I also think the youth climate movement has ignored a vital segment of the youth population — scientists and engineers. We’ve talked about “green jobs” to install solar panels and retrofit buildings, but from what Jesse Jenkins and I have seen, there’s been very little focus on the “green jobs” of engineering and laboratory research. We need a generation of innovators even larger than the Sputnik generation, yet we’re falling behind in STEM education. Andy Revkin wrote a great post about this yesterday on Dot Earth, “Are Chemists, Engineers on Green Jobs List?”

On the college campus level, this means organizing more students to advocate for greater education and research around low-carbon energy technology and science. Instead of asking college students to simply push for campus carbon neutrality, let’s help them push to establish new majors, new professors, and new centers for clean energy innovation. Knowledge creation, education, and research – these are the comparative advantages of our institutions of higher education, and we should be doing everything we can to leverage them for climate solutions.

We also need some sort of “National Energy Education Act” — modeled after the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which created the human capital necessary to win the space race and launch the world into the information age — that would provide billions of federal dollars to support the creation of these university research and education centers, to provide undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships in the energy sciences, offer grants for more energy research projects, and fund ARPA-E. Jesse and I proposed an idea like this over the summer in the San Francisco Chronicle and Baltimore Sun (PDF), and Chris Mooney featured it in Mother Jones. I also gave a short interview about it here.

So yes, let’s get more young people to advocate with fearless tactics, but let’s also make sure our generation is prepared for the energy innovation challenge. We’re going to be fighting this war for the rest of our lives — we’d better have the brains to win it.

We are the tired, old, failed, saboteurs of their future.

We should be pleading for mercy.

I think this is one thing that phases many people – the gentle upward global ave temp trend…

Very soon, we won’t be able to adapt to climate change: Pachauri

Asked how adaptation to climate change could be improved, the IPCC chief told IANS: “Don’t look at (global) averages. Look at specific impacts in different parts of the world. That is the way to adapt.”

Thanks for posting this and sharing your site with our voices. I think that this question also has some real questions for traditional ‘green’ nonprofits and where they should direct their energy.

Thanks,
Richard