, and foreign policy.

WE are the ones fighting 2 wars with countries that didn’t harm us instead of eliminating terrorism at the source, WE are the ones accumulating unprecedented amount of debt due to increasing college costs and the deregulation of the credit card industry, and WE are the ones that will be dealing with the worst CO₂nsequences of the climate crisis if we fail to act now!

At Campus Progress we are organizing events to encourage recent grards to get a clean energy job, we are providing support to emerging journalists who want to break the news on the most recent environmental disaster, and we are helping young people with ambitious campaigns in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, the District of Columbia, among others. We are also creating innovative multimedia to highlight the connections between the climate crisis and other progressive issues:

So join the Campus Progress Network and get access to all of our fantastic resources to take your activism to another level!

ACE :: Alliance for Climate Education is taking climate change back to school, literally! Around the country, trained ACE educators bring in-person, science-based, free, multimedia presentations to high schools. In our presentations, we cover the facts behind climate change and what students can do to stop it. This fall, we’re on track to reach 140,000 high school students with our program. Here’s a trailer of what we do:

After every presentation, we see that high school students get it when it comes to climate change. They realize human-caused climate change is real and that it is the most urgent challenge of their generation. We also see that students are ready to take it to the next level and do something about climate change.

And so, beyond presentations, ACE helps students get involved through action toolkits, grants, scholarships, leadership trainings, social networks like Facebook and more. Check out scholarship winner Kristine Cabuago!

You may also notice that in our name is the word Alliance and we strive to be just that! We look to connect and direct students to national and regional organizations wherever possible and help them plug into the larger climate movement (ie: please contact us if you are a national or local climate organization that works with young people!).

And so on this Blog Day of Action, we want you to know that high school students are powerful and they can change the course of humanity. It is our hope here at ACE that we can support students with the knowledge, tools and resources they need to make a difference.

Below are the full digital details on ACE:
• If you’re a high school student and you’d like to have an ACE presentation at your school, email: info@climateeducation.org
• Watch our trailer: http://www.youtube.com/ClimateEd
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/acespace
• Website: http://www.acespace.org

Right now Copenhagen is the most important city in the world. In just 2 short months, the city might witness the formation of a global climate treaty. You’ve heard of the Kyoto protocol – the climate treaty that the US helped draft 12 years ago? The one that pretty much every other country has signed on to?

Well, the US, with 1/4 of global greenhouse emissions, has more excuses than a student with a late term-paper about why it hasn’t done its part to help solve climate change. The people of the world aren’t impressed.

Two years ago in Bali after a dramatic plea from Papua New Guinea in the final hours, the US and other leaders agreed to make a global treaty in Copenhagen in 2009. According to the Bali agreement, the plan needs to have four key elements to bring all nations together (here’s the homework assignment). It needs to set mitigation targets for every country (reducing carbon emissions). It needs to protect forests from destruction (which cause 20% of global emissions). It needs to help poor countries develop more responsibly than we did by providing clean technology because the world can’t afford to repeat the dirty energy economies of the 20th century. And it needs to help poor countries deal with the present and increasing effects of the climate crisis.

The road-map to Copenhagen, agreed on by the leaders in Bali, places a responsibility on every national government, but the path has been most difficult for the United States. Stubborn, short-sighted politics have delayed action for years, but the window of opportunity for a global deal in Copenhagen has added urgency to our fight.

When the the timetable was set, climate activists like myself stepped up efforts to get the US on track in the two years from December 2007 to December 2009. We threw ourselves into an election that promised change and took on challenges on a historic scale. But that clearly hasn’t been enough.

Photo Credit: Robert Van Warden

We brought 12,000 activists to Powershift09 for the largest lobby day ever, and then stopped the U.S. Capitol plant from ever burning coal again. Just last month over 1,800 flash-mobs all over the world placed wake-up calls to world leaders on the need for climate action. And it’s working; the global movement we’ve been working for is here and its beautiful.

The one tiny, little problem is that a handful of US senators stand between us and a global climate treaty. In Bali, they said the treaty needed to deal with 4 things, things that the senate (and specifically the finance committee) can provide.

Luckily, large environmental organizations are pulling out all the stops to fight for ambitious reductions in domestic emissions – as ambitious as we can get. (But boy are my fingers crossed that we can get something better.)

What we’re lacking, and this is where you come in, are people fighting for those other three provisions. Adaptation, clean-tech transfer and forest protection receive mere lip-service in the initial draft of the Kerry-Boxer bill.

Developed countries need to put money on the table. How much? According to the Climate Action Network International policy paper, $150 billion per year, additional to existing aid, and raised from auction allowances. The European Commission Communication on Climate Financing is talking on a similar scale at least, calling for €50 billion annually by 2020.

What that works out to for the US, is in the range of 5% of allocation revenue for international adaptation, 5% for clean tech-transfer, and 5% for forest protection. The House climate bill in June allocated just 1%, 0.5% and 5%, respectively for those provisions. The Senate can do better and needs to do better. Whether we get a global deal or not could all come down to the next few weeks in the US senate.

We’re so close to the global climate deal we need, but three of the four major provisions required aren’t getting much attention. Let’s give the senators on the finance committee a reason to look beyond their petty interests and own up to the responsibility we have to the world. Take a look at the senate finance committee members and how to contact them.

Two years ago, we could only hope that a good US Senate bill would be the biggest remaining obstacle to a good global climate treaty. It took millions of calls and letters, thousands of individual meetings and one of the largest days of action the world has yet seen to get us here. We’re not done yet. If we can make the case for financing global solutions to the Senate, we can start to see the outlines of history — the story we can tell our grandchildren about how we fought for, and won, a planet they can still enjoy.

Morgan Goodwin is a fellow at the Avaaz Action Factory in DC