161 Days Left - Time is Running Out: Kofi Annan's TCK, TCK, TCK Campaign

Just a short one today (we're joining a bike ride send-off for our young friends who are cycling across Canada this summer to raise the climate change emergency alert — follow their Pedal for the Planet journey).

Climate Justice Allies including Desmond Tutu, Rajendra Pachauri, Wangari Matthai and Jeffery Sachs, among others, have joined former UN Secretary General Koffi Annan in the TCK TCK TCK Time for Climate Justice campaign.

This is a brand new, global, new media-centred (Web 2.0, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Youtube, etc.) campaign to tell the world that time is running out to deliver climate justice at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15) in Copenhagen, December 2009, where negotiators from the world's nations will attempt to finalize a successor to the Kyoto Protocol (and so far, they're failing miserably).

The campaign's goal is to recruit Climate Allies from around the world. The more that general public participants engage with the campaign, the more their status as a Climate Ally increases, making the campaign interactive and engaging (at least for young people and new-media-savvy oldsters), and securing a commitment of attention and assistance for the cause.

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Sometimes people think that "just talking about it" is a waste of time. My research shows that "finally talking about it" can be viewed as action. By talking about it, you are

• reinforcing your own understanding of the issue
• raising awareness
• spreading the word
• teaching others
• making it okay for others to talk about it
• getting it into the public discourse.

The "it" in this case is climate justice, something that human beings have never had to think about before now (the climate was the climate, every region of the world had its own —stable for the last 10,000 or so years — and human beings did not affect it).

The notion of climate justice is asking those of us living in greenhouse gas-spewing developed nations to recognize that we have wrecked havoc with the global climate, and that the impacts of this climate chaos are hitting the least developed regions of the world first - and to do something to mitigate these impacts.

But our day has come; to wit, the severe drought affecting agriculture in the southwestern USA. "There but for the grace of God go I" will not apply to us much longer.

What we do to the children of the poor and "climate innocent,"

we do to our own children.

Tck, tck, tck.