Global Work Party

It's been a crazy couple of weeks - the 4th Annual Climate Leadership Summit of the ACUPCC was a great success a couple of weeks ago in Denver, and last week we had the opportunity to participate in an exciting milestone of Penn State's strategic sustainability planning process.  In both cases, high-level decision makers from our country's institutions of higher learning were coming together to essentially imagine themselves and their institutions in a sustainable future, and look back to 2010 to see what we had done to get there.

Bill McKibben performs a similar backcasting exercise in his latest piece in the Solutions journal - looking back from 2100 and recounting how the events of 2010 and 2011 started a real concerted push towards 350 ppm.  The Global Work Parties last month were a big help and inspiring - see the video below.

I think it's particularly important to share this video ahead of Tuesdays elections.  Here in the US we get a very slim and distorted slice of the real news - we forget the rest of the world is out there - and the discourse on climate disruption and solutions is very different than what's coming across in our political arena (like this campaign ad for West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin where he literally shoots the cap & trade bill with a rifle (and not because it's a free-market solution based on Republican principles) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIJORBRpOPM)

China, India, Europe, and the rest of the world are moving ahead with solutions, and we're risking missing the greatest economic opportunity, certainly since the Industrial Revolution, and possibly ever, by bowing to vested interests.  We've got to wake up and get moving towards a visions of a sustainable future.

Stay going.