Yoots to Obama: Listen Up!

Thousands of youth gather on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC to call for a green economy, a safe sustainable future and binding climate legislation from the United States government. The rally followed on the heels of PowerShift '09, the largest climate change youth conference in United States history.ActionFactoryDC/Flickr

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Will President Obama have a youth problem in 2012? In the 2008 election, young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 picked Obama over John McCain by a 2 to 1 margin. Energy and environment are two issues that young people cite as important electoral concerns much more regularly than older adults. And when it comes to energy and environment, the administration hasn’t had all that much luck getting things done.

So this weekend, when thousands of young people gather in Washington, DC for the massive youth climate and energy summit Powershift, there’s probably going to be a different vibe than there was at the last conference, in 2009. When I covered Powershift two years ago, there were more than 12,000 young people really excited about the new administration and the prospects for passing a climate and energy bill. Now no one thinks a climate bill is going anywhere for at least two more years and even an energy-only bill seems doomed to fail. Meanwhile, the solutions Obama has been talking about of late sound a whole lot like the same old, same old, highlighting offshore drilling, nuclear power, natural gas, and “clean coal.”

Courtney Hight, co-director of Powershift and the Energy Action Coalition, the group that has taken the lead in organizing the conference, knows this frustration well. After working for Obama’s primary campaign in New Hampshire in 2007 and the general election campaign in Florida in 2008, she took a post at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. But last June, amid frustration about how little was changing on energy and environmental policy, the 31-year-old left CEQ to take over the helm of the Energy Action Coalition.

“We can’t just work with the politics,” Hight told Mother Jones this week in the EAC office, amid dozens of volunteers scrambling to put the finishing touches on the conference. “We have to change the politics.”

A deciding moment for her, she says, was last year’s Gulf oil disaster. She expected angry citizens to be literally at the door of CEQ demanding policy change. But the angry mobs never really showed up. “It baffled me,” said Hight. It also pushed her back into organizing work.

For at least the past two years, the environmental movement has been almost singularly focused on passing a climate bill. But this year’s summit will focus more on training attendees in community organizing. EAC and other groups will have more than 700 trained organizers on site to train the thousands of other attendees on how to mobilize support back home. On Sunday they will also offer lobby training for attendees—all with the goal of putting pressure on Obama and Congress to make the right choices on energy and environment.

“Obama can be bolder,” said Hight. “We have to show him we need him to be.”

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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