(Cross-posted from Its Getting Hot In Here)
First, there was the Campus Climate Challenge, building  a base of action on campuses nationwide. Then, there was PowerVote, mobilizing youth across the country to vote for a clean energy future and shift America’s political landscape. Recently, there was PowerShift 2009, with 12,000 young people convening in Washington DC and continuing the effort in their local states to call for bold climate policy. And now …

As the youth climate movement forges ahead to deliver on its major short-term goals, we start to catch a glimpse of the long-term struggle still ahead – the one in which we must innovate and implement climate and energy solutions that also revitalize the economy and empower of communities. In this struggle, we must slowly wresting control of the economy from the fossil fuels that have run our society and putting it in the hands of millions of local innovators around the world who are harnessing the power of the wind, sun, and landscape to sustain their lives and their local economies. We must figure out how to make our buildings more efficient, our urban planning smarter, our agriculture sustainable, our grid system renewable, and our industries green. This is the epic economic, political, and social project, at least of our generation and probably of more to come – it will take decades, is global in scope, and must be participatory and people-supporting both if it is to be fair but also if it is to succeed.

Let’s be frank: as a movement, we have a pretty good idea of why this needs to happen, and a somewhat more vague idea of what needs to happen, but relatively little sense of how it will be done.  More news: our political leaders, scientists, and economists don’t really know what to do either. We are embarking on a societal process of figuring out how to create this new future, and as a warning, much of the planning is being done by those (supporters of “clean coal”, nuclear, tar sands suburban sprawl, agri-business, central station transmission, etc.) who prefer solutions that will lead us to dead ends.

If you want to spend your summer building your capacity and career as a creative leader helping develop the solutions we need to see, please join us for the Summer of Solutions. In 2008, we piloted a program in St. Paul Minnesota with 25 participants, and a sister program started in Portland Oregon – now we’re going nationwide.

I’ve recently been working in St. Paul on how we’re applying the stimulus funding around efficiency, and I wanted to call a tension to a potential hurdle for successful climate solutions: As activists, we need to make sure that initial investments actually help change the market.

Minnesota is slated to receive about $131.5 million in federal stimulus funding for weatherization and energy efficiency to be spent over the next 18 months, plus about another $54 million in conservation block grants for the state. That’s a lot of money coming in quickly, and energy efficiency is just one small part of a series of investments in renewable energy, job training, infrastructure improvements, and economic aid in the recent federal stimulus package.

This is all very good news. Major investments in efficiency and weatherization are an excellent idea (I explain why at a note at the end of this blog post). The problem is that current market barriers are keeping energy efficiency, which ought to be a no-regrets, win-win-win solution, from being adopted at scale. No one in their right mind would let a 20% low-risk financial return go by, especially these days in a falling economy, yet we do exactly that every day by throwing money out the cracks in our doors and the cold drafts that blow through our un-insulated walls. There are many reasons that we are missing these opportunities – lack of information, lack of access to capital, obscure and complex auditing and contracting services, and little feedback as to how much energy, money, and carbon one is wasting. If we can solve these barriers, hundreds of billions of dollars of investment will flow towards this sector on a sustained basis, helping all Americans cut their energy costs and carbon emissions while creating long-term sustainable jobs. If initial investments (even the roughly $200 million dollars that the stimulus package might provide to Minnesota) only go towards paying for efficiency in some more houses, we will have just scratched the surface and end up with the same stunted efficiency market we have right now. The stimulus funding will only help solve that problem if it is deployed rightly.

MCEC will be kicking off on February 1 at colleges across Minnesota. Here at Macalester, we have a number of sweet activities lined up. Check them out if you’re in the Cities!

“Climate Change Policy Opportunities: A screening of “The First 100 Days” Webcast and discussion with our elected officials,”

7:00 – 9:00 Wednesday February 4^th, John B. Davis Lecture Hall, Campus Center
Come engage with Minnesota’s elected officials while kicking off the Minnesota Campus Energy Challenge! The night, a part of the National-Teach-In on Global Warming, will start off with the “Solutions for the First 100 Days” webcast, featuring David Orr, Billy Parish, and others, followed by a panel discussion with politicians, including State Representative Erin Murphy. The discussion will focus on what kind of policy changes can be made in the first hundred days of Obama’s term in office, including current and upcoming climate focused policy and how the politicians plan to partner with the youth climate action movement. The evening will conclude with questions from the audience.

Sponsored by: Sustainability Office

“EnviroMarathon”

9:00 – 3:00 John B. Davis Lecture Hall

3:00 – 9:00 Olin-Rice 100

Thursday February 5^th

Our EnviroMarathon, part of the National Teach-In on Global Warming, will be a series of talks, presentations, and discussions from 9:00 in the morning to 9:00 at night, led by renowned Macalester faculty as well as leaders and activists of the environmental movement. Over the course of the day, a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives on the environment, sustainability, and climate change will be presented as Macalester joins over 600 campuses engaging in climate issues on Feb 5^th for the National Teach-In on Global Warming.

Current Schedule

9:00 – 9:40 – Amy Damon “Poverty and Wildlife: Development and Conservation Conflicts Around Serengeti National Park”

10:00 – 11:00 – Christie Manning and Elise Amel “Psychological Tools to Empower Sustainability”

11:00 – 12:00 – Michael Griffin “Enduring Myths and Icons in Media Coverage of the Environment”

3:00 – 4:00 William Moseley – “Beyond Knee-Jerk Environmental Thinking: A Geographic Perspective on Conservation, Preservation and the Hetch Hetchy Valley Controversy.”

4:00 – 5:00 Dave Sheild – “Geothermal Energy, Modeling Economic Growth through Environmental Sustainability”

5:00 – 6:00 K.P. Hong – “One Earth, Many Stories: Primacy of Responsibility over Religious Diversity”

7:30 – 8:00 Andy Frank “America’s Greenest Campus: Walking the (Carbon Footprint) Walk”

8:00 – 9:00 Hannah Rivenburgh “Marking Turf, Mow Jobs, and Mono-culture: The Gendered and Ecologically Fragmented American Suburban Lawn”

On science, Apollo program, and civil rights

What’s up TEAM,

For the last two months, I’ve been organizing a conference called Minnesota Powershift, a fantastic opportunity for youth and community members to connect and network. Minnesota Powershift is this weekend, October 3-5.

Last night, renowned climate scientist Jim Hansen spoke to a number of policymakers, nonprofit leaders, teachers, students, and others at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Hansen has been blowing whistles on climate change for twenty years, most recently citing 350ppm of CO2 as the level which we must reach to avoid catastrophic damage from climate change, and inspiring the 350 campaign. Hansen’s speech highlighted both the scientific consensus on global warming and the lack of an effective response from policymakers.

Yet during Jim’s speech, I was struck by his inability to connect the severity of his findings with the morality of responses from policy makers, young people, or really anyone else. We are past the point when expertise is needed from the scientific community. By continuing to propagate the “science vs. junk science” battle, Hansen and others are ignoring real questions of power, morality, citizen engagement, and the social changes that are needed to build a clean energy future.

Hi all, and welcome to the official blog of TEAM MN! If you’d like to help contribute to this blog, please email keylimekai@gmail.com