I'm thrilled because I feel like months of hard-work on climate advocacy around the world is paying off right now, big time. Just take a glance at the reports from around the world pouring in from the Global Climate Wake-Up Call.
Today in Pittsburgh, I helped organize a wake-up call flash mob, which was swamped by media all hungry for the story on G20 protests. We delivered with a perfectly executed action with dozens of media outlets, live TV and some pretty clear visuals: We need climate action from world leaders in Copenhagen.
Every action isn't without its last minute changes, and in this case it was a good change. We got news that Gordon Brown committed to go to Copenhagen and urge other world leaders to do the same. Within the hour we had made another mask, found a UK flag and re-worked our event to thank Gordon Brown and hold him up as a model that Obama should follow on this issue.
Talk about rapid-response. But it totally worked!
Amid all the tension about good/bad protests, tensions with the city and the general nervousness here about the upcoming summit, our event struck the right tone. Here were dozens of creative activists using new and exciting tools to take part in the public debate. We're thrilled to be out in the streets voicing our strong demands for climate action, and our biggest priority is to be effective and get that message across.
The rest of the news pouring I'm going to try and summarize:
Here's more on Gordon Brown committing to attend Copenhagen and invite other leaders to do the same. This is live news coverage of him answering a real phone call from a flash mob participant in london:
China and India will announce their plansfor bold climate targets this week, using the UN General Assembly meeting this week.
The Chinese and Indian measures — if fully realised — could represent a breakthrough in bringing them into a global climate change deal at a UN summit in Copenhagen in December. Almost all observers say the Copenhagen talks are dangerously stalled..
"This suite of policies will take China to be a world leader on addressing climate change, and it will be quite ironic to hear that expressed tomorrow in a country (the United States) that is firmly convinced that China is doing nothing to address climate change," De Boer said.
The fact that all of this is at the same time as around 2000 different global climate wake-up call actions across the world. No, that's not a typo. The photos and videos and news reports have been coming in like a deluge. Seriously, look at the stream here.
RL Miller has done a better job than me in pulling together even more of these strands. She sums up more great news from Japan, Australia and more. Well worth a read.
From here in Pittsburgh, we feel we've put the week off to a good start, made a very clear demand of Obama (commit to going to Copenhagen!) and we're thrilled to build this momentum.