Today, NRDC Action Fund launched an exciting new video and call-to-action campaign: .

The video features Leonardo DiCaprio, Jason Bateman, Justin Long, Edward Norton, Forest Whitaker and others calling for strong action for a clean energy future.

Take a moment to watch the video, share it with your friends, and email your Senators to tell them this is our moment.

The United States of America can lead in the development of clean energy technology and manufacturing while we lead in the fight against global warming.

Everyone knows we have a dependence on oil we buy from countries that don’t share our values. This threatens our security and our integrity. And it needs to stop. We know it does. Still, we’ve seen our dependence on foreign oil grow and pollute the air we breathe and endanger our planet. But we can change that. Now.

There’s a bill in the Senate that will break foreign oil’s stranglehold on our country, reduce carbon pollution, and create jobs right here in America—good jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.

It’s one of the most important pieces of legislation of our time. It’s a clean energy bill. And it’s been a long time coming.

I’m not dead yet

The conventional wisdom around Washington is that the climate bill is dead. It’s an obituary that’s been written before, but ask anyone in the political establishment and they will tell you that this time it’s for real. Ask any member of the insider DC press corps, they’ll tell you that Scott Brown’s upset Senate victory in the Massachusetts was the final nail in a coffin they have been hammering relentlessly all year.

They are wrong.

Passing comprehensive clean energy and climate reform is not going to be easy, but who ever thought it would be? The death of climate legislation may fit into the standard media narrative and make for a nice story, but it’s not true and here’s a few reasons why:

1. Real Bipartisanship

Unlike the months long health care “negotiations” Max Baucus conducted with hostile Republicans, the Senate climate bill has bipartisan participation from the get go. Conservative Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and self-appointed swing vote Joe Lieberman (?-CT) have teamed up with John Kerry to craft a bi-(tri?)-partisan proposal to cap carbon, and Susan Collins (R-ME) has put forward her own cap-and-dividend approach.

There are positives and negatives to this bipartisan route. Will the compromise bill that emerges include unsavory trade-offs (i.e. nuclear title, “clean” coal, drilling permits)? Almost certainly. But as painful as these compromises may be, they also pave the road to 60 votes for a price on carbon. Lindsay Graham might be an unlikely climate hero, but his involvement could be the difference between disastrous inaction and a cap on carbon pollution. (For more on this, see some cogent analysis from Joe Romm)

2. Obama’s Getting in the Game

A great deal of anger has been directed at the White House for their failure to visibly lead on climate. Much of it is deserved. However, there are signs that President Obama and the administration are ready to step out in front on this issue.

Previously, we’ve seen a lot of behind the scenes maneuvering from Obama and other climate leaders in the White House such as Lisa Jackson, Carol Browner, and Steven Chu, as well as some stronger public engagement including last month’s Youth Clean Energy Forum.

In an editorial this weekend, the New York Times called for Obama to make a forceful argument for clean energy jobs and climate action in his State of the Union speech. Early indications suggest that climate will, in fact, be a prominent component of Wednesday’s address to Congress.

In addition, the White House has a trump card of its own – the ongoing effort by Lisa Jackson and the EPA to limit carbon pollution through their independent regulatory authority. The threat of EPA action serves as the stick to compliment the carrot of Senate negotiations, and as demonstrated by Lisa Murkowski’s Dirty Air Act, is clearly making big polluters nervous.

3. You

The politics and policies are complicated, but there is also one big, simple reason to be optimistic about climate action: all of you.

The youth climate movement has been out in front, aggressively making the case for our clean energy future. The movement is getting bigger, louder, and more organized by the day. Even with Washington’s usual suspects ready (perhaps eager) to leave climate for dead, rather than scale back, youth climate leaders plan only to ramp up.

Never underestimate the power of passionate, organized activists to rapidly reshape the narrative and reconfigure the conventional wisdom.

Just last week, thousands of citizens contacted their senators to oppose the Dirty Air Act. On Thursday, Lisa Murkowski took to the Senate floor and not only directly addressed the Dirty Air Act label, but also announced she was indefinitely postponing the vote on her proposal. This partial victory was only the beginning of the fight (stay tuned for more!) but it demonstrates the impact targeted activist pressure can have on the legislative process.

It’s easy to feel frustrated or powerless in the face of the perfect storm of bloviating and bullshit which passes for American politics. Don’t.

It’s time to double down. Join our Organize to be Heard Challenge or take part in any of the other amazing youth climate action going on across the country. Figure out who’s organizing on your campus and get involved. Recruit your friends. Enlist your acquaintances. Draft that one guy you met that one time (yeah, him too).

Do whatever you can to make your voice heard. It’s our clean energy future and no one is going to secure it for us. We have a lot of work ahead, but someone needs to tell the DC establishment that climate isn’t dead yet.

P.S. Though his spirit is admirable, please resist all comparisons to a certain Black Knight

Sparty celebrating a succesful clean energy event

Tom Izzo and the Michigan State basketball team aren’t the only ones off to a strong start this season. The Spartans have also jumped to an early lead in the Organizing to be Heard Challenge, racking up hundreds of letters and phone calls asking Senators Levin and Stabenow to support clean energy.

As The State News Reports:

On Wednesday night, students from Spartans Repowering America, the MSU chapter of the national organization Repower America, painted the rock on Farm Lane in an effort to promote a larger interest in their cause. Overall, the group collected more than 100 letters and several video testimonies from students.

Some of the goals of Repower America include creating a green economy, bringing jobs to Michigan, ending dependency on foreign oil, increasing national security and creating a clean environment for future generations, Starke said.

“I think it’s important for students to have the opportunity to communicate with senators,” Starke said. “Clean energy is important for our future and anything we can do to be a part of our government is important.”

Read the rest at The State News

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.

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