A Call to Action for the Youth Climate Movement

I have just returned from three action packed days at the PowerShift Conference, run by the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. The energy among young people, all devoted to making a change was both intense and motivating.

The Powershift conference brought together about 1500 youth from around Australia to work towards building a sustainable future by encouraging green jobs, and pressuring the Rudd government to goto Copenhagen with strong a strong policy of pursuing targets. The conference was a combination of guest lecturers, small group workshops, and fun activities, all with the goal of creating a nationwide youth activist movement to fight dangerous climate change.

While many activists at the conference realised the strength that could be had through showing that the youth environmental movement would best be served by a strong united movement, others found it their business to divert attention away from the broader issues of environmental sustainability, renewable energy, and unclean coal power plants, towards other issues, such as the dangerous nature of nuclear power.

While the nuclear debate is an important issue, especially so for Australia which possesses around 40% of the world’s uranium, having the debate derails the global environmental movement. It diverts attention from the bad press that the government deserves for deserting the environmental lobby as soon as it won the 2007 election and from the environmental problems caused by outdated coal power plants.

Remarking in a press conference on Sunday the 12th of July, former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery said that nuclear could play an role in providing energy in densely populated areas (for example the East Coast of the United States).  The AYCC Co-director, Anna Rose, was quick to state that she didn’t believe that nuclear was the answer. Immediately it took the united image of striving towards Copenhagen, with youth, and well established professionals like Flannery hand in hand, to an image of division and conflict dividing the environmental movement.   I’m not going to enter into the nuclear debate – there are already enough voices, far more powerful and knowledgeable as me, debating this issue. But the main message of the movement needs to be to move away from coal, towards research and development, and the larger rollout of renewable technologies - I would hope the whole environmental movement would agree with this!

Everytime the nuclear issue drives another wedge into the environmental movement you then have passionate and pragmatic young voices, who could well be out there in marginal seat campaigns, or telling their personal stories of climate change in the community, diverting their attention from drafting strong climate policy to petty ‘partisan-like’ politics. Young people, for the most part have been deserted in an age of bi-partisan politcs, which is plauged by petty factional politics, this is therefore a chance for young people to show up our politicians; acting like them just further undermines the youths credibility in the public spectrum.

Powershift in this fashion outlined the best and worst of youth movements in Australia. There are few places in the country where you could find a group of such dedicated and motivated individuals. But with this intense passion, came an idea that some people needed to ‘show up’ the rest of the movement, and use it as a recruiting session for their own partisan campaigns.

Despite the policy differences that exist between all these groups, their underlying core policies are remarkably similar. I think I speak for all young activists when I say that we should increase our use of renewable resources, that we should pressure the Rudd government to go for a better target than 5%, and that we should all be demanding governments invest in establishing Green Jobs. But when discussion is shifted away from these important issues it puts a hold on the pragmatic, realistic discussion that took part for the majority of PowerShift. Powershift, like any conference, only received limited (although considerable) media coverage, this gives them a finite opportunity to be heard. The 8 second sound bite that could be used to show up bad energy policy under the Rudd government suddenly becomes one about the dangerous nature of uranium – the only people I think would be happy about that would be the coal industry who have just escaped public criticism once again. 

Australia’s youth climate activists have both the knowledge and the wisdom to play politics with the leaders of Australia and the world, but they first must prove they can resolve differences among themselves, and come together as a united group of youth determined to solve the climate crisis. 

Copenhagen will be one of the most important environmental conferences of our generation. It is going to need all people, young as well as old, to get behind progressive policies, and demand better targets for the next 50 years, if we are too busy infighting among ourselves about nuclear power then we will surely not get the response we are after from world leaders at Copenhagen.  For a conference that our future depends on we need to take this seriously - I think that’s something all of us can agree upon.