ONE HUNDRED DAYS! Making Every Day Count by Joining Forces with Avaaz

Only 100 days until the Copenhagen climate talks. I'm not the only one noticing that time is tck, tck, tcking away.

Global campaigning organization, Avaaz, is asking everyone whether they should "pull out all the stops this month to beat climate change," making climate change their concerted focus for the next four weeks, until the next UN Summit in September.

I definitely voted YES, and hope you will, too.

Here's an excerpt from their message:

Avaaz is considering a massive, network-wide push for a "global wake-up call" to world leaders on September 21st. This would be the biggest organizing effort we've ever done, aiming to bring our whole network out (peacefully!) to the streets, ringing alarms, holding massive rallies in major cities, and gathering to send wake-up messages from schools, homes, and public squares. From all these places, we would flood world leaders with phone calls, and the actual sound of these millions of voices would be recorded, condensed and presented to heads of state at the UN climate summit in New York the next day.

If we do this, Avaaz will spend the next 4 weeks almost non-stop on it, and it will take hundreds of thousands of us joining efforts to pull it together -- hosting and attending events, reaching out to our communities, using all our creativity and dedication. This is an important decision, and we need to make it together. From now until September 21 -- should we do it?

Here's the link for voting YES (it would be silly of me to supply the link for voting no): VOTING YES TO A SAFE CLIMATE

By the way, here's what their petition to world leaders will say:

We call on our leaders to go to Copenhagen and sign a global climate treaty that is:

AMBITIOUS: enough to leave a planet safe for us all.

FAIR: for the poorest countries that did not cause climate change but are suffering most from it.

BINDING: with real targets that can be legally monitored and enforced.

I wrote and suggested that their campaign also include a focus on

ZERO: carbon emissions, since zero is the only target with any hope of safeguarding the future.

COMPASSION: for all those already impacted by the ravages of climate chaos (since those who aren't affected yet are still being total jerks about pretending it's not going to impact them or their children).

I hope you'll take a moment to vote YES in Avaaz's campaign. They're a good organization that can really get things done.

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.

*****

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.