At this point, EAC’s primary purpose for existing is to organize PowerShift and organize youth. As I have seen throughout my organizing career, many organizations choose to prioritize volunteer engagement and building activists OVER actually passing the bill. The idea is often that the network of activists will prove more valuable at some future point or that what’s really important is organizing people, especially youth, and not passing legislation/pushing corporate reform/etc etc.

Jessy’s quote does not surprise me, and I am interested to hear if she will publicly say that she was misquoted or her statements were taken out of context.

To be honest, youth in this country will not engage in large scale civil disobedience (I’m 25). As a professional organizer for environmental campaigns, I can tell you how hard it is to have anyone, even older folks who engaged in civil disobedience in the past, to engage in any actions beyond feel-good, “celebratory” actions. American youth doesn’t have the stomach for this. Moreover, I find it highly unlikely that Americans will engage in large-scale strikes, walk-outs, etc. Right now, we do NOT NEED a “revolution” along these lines. We need to fundamentally change the American mindset by putting a cap on carbon, and putting a price on carbon. This is the #1 thing we can do to change our country and our world.

Waxman-Markey does just this – without it, our window swiftly closes, and I do NOT want to spend the next decade trying to do what we could have done this year.

http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/ 2009/ 07/ 14/ unity-over-divisiveness-generational-approaches-to-the-climate-crisis/

[JR: Well, I can't speak for CAP -- that is not the way this organization works. I have complete editorial independence from them. But I can certainly tell you from the very highest levels of CAP down to the lowest, we are working as hard as possible to strengthen this bill. Sorry if most of that must inevitably be off the record and behind the scenes. Anyone who thinks I am not working flat out to pass the strongest possible bill, preferably one far stronger than W-M, is not a regular reader of this blog. As for those numerous "ra-ra-ra" posts, I'd love to see some links rather than handwaving.]

Anyway, is some of the contention expressed here an outside-the-beltway/inside-the-beltway perceptions of moral leadership?

[JR: You can start here. That is really a shameless piece of misinformation, as I showed here.]

* Many (most?) Energy Action Coalition members did support ACES in the end. Still, ACES alone, or even combined with Obama’s other actions so far, will not be enough to reduce greenhouse gas pollution fast enough to avoid many costly climate tipping points. There will be plenty of youth activism in the coming years even if ACES passes. Many of us celebrated the House vote (including on IGHIH, as was noted in earlier comments), even as we prepared to push for the level of reductions necessary to secure a safe climate.

* Joe’s point about Jessy’s quote is right on. Regardless of how she meant it, the nature of the press means it’s up to her to publicly state her meaning if she feels she was misquoted or misrepresented. Otherwise, most people will assume the quote and context are accurate.

* The Energy Action Coalition and the youth climate movement in general owes part of its success to being open and inclusive. I don’t think censoring them on IGHIH, while letting everyone else publish, is the right response. Rather, it’s up to other posters and readers to point out in the post comments and in their own posts when someone says something that we think is bad, and ESPECIALLY if it is actually incorrect.

* While those within the Coalition and those who post on IGHIH consider it an open blog, it’s important to realize that people outside of us don’t know this. From their perspective, it does look like EAC is endorsing all posts by promoting them on its site as they are posted. I don’t think the answer is removing the link to the blog, but maybe we could make it more clear that it is open. If you read the About box on the IGHIH page, it says it is a “Community Media Project”, but neither the About box nor the About page actually describe it as an “open forum”.

* We also feature the IGHIH blog on our homepage, but with a note that we don’t necessarily write nor endorse the posts.

But, damn, it is great to see young people getting so fired up and feisty. You go. Keep their feet to the fire even if they are technically correct that you’re being “impractical”. It’s your job to be impractical and motivate the rest of us to reach beyond our comfort zones.

I was on Capitol Hill visiting with my rep. on the day of the vote to urge him to vote in favor (D-ID-Nay unfortunately) and witnessed the turnout of Power Shift Activists urging the passage of ACES. To say that part of the youth climate movement has been co-opted by anti-environment forces might be a bit of an overstatement. Campus Progress, a Center for American Progress program, is a member of the Energy Action Coalition. This seems a bit inconsistent on the part of CAP.

I turn to climateprogress.org to get my ACES news, but feel like I could use a less ra-ra-ra, a little more criticism, and a whole lot less intergenerational quibbling. We have a tremendous opportunity to improve this bill in the Senate, if this bill needs improvements, as you agree it does, let us focus on making those changes rather than praising the bill, and blaming the youth for their idealism.

Again, just a thought. Props, Respect, Et. Cet…

I would really like to hear your plan for turning H.R. 2454 from a weak law into a strong law. I would even like to hear a complete history of the other laws that you tell us a little about. How did the Montreal Protocol grow to become what it is today? How did the Clean Air Act grow? How do you know that H.R. 2454 will get stronger with time rather than weaker? I was here when all of this happened, I’m older than you are, but it wasn’t in the news. I was hiding in another executive department. The writers of H.R. 2454 have assumed that we have 50 years in which all of the improvements can be made, and that we have a whole century before civilization falls. I think that the young people are telling you that Waxman’s assumption is just that: an assumption. In 1980, H.R. 2454 would have been a good, strong law. 29 years have slipped by since then.

You say:
“But Energy Action is now publicly attacking Waxman-Markey because it is supposedly far too weak to solve the climate problem. Perhaps they are utterly unaware that TBI and Jenkins have repeatedly opposed even far weaker efforts to deal with climate. TBI has attacked any policy that creates a serious price for carbon — whether cap-and-trade or a tax.”

Come on Joe: This is a straightforward “guilt by association” fallacy, you are clearly stating that because IGHIH has posts from TBI members “EAC is now publicly attacking” something as evidenced by / because the fact that “TBI has attacked…”. You are clearly conflating TBI’s views and EAC views explicitly (or at least very implicitly). If not, why would TBI and EAC’s relationship be the focus of several paragraphs of your post?

Again, the purpose of IGHIH is explicitly to provide a -/+ open forum for youth climate activists. The viewpoints there just that. BRI gets their say and 60 other parties do as well.

To say EAC is doing “X,Y,Z” because a few bloggers on an blog whose mission is to be an open forum (not, by contrast, to express EAC’s views) is more than a bit disingenuous in the internet age.

The Montreal Protocol compromise worked in large part because the same multinationals producing the CFCs owned the patents for their replacements and could use their monopoly rights for extortion along with saving the Ozone. No parallel exists for Capital in the case of climate change.

Contrary to “every piece of major environmental legislation,” the Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 is a perfect example of a compromise bill put forward when there was still plenty of grassroots pressure building that terribly demobilized the anti-stripmining movement for decades (see Chad Montrie: To Save the Land and People; Shover, Clelland and Lynxweiler: Enforcement or Negotiation).