'I matter!' - Kids against Climate Change.

Every generation needs a revolution. The time for our revolution has come. It is a revolution that will push beyond the politics and debate about climate change and express the truth that’s been hidden for so long: climate change is about us. We are the generation being called to stop global warming in our lifetime. We don’t have a choice. The Earth is calling us. Alec Loorz, 16, El Camino High School junior, Ventura, California. 2010 Bioneers Conference

Two days before Christmas and another sleepless night. Not something I ate after all, just a touch of post-Durban-conference-fatigue-syndrome. Five am and ambushed by yet another “revolution from the heart of Nature” on ABC Radio National (Listen now). Not The Goon Show, but perplexing in the same mad kind of way. But could I stomach another revolution before breakfast?

Future generations, apparently, are screaming at us. But the only screaming (or screeching) I could hear besides some magpies and a galah, was from an inner voice urging me to flick the switch on our national broadcaster’s early morning offering – an “on demand” replay of the Clean Energy Climate Challenge from last year’s US Bioneers Conference.

Bioneer: A neologism (root: “biological pioneer”) describing individuals and groups who strive to develop solutions to various environmental and socio-cultural issues from the perspective of “whole systems thinking”, a view that all life is interdependent.

Before I could do so, however, on came a young evangelist: 16 year-old Alec Loorz, a junior student from the El Camino High School in Ventura, California. He had, he said, spent his “entire teenage life urging people to take action on climate change”. His generation had “an inherent sense of calling” about it.

Blogger Penny: “This is the kind of energy the world needs to turn this Titanic around before the Earth hits the tipping point into climate chaos. Thank you so much, Alex, and keep up your amazing work!”

According to the Bioneers, Alec’s I MATTER! campaign is “mobilising young people worldwide for the defining issue of their lives” – to reduce “our addiction to fossil fuels” and  “stop global warming in our lifetimes.” Clearly a committed chap, his Declaration of Independence from Fossil Fuels (350,000 signatures) was presented to the US Congress in October 2010.

 The time has come for us to take matters into our own hands. I am going to join with youth around the world to take legal action and bring our case to the courts (applause). We will demand that our government commits to the requirements Dr James Hansen prescribes and begin to govern as if the future matters. This is our revolution and we are going to make it happen.

Let me ask you: who is ready, who is ready to stand up, unite together across generations and start a revolution that is so loud, provocative and so unquestioning that we will be impossible to ignore. Let’s make it happen! (sustained applause)

Two climate fundamentalists more than ready to unite together across generations were Alec’s mentors, Al Gore and James Hansen, NASA’s chief climatologist. Inspired by Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Alec founded an “inconvenient youth” activist group, Kids vs Global Warming, when only 12 years old. Feeling “the weight of the global situation and a sense that he could make a difference,” he – like them - was compelled as to preach the gospel of global warming.

Inhis 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, Gore described how his eco-evangelism arose out of an “unshakeable belief in God as creator and sustainer” and the “revelatory power in the world”.

Many prophecies used, he wrote, “images of environmental destruction to warn of transgressions against God’s will. For those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, it is hard to read about the predictions of hurricanes 50 percent stronger than the worst ones today, due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases that we have fostered, without recalling the prophecy of Hosea: “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”… Many believers and non-believers shared a “deep uneasiness about the future, sensing that our civilisation may be running out of time.”

What could be done to save the planet? Humankind has to reconnect with religion; discover a new faith in the future; and develop ‘environmentalism of the spirit’.  Only then would it be possible “to re-sanctify the Earth, identify it as God’s creation, and accept our responsibility to protect it.”

Gore is a big fan of Noah. “Noah is commanded by God to take into his ark at least two of every living species in order to save them from the Flood.” It was “a commandment that might appear in modern form as: Thou shalt preserve biodiversity. Indeed, does God’s instruction have new relevance for those who share Noah’s faith in this time of another worldwide catastrophe, this time one of our own creation?” 

Hansen has been - and remains – another key influence on Loorz, introducing him at the Bioneers Conference on October 15, 2010. “I met him when he was a kid,” he confided. “He’s still a kid. He’s a high school student, but he now towers over me. He’s an example of what we need. We need to get the young people to understand what’s happening and get them to put some pressure on the older people to give them a fair shake.”

Dr Hansen, Alec replied, was one of the people he “admired most in the world. He’s a scientist who’s become an activist, a movement leader and a hero for my generation. Yes!”                                                                                                                    

Yet there is something unsettling – and disturbing - about the targeting of vulnerable young (and not so young) minds; about Alec’s “inherent sense of calling”; and how this mission electrified his Bioneer audience. Was this the birth of a new religion, political party, or a combination of both? One thing seemed clear: they were going to try and give Hansen’s “older people a fair shake”.

Perhaps it was the time of day or that galah across the road, but Bob Fosse’s 1972 film, Caberet, suddenly came to mind. Could Alec have been channelling one of the young patriots in the beer garden scene?  They also believed tomorrow belonged to them; that it was up to them to change the mindset of every person – if not on the planet, then in the country - for that was “what we were born to do”.

Dr R K Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for almost a decade, also sees kids as“major agents of change”. For him - and his UN colleagues - kids have a “crucial mission”. They must be “mobilized” to join the climate crusade.

This is no surprise. Remember the opening film of the UNFCC’s 2009 COP-15 Copenhagen Climate Conference? An anxious young girl clutching a white (polar) teddy bear is plunged into a world of extreme weather and climate catastrophe. At the climax, she asks us to “please help the world”.

Background voices warn of “hundreds of millions of climate refugees” and chastise those who “still doubt the human influence on this predicted catastrophe.” The 4 minute 14 second film ends with what an analytical psychologist might describe as an infantile fantasy: “We have the power to save the world - Now.”

Donna Laframboise, author of The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert, asked two questions on her blog last week: “Does it really need to be said that science and activism are two very different things? Is there something I’m missing here – something that makes it OK for the head of a scientific body to be a full-blown activist?”

Reports by Dr Pachauri’s IPCC (the delinquent teenager) are being used by governments to justify carbon (dioxide) taxes and increased energy costs. They are why many UN countries seek to settle alleged developed world “climate debt” by annual transfer of at least one hundred billion dollars from it to the developing world. They are the sacred texts of those who insist anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are “dangerous pollution”. Yet Laframboise’s book demonstrates aspects of the Panel’s work (and processes) are flawed and not the outcome of an impartial compilation of evidence. 

The tomorrow-belongs-to-me (us, them) school of climate alarmism – and the IPCC - clearly need a few shakes too.