It’s been a bummer of a week for climate news. The Senate bill continues to languish behind health care and there have been some disconcerting rumbles that it might now be back-burnered even longer as an increasingly spineless nervous Senate focuses on jobs and deficit. And out of Singapore on Sunday we hear that Copenhagen definitely won’t produce a legally-binding agreement, but will rather be the first piece of a “one-agreement, two-step” process, the controversial (and dangerous (pdf), and expensive) delay due largely to U.S. inaction.

So allow me this week—amidst immense frustration—to focus on something positive. Let’s take a look at the core climate solution, the lowest hanging fruit on the emissions reductions tree, the no-brainer fix that is so practical, so cheap, and has such potential, that it’s going to make America’s hesitation to commit to even modest CO2 cuts seem absolutely ridiculous. We’re talking, of course, about efficiency.

Lost in all the argument over mitigation targets and emissions reductions is the simple idea that reaching these goals might actually be easy. Well, easier than anyone is anticipating, and potentially a great boon for the economy at large and for the average American’s wallet. Consider this: The emissions reductions goals laid out in the Waxman-Markey House bill could be met by improving energy efficiency alone and at a net savings to the public and U.S. businesses. According to a July McKinsey report, a $520 billion investment in efficiency through 2020 would yield gross energy savings to the tune of $1.2 trillion, effectively lowering the nation’s energy bill by nearly $700 billion while cutting emissions by 23 percent from business-as-usual. Just how big is this savings? “Greater than the total energy consumption of Canada excluding transportation,” said Ken Ostrowski, a senior partner at McKinsey.

A similarly enlightening report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that the efficiency provisions already in the Waxman-Markey bill would save the average American household $750 annually by 2020 and a whopping $3,900-a-year by 2030, meanwhile creating around 650,000 jobs. This is part of the reason why a diverse coalition of nearly 200 business, labor, civil rights, and environmental groups sent a letter earlier this month to Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, urging her to support an important energy-efficiency provision in the Senate’s legislation.

What’s more, these reports didn’t even touch the transportation sector, where increased fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks that the Administration has already rolled out will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by nearly a gigaton (add another roughly three-quarters to the efficiency savings noted above) and save the average car buyer more than $3,000 in fuel costs. Nor did the McKinsey report factor in a price on carbon emissions, which most analysts and experts see as inevitable. “Even if we don’t get a climate bill this year, it’s extremely conservative to think there will not be a price on carbon in the next decade,” said Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Meaning the cost savings will surely be even greater.

Translation: it won’t be painful to meet the reductions goals of Waxman-Markey or whatever version comes out of the Senate. And while these goals are admittedly far too modest and don’t nearly achieve what the latest science demands, Congress’s hesitation to commit them to law remains the biggest barrier to a global climate agreement. Americans need to understand that for all the drawn-out debate, these target emissions levels aren’t so big a hurdle. We can step right up to them using existing technologies in ways that actually save consumers money and creates jobs. The commitments that we just can’t seem to make, for which the world is impatiently waiting, can be met with the simplest of win-win-win solutions. Energy efficiency’s moment is long overdue.

Well, not quite everyone.

A rather remarkable rift has opened even within the world of climate advocacy and activism (remarkable even for a field where infighting is somewhat commonplace) between those who are reacting to this news with outrage and those who think it might actually not be that bad a thing. Those who adhere to the scientific reality versus those who defer to a political one.

The cause for outrage is clear. Every month we delay taking strong action, the worse the problem gets, the greater the misery spreads, and the more land and lives will be lost. We also know, thanks to a recent International Energy Agency report (pdf), that with every year of delay, the cost of combating climate change increases a whopping $500 billion.

How then, at this moment of inaction, could this possibly, maybe, be a good or justifiable delay? Here are a couple well-respected pragmatic voices giving their take:

Joe Romm on Climate Progress, whose lede (”Some very good news on the international front”) certainly raised some eyebrows Sunday morning:

For 8 years, U.S. negotiations were run by hard-core anti-scientific conservatives, who not only blocked any domestic action and opposed any international deal — but the Cheney-Bush negotiators actually actively worked to undermine the efforts of other countries to develop a follow on to the Kyoto Protocol. It was never possible that team Obama — in just a few months — could undo that and simultaneously develop a final international deal and pass bipartisan U.S. climate legislation…The new plan for Copenhagen makes the prospects for a successful international deal far more likely — and at the same time increases the chance for Senate passage of the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill…

Andy Revkin on DotEarth:

Many seasoned participants in nearly two decades of treaty negotiations aimed at blunting global warming had predicted this outcome…Having leaders of the world’s established and emerging powers take away the drama now could ease the burden on functionaries diving in to resolve enormously complicated issues next month.

Jake Schmidt on NRDC’s Switchboard:

To some this may be viewed as a setback, but is it? Well it depends on what countries actually do in response when they come to Copenhagen…[An] extension — months not years — could be worthwhile if countries use the time to firm up their commitments to reduce their global warming pollution and to finalize all the details of an international structure to ensure that those commitments are met.

How such political pragmatism fairs against the cold, indifferent realities of science is another question altogether.

Photo (cc) by Flickr user StarvingFox.

These vets of Operation Free took to two buses (yes, they were biodiesel), and rolled across the country talking to the public, political leaders, and fellow veterans about the national security implications of climate change and the need for Congress to take action. By all accounts, their message—that climate change is a threat multiplier and that transitioning to clean energy is our best defense—rang loud and clear.

“I made this trip,” explained Matt Victoriano, a Marine who served in Iraq, “because it became painfully aware to me that our current energy policy is a direct threat to our national security and the troops.” Marine General Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, takes it a step further: “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.” In other words, to best support our troops, support a clean energy future.

With more than a month to go before the Copenhagen climate talks, the press are practically tripping themselves to write off the talks as a failure. Now, I’m not here to blow sunshine and tell you that all’s going great here in Barcelona, and that we’re well on our way to a fair, ambitious, and binding deal coming out of COP15. But I do think the terminal diagnoses are a bit premature. Why? Because there are a boatload of critical stops—and great opportunities for progress—still remaining on this road to Copenhagen that could make this a true November to remember for international diplomacy.

Here’s the thing: For all the thousands of delegates who travel tens of thousands of miles to get together at these “intersessional” talks and eventually in Copenhagen, the real action happens elsewhere. As a climate expert with decades of experience with the international negotiations process admitted to me, “There’s a real limit to what can get done in these negotiations. At this point, everything has to come from the Heads of State.” Meaning, negotiators in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change only have so much room to move. There’s a very slim mandate granted the delegates by their respective lords and masters (and employers). The cards each delegation holds in its hand (to use the most overused metaphor of these talks) are given to them by the powers above, and are typically determined by domestic politics back home. (I dug into this as it relates to the bills struggling through Congress a couple weeks back.)

But now, as pressure mounts and the potential for an embarrassing failure in Copenhagen rises, the real decision-makers might feel compelled to sit down, look each other in the eyes, and try to figure some things out. Bilateral meetings, summits, small forums—that’s where the real hope for a climate deal now lies. “The U.S. and E.U. need to sit down and fall in line,” the same expert told me. “Obama has to go to China with a plan. And then India… Negotiators meeting with negotiators? None of it really matters unless the leaders are meeting with other leaders.” Those leaders will have plenty of opportunity to do so this month.

Consider what follows to be something of an addendum to my earlier Countdown to Copenhagen calendar. These are some absolutely crucial meetings between vital players, any one of which could kick these talks into high gear—or, if Heads of State keep playing coy, derail them entirely.

November 3-4: U.S.-E.U. Summit, Washington D.C.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, and other key European foreign policy players will come to the White House, and climate is on the agenda. Merkel will actually take some time to address Congress and urge them to join every other industrialized nation with a domestic climate change plan. Finance (for developing nations to build their own clean energy economies, and also to adapt to the impacts of climate change) will be prominent in the talks, and there’s some hope that the United States will align with Europe. As Antonio Hill, Senior Climate Advisor for Oxfam, said, “The finance ball is in the U.S.’s court. It must say how much money it is going to commit to help poor countries tackle climate change. The E.U.-U.S. Summit is a perfect opportunity for America to move forward with the E.U. on climate finance. If there is political will in Washington there could be real progress in Barcelona.”

November 6-7: G20 Finance Ministers meeting, Scotland
More finance. As instructed by Heads of State in the Pittsburgh G20 meeting, ministers must report back “a range of possible options for climate change financing.” This is less about hard numbers and more about who’ll hold the purse strings and how cash will be delivered, all of which is contentious and key to the negotiations.

November 14-15: President Obama visits Beijing, China
This is potentially the most important bilateral meeting of Obama’s tenure, and worth holding your breathe over. Back in August, the two nations signed a “Memo of Understanding” on climate change and clean energy cooperation. Hopes are high that a truly momentous announcement of definite commitments and concrete actions will come out of this visit.

Mid-November: Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, United States (probably)
Launched by Obama in March, the MEF, which includes 17 major world economies including the United States, European Union, Russia, Japan, China, India, and Brazil, has been meeting monthly. Experts expect cooperative clean energy technology action plans to be presented and for the Communique to set the tone for Copenhagen.

November 24: Prime Minister Singh visits the US, Washington, D.C.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will come to the capital to talk about trade, business, and of course climate. India wants stronger commitments for adaptation aid and more generous technology transfer laws. The US will be insisting that India figure out how to measure, report and verify their emissions mitigation actions. India has made some bold, ambitious climate claims of late, but have also called out the United States for “measly” efforts.

December 7-19: COP15, Copenhagen, Denmark
To be continued…

Climate activists have been waiting two long decades to see what a global climate movement would look like. As of last Saturday, we know. And as movement mentor and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben wrote in an email after watching photos of grassroots actions around the world projecting from the giant, iconic screens of Times Square, “it looked diverse and creative and beautiful.”

Diverse? There were events on every continent and in all but 14 of the world’s countries—from Americans at home to soldiers serving in Afghanistan; from England to Lebanon; from dirt-poor Tanzania to fast-developing India to oil-rich Abu Dhabi. Creative? How about Malaysian scuba divers removing invasive starfish from a local reef. Or 350 synchronized swimmers diving into a public bath in Hungary? Or taking the Saturday college football spotlight and forming a giant 350 at midfield during halftime of the Syracuse game.

Beautiful? Look no further than the shrinking Dead Sea, where activists from Palestine, Israel, and Jordan put aside their political differences and formed an enormous 3, 5, and 0 on their respective shores.

Saturday, October 24, 2009, will surely be remembered as the day that the global grassroots climate movement finally came of age and settled on a number. By my most recent count, there were 5,245 events taking place in 181 countries, all of them driving this single figure home: 350. As in, the 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide that science tells us is the safe upper limit to have in the atmosphere, if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” (Unfortunately, and as we’ve mentioned before, we’re already past it.)

This day has been a long time coming. Ever since the late 1980s, when climatologists first proved absolutely certain the dire potential of what was then called the “greenhouse effect,” anyone following the science has been slapping his head and scowling at the lack of international mainstream attention. For about 15 years, anyone trying to convey the urgency of the threat had the feeling that he was screaming down an empty hallway. Sure, there were meetings—the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, for instance—but there was never anything of a movement to parallel or empower the diplomatic processes. And now there is.

As the talks leading up to COP15 head to Barcelona next week, delegates will be presented with photos, fact sheets, and statements of support gathered from across the globe. Negotiators and heads of state alike are being bombarded with the clear—and unprecedented—message that these talks cannot fail, that we need an international agreement, and that this agreement must live up to the ambition that science demands.

October 24 was just a start, and Copenhagen will be far from the end of the fight. It will take a generation’s worth of sustained global effort to return our planet’s atmosphere to safe levels of carbon dioxide concentration. The good news is that we now have a true global movement—a movement that rises above individual national interests, a movement that understands the gravity of the threat and the depth of the scientific challenge; a diverse, creative, and beautiful movement—and this movement is just hitting its stride.

Photos courtesy of 350.0rg; see more at its Flickr set. Top: 2,000 students from Massey High School in Waitakere City, New Zealand, assemble on their field to show their support for 350. Photo by Steve Campbell. Middle: Students at Syracuse University take to the field. Photo (cc) by Lauren Schuester. Bottom: People gather in Jordan, Palestine, and Isreal (left to right). Photo (cc) via 350.org.

The United States and other industrialized countries have to face up to historical responsibility.

When it comes to climate change, the burden of historical responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the developed West. There’s no avoiding the fact that industrialized nations, which have grown economies, developed infrastructure, and generated great wealth by burning fossil fuels, have also affected countries throughout the developing world. The impacts of climate change aren’t some future threat—they are happening now, damaging homes, food crops, and roads, putting a strain on public services, and even taking lives.

Adapting to the impacts of a changing climate is expensive, especially for the poorest, most vulnerable countries who did little to cause the problem. Bangladesh, for instance, is already earmarking a substantial portion of their relatively puny GDP, over one percent, for climate change adaptation. This despite the fact that Bangladesh’s GDP will shrink because of climate change. These countries demand—and deserve—help. Despite some lovely rhetoric, rich nations haven’t yet put any minds at ease.

With the COP15 climate change conference in Copenhagen fast approaching, it’s becoming all too clear that this issue could realistically derail the talks. “They want to deny historical responsibilities,” warned the Filipino lead delegate Bernarditas Muller at a recent Oxfam event. If the United States and other Annex I countries don’t show they’re serious about ponying up cash commensurate to the damage done, there’s a legitimate chance that the G77/China (a big block of developing countries) and AOSIS (the Alliance of Small Island States—without question the most immediately vulnerable to climate’s threats) will simply walk out. Far from an empty threat, many of these countries feel that without adequate adaptation assistance, they will perish. Leaders in the dirt poor Maldives—where last week a Cabinet meeting was held underwater to call attention to their plight—are already looking for land to relocate.

It won’t be cheap. Developing countries are now calling for 1.5 to 2 percent of developed nations’ GDPs—at least $150 billion a year—to be designated for adaptation assistance alone. Our climate debt is even deeper, though, if you consider the amount of greenhouse gas that’s already been emitted. With about 20 percent of the planet’s population, developed countries have emitted about three quarters of the greenhouse gasses that are now settling into the atmosphere.

In a paper titled “Climate Debt: A Primer,” the Third World Network wrote that “[d]eveloped countries representing a minority of people have appropriated the major part of a shared global resource for their own use—a resource that belongs to all and should be fairly shared with the majority of people.” To avoid deepening our climate debt, the paper urges, “developed countries must seek to become carbon neutral and more. Reflecting their historical responsibility, their assigned amounts of atmospheric space in any future year should be even lower. They must take a lead in cutting emissions through deep domestic reductions, and by accepting assigned amounts that reflect the full extent of their historical emissions debt.”

It is high time that industrialized nations, lead by the United States, recognize the fact that we’ve already caused a lot of damage—expensive damage—and that it’s only going to get worse. It’s our moral and diplomatic responsibility to help these poor, vulnerable countries deal with the mess we’ve made, and to leave enough of the atmosphere intact to avoid bringing about even worse fates.

Illustration by Will Etling

How Obama can overcome incredulous reactions and truly earn his Nobel Peace Prize in Copenhagen.

They’re still scraping jaws off the floors of the U.N. center in Bangkok. For it was at the tail end of the last day of the two-week session of climate change talks, during which the United States stood tall and stubborn as the biggest obstacle to an international agreement to be achieved Copenhagen, that word of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize buzzed through Blackberries and laptops, cascading like a wave through the closing plenary. The reaction, it must be said, was far from positive.

It’s hard for me to emphasize enough the thickness of the international resentment towards America at the climate negotiation level. I can’t tell you how much time I spend defending the American position in these negotiations, explaining the frustrating nuances of our domestic politics (if you ever want to see a face achieve superhuman levels of confusion, try describing the filibuster to someone from another country) and the infuriating disinformation machine that runs amok through our national media. But it’s simply the sad reality that anyone from another country (besides Canadians, who share our sense of shame) who cares a lick about climate change is still outrageously disappointed with America’s hindering positions in these talks and for most folks the blame lies on Obama’s shoulders.

I’m not saying I totally agree with it, but that’s the world’s take.

So the contrarian argument has been an easy one for folks to make, and it goes something like this: The United States is the biggest obstacle to reaching a global climate treaty, and climate change is—it’s no hyperbole to say—the biggest threat to global peace the world has ever known. Therefore, the United States is the biggest threat to global peace the world has ever known. Therefore, Obama doesn’t deserve the Peace Prize.

Obviously, this is an entirely climate-centric view, and the Nobel folks have a lot more to consider. Apparently, his nuclear disarmament efforts gave him the edge. But I also like to think that this was something of a politically calculated move by the Nobel Committee directly related to climate. Obama will have to go to Norway to accept the award on December 10th. It just so happens that there are some pretty big international climate talks happening really close by at the same time. (And I’m certainly not the first to consider this proximity.) You might recall that Gore accepted his prize in Oslo in 2007, and immediately flew off to Bali to speak at those climate talks that set the course of action for these two years leading up to COP15. Last I checked, Copenhagen is a heckuva lot closer to Oslo than Bali.

So could the Nobels be teeing Obama up for a huge, world-shaking action to “justify” his award? “It’s hard to imagine a more directed appeal for President Obama to come to Copenhagen,” said Center for American Progress Senior Fellow and international climate policy expert Andrew Light. If Obama showed up in Scandanavia empty-handed for COP15, he’d be opening himself up to a raft of “Emperor has no clothes!” jokes and derision (a Danish fairytale, ironically). The Nobel announcement even did touch upon climate change directly, stating that “[t]hanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting.” You’d be hard-pressed to convince attendants of the Bangkok climate talks that the United States is playing much of a “constructive role.”

“This is probably an encouragement for him to act,” said Polish President Lech Walesa, a 1983 Nobel Peace laureate. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the prize the following year, agrees that the award shows great things are expected from him. “It’s an award coming near the beginning of the first term of office of a relatively young president that anticipates an even greater contribution towards making our world a safer place for all,” Tutu said. It’s absolutely true that nothing will make this world a safer place for all than preventing the wholesale deterioration of a stable climate similar to that which all human society has developed. Will Obama feel prodded by this award, feel sufficiently pressured to be bold on the international climate front? Let’s hope so.

I’m getting a lot of emails here in Bangkok—where I’m currently tracking the U.N. climate treaty negotiations for TckTckTck’s Adopt a Negotiator project—from folks back home wondering what they can do to help secure a deal. How can concerned citizens back on the home-front possibly impact the high-level diplomatic talks on the other side of the globe? The answer, it turns out, is simple: Help the Senate pass the new energy and climate bill.

It’s all too clear at these meetings that the biggest holdup to progress in the negotiations is America’s reticence. Our delegates are talking, sure. They’re offering plenty of positive rhetoric and doing as much as they can to be a constructive force in the conference rooms and plenaries. But the frustrating reality—the real big lesson learned from the first week of meetings—is that negotiations don’t go anywhere without U.S. numbers on the table.

That means everyone’s pretty much dancing around the real discussion until Jonathan Pershing, our lead delegate, lays down a couple crucial bits of information. Namely, what can America offer in terms of emissions reductions (UN speak: mitigation)? And what can it dish out in terms of straight up cash (financing) for adaptation and emissions reductions programs for poor, vulnerable countries? Without the answers to these questions, there’s no way to start putting the puzzle together. At the end-of-the-week “stock take” session here in Bangkok, where delegates give their sense of where negotiations stand, the European Union made a dramatic call that was echoed by many: It’s time to lay our cards on the table. Everyone knew who he was talking to.

The problem is, those numbers have to be a product of our domestic politics. If Kyoto has taught us anything, it’s that nobody can trust the United States until they see what we’re actually going to do. (Quick history lesson: The United States signed the Kyoto Protocol back in 1998; eleven years later, it still hasn’t been ratified. Mind you, at least 185 countries have ratified the Protocol, from Russia to Rwanda to Australia to Iraq. Iraq!) There’s a massive trust gap. To be a credible player going into Copenhagen, the United States has to show something concrete coming from the home-front. Pershing has not been at all coy about the fact that he needs to bring home a treaty that will be signed and ratified. We don’t want to write a another check in Copenhagen that our domestic politics can’t cash.

We also learned that this has to start in D.C., and not just end up there. For a treaty to ultimately be ratified (which will need a two-thirds majority vote in Senate for approval), the meat of the meal has to be cooked back home and brought to the international table, and not the other way around. We tried that in Kyoto, and of course, failed. Whether we like it or not, our plans and commitments for emissions reduction targets are the absolute foundation for an agreement to be built on, and thus far, we’ve delivered bubkes.

So everyone’s waiting on America. And Americans are waiting on the Senate.

Fortunately, Senators Kerry and Boxer dropped their version of the energy bill, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. In it are those numbers we need. The reductions are, predictably, less substantial than what most of the world wants to see, but that’s another argument for another time. Right now, any forward progress is encouraging. But if the perception here in the United Nations is that the Senate bill could fail—or even if it could go the way of health care, sputtering watered down to an uncertain fate—then there’s little hope for progress heading into Copenhagen.

And so the equation is simple: [the strength of our Senate bill] x [the chance that it'll be signed into law] = [likelihood of a fair, ambitious, and binding treaty in Copenhagen].

Here’s what you can do: For starters, call your Senators immediately. Use 1sky’s handy tool to get their numbers and a basic script. It’s easy as anything. (Some even find this sort of lobbying addictive.) Also mention that this needs to happen soon, as the fate of an agreement in Copenhagen depends on it.

The Alliance for Climate Education teaches the reality of climate change to our nation’s children—with ease.

Not long ago, I wrote that “the kids are alright.” I was talking about the incredible force that the youth climate movement has become over the past couple of years, taking advantage of the web’s networking potential and bringing together like-minded thinkers and activists, often culminating in good old-fashioned, on-the-ground mobilization.

But the youth climate movement is still limited, in its size, to those young folks who are already conscious of, and motivated by, the grave threat of climate change. How can we grow these ranks?

Climate change is complicated. It’s nuanced. To understand the severity of the threat requires a good grasp on some science. The trouble is, that science isn’t reaching people who don’t go out of their way to find it.

As far as movement building goes, this is a problem. The climate change movement now isn’t like, say, civil rights in the 1960s, when anyone with a moral bone in their body knew what was right and just. To care that much about climate change—to care enough to write your reps or pressure companies or march on Washington—the scientific reality of climate change has to really sink in.

Unfortunately, good climate education is hard to come by. Most American schools struggle to meet basic science education requirements, and a scant few actually have curricula that teach climate change. (My quick survey turned up only a couple of high schools that taught it. If anyone knows of more, please comment. I’d love to hear about them.)

The Alliance for Climate Education (which is launching any day now here) aims to change that. The nonprofit was founded a little over a year ago—kickstarted by wind power entrepreneur Michael Hass—with a mission to bring climate education into high schools, and make sure that America’s students aren’t missing the story of the century. The group’s efforts are centered on educational presentations. Now, communicating climate issues in an earnest and engaging way is a near-impossible thing to do. But—trust me here—these aren’t your typical school assemblies or dry guest lectures. Think Al Gore’s slideshow for the MTV set. It was scripted by ACE specifically for the youth audience, and the visuals were animated by Free Range Studio, the folks that did the wildly popular Story of Stuff video, which probably found its viral way to your screen sometime over the past few years. And the presenters—ACE calls them Educators—themselves are the real hook. ACE recruits entertainers—MCs, rappers, actors, and actresses—to push the lesson. I’ve seen more than my share of attempts at earnest climate communication, and—big cynical grouch that I am—typically come away frustrated or bored or both. But check out this trailer, watch Ambessa Cantave in action, and try to tell me that his audience doesn’t get the message.

The presentations started in spring, and by the end of fall ACE will have already reached 140,000 students. But what happens after the presentation? I asked Alisha Fowler, an Educator for ACE, how they hoped to keep ACE’s work from being little more than an earnest and entertaining break from class. First off, she explained, every audience is invited to sign on to a “Declaration of Independence from Fossil Fuels.” Most do. Then, through ACE’s Youth Empowerment Project, particularly motivated students can start their school’s own Action Team, with ready-made toolkits for greening their schools and continually building climate awareness.

So far, most of ACE’s work has been around California’s Bay Area, where the organization is based. But they’re working hard now to move past the test-drive stage. This fall, they’ve launched in Texas (2,100 Houston students reached in the first week alone), have opened offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Boston, and they’re scaling up on-stage talent to meet their wildly (and appropriately) ambitious goal of presenting to two million students by the end of 2011. Think about that for a second—there are right now about 22 million high school students in the whole country. Within a couple of short years, ACE could deliver solid climate change lessons to nearly 10 percent of them. If you’re looking to grow a movement, that’s a lot of seeds.

How Glenn Beck and Fox News may have just unleashed progressives’ greatest hope.

The wingnuts won’t have Van Jones to kick around anymore. Victim of a month-long, flagrantly dishonest smear campaign orchestrated by Glenn Beck at Fox News, Jones resigned last Saturday—as you’ve surely heard—from his post as the White House’s special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation.

Thank you, Glenn Beck, for giving us Van Jones back.

Like many folks who’ve long admired Jones’s work, upon first hearing that he’d been offered a job in the administration, I was torn. Yes, it was a validation of the “green collar” vision, one that would presumably be delivered by a true progressive visionary within the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But anyone who’d ever talked to Jones or seen him speak—recognizing him, then, as the most powerful, charismatic, and eloquent communicator in the whole environmental realm—worried about what the movement would be losing when he stepped into the hypersensitive, message-controlled, make-no-waves halls of Washington. Surely he’d have to tone it down, rein in the rhetoric, and play nice for no drama Obama. Many of us knew deep down that this wasn’t how he made an impact. As Arianna Huffington so rightly put it, “Van Jones was the best person for the job he just gave up. But the job was not the best use of Van Jones.”

Now don’t get me wrong, the fringe Right’s take down of Jones is sobering and sad, and more than a little bit scary. Lies—loudly repeated lies—brought him down. Beck’s screaming points have been debunked again and again, and weren’t even taken seriously at first. (”We all blew it,” Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope confessed.) Dave Roberts at Grist, one of the very few people who stood up to the scam as it was unleashed, squashed one after the next of Beck’s faulty claims: Jones was never a “green jobs czar” (”there is no such thing”), nor was he a “criminal” or an “ex-con” (and he was “never charged with a crime, much less convicted”). Jones’s old boss, Eva Paterson, held up more truths about his personal history against the deceptive bile spewing from Fox News. But the lies rang louder.

Thankfully, the silver lining here is quite bright. Jones has been pulled out from behind a desk deep in the shadows of D.C., “a low-level political appointee,” as Roberts wrote, “with two Senate-confirmed layers between him and Obama,” and is free again to do his best work: speaking the truth about climate, energy, and economy; promoting solutions; and rallying citizens around the cause. For a progressive environmental movement that is desperately short on charisma, an unmuzzled Van Jones is exactly what we need. And now, thanks to Beck, he’s more of a household name. More famous. More influential. More powerful.

Jones has the spotlight. He’s also got a freshly-motivated network of support from throughout the progressive and environmental community—from his partners, colleagues, and supporters who regret sitting a little too silent as he was chewed up and spat out of Washington. And he’s got a vision, a broad comprehensive vision spelled out in his book, The Green Collar Economy, for how America can effectively combat climate change, while reducing our energy dependence and creating millions of jobs for those hungriest for work. The environmental and progressive movement badly needs more powerful, electrifying voices. Jones just got his back. So while the unceremonious exit of Van Jones, politician, should cause us all quite a bit of unease, Van Jones, activist, organizer, leader, has his best work ahead.

–

Beck Backfire Book Buy: The paperback version of Van Jones’s book, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, will be released at the end of the month. The hardcover, published a year ago to much acclaim, hit The New York Times Best-Seller list. So should the paperback. In it, Jones provides a blueprint for how we can, as a nation, combat climate change, achieve energy security, and bring millions of new jobs to the Americans who need them most. I rarely ask anyone to buy anything, but we should all stand up and support Jones (better late than never), purchase the paperback, and put The Green Collar Economy back on the best-seller lists. (Guess who’s atop the paperback nonfiction list now?)

Van Jones photo (cc) by Flickr user PSD.