Portland’s thriving food-truck scene is a destination in its own right. Photo courtesy Roboppy via Flickr

A New York minute is understood to be the interval of time between a Manhattan traffic light turning green and the guy in the car behind you honking his horn. 

Lately it’s also enough time for a hungry Manhattanite to get a substantial grass-fed beef hamburger, sourced straight from the La Cense ranch in Montana to its New York “Beef Burger Truck”; an iced, rainforest-friendly coffee from the Street Sweets truck, served up in a clear but biodegradable cup; or a cone of whole-bean vanilla ice cream made from hormone-free dairy and pure cane sugar, from the Van Leeuwen Ice Cream truck. And still have change left over from a $20.

They’re part of a new wave of Net-savvy street food vendors across the country who are transporting the Slow Food movement’s embrace of local, sustainably-grown, and uncommonly delicious ingredients beyond the confines of pricey restaurants into the nation’s coast-to-coast love affair with street food. Call them the nouvelle food trucks.

Despite the grim state of the economy, urbanites are spending as much if not more of their food budgets on eating out than on cooking in. But rather than sit down to an expensive restaurant meal, upscale food trucks and carts have become go-to venues for quick, tasty meals. The nouvelle trucks are an even newer breed of mobile entrepreneurs, who specialize in whipping up relatively cheap fare that doesn’t require eaters to chuck their health — or their ethics — in the gutter.

Sweet tweets   

To help build their brands, many nouvelle trucks use Facebook to build customer loyalty, and Twitter to broadcast their truck locations.

Sweet Treats co-owner Samira Mahboubian dispenses change.Photo: Emily Gertz“Social networking — it’s essential, it creates a buzz,” says Grant di Mille, co-owner of Street Sweets with his wife, Samira Mahboubian.

It also creates business. Since “the police can at any time tell you that you need to move,” says Di Mille, “I can tweet that I’ve moved from 45th to 46th Street,” guiding thousands of hungry followers to their next fix of freshly made, all-natural whoopie pies, cookies, and croissants, as well as his truck’s signature locally-roasted, fair trade coffee. 

A big social-media presence also leads to more catering jobs, he says — gigs that can be crucial to the bottom line for a food truck business, particularly one featuring expensive upscale ingredients.

Only a handful of “good food” trucks are driving around New York. It’s a different scene in Portland, Ore., recently rated the nation’s #1 street food city by CNN. There, more than 400 vendors vie for the hearts and mouths of greater Portland’s 2 million or so residents, as well as its influx of tourists. 

Brett Burmeister, who owns, manages, and writes most of the blog foodcartsportland.com, says that while not every vendor touts an organic or sustainable ethos, environmental conscientiousness pervades his city’s street-food scene: “I’d say 90 percent [of the carts] are using biodegradable types of containers.” While Portland has banned Styrofoam containers, “you rarely even find the clear plastic clamshells,” he says.

The food cart boom has also benefited from the city’s long-time embrace of Oregon-grown and produced foods, says Burmeister. “All the weekend carts go to the farmers markets in the morning for their supplies.” And at least one stocks up hyper-locally: “YoGio, a Korean cart in north Portland, is getting vegetables from a local front-yard farmer,” he says, “a lady just down the street who is growing enough that they can get what they need.”

In the San Francisco Bay area, 80 street-food vendors will participate in the second annual Eat Real Festival, held in Oakland in late August. The event is dedicated to the idea “that delicious, convenient, affordable and sustainable food should be celebrated through an annual food festival,” says director Susan Coss. Vendors can charge no more than $5 per serving, and must include at least a few local ingredients in their dishes.

Although only 40 street food vendors participated in 2009′s inaugural fest, 70,000 people showed up to eat (organizers expected around 30,000). The carts took in around $300,000 over three days, and the event broke even on expenses in its first year.

“We were very lucky, the timing was perfect,” says Coss. In addition to the area’s longstanding enthusiasm for local, sustainable, and organic, “there was a big upsurge of interest in street food, it was new and hot. On top of that, the economy was horrible, and people weren’t paying to go anywhere [out of town].” 

All of Eat Real’s vendors will be sourcing locally and sustainably — some because the festival requires it, others because their clientele like it.

Still other Bay Area nouvelle food trucks do it out of a personal commitment to helping build a better food system, one serving at a time. Take Let’s Be Frank, which sells grass-fed beef hot dogs from carts and trucks in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

For most of his former career managing high-end San Francisco restaurants, cofounder Larry Bain paid top dollar for prime cuts of grass-fed beef. But the ranchers told him they could not live on selling rib eye and filets alone: “Every cow has about 600 pounds of trim,” Bain says, “a significant amount of meat per cow” that gourmet restaurants don’t want.

Let’s Be Frank pays around $2.50 per pound for this high-quality beef trim, says Bain, compared to $1.60 or so on the commodity market. “Sometimes it’s the tipping point for the ranchers, letting them support their families and stay in business,” he says.

Combined with more and more food-aware customers, the result is a thriving hot dog cart business that doesn’t have to compromise on health or animal welfare: “People are starting to understand the external costs of cheap food,” says Bain, and to grasp that paying fifty cents extra for one of his hot dogs is “a good investment.”

New York City’s People’s Pops buys the fruit for its succulent ice pops, sold at seasonal booths, from regional growers who need additional markets for their apples, berries, plums, and more. “You have an oversupply issue in season,” says co-owner Nathalie Jordi. “We take all that excess fruit and preserve it in a way that adds value. We can pay a fair price, and then sell it, which makes us money. The customer gets their fruit in a way that’s delicious, local, and healthy. It’s a win-win-win.”

The Whole Foods of the streets?

The good fast-food trend has yet to significantly transcend its origins in higher-income brackets, according to Caleb Zigas, executive director of La Cocina, a San Francisco nonprofit food-business incubator. “Vendors in low-income commu
nities are vastly unaware of the other contingent” of street-food vendors, he says.

La Cocina provides low-cost commercial kitchen space and other business development services to 30 food entrepreneurs, primarily women from the city’s lower-income Latino neighborhoods. “We don’t require any of our businesses to support the ‘good food’ movement, even though we support it,” says Zigas, because their “target market is not interested enough in local foods to support the rise in prices.” The program promotes sustainable practices in other ways, however: “We’re a certified green kitchen, so anyone operating here is working on green business principles.” And given all the great produce grown in California year-round, he says, many vendors inevitably use local foods.

But tensions can arise between the old and new schools of food vending. Back in New York, last summer Street Sweets had angry confrontations with immigrant street food vendors, who feared losing prime midtown sidewalk locations to the brightly painted truck and its upscale goodies. 

Certainly many of the nouvelle truck owners seem to be people with higher educations, or former business and corporate careers that honed their skills in marketing and social media.

“They have a lot of resentment toward us,” di Mille says, “because [they] look at us and say, ‘Why? When you have so many other options?’”

For di Mille, it seems to be the classic American entrepreneur’s drive to succeed, as well as selling something he can believe in that also makes customers happy — like cookies and cupcakes. “We’re very passionate and proud of our business,” he says. “With so many choices within eyeshot of my mobile business, if you come to me, that’s an honor.”

Jordi predicts that the movement for local-sustainable-organic street food is only going to grow. The challenge is figuring out how to meet demand without compromising values. “There’s this vast divide between artisan food at the top, and this mass-produced shlock,” she says. “I really see potential for a product like ours to go somewhere in the middle.”

Rep. Mike Doyle chats with Grist.Photo: G20Voice

Doyle, a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was an early critic of the Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy bill.  But he eventually emerged as a major supporter of the legislation, brokering components that would benefit the industrial and manufacturing sectors and whipping up votes that helped the bill squeak to passage in June.  With Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), Doyle crafted a compromise measure that in the bill’s first 10 to 15 years would give away a mass of greenhouse-gas pollution credits to heavy industries facing intense overseas competition (such as steel, natch), as well as to power distribution companies serving local electric utilities.

While Doyle’s amendment angered some climate advocates, others feel he played a critical role in swaying enough of his fellow “Brown Dog Democrats” to pass the bill.

During the G20 last week, Doyle sat down for a quick chat with Grist about congressional climate politics, clean energy jobs, and the greening of Pittsburgh.

—–

Q. Let’s jump right in: From your perspective, what’s it going to take to get a carbon cap-and-trade measure through the Senate?

A. Hopefully the House bill hasn’t set the ceiling, and the Senate bill is going to set the floor.

It remains to be seen.  The ultimate work is going to get done in the conference, as we put the House and the Senate bills together.  I think the message we’re trying to convey to the Senate, and to others who were initially skeptical about whether this could be done in a way that didn’t devastate the economy, is that this can be a win-win situation.

Q. By win-win, you mean climate and economy, right? Your district is rich in coal and steel, and yet you brought many important constituents around to supporting the House climate and energy bill.

A. When this bill was first introduced in the House, I heard from the industries, and they were panicked that this was going to devastate the steel industry [and] jobs in western Pennsylvania.

I remember telling John Surma, the CEO of U.S. Steel, that he could either be at the table or on the menu.  We were moving forward, and I wanted him to come to Washington, D.C., sit down with Ed Markey [D-Mass.] and Henry Waxman [D-Calif.] and those of us on the [Energy and Commerce] Committee, and talk about how reducing carbon emissions impacts his industry [in relation to] other countries that don’t have [climate] regimes yet and are his competitors, and how we could fashion legislation in such a way that we could have a win-win situation.

It was really out of those discussions that the Doyle-Inslee amendment [PDF] was born in the House, which basically says to our industries that if they become more efficient and lower their carbon footprints and do that better than the sector average, we would reward that, and we’d do it in a way that was WTO [World Trade Organization] compliant.  We’re saying to steel, “We’ll give you the level playing field you need until such time that we get agreements with other countries that you’re competing with.”

Q. Being a hometown boy must have helped.

A. I get a certain amount of street cred, just ’cause I grew up here, and my dad and my grandpap — we’re a steel family.  So it’s sort of like, “He wouldn’t screw us.  He’s one of our guys.”

Q. The major competitor is China, which, as a developing nation, is not required to take on binding emission-reduction targets under the Kyoto climate treaty.

A. We’ve always had this debate in the Congress: “We don’t want to do anything ’til the Chinese do something.”  For eight years, we had a president who said, “We’re not doing anything until the rest of the world does something.”  And we did nothing. 

Well, we all understand that America’s going to have to lead this; that when we lead, then it gives President Obama and future administrations the leverage they need to say to developing countries, “Join us.” 

Q. I think it was surprising to many people beyond the Beltway that there was so much Democratic resistance to the Waxman-Markey bill.

A. It’s almost regional. [In] states like Pennsylvania and Ohio and West Virginia, where coal is king and supplies our electricity, we had to say, “How do we approach these early targets?”  Our target is 80 percent reductions by the year 2050, but the toughest part is getting started.

Part of the strategy in the House bill was to mitigate some of these impacts early on, in areas that were coal-intensive, until we can get technologies on board to help them reduce emissions.  Because under the early scheme, they’re not going to meet the caps, because there’s no carbon-capture-and-sequestration technology deployable as we speak today.  So they’re going to have to buy credits.  The theory [being promoted by opponents] is that they’re going to buy these credits and pass them right through to the ratepayers, and everybody’s going to pay more.  We solved that problem in the bill.

Q. But there’s still a massive amount of misinformation going out to the American public about all of those measures.

A. No question.  Last week, one of [Pittsburgh's] two major papers did two editorials, one calling the whole idea of climate change “junk science,” and then just a few days later, saying how [climate legislation] could bankrupt this region.  It gets hard to have a rational discussion with those people who think climate change is a hoax. 

[But there are also] those people who think, “You know, I’m not sure it’s the end of the world.  But just in case it is, we should err on the side of caution.”  I think that’s where most western Pennsylvanians are.  Not everybody hears Al Gore, but a lot of people are saying, “Hey, we’re talking about our kids and our grandkids.  And if these people who say it’s a hoax are wrong, then we’ve really hurt the next generation.”

Q. Can people in your district picture a role for themselves in a low-carbon economy?

A. People that used to work in the mills come to me and say, “Mike, I didn’t go to college.  I’m not a scientist at Carnegie Mellon.  What does all this mean to a blue-collar guy?”  And they start to see that as you build these wind turbines, there’s jobs for people at all different levels in this green economy.  So people are slowly coming around. 

We like to build stuff.  That’s the other part that intrigues people from our part of the region.  They want to work with their hands.  People can get their heads around building solar panels and wind turbines.

That’s how a blue-collar kid that came from a steelworking family can go to Congress and support a clean-energy bill.  Where a lot of people think this would be a natural “no” for me, it’s really become not only an easy “yes,” but something we can go back home and talk about.

Q. Some climate activists are arguing that the ethical dimension to climate change is getting lost in the economic cost-benefit analyses.  Is that a case that would resonate with your voters, or voters in general?

A. The ethical argument verses the economic?  You know, I don’t think so.  Because people aren’t sure whether [climate change is] real or not.  I think if they were sure, then the ethical argument would be a no-brainer; of course we have to do something.  But since they are uncertain, the economic argument is really the only way to approach them.

It makes a compelling argument.  I told a lot of my colleagues — and some of them are in tougher situations than I’m in — that I really think you can go back home, and this is something that people will understand, if you take the time to sit down and explain it to them. 

Q. What’s your answer to people who say the government has no business mandating carbon pricing and green building standards? 

A. We have building standards for earthquakes in the West Coast, and building standards for hurricanes in the East Coast.  Why don’t we have building standards for having buildings that produce energy, instead of using so much energy?  Because energy isn’t cheap any more. 

Q.Going greener has helped Pittsburgh retain manufacturing jobs and revitalize the city’s economy — cleaning up brownfields, reclaiming the waterfront for the public, building green, and now bringing wind power jobs to the steel industry.  What’s next?

A. We have a national energy lab.  We have Alcoa.  We have PPG doing some state-of-the-art things in photovoltaics.  Right at Carnegie Mellon, Volker Hartkopf is constructing a [six-story, 7,500-square-foot] building that will be a net energy producer, not user [PDF].  He’s using a lot of the materials and research that’s coming out of institutions right here in Pittsburgh to do that.

We see this going on in our region, and we say, “Why shouldn’t Pittsburgh be the place where we do this kind of stuff, and produce these materials?”  We’re starting to get our heads around these ideas of the future. 

Let man tear asunder.

It was the only climate-specific policy directive to come out of the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh, and it fell far short in the view of climate activists, who were hoping for a firm proposal on “climate finance” — G20 aid to poor nations for help in adapting to and mitigating climate change.

“Removing fossil-fuel subsidies could be an important step towards cutting CO2 emissions,” said Oxfam climate advisor David Waskow in a statement. “But it should not be allowed to distract from the failure of rich countries to offer poor countries the help they need. Poor people should not be asked to pay the price of cutting emissions” that rich countries have created.

Greenpeace climate finance advisor Steve Herz agreed.  “We think it’s an important step forward,” said Herz, “but it’s no substitute for the work we expected them to be doing here, which was putting together a fair and ambitious financing package to help the world’s poorest nations.”

Despite the disappointment of activists, the commitment on the part of G20 leaders to cut fossil-fuel subsidies is an important step, assuming they follow through on their pledge. Fossil-fuel subsidies add up to around $300 billion across the G20 major world economies. Developing nations tend to use these subsidies to artificially lower fuel prices for consumers, while developed nations like the United States use them in the form of economic and tax sweeteners for fossil-fuel producers.

According to estimates from the International Energy Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, eliminating the subsidies would reduce global greenhouse-gas pollution 10 to 12 percent by 2050.

“We already know that the prices [for fossil fuels] are too low because they don’t reflect the cost of climate change … the true scarcity value and opportunity cost of using this resource,” said Columbia University’s Scott Barrett, who studies natural resource economics. “These subsidies are sending the wrong signal about value and scarcity of fossil fuels in the marketplace.”

Fossil-fuel subsides are also a drag on the ecomony. “If you’re selling kerosene at a lower price than the world price … it will come out of the public purse in some other way,” said Barrett, who co-authored a survey of economic policy strategies for combating climate change — including the elimination of fossil-fuel subsidies — for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment report, published in 1995 [PDF].

Removing artificial price supports will help cool demand for dirty fuels while simultaneously making cleaner energy more competitive. But it has to be done with care. if subsidies are cut off thoughtlessly, warned Barrett, a head of state could end up with riots in the streets.

This is one reason fossil-fuel subsidies have not played a bigger role in climate negotiations. Another, according to Barrett, is that many climate negotiators “were pushing for targets and timelines,” to the exclusion of all other options.

“The biggest problem with targets and timetables is that they’re not being met, they don’t work,” said Barrett.  “So why not supplement discussions about targets and timetables with discussions about actions that are actually going to be taken” — like retiring fossil fuel subsidies, which looks like it may actually happen.

At the end of the Pittsburgh Summit, G20 heads of state directed their finance czars to begin developing a more detailed phaseout plan at a November meeting in Scotland. The G20 will revisit the issue at its next meeting, in Toronto in June 2010.

Young activists from the Avaaz Action Factory joined the mass “People’s March” into downtown Pittsburgh on Friday afternoon, not far from the site of the G20 Summit, after holding their own climate-focused march in the morning.  Their Twitter-friendly slogan is “G20 Climate FAIL,” criticizing what they say has been a lack of action toward a global climate treaty.  In particular, they believe President Obama is failing to show leadership on setting firm timelines and targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions.   

Still, the Avaazians remain hopeful that a significant agreement will emerge from December’s international climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen, and seemed happy to be part of the scene.

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Djimon Hounsou at the U.N. Climate SummitPhoto: United Nations

As a global ambassador for the aid and development group Oxfam, Hounsou has traveled in sub-Saharan Africa and seen the direct links between climate change and human suffering.  “I’ve witnessed firsthand devastation with drought,” the Benin-born actor told reporters after he helped to kick off the U.N. Summit on Climate Change.  “Year after year, [local farmers are] still expecting the rain to come pretty much as it used to.  It’s not coming.  So they have to adapt, with their crops and plantings.” 

Not an easy proposition in a country like Mali, which Hounsou visited on a humanitarian mission.  The average income in this Western African nation is about $3.29 a day.

Often the communities Hounsou travels to know that something has gone wrong, says Oxfam America President Ray Offenheiser.  “We held a climate hearing in Ethiopia a week or so ago.  One comment was … ‘For many many years, there were all varieties of birds here.  And now the birds are gone.’”

Signs like this are signals of a “profound change” for these communities, Offenheiser says, even if “they don’t have all the information about what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what it means.” 

“This is where the climate change story and the adaptation story become the human story,” he continued. “It’s about people, their lives, their livelihoods, and how they are going to change.”

One of the major points of gridlock in this year’s international climate-treaty negotiations is how the rich, industrialized nations are going to help the poorer developing nations adapt to and mitigate climate change — while also continuing to send over the aid and development dollars they already provide for a host of other reasons. 

It is widely accepted now that the wealthy countries bear this responsibility; after all, they got fat and happy by creating the greenhouse-gas pollution that’s now slow-cooking the Earth. But how much help should developed nations offer?  This is just one of the many contentious open questions to be addressed at December’s climate-treaty talks in Copenhagen.

Oxfam estimates that wealthy nations need to come up with around $50 billion a year to help poorer nations adapt to global warming, and about another $100 billion a year to finance low-carbon development, so that these countries can ameliorate poverty without taking a coal-and-oil-fueled path to prosperity.

Hounsou hopes that if the citizens of wealthy nations better grasp the human costs of climate change, they will pressure their leaders to ante up. 

“We haven’t engaged the world population into this issue yet,” Hounsou says, noting that Western media in particular have not paid attention to the human component of global warming. 

Still, “no matter how you look at it, developing nations have to initiate the discussion at Copenhagen,” he said.

Watch Hounsou at the U.N. Climate Summit: 

Sens. Boxer and Kerry at a climate rally in June.Photo: David Pierpont, NWF via FlickrLast night at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, Teresa Heinz read a message from her husband, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), that set the gala crowd to cheering:  He and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) will introduce a climate bill in the Senate next Wednesday.

The bill will be backed by a strong and broad coalition, according to Kerry’s message, which Heinz delivered at a pre-G20 party sponsored by the U.S. Climate Action Network, and “will take a more comprehensive approach to dwindling oil reserves than any prior legislation.”

The legislation will be a “thoughtful, innovative, far-reaching solution” in four areas: the nation’s energy foundation; U.S. economic competitiveness; the health of the environment; and national security.

In between sets by the cream of New Orleans jazz musicians, an upbeat Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) encouraged the crowd to stay optimistic about the prospects for a good international climate treaty to come out of December’s negotiations in Copenhagen.  “We need to get the Senate to act,” said Doyle, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which produced the energy and climate bill tha the House passed in June.

“Let’s give President Obama some arrows in his quiver to take to Copenhagen,” Doyle said, suggesting that the Pittsburgh crowd remember to call Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) in the coming weeks and ask him to support the upcoming climate bill.

U.N. headquarters: Site of all the inaction.Photo: United Nations

President Barack Obama had pride of place on the agenda, as the first head of state to speak to the gathered world leaders, ministers, and climate negotiators.  His speech, which was warmly received, offered rhetorically forceful yet wholly general commentary about the huge risks posed by climate change and the need for action.  Obama said nothing specific about what his nation was prepared to commit to in order to slash its emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.  Most of the speeches by other heads of state charted the same safe territory.

Chinese President Hu Jintao, on the other hand, vowed that China would curb the growth of its greenhouse-gas emissions by a “notable margin” from 2005 levels by 2020.  He said his nation would generate 15 percent of its power from renewables and nuclear by 2020, and plant 150,000 square miles of new forest over that same period.  He also committed to improving energy efficiency and integrating climate action into domestic economic development plans. 

While Hu avoided talk of specific emissions reductions and stressed that developed countries should do more than their developing counterparts, his statements were the most definitive to date about what China is prepared to do to cut and compensate for its carbon emissions.

Al Gore hailed Hu’s speech.  “I think that China has provided impressive leadership,” Gore said.

Humberto Rosa, Portugal’s secretary of state for environment, echoed that sentiment.  “China has today given a little bit of leadership” among the developing nations “by giving solid numbers,” Rosa said.

Gore, Rosa, and others had similar praise for Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, who has pledged that his nation will cut emissions 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

These new commitments from Asia’s powerhouses are putting real pressure on the U.S., as is the European Union’s willingness to commit to cuts of 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 if the U.S. will follow suit.

Meanwhile, small island nations — some of whose very existence is threatened by climate change — are also putting on all the pressure they can. 

This past summer, the world’s major economies announced a goal of keeping overall surface warming of the Earth by 2100 to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures.  The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has challenged the global community [PDF] to keep overall surface warming well below 1.5 degrees C, which would mean even greater cuts than the most ambitious treaty proposals made so far.

A treaty that settles for anything less would spell disaster for island nations, in the view of Dean Bialek, U.N. representative for the nonprofit group Independent Diplomat, who is advising and assisting the AOSIS nations in the climate treaty negotiations. “[It] would mean complete inundation and statelessness,” says Bialek.  “That’s a morally repugnant outcome, and totally unacceptable.”

But despite China, despite Japan, despite the European Union, most observers agree that it will all come down to what the U.S. is prepared to do.  “A firm commitment from the U.S. would make the dominoes fall into place,” Bialek says. 

“With the change in administration in the U.S., everyone believed that a strong deal was forthcoming,” Bialek continued. “Hopes have dimmed a bit due to the mixed signals coming from Washington.”

Portugal’s Rosa says the E.U. still trusts that President Obama wants to fight global warming, but worries that America’s domestic political process could derail this year’s international treaty talks. 

“The American people and the Senate are the real actors now,” Rosa says.  “We’re sure the United States will get there, but we’ll be sorry if it’s not in time for Copenhagen.”

Kumi Naidoo

But each is a cautious optimist when it comes to international action on climate change: While it may not be probable that world leaders will forge a strong international climate treaty this year, it’s still possible. And citizen pressure is the key.

One day before the United Nations’ day-long Climate Summit on Sept. 22–which features President Obama’s hotly anticipated first address to the U.N.–Naidoo sat down to talk with journalists and bloggers about the global tcktcktck campaign, a coalition of several global non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The name tcktcktck is meant to evoke the sound of a clock ticking down to December’s international climate treaty talks in Copenhagen. The group has been organizing periodic citizen activist “mobilizations” around the world, featuring creative street performance–style protests coordinated via online social-media tools.

The worldwide citizen actions, including Sept. 21’s Global Climate Wake-up Call, have been timed to coincide with major climate and economic meetings around the world. Ever the optimist, Naidoo believes that “if the mobilization really peaks in the coming weeks … then the momentum could shift considerably.”

Naidoo acknowledges that expectations among both negotiators and activists about the likely outcome of the December talks are growing increasingly pessimistic. Even so, he believes that there’s still time to create a different outcome. “If we can change the context of the political world” by turning out hundreds or thousands of people to demand climate action, he says, “we know that failure to act will be an electoral liability for a lot of nations.”

Turning out citizens is also crucial for the civil-society campaigners who will be at Copenhagen, he says, to prove that there’s a sizable global constituency in support of strong action on global warming. “Otherwise, why should any of these leaders listen to us?  We have to show that citizens are behind us.”

Asked about what American climate advocates, in particular, could be doing in coming weeks, Naidoo acknowledged that the battle over health-care reform has sucked up most of the nation’s political oxygen. As a result, he said, “the first challenge is to be able to open up some space,” and refuse to accept that climate legislation cannot progress until health care is resolved.

He believes that American climate campaigners might pry open that space by allying more closely with the city and state governments that enacted progressive climate policies during the “last eight years of Bush administration denialism” about global warming.

He also advises climate advocates to make their arguments in plainer language for citizens who may not know a lot about the issues, and to revamp their media strategies. “My reading of the U.S. is that, insofar that you can call it a democracy, it’s an electronic democracy,” says Naidoo. “What people hear on talk radio, what they see on mainstream TV channels … part of the campaign here has to be getting smarter about penetrating the media that has the ability to shape national consciousness,” even if that means getting down and dirty with Fox News.

“If I was in the U.S. right now,” said Naidoo, “I would find 10 of the most well-endowed financial folks who get it, and ask them to put serious money on the table for a serious media effort. Take the thing to a different level.”

A Stern talking-to

Sir Nicholas SternLater in the day, Lord Nicholas Stern expressed a similar guarded optimism on global climate action before an audience of academics and students at Columbia University.

Stern, who famously quipped that climate change is “the biggest market failure in financial history,” is the author of an influential 2006 report on the economic implications of climate change.  In it, he predicted that while it is possible to significantly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the coming years, it will not be cheap. He estimated the cost to be around 2 percent of the world’s annual gross domestic product (GDP). But on the plus side, grappling successfully with global warming would open up unprecedented opportunities for ending poverty and creating sustainable economic growth, he argues.

“I think this is a story of investment opportunity,” Stern said on Monday — specifically, investments in new technologies that will cut across the whole of the global economy and create “the most dynamic period of economic growth that we’ve probably seen in the whole of economic history.” Not to mention the fact that sufficient reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions mean significantly less risk of the massive droughts and floods that displace millions, escalate conflicts over food and other resources, and intensify world poverty.

According to Stern, the two key challenges of this century are overcoming poverty in the next 20 to 30 years, and managing climate change in order to slash emissions from 2020 onwards. “It’s quite clear from the structure of both problems that you have to act on them now,” he says.

And like Kumi Naidoo, Lord Nicholas Stern believes that political leaders will be best motivated to act on climate change when they are held accountable by their own citizens.

Around 30 people gathered at Union Square in Manhattan at 12:18 pm on Monday to make simultaneous cell-phone calls to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking them to support a strong international treaty to slash greenhouse-gas emissions and stop global warming.  The event, organized via text messaging, was part of a global Climate Wake-up Call to world leaders, with similar gatherings happening at 12:18 PM local time in more than 2200 locales in 128 nations.

Many of the callers at Union Square encountered busy signals and full voice mailboxes — suggesting that calls were being made from hundreds of similar “flash mobs” up and down the East Coast at the same time.

The time is symbolic of the date December 18 — the last day of this year’s international climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen.

Advocacy group Avaaz.org has been getting live reports on Wake-up Call events around the world.