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College Students Take Climate Fight to Global Stage

November 23, 2009 - BAR HARBOR -- Legislation to fight climate change is stuck in the U.S. Senate.

Polls say Americans are less concerned about global warming.

And there is little hope that international negotiators will sign a new global climate treaty in Copenhagen next month.

But you won't convince Brooke Welty or Robert Friedman that the moment, or the momentum, has been lost.

"I think that makes Copenhagen all the more important," said Welty, a Portland High School graduate and now a junior at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. "We need to convince the world that the youth, the future generation of the United States, that we don't agree with the current policies and politics going on in Washington."

So, when the U.N. climate conference begins Dec. 7 in Denmark, Welty will be there, along with a dozen other College of the Atlantic students. So will Friedman, a Bates College junior, and hundreds of students from around the country and around the world.

Members of the global youth delegation will convene their own shadow summit, adopt formal positions and policies, and make their presence and their opinions known. They are highly organized, holding regular teleconferences and communicating on the Internet.

Some students are assigned to follow policy issues and negotiate positions. Welty is on the action team, which could involve "bird-dogging" negotiators, staging demonstrations or taking part in street protests. Friedman is on the media team, posting blogs, videoblogs and updates on Twitter. (The blog is at: sscinternational.org.)

For both Welty and Friedman, protecting the environment is more a career path than an extracurricular activity.

Welty, in fact, will travel directly from Copenhagen to India for a three-month internship with Greenpeace International. She has been an activist and organizer since high school, when she was president of Portland High's Environmental Club and helped buy trees to plant in parks, remove unnecessary light bulbs in the school and introduce a bottle recycling program, among other things.

When the students started planning for the trip, as long as a year ago, it appeared world leaders would be signing a historic treaty to fight climate change. Now negotiators are reducing expectations and suggesting the Copenhagen meeting will lay the groundwork for a treaty that won't be signed until next year.

Legislation to reduce global-warming pollution in the United States, once expected to pass through Congress before the Copenhagen summit, now isn't likely to reach a vote before next spring.

And, even as scientists report more evidence of warming, recent polls in the U.S. and Europe say public support for climate action has slipped.

Just 35 percent of American adults consider global warming a "very serious problem," down from 44 percent in April of last year, according to a poll released in October by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Experts blame everything from the bad economy to "doomsday fatigue."

The students insist they aren't discouraged. "We're definitely frustrated. We need our voice to get across," Welty said.

If a treaty isn't signed in Copenhagen, the youths will have more time to organize and lobby negotiators before the next meeting, in Mexico in 2010.

"If we make a huge fuss," she said, "they'll see what happened in Copenhagen and we'll make it even bigger in Mexico."

Friedman said the public may be tired of hearing doomsday theories, but the urgency continues to grow. "We need to stick to the science, and the scientists are telling us that we need to act now," he said.

Friedman said he still expects a historic agreement, if not a legal treaty, to come out of Copenhagen.

"I don't think anybody can say nothing is going to happen until the conference is over," he said. "I may be an idealistic young person, but I'm not going to say it's dead in the water until it's dead in the water."

JOHN RICHARDSON, Portland Press Herald, November 21, 2009


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