When past generations faced immense challenges, our society found ways to pull together and rise above – the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal programs pulled our country out of the Great Depression, they didn't create another one. In World War II, we defeated global fascism by reorienting our entire economy, not by continuing the economy of the past. And when the promise and ideals of our country did not extend to black Americans, a principled social movement wrote new laws for our country, sharing a dream that inspired a generation even if it has yet to be fully fulfilled today.
But for the past twenty years we have heard nothing but denial, delay, and hollow rhetoric on the issue of our time, global warming. And what more consequential issue has ever faced humanity? As our problems have become larger and more complex, our politics have become more and more trivial, more tragically beneath the tasks before us. The politics of today are not worthy of our American heritage.
So it is time to restore our American spirit of resolve and hope – yes, learning from past achievements, but also writing our own, unique generational story.
We can build our own Clean Energy Corps, providing millions of young and retired Americans with service opportunities retrofitting tens of millions of low-income homes helping those who most need to save money on their energy bills and reducing pollution.
We've had decades of subsidies, tax breaks, and corporate welfare for oil and coal companies. What if we invested the same amount in energy efficiency, wind, solar and other clean energy sectors? We could have an economy that actually improved our quality of life...
Remarks of Jared Duval
Delivered Sunday, August 5th, 2007
Concord, New Hampshire
Growing up in New Hampshire, our tradition of leading the nation has always shaped my sense of what is possible. I want to thank all of you – whether you walked all five days or whether you first came out today - because you have now expanded that sense of possibility. This march and rally show that New Hampshire is again ready to lead the nation.
Until I was 5 I lived in Colebrook, New Hampshire, way up north. My dad was the head chef and my mom a waitress at the Balsams. When she was pregnant with me, my mom had her baby shower in the ballot room, where the very first votes for President are cast every four years from Dixville Notch.
Not surprisingly, almost all of my early memories are outdoors. Tapping sugar maples with my sister, hunting and fishing with my dad, learning to ski with my mom, hiking the AT with my uncles – things I never thought would change but all of which are now at risk because of global warming.
Later in my childhood I lived in the Upper Valley, spending much time at Lake Morey, named after the inventor, Samuel Morey. Now some of you may not know his name – Robert Fulton beat him to the patent for the internal combustion engine – but Morey was actually the first to discover internal combustion, using turpentine, and later received the first patent for a gas engine.
What Morey discovered enabled amazing technological and economic progress. But after nearly two hundred years, the search for and combustion of the fossil fuels needed to power his engines has changed the makeup of our atmosphere and put us dangerously close to destabilizing the climate.
While I spent my childhood swimming and fishing in Lake Morey, I came of age with my generation on September 11, 2001. And the lesson our leaders told us they learned that day. They told us they would never again ignore a gathering threat to American security. But that rings so hollow in the face of global warming. That is why so many youth are involved in this movement, so many of whom who are here today and who have made this whole thing possible, because our elders in the highest positions of power are doing tragically little about it. If anything, the lesson young people have learned is that when the fate of the world is truly at stake - from a problem that is so simple you can teach it to a second grader - the President is going to call for more scientific studies, for baby-steps, or will try to scare Americans into thinking that nothing can be done about it.
That is not the America I learned about in history class. That is not the America that New Hampshire helped shape. And that is not the America that we, as the first primary state in the nation, will allow to continue. It is worth asking what Samuel Morey would do today: cling to the past of build on the spirit of American ingenuity once again.
Our generation can reclaim the promise of America in the 21st century, powering our society with clean energy that makes us healthy, sustainable, and secure. It is time for transformational change. It is time for a new generation to lead. Not necessarily a new generation of youth, but a generation of all ages united around a new kind of energy for our country and world.
So we have gathered here today to chart that future. We are not alone – right now over a hundred, including the world's pre-eminent climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen, are also gathered in Des Moines, Iowa. And we are united in our call – it is time to build a clean energy economy for real global warming solutions. We need to cut global warming pollution at least 80% by 2050, starting now. And we can do that by investing in 2 million new clean energy jobs for Americans.
In the last 50 years, more humans have been born than in all previous human history. As our population and resource use have grown exponentially, so too have the scale and complexity of our problems. Dr. Hansen said over a year ago that emissions must peak and decline by 2015 or today's youth will be condemned to live on a radically "different planet."
Leading scientists predict that "different planet" would be marked by sea levels up to eighty feet higher, the extinction of up to sixty percent of species on Earth, and hundreds of millions of refugees from drought and flooding of the coasts where over half of the world's population lives. Leading economists predict the costs to run into the trillions of dollars – those are Great Depression numbers.
But can those numbers even begin to describe what is at stake? The value of our lives, our unmet human potential?
When past generations faced immense challenges, our society found ways to pull together and rise above – the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal programs pulled our country out of the Great Depression, they didn't create another one. In World War II, we defeated global fascism by reorienting our entire economy, not by continuing the economy of the past. And when the promise and ideals of our country did not extend to black Americans, a principled social movement wrote new laws for our country, sharing a dream that inspired a generation even if it has yet to be fully fulfilled today.
But for the past twenty years we have heard nothing but denial, delay, and hollow rhetoric on the issue of our time, global warming. And what more consequential issue has ever faced humanity? As our problems have become larger and more complex, our politics have become more and more trivial, more tragically beneath the tasks before us. The politics of today are not worthy of our American heritage.
So it is time to restore our American spirit of resolve and hope – yes, learning from past achievements, but also writing our own, unique generational story.
We can build our own Clean Energy Corps, providing millions of young and retired Americans with service opportunities retrofitting tens of millions of low-income homes helping those who most need to save money on their energy bills and reducing pollution.
We've had decades of subsidies, tax breaks, and corporate welfare for oil and coal companies. What if we invested the same amount in energy efficiency, wind, solar and other clean energy sectors? We could have an economy that actually improved our quality of life.
Some local leaders here in New Hampshire have started us down the right path. Republican Mayor Bernie Streeter in Nashua has signed on to the US Mayors Climate Protection agreement and is taking steps with his cities "green team" to reduce energy use and move to more clean and efficient energy. And our legislature and governor worked together to pass a vital Renewable Electricity Standard for the state this past year.
But most of all this issue needs national leadership and we can provide that too. Jay Buckey, running for US Senate here in New Hampshire , has talked of an "Apollo like project" to move our economy from fossil fuels to clean power and has made building a new energy economy the centerpiece of his campaign.
John Edwards, running for President, has pledged to achieve the scale of emissions reductions we need – at least 80% by 2050 – and to do so by investing in a new clean energy jobs corps for America, proposing to alleviate poverty and joblessness while solving the climate crisis. Other candidates have started articulating similarly broad and comprehensive approaches, including Gov. Bill Richardson and Senator Chris Dodd. As for almost all the other candidates, they have a long way to go but we hope they too will soon show real leadership.
Because we would be shortsighted to pin our hopes to any one candidate or party. We can't take that chance. Instead, we must continue building what is on showcase today – a citizen's movement so powerful and focused that ALL candidates have no choice but to heed our call.
As we build our movement, we can take heart from leaders who have come before us. I am inspired most of all by the example and words of Robert Kennedy,
"Our answer is the world's hope; it is to rely on youth. The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying.
This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease."
More opportunities to clear the political blockages to real progress exist beyond this historic day, in the near future. Indeed, this is just the beginning of a new phase for the social movement of our generation. For Nov. 3 rd, Bill McKibben has announced a second national Step it Up action that will, as we are today, call for real leadership but all across our country, in cities and towns large and small.
Before I conclude, let me say this – and this is the most important thing I can say. The climate crisis is unlike any issue that our political process, our society, has ever had to respond to. Not only is it global in scale, it has a real deadline. Unlike healthcare or education or any other important issue on the political agenda, if we do not create progress on global warming within the next two years we will not be able to come back to it in another 2 or 4 years and still have opportunities for any real progress.
Once a certain amount of carbon gets in the atmosphere - and we are so dangerously near that limit - we will have forced upon our selves a future unlike anything we can imagine. If we don't mobilize to achieve a peak and decline of carbon pollution over the next 5 years, we may miss our last chance to avoid climate destabilization. I say this not to scare but so that we may be moved by the sober and unforgiving truth. In short, we must act on global warming because if we don't, it will act on us.
But this isn't about one issue over another. Global warming is a problem so large that an effective solution can mean positive changes across society, on issues we all care about. This is not a mere environmental issue. If we move away from fossil fuels, the millions of people who suffer from asthma and respiratory diseases will become healthier. Millions of unemployed will get jobs in a clean energy economy, and not just any work – healthy, stable, family supporting jobs that, by their very nature can't be shipped overseas.
The time for historic, transformational progressive change in America is now and responding to global warming is our chance to make it happen. Some generations have heeded the call to serve by going abroad. It is time for our generation to come home and serve by building a new energy society in the country most responsible for the problem of global warming. We can - we must - lead the world again.
As we leave from this place and move beyond this historic day, we must continue to find hope and take solace in each other. In the face of this immense challenge, it can feel incredibly lonely, but I have found inspiration in the vibrant community this movement is helping create. We all have individual responsibilities but our greatest individual responsibility is to join together with others to effect change.
This issue is beyond politics but it cannot be solved without political action. Light bulb and car changes are nice but getting to the root of the problem requires institutional change that only our democracy can achieve. And only we can make that happen. We are the ones we've been waiting for.
It may be daunting to envision the change ahead of us. But the words of the great American patriot, Thomas Paine, ring in my head. Not far from here in the midst of the American Revolution, he once wrote "the greater the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."
Exactly a year before he died, another great American patriot, Martin Luther King, spoke these words. "There is an invisible book of life which faithfully records our vigilance or neglect."
I believe that at this moment of time, claiming vigilance will require more from us than ever before.
When I think of why I do this, it really isn't so much about my generation or even future generations. It has much more to do with a feeling of responsibility to the generations before us, to my father and mother, to Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy's generation, even back to Samuel Morey's generation and Thomas Paine's and then back further - over 10,000 generations to the beginning of the great human experiment.
More than anything, we stand on their shoulders today. We owe our ancestors, those bold trailblazers, inventors, and explorers who brought us here a better effort to meet our unfulfilled potential. Two hundred years of fossil fuel use is just a blip in the vast history of our civilization. We mustn't throw away our promise for a few more years of dependence and weakness.
As individuals and as one united generation, let us err on the side of audacity so that we may claim vigilance at our own unique moment in history. Together we can reclaim our future. Together we can build a new energy society. Together we can, we must make it so. Our time is now.
Thank you.
