In June of 1972, some 35 years ago, a group of future-thinking leaders met in Sweden for the first United Nations Convention on the Human Environment. By the end of a whirlwind week, they had issued the Stockholm Statement, established what is now known as UNEP, and given birth to the modern field of international environmental law.

Twenty years later, in June of 1992, just one month before he would be chosen as Clinton’s running mate, Al Gore was scheduled to present as the head of the Congressional Delegation at the NGO “Global Forum” at the Earth Summit, an event that spawned the Convention on Climate Change, the precursor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Unknown to Gore, a group of 30 rabble-rousing teens and 20-somethings were waiting for him the day of his talk. Organizing themselves into “U.S. Youth at Rio” — in Brazil to push for Bush I to sign the Biodiversity Convention and to call for real leadership on the environment — they somehow got to Gore’s staffers and asked, quite audaciously, to be allowed to introduce him.

One 22-year-old in particular, Aimee Christensen, was up the night before, working with her colleagues to write the statement they hoped to give. By the end of the all-night session, Aimee was chosen to give the speech.

When Aimee arrived at the venue the next day, she was told that due to limited time, the introduction was a no-go. Undaunted, Aimee was waiting when the 44-year-old Senator from Tennessee arrived at the venue. She introduced herself with speech in hand to ask for five minutes to speak and introduce him. Al Gore thought about it long and hard, and then — amazingly — said yes.

Gore took the stage, thanked the audience, and let them know that he was going to let a group of young Americans speak before him. He wasn’t sure exactly what they were going to say, but they were passionate about it.

Aimee and the group of U.S. youth took the stage and proceeded to give their speech to an audience of 600. They were interrupted frequently — not by critical adults, but by loud applause — and finished to a standing ovation.

The Law of the Few

This past Saturday night things came full circle — nearly 15 years later, Aimee again gave an inspirational talk to introduce Mr. Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth at the 17th Annual Conference of the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS) at George Washington University Law School.

In the past decade and a half, Aimee has built on her revolutionary beginnings to make a big impact in the public, private, and governmental sectors — most recently as the new “Climate Maven” at Google.org. Apparently, her boss called her that one day and they went with it.

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, describes Mavens as the information specialists, one of three key ingredients — along with Salespeople and Connectors — in helping social epidemics reach a critical tipping point.

Gladwell calls this his Law of the Few, as in there are a select few who really move society to the tipping point. To understand Gladwell’s concepts and these three types in my own language, I have chosen mental representatives.

In my mind, the Maven is a smarter Cliff Claven — not just in possession of knowledge, but excited by the data and eager to share what they know. And that is an accurate description of Aimee. Every time I meet with her to talk about new ways to address the climate crisis, I come away with pages of notes and several hours of online research.

But to call Aimee a Maven is to sell her short. She is also a Connector.

According to Gladwell, the Connecter is a special type of person with a knack for bringing the world together. The Connecters are the Laurie Davids of any group. And that is also Aimee. With most of my colleagues, there is usually an exchange of contacts, as we share our social data in a somewhat open-source network. But when I talk with Aimee, it is all take and no give on my part.

Last April, the head of the NAELS Board held a small dinner and reception for Nobel prize winner Wangari Maathai in conjunction with the 2nd California Campus Climate Neutral Summit. I was lucky enough to get an invitation to attend both events, and thought this was finally my chance to pay Aimee back for all of her support.

“You should come down to Santa Barbara,” I wrote her. “We are putting together a fantastic event and would love to have you speak. If you need an incentive, you could meet an inspirational Nobel winner!” “Thanks,” she responded. “Your event looks fantastic and I hope to make it. As for Wangari, I’ll be seeing her up here on the Google campus next week.” Foiled again!

But perhaps the most applicable title for Aimee is Salesperson, someone with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing.

I have always thought of the Salesperson as the Lee Iacocca of the group — somehow able, as a new CEO, to sell Congress on supporting a flagging Chrysler company in 1979 with a $1.5 billion loan guarantee, just as they had supported airline and railroad bail-outs in the past.

Aimee’s salesperson personality hit home last week. Although I have considered becoming both a vegetarian and vegan several times, and even had a short stint as a vegetarian (to impress a girl) in high school and college, I have not been basing my food orders these days on those principles.

Enter Aimee this past week. During our first meal together at a Vietnamese restaurant in Georgetown, Aimee gently but firmly convinced me to reconsider the carbon impact of the food I eat, and urged me to order lower on the food chain. At Bertucci’s Saturday night I got the minestrone and salad.

The Law of the One

So, with all due respect to Gladwell and his Law of the Few, it is time to recognize the Law of One. As it turns out, Aimee is the Tipping Point.

As a first-year law student at Stanford in 1999, before climate change was on most of the world’s radar, she ran a successful campaign to get the school to commit to a responsible climate investment policy.

As a founding Governing Board member of the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS), Aimee brought in some heavy hitting speakers to a Seachange Conference at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto and recruited more for the initial NAELS board.

As a driving force behind Environment2004, Aimee connected the environment and climate change with voters’ values and concerns several years before most others did.

As the founder and director of Christensen Global Strategies, Aimee created something our of nothing, connecting to top level clients and helping to solve some of the country’s most advanced environmental problems.

And now, at Google.org, Aimee will see the world’s top projects come across her desk. She will see the seeds of projects from the next generation of Edisons and Einsteins. And I have no doubt she will play a central role in giving the best and brightest projects and young entrepreneurs the support and funding they need to change the world.

Creating a 10-90 Googol of Aimee’s

And the difficult but obvious task for Google, the country, and the globe is how to mass produce Aimee Christensens — and the other tipping points like her out there — and send them out to learn, teach, and connect people, while persuading them and helping them change their lives.

And through one tipping point that moves 10,000,000,000 people, or 1,000 tipping points that move 10,000,000 people each, or 10,000,000,000 individual tipping points, we must figure out how to sustainably support 10 billion people on this planet by the end of the next half century and beyond.

So good luck to Aimee, Google.org, and all of us! And I will close with words from Aimee herself, delivered this past Saturday night, fifteen years after her bold introduction of Al Gore half a world away:

“Global Warming is the first most clear impact of our unsustainable path to date, and the good news is that with our climate system, as well as on other ecosystems, reducing our impact on nature will also create many co-benefits like better health, better jobs, greater income (from sustainable livelihoods), and improved quality of life.”

…

A recent report by the Global Footprint Network and World Wildlife Fund found we are consuming the planet’s resources 25 percent faster than the earth can renew them, a rate unprecedented in human history. To keep it up, ‘we’ll need two planet’s worth of natural resources by mid-century.’”

…

I see our planetary degradation as an opportunity for us — we can make the world a better place, we can come together to fight against the common challenge to which no one is immune.

This is the chance for all of us to be activists, all of us to be advocates. Those of you who are law students have incredible opportunities to make a difference right now — and you will have many opportunities coming your way as attorneys. As law students you can join with Campus Climate Neutral, bringing together business and engineering students and show your universities and communities how to go carbon neutral and save money. You can lobby for investment responsibility policies to minimize the extent to which your university’s endowment is financing further global warming. And you can engage our political leaders at the local, state, and federal levels.

To all of us, it’s time for more.

Don’t be afraid to be an advocate.

This coming Sunday, former Vice President, Oscar winner, and rock ‘n’ roll organizer Al Gore will address a group of more than 400 leading CEOs, COOs, nonprofit leaders, politicians, court justices, attorneys general, law school professors and Deans, entrepreneurs, and environmental professionals.

Only most of them are still in law school.

This Sunday, Gore will give the closing address at the 17th Annual Conference of the National Association of Environmental Law Societies, The Future of Environmental Protection, hosted this year by the George Washington University Law School. His inspirational words will no doubt have a profound effect on a group whose actions over the next 50 years will play a central role in the future of the planet.

And a Child Will Lead Them

In October, 2006, Business Week ran an article titled “Global Warming: Here Come the Lawyers.” The story looked at a sampling of the 16+ legal cases currently pending in federal and state courts directly involving global warming. The article described the “ambitious legal war on oil, electric power, auto, and other companies whose emissions are linked to global warming” and compared the cases to successful tobacco litigation.

This hot litigation topic actually has its roots in law schools, where in 2001, Yale law student Dave Grossman wrote an ahead-of-its time article, " Warming Up to the Idea of Global Warming Litigation." Since then, Dave has continued his battle against climate change, most recently as founder and director of Green Light Group Environmental Consulting. According to Dave, "Tort, and public nuisance in particular, just seemed to fit the facts of climate change, so I set out to see how feasible a climate tort suit would be. Turns out, it was a good fit. Since then, a number of suits have been filed around the world, and people are taking the litigation risk more seriously. You never know how the work you do as a student can have an impact."

And there is no doubt that the next generation will be well-schooled and centrally involved in all sides of this litigation. Two weeks ago, 67 teams of law students from around the country converged in White Plains, NY, for the annual Pace Law School Environmental Moot Court Competition to debate a hypothetical lawsuit filed by the Province of Inuksuk and Village of Akuli against a coalition of energy companies for damages related to global warming.

Beyond Litigation

But what the Business Week article and the increasing coverage of litigious efforts to stop global warming in the United States often leave out are the hordes of revolutionary young lawyers who are coming together across the country to start a modern industrial revolution.

This modern industrial revolution, coming in the midst of the most prolific industrial age in humanity’s short history, must solve the dilemma of how to provide goods and services to an estimated 420+ million people in the United States and a mind-boggling 10 billion people worldwide by 2050 — and here’s the kicker — using 1/5 of the carbon.

Today’s average law student is 22 years old and will hit retirement age in 2050. That leaves 43 years to retrofit 107 million U.S. households and build 50 million more; transform the commercial and industrial sectors; and find massive, low-cost, low-carbon transportation solutions. While litigation may help push energy companies, auto companies, and others to move faster, it is only a small part of an all-encompassing solution. These future leaders must literally build a new world.

Although they have not yet made national headlines, centers to address tomorrow’s problems today and train a new generation of attorneys to deal with these issues are springing up at law schools across the country. At UC-Boulder’s Energy and Environmental Security Initiative (EESI), NAELS Governing Board member Kevin Doran and visionary Professor Lakshman Guruswamy are leading law students on an interdisciplinary mission to use innovative legal and policy solutions to address global warming and energy security.

“What we do,” explains Kevin, “is help students see the impact of law on all the areas where progress is needed. Whether you’re talking about basic science, applied R&D, market development and so forth, law either expands or contracts the universe of possibilities. Our students learn that good legal solutions can’t be devised in the abstract. They need to be informed by the very environments and processes they’re meant to deal with.”

Lakshman puts it this way: “We show students how to use law as instrument for profound social change. We show them what the law can really do.”

A Revolution in the Nation’s Capital

Beginning tonight, more than 300 law students, law professors, and legal practitioners, representing over 50 schools in more than 30 states will converge on the nation’s capital for the NAELS Conference. They will meet, fittingly enough, at George Washington University Law School, named for the first president put into power by a system created largely by an early group of revolutionary attorneys — John Adamas, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay.

And over the next four days, these leaders will hear from another group of revolutionary attorneys who cut their teeth in the 1960s and 1970s as the environmental legal movement began. According to GWU law student and conference co-organizer Alex Menotti, "We are excited to host several hundred of the nation’s future environmental lawyers and engage in a discourse that will create a bridge between practitioners who virtually invented modern environmental law in the 70′s and those who will practice well into this century."

This group of leading practitioners includes attorney Neil Proto,who served as the chairman of Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures (SCRAP). Mr. Proto led a group of law student who filed a case, United States of America. v. SCRAP, that made it all the way to the Supreme Court and opened the door to law suits in U.S. courts by everyday citizens. Mr. Proto’s book, To A High Court: The Tumult and Choices that Led to United States of America v. SCRAP, speaks to the power of law students to affect change, even before they leave law school. This Saturday, Mr. Proto will again lead a group of law students, moderating a session on modern student activism.

You Say You Want Revolution? We’re All Working on the Plan

So over the next four days, amidst panels, movies, happy hours, heated discussions, and debate, the next generation of legal, U.S., and world leaders will come together to plan a year, career, and life of activity to both stop global warming and start a Modern Industrial Revolution.

Through NAELS’ projects Campus Climate Neutral and Project MIR (Modern Industrial Revolution), and the hundreds of individual efforts around the country, these students will widen their perspective well past finals, bar exams, and legal employment, to see themselves as the vanguards of this world, standing both on the precipice of global environmental catastrophe and on the verge of a new, beautiful world. And they will widen their perspective of environmental law — realizing that the modern battle to protect the environment will take all of us.

From future corporate lawyers working on patent law, tax law, real estate law, and environmental compliance for their clients to public interest attorneys suing to keep their clients in line with the law; from law school Deans to regulatory commissioners; from Congress to City Hall; from the State House to the White House; across the public, private, and governmental sectors, it will take an enormous legal U.S. village to solve this problem.

And lawyers, as they have always been, will be centrally involved in this revolution.

So here come the law students, and not a moment too soon.

Please check back in over the next three days for dispatches from this revolutionary event.

One week ago today, I awoke to a sun-splashed view of the Flatirons from a travel inn just off of Broadway Avenue in Boulder, CO. These sandstone shelves — named in the days of Abe Lincoln by intrepid pioneer women who said they looked like the flat, metal irons used to iron their clothes — emerged some 290-296 million years ago as the earth’s crust lifted and tilted. These mini-mountains provide an Edenic backdrop for Stephen King’s The Stand, and last week, served as the setting for higher education’s non-fictional sustainability Stand at the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit.

While “set in stone” by human standards, the Flatirons represent a true testament to the incredible power of nature, when given time, to change dramatically. These peaks, not there a short 300 million years ago — 1/15th of our Earth’s 4.6 billion year history — now dominate our modern landscape. But as Arizona State University President Michael Crow noted in the summit’s first plenary session, we humans are more impatient.

Crow calls the current University period the “Stone Age” — more often than not representing the worst in humanity. He pointed out that these rigid, complex social constructs are usually slow to change — filled with many argumentative, self-focused, egotistical, and hubristic leaders whose actions are more motivated by what they think they are to themselves than what they might be to someone else. Crow closed by admitting his own shortcomings in this area and demanding that the humans running today’s institutions of higher education, the thousands of professional employed by them, and the 17 million students attending them, change, and change fast, moving from the "Stone Age" into the "Sustainability Age."

A full day’s drive to the west, graduate students at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC-Santa Barbara, working under famed social scientist Oran Young, are looking into this social impasse to analyze why institutions are so slow to move into the Sustainability Age, despite the short- and long-term benefits.

This graduate student research project, Campus Climate Neutral 2, follows on the heels of Campus Climate Neutral 1, a student effort developed by the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS) to work with the University to develop a long-term climate-neutral plan. Among CCN 1′s more exciting findings: achieving Kyoto targetes, California’s GHG reduction goals, and even climate neutrality would save the school millions by 2020. CCN 2 is trying to figure out why UCSB — and other similar instituions across the country — are not moving more quickly to capture these savings and the other benefits that come with conserving energy, increasing energy efficiency, creating new energy sources, and dramatically reducing campus greenhouse gas emissions.

These Roots Run Deep

In many ways it is not surprising that universities — founded with the profits from East India Tea Company Directors like Elihu Yale and tobacco magnates like George Washington Duke on the East Coast; funded by steel and oil barrons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Rockefeller (University of Chicago), and Andrew Carnegie in the Midwest; and built by railroad and gold moguls like Leland Stanford in the West — support the current industrial order. In fact, universities, the non-profit foundations that support them (Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller), and the cities and states that house them are simply new incarnations of recycled industry profits — one of the rarely noted positive byproducts of the last two modern industrial revolutions.

But as the summit demonstrated, we are confronting a problem where the old industrial order — and all its byproducts, both good and bad — must undergo revolutionary social and industrial change in a relatively fast period. Planned for about 200 attendees, the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit brought more than 600 people together to try to tap into our collective capacities to change. And as recently hired UC-Boulder Environmental Center Director Dave Newport put it, “we are apparently very bad event planners.”

After driving efforts at the University of Florida, Dave has hit the ground running at CU, connecting to his new staff and tirelessly organizing this visionary two-day summit, co-sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). According to Dave, "Be it planning or serendipity, this Summit (and AASHE’s October conference at ASU) are where years of work by students, faculty, and campus advocates nationwide came together and we witnessed higher education’s first few steps towards the Sustainability Age, a new campus business model, and the societal leadership we must exert. Hope was born anew."

Stone Soup & A Rocky Mountain High

By his own admission, ASU President Crows’ views have made him unpopular in some Ivory Towers and with the "Stone" Gods who run them, but he really doesn’t seem to care. One man who has heard Crow’s call is UC — Boulder’s Chancellor G.P. "Bud" Peterson, who came to Boulder a short seven months ago and has not been afraid of change. Over the past half year, he has tried hard to catch up with the city of Boulder in burning an aggressive path towards sustainability. According to President Peterson, it is the next generation that hold the potential energy to change the world.

During a lunch-time presidents meeting that brought together several university deans, chancellors, vice chancellors, and other visionaries, President Petereson urged us to tap into the collective, renewable energy of today’s students. According to Peterson, today’s institutions must force today’s youth to stop being passive consumers in the classroom and to start participating in their own education. In doing so he believes that these future leaders will transform themselves from objects of history to subjects in history and find the spiritual food that’s missing from their lives.

Peterson compared UC-Boulder ‘s contributions to national and international sustainability in terms of the famous children’s book Stone Soup. In the story, one person begins to make a soup with nothing but stones, a pot of water, and a hot fire. Others add their own ingredients until the soup and the community that created it becomes a complex, energized mélange of flavors. In the case of UC-Boulder, Peterson hopes each school will bring their own ingredients to an open source fire that will help cook up a 10 billion person, sustainable global soup by 2050.

But if you talk to Bud, Dave, and an active UCB community, they refuse to take credit for this work. According to them, they have simply harnessed the energy and momentum that already existed — created primarily by students. And if you listen to them scheme and look into their eyes you can tell they are just getting started. This past week UCB joined nearly 100 other schools in committing to the ambitious goal of long-term climate neutrality.

Leading a Revolution Without Hitting First Gear

The climate neutral concept to which Presidents Crow, Peterson, and others are committing first hit campuses in 2000 when visionary David Orr commissioned a Climate Neutral report for Oberlin College from Rocky Mountain Institute. Since then, the concept has spread to Middlebury College, which developed a climate neutral plan in 2002, the Climate Neutral Network, and several Climate Neutral events including the 2004 Winter Olympics — somewhat shockingly headed by U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney — in Salt Lake City, Utah. It essentially means that a campus, event, or individual reduces as much of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their actions as possible, then fund cheaper emissions reductions projects elsewhere to offset the rest — creating a net zero impact on the earth’s climate system.

While many often compare this bold commitment to the Apollo Project — the U.S.’s commitment to put a man on the moon — it is actually much more difficult. Achieving global sustainability will require building a whole new world, not achieving a single engineering marvel.

While this may seem like a difficult or utopian goal, it is real and feasible for the 17 million ambitious, energetic, young minds on today’s campuses. The Edisonian group of graduate students at UCSB showed this — proposing, developing, funding, and marketing a climate neutral plan for UCSB that will serve as a model for campuses around the country. Even more encouraging, since completing their report these students have split across the country to continue their revolutionary sustainability and energy work at the private, governmental, public, and academic level. We need 100,000 more like them!

This point was summed up in two eloquent examples by Tony Cortese — a father of the sustainability movement, President of Second Nature, and a member of AASHE’s Senior Council. According to Tony, a recent survey of Fortune 500 CEOs found that around 90% of respondents felt that sustainability was important to the success of their businesses. However, in a gross market failure, only about 30% thought they had the knowledge or skills in current staff to do anything about it. Time to train the other 70%.

From Fear of Commitment to Meeting Commitments

The recently launched American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, which includes a pledge to go climate neutral, is spreading like a Colorado brushfire among chancellors and presidents — by the time this post hits the net, it will probably have over 100 signatories. AASHE, Second Nature, and ecoAmerica are supporting the presidents in their collective effort.

A somewhat similar but more general commitment to sustainability by campus presidents — the Talloires Declaration — was signed by some 250 schools in 1992 and planted the seeds for today’s exponential growth in campus sustainability. “It feels like we have a tiger by the tail,” said Judy Walton of AASHE, commenting on the movement’s rapid growth and AASHE’s quintupled membership in its first year of existence.

But committing to climate neutrality and actually getting there are very different things. In the process of undertaking this monumental challenge, the next generation will be thrown into the deep end over their heads — and forced to swim. And every step of the way — as they succeed, fail, and graduate — they will be learning how to transform this country. This climate neutral university movement is as much about reforming higher education and creating a generation that can build a new United State of America and global economy as it is about transforming physical campuses.

Lee Bodman of ecoAmerica noted that out of the 16.8 million students at today’s U.S. universities, only 2.5% undergrads and 0.5% of grad students participate in "environmental" opportunities. In some ways, I think this reflects a failure of the university system. In another way, I believe it represents a failure of the environmental movement to frame this issue. Conceived as a broad Modern Industrial Revolution to produce 500% efficiency and revolutionize all of our major industries in 50 years, there are far more students involved — racing solar cars; exploring new, renewable and low carbon energy solutions; and designing energy efficient light bulbs, computers, houses, neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations.

Whether they know it or not, there are currently 302,000,000 Americans engaged in environmental activities. It is the tie that binds us. And as Bodman noted, the potential for aggressive change is tremendous, particularly if the goal can be framed in hopeful terms — as an incredible opportunity like the historic Marshall Plan.

Given enough training, support, and encouragement, today’s students will learn team-buidling, social organizing, project management, and sustainability principles — like the Santa Barbara students — at today’s more than 4,000 universities. They will then go on to modify the 107 million residences and millions of commercial buildings in this country and build another 75 million new high-performance structures to climate neutral standards. They will learn about sustainable transportation, transforming Amtrak into a new, shining, beacon for the world and dreaming up hypercar and maglev transportation systems as unimaginable today as the automobile was in the days of horses and canals. They will learn to mass produce sustainable products in sustainable ways, en route to providing goods and services to 420 million Americans — not to mention 9.5 billion global citizens — by 2050, while reducing carbon emissions a full 80%,

Today’s average 22 year old will retire at 65 in 2050 and will have to have done all of the above to give us a shot. It’s time to get busy.

A Wind-Wind Situation

And just as the solar potential of Arizona hit me last October, producing visions of a new Southwestern energy capital, the wind energy business is beginning to boom in Boulder, and it is breathtaking.

Driven by visionary thinkers like Boulder’s mayor Mark Ruzzin, one city of 100,000 diverse individuals is starting to make an impact. While “taxes” have lost political races and started revolutions, Boulder’s carbon tax — developed in collaboration with the local business community — has been a big hit. This market mechanism has allowed wind a toehold in an energy industry dominated by heavily subsidized and established fossil fuel companies.

According to Mayor Ruzzin …

… in Boulder, we emphasized the economic development potential that will come with moving towards climate neutrality. We have a vibrant entrepreneurial spirit and a healthy energy industry cluster here, and being aggressive in regards to climate change became attractive to these business leaders because both those creating new businesses and those running established ones — solar installation firms, energy consultants, green building companies — see real market development potential for their products and services. And by cutting their teeth, so to speak, in Boulder, they will be prepared to take their offerings to all the cities, institutions, and industries that ultimately follow our lead.

Boulder’s fertile young alternative wind energy business still awaits its Edison. But that is not stopping companies like Renewable Energy Choice and 28 year old Director of Community Relations Nick Algee from expanding this market. Over the past year, Nick has been travelling the country on a tour of Whole Foods stores, which have introduced the first at-the-counter, retail wind energy purchases. Soon you may be hearing, "will be that be paper or plastic and would you like some wind power today?" as you buy your food.

Boulder — led by Mayor Ruzzin and ex-Commisioner Will Toor — was one of the original nine cities to commit to meeting Kyoto through the U.S. Mayor’s Climate Protection Initiative. The initiative now includes hundreds of mayors representing 60,000,000 people — nearly 20% of U.S. citizens. The mayor also showed his support for binding, legal, voluntary measures, by working with the city to join the Chicago Climate Exchange.

And on campuses and in cities across the country, these initiatives are being powered by the next generation, who are transforming their world. According to Ruzzin …

… we have already begun to tap into the enthusiasm of CU students to help with our climate change efforts. For example, our Energy Brigade program uses student volunteers to walk door-to-door in student and low-income neighborhoods, giving away our Cool Kit, a tool box of no- and low-cost energy conservation measures such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, weather stripping, faucet aerators, and energy conservation education materials. The kits instantly save homeowners and renters money on their energy bills, and are a fantastic opportunity for engaging with CU students and their desire to make Boulder a better place.

Now as I have been reminded, often quite bluntly, by Gristmill, Huffington Post, and ItsGettingHotInHere commenters, wind is still a marginal national energy source, the Modern Industrial Revolution is just beginning, and neither is guaranteed success. The resource shifts of the past — from wood to coal to oil to natural gas to nuclear — were driven by supply, demand, and cost. Overuse of wood stripped the land, making wood more expensive to import from Europe or the western U.S. and opening the door for coal. The need for mobile sources of power, the invention of the automobile, and the World Wars opened the door for mass mining of Rockefeller’s oil and the natural gas that came with it. Edison and Westinghouse’s revolutionary electrical systems gave coal a second wind. The oil embargo of the 1970s jump-started nuclear power. Just as there will be fortunes made in new industries, there will be fortunes lost and lives ruined. Despite the brilliant innovators that led and will lead these shifts, none have happened without making financial sense.

At present, non-hydro renewable energy makes up less than 1% of the U.S. energy mix and is projected by the Energy Information Administration to grow, but remain less than 10%, by 2030. With fossil fuel subsidies taken into account, current renewables sources are often still prohibitively expensive. Until that changes — whether through natural market trends or market mechanisms like taxes, incentives, and subsidies — the EIA will be right, and we will be in trouble.

Still, over the past year, thanks to the visionary work of folks like Crow and Buizer at ASU, Peterson and Newport at UC-Boulder, Billy Parish and the folks running the Campus Climate Challenge at Energy Action, graduate students working on Campus Climate Neutral, and Tony, Judy, Julian, and the folks at AASHE, more than 100,000 undergraduates, 25,000 graduates, and 1,000 visionary higher education leaders have been shown a glimpse of the future. And it is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes.

The Hart & Soul of a Nation

Ending at the beginning, the summit featured a speech by Gary Hart. Hart, elected to his first term in 1974 — the same year I was born — has seen many things over the past 32 years and has decided that energy independence is the single most important security issue facing America . He spoke of the duty of his generation — a duty that has gone unfulfilled — to ensure the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness not just for current generations, but for future generations as well. Up at Oberlin College , David Orr — who helped start the climate neutral wave — is framing this as a Constitutional violation.

In his closing, Hart also spoke of his positive vision of the U.S., noting that every time any of us give the Pledge of Allegiance, we commit not only to allegiance to the American flag, but to "the Republic for which it stands." According to Hart, America guarantees rights to its citizens with the tacit assumption that we fulfill our civic duty as citizens to that Republic — duties that then earn us these inalienable rights. For many Americans — and millions around the globe — these basic duties have gone unfulfilled and the basic rights of future generations are at serious risk.

Back in the late 1700s, our Founding Fathers (and Mothers) used less than 1 quadrillion BTUs of energy and couldn’t have possibly anticipated the 100+ quadrillion BTU crisis we have gotten ourselves into. But if they had they surely wouldn’t have let it go unchecked. Hopefully, we can use their revolutionary framework to get ourselves out of our current predicament and create a nation and a world that can deliver on its guarantee of rights for many generations to come.

Join the Revolution

So I invite you all to spend some time checking out the various links in this blog and to join this Modern Industrial Revolution that will be fully funded, totally televised, and may be our last shot.

As Natural Capitalism (whose motto is "Creating the Next Industrial Revolution") guru Hunter Lovins noted at this year’s conference, there is increasingly no financial reason not to get involved with aggressive measures to reduce emissions. Hunter noted that many campus and city projects with a 2-5 year payback represent am amazing rate of return if organizations are willing to invest the upfront capital, particularly when compared to our own, individual investments, where we are all generally ecstatic with low, double-digit, annual returns.

Time to Rock It

Sadly, doing some follow-up research for this blog, I found that the whole premise is flawed. In fact, the Flatirons have been altered over the past fifty years at the hands of man.

No, global warming does not directly threaten these formations in the next several decades. And no, to my knowledge, the minerals used to de-ice Denver’s roads — pulled from the range — are not threatening their long-term existence. In Boulder it was the next generation, full of testosterone, energy, and confidence, who transformed these faces — painting giant "CU"s on the Third Flatiron during the 40s, 50s, and 60s. And today’s youth — educated, trained, supported, and inspired by higher education — need to be equally bold in leaving their deep imprint on the next ten to forty years of human civilization if we are to meet our 2050 goals.

According to Lovins, we have somewhere from 10-50 years to correct the current climate crisis, probably more like 10. And while 20 and 50 year goals are great, we need to handle this climate crisis now or we may be literally dooming future generations to life on an uninhabitable planet.

And within the next several centuries, the Flatirons will watch traces of humanity — one of nature’s most incredible and powerful creations — and our stone, bronze, copper, gold, and sustainability ages slowly disappear as the earth spins on without us.

A little over a century later, I am sweating about 175 miles south in the 95 degree heat of Tempe, Arizona.

And although the Grand Canyon is still intact, we have not listened to the advice of this great Republican leader on a global scale. We have, in fact, marred this globe, and marred it badly. And we need to fix it. And to do that we need to build a new world. “Leaving it as it is," complete with its 6 billion greenhouse-gas-spewing citizens, is no longer an option.

I am in town for a conference set up by Arizona State University (ASU) and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) to confront this very inconvenient truth.

The Role of Higher Education in Creating a Sustainable World has brought together 650 participants from 200 universities and colleges in 46 states, four Canadian provinces and five nations. These sustainability leaders, from 18 to 80, will spend the week trying to figure out how to harness the resources and energy of higher education to ensure that we will to our kids at least as many global resources as we inherited.

The largest campus sustainability gathering to date is serving as both the launching pad for Arizona State University’s revolutionary new School of Sustainability and as a visioning session for a new AASHE initiative to get every university president in the country to commit their institution to long-term climate neutrality.

ASU’s School of Sustainability runs undergraduate and graduate programs to prepare students to address the complex, interdisciplinary challenges of building a sustainable future. The school and its research equivalent form the core of ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability. According to conference co-chair and ASU sustainability guru James Buizer, “This is our way to make sustainability a basic tenet of everything ASU does. It has been a transformational exercise.”

The other conference co-host, AASHE, is an association dedicated to advancing sustainability at all levels of higher education. AASHE was launched in 2005 as the fusion of EFS West and the Consortium for Environmental Education in Medicine (CEEM), and is off to a fast start.

AASHE’s bold new Climate Neutral campaign asks universities to continuously and aggressively improve their efficiency and reduce their carbon output until they eventually eliminate and counteract their overall contribution to global warming. While the concept of climate neutrality may sound radical to some, and a commitment of this magnitude could seem risky to administrators, conference co-chair Tony Cortese, a senior AASHE advisor, accurately notes that “at this point not acting is an even bigger risk."

And there is such vast untapped potential in higher education! As AASHE Board Chair Sherri Tonn puts it, “Universities are like small cities entirely filled with people dedicated to learning. Campus communities can stop adding to climate change and begin to take care of our planet.”

Moreover, the great campuses of this country, acting together, in an open source analysis of sustainability, can do even more. Near the end of the conference, Mr. Buizer noted that the staff at ASU had “learned a great deal from our guests," were “extremely pleased to have served as host” and “had a wonderful time seeing old friends and meeting new ones.” Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful, long-term, sustainable friendship to me.

Renewable student energy

Best of all, throughout the week, a stream of renewable, youth, and student human power flowed through the conference — power that will drive the increasingly efficient engine of higher education and generate the leaders, ideas, and technologies needed to create a sustainable world.

The National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS) presented its work on its flagship project Campus Climate Neutral — a graduate student project at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, to develop a climate neutral plan (PDF) for the UC-Santa Barbara campus. Standing on the shoulders of giants, the students worked from revolutionary climate neutral models and plans at Middlebury and Oberlin (Word doc).

Several representatives from Energy Action, a coalition of youth and student groups running the Campus Climate Challenge, also wandered the ASU halls, soaking up knowledge, teaching, and planning. The group, whose leaders’ names you will surely know 10 years from now, include:

• Already-famous Yale dropout and Energy Action co-founder Billy Parish;
• visionary organizer Dave Rosenfeld from the Student PIRGs;
• wise-beyond-his-years shareholder engagement and university endowment expert Mark Orlowski from the Sustainable Endowments Institute; and
• New Age Cornell graduate student, Dan Roth, Co-Chair of the Youth Action Team of the US Partnership for the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.

These young leaders are all touring the country, launching and implementing innovative campus solutions while engaging in an unprecedented, self-cloning process, trying to enable, train, and mobilize thousands more just like them.

They hope to leave the next generation of students with exponentially more American human resources than they were given. It is truly inspirational to watch and gives me hope.

By the time we get to Arizona

In many ways, the location of this gathering of visionaries seems appropriate as our generation looks to the future. While many of us Ivy Leaguers and Northerners flew in from frost warnings, and are preparing to hunker down for an extended fall and winter, Arizona is warm and drenched in sun. Everywhere I look around campus I see ASU’s mascot — Sparky the Sun Devil — reminding me of this state’s unmatched, year-round solar potential and the jobs and prosperity a new renewable energy industry would bring to the area.

And in this century, we are seeing another bold Republican, John McCain, from Arizona himself, perhaps inspired by the words of the great Theodore Rex, breaking with powerful interests in his party, and pushing for the first national legislation limiting global warming emissions.

If he is succesful, my great-grandchildren, if they return to Arizona a century from now, may walk through the streets of their generation’s Texas — only their’s will be a sustainable energy capital. We can only hope.

Teddy Roosevelt closed his Grand Canyon speech with a flourish: “We have gotten past the stage, my fellow-citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of our country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation, whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery. Whatever it is, handle it so that your children’s children will get the benefit of it.”

Let’s hope and make sure that AASHE, ASU, NAELS, Energy Action, and U.S. higher education in general — with its 15 million students, 4,000-plus universities, research labs, brilliant professors, and powerful administrators — finally heed Teddy’s advice and take the lead.

If we won’t, who will?

This past week, I had the incredible honor of presenting on a panel with religious leaders from around the world as part of the Climate Institute‘s Summit on Climate Destabilization. The panel, chaired by famed Earth Day founder Denis Hayes, featured revolutionary leaders from the Jewish, Presbyterian, Catholic, Christian, Muslim, and Mormon faiths, all united in efforts to urge their religious communities to take action to stop global warming. As each leader spoke, I watched the rest of the panel nodding, taking notes, and cheering each other on.

“Good relations” and “reciprocity in all fields” indeed!

• Jo Anne Lyon of World Hope International spoke about her group’s work alleviating suffering and injustice;
• the Reverend Sally Bingham, Executive Director of The Regeneration Project of Interfaith Power & Light, talked about uniting faiths around climate solutions;
• Mr. Walter Grazer, Director of the Environmental Justice Program for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, provided a Catholic Perspective;
• Rabbi Warren G. Stone quoted from the Torah, telling the crowd to “be bold”; and
• attorney Joseph Cannon provided a Mormon perspective.

Of particular note was a Presbyterian initiative, spearheaded by Pamela Mcvety, asking the Church’s 2.4 million members to “bear witness” to global warming and Go Carbon Neutral in their own lives. This revolutionary commitment made by the national body of what Mrs. Mcvety jokingly called the “frozen chosen” — a religion in which conservatives outnumber liberals by an estimated 2-1 — shows the amazing potential of religion to overcome political and cultural differences in the face of a common global threat.

In the session’s final presentation, Dr. Khalid Shaukat, Advisor for Scientific Issues for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), quoted passages from the Qu’uran, stressing the responsibility of all Muslims to protect creation. A response to the Pope’s remarks by Dr. Shaukat’s group, the Islamic Society of North America, notes:

It is true that some Muslim rulers deviated from Qur’anic principles by using political or military power to oppress other religious communities. However, such actions were exceptional, which is why the oldest and most diverse Christian and Jewish communities were found in Muslim lands up to the modern period.

Before last week, I imagined two of the most influential religions in the world locked in a death spiral over conflicting religious values. But after listening to these forward-looking leaders turn the issue of climate change — potentially the ultimate divider — into the ultimate uniter, I have faith.

Their talks highlighted the huge base of common beliefs — respect for creation, one’s neighbors, and future generations — that great religions and all of humanity share. Each of these visionary leaders has begun the long-term process of changing the behavior of the more than 3 billion people their faiths represent. I am humbled, inspired, and hopeful.

No offense to Larry Page or Sergey Brin. You have shown that youth — thrown in the deep end far too early — can actually rise to the challenge, blossoming into revolutionary 25-35 year olds who truly change the world.

While past industrial revolutionists created the steam engine, the cotton en(gin)e, and the diesel engine, you created and revolutionized the search engine, and have revolutionized the internet. Good show!

But, honestly, where are your 1,000 counterparts, working together at every level of industry, government, and the nonprofit sector, to address our generation’s Cold War — the threat of global warming?

Blast from the Past

Where is the Renewable John D. Rockefeller, following in the footsteps of Standard Oil’s founder, and at 31 creating a “Standard Sun” and “Standard Wind” to battle for global energy market share?

Standard Oil may be a forgotten name to our generation, but this little oil company, born in the ’70s (1870s, that is) grew fast, at one point accounting for half of all US oil production — at the time the 4th largest US export in value. Since then, Standard Oil’s offspring — sired by Justice Edward Douglass White and the Supreme Court in 1911 under Antitrust laws — have grown up to be today’s fantastically successful and infamous energy companies. Their actions both meet the vast energy needs of us all, and perpetuate a system that threatens to cook the planet. We need alternatives.

And where is today’s ruthless, 30-year-old Thomas Edison, finding new and innovative ways to use, market, and sell new energy products and systems — stealing patents, failing more than succeeding, crushing the competition, and not giving up until he ran his industry?

And where is the 26-year-old Henry Ford II of today — capitalizing on the public’s frustration with traffic, gas prices, road rage, and high fatality rates — to either transform or compete with America’s Big Three auto companies, forcing them to become players in a more diverse Modern Transportation Industry that includes a first-class rail system and other low-carbon travel?

Now perhaps these all sound like utopian goals, but so did the automobile in an age of horse travel, coal in the day of wood, oil in the day of coal, and an energy grid in the days of candlelight. Young Rockefeller, Edison, and Ford found ways to do it.

Excuse Me

I have always been told to can the excuses, so I will, but first I want to lay out some possible reasons that we aren’t producing more industrial revolutionaries. It is important to know where the hurdles are and how high they rise, so we can either break them down or jump over them.

Top Five Excuses Why Generation X is Not Doing More

1. The system has failed us — charging us exorbitant fees for degrees, in effect forcing us to choose between taking jobs as indentured followers (think first-year law associates) or setting out on our own with $1,000+ monthly payments.
2. Our forefathers and parents taught us to mistrust each other — turning North vs. South, Hatfield vs. McCoy, Democrat vs. Republican — and we are now paddling opposite directions while our boat sinks.
3. We have become complacent, living through the relatively safe and secure ’80s and ’90s. No civil rights marches to grab our attention. No draft to force many of us to either protest or shut up and suit up.
4. The need for increased specialization has narrowed our focus — depriving us of the chance to become Renaissance world visionaries.
5. Neither the categories of “student” or “professional” properly encapsulate us, and we are in limbo — confused about our role.

More fundamentally, though, I think those who care the most about a Climate Neutral future, the great, young, environmental leaders of our time — the Adam Werbachs, the Billy Parishes, and the Chip Gillers — have been taught that to change the world you must be a revolutionary environmentalist, not a revolutionary industrialist. They need counterparts!

Stopping and Starting

“Stop Global Warming” has become our clarion call, and with good reason. Because that’s what good environmentalists do, right? Stop things? Development projects, power plants, polluting corporations.

But in a more fundamental sense, to get society to stop global warming is to ask all of us to come together to build a brave, new world — a world that can somehow provide services and goods to 9 billion people in the coming century, while creating minimal pollution, waste, disease, and death.

To discuss how to “stop” global warming can too often be to look at the glass of the future as leaking and nearly empty. To plan a Modern Industrial Revolution (MIR) is to see an enormous overflowing pitcher.

We are a generation that must come together to erect thousands of steel towers across the country for wind turbines; replace 500 million old, leaking windows; create 150 million cars that don’t need much, if any, gas; and lay another 50,000 miles of passenger tracks and 50,000 solar panels.

We are a generation that must follow our passions and let them take us outside traditional politics, academic disciplines, and career paths, to change the face of social, economic, and political systems in this country.

Calling Generation X

So with this blog post, I would like to throw down the gauntlet to Generation X, starting this instant — because we don’t have a moment to lose.

For the foreseeable future, I will dedicate this space to challenging, highlighting, and enabling my Generation X’ers to do more, be more, and build more on our way to a Modern Industrial Revolution.

For some inspiring examples, see what graduate students around the country are doing, before they are even out of school, to build climate neutral campuses.

And for those of you who don’t believe it can be done — that modern-day industry is too entrenched, that the world is built by adults, and that revolutions are run by teenagers — tune in next week when I will submit my first data set of historical leaders 25-36 years old. Some got rich, some got famous, some died trying, but most took the industrial “road less traveled” and changed the world.

It’s time for all of us to join Larry and Sergey and find untapped ideas to speed our long march to Climate Neutrality. Who is with me?

Coming Soon: Part II: Solutions to Pollution — Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution