…and take climate action:

When the going gets tough, and people remain ambivalent towards the simple steps they can take in their lives to reduce their energy use, it seems there’s only one thing for it… It’s time to start breaking into people’s apartments, changing their light bulbs, dropping bricks in their toilets, and switching off their appliances by stealth, obviously!

Did you know that big oil companies throughout the USA and Canada employ the same Public Relations firms that were used by the Tobacco lobby in the ’60s to deny the link between smoking and Cancer? Did you realise that the Bush White House has been systematically suppressing reports on the science of climate change, and using executive power to edit language written by scientists, to create the illusion of uncertainty where there is none? Canadians, did you realise just how deep the links between the denial machine in the USA, big oil south of the border, and Stephen Harper’s government really go?

It’s not often that I am truly impressed by a piece of main-stream investigative journalism, but this documentary from the CBC’s hard-hitting Fifth Estate series is clear, well presented, and damning in the evidence it presents. Please, watch it, and get your friends to watch it too.

(Running time: 41 Minutes. Watch on Google Video.)

I’m in the process of archiving the best of my photos from the Montreal climate change negotiation here on this site, but I am also making DVDs with all of the original high-resolution photos. I’m selling them for $20, see this page for more details.

I am currently in Montreal at the global climate change negotiations. Things are really starting to get intense here, with marches in major cities across the world this Saturday, there is a huge amount at stake and the scientists now telling us we have only 10-15 years left to make the deep cuts in emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change, the stakes couldn’t be higher. I’m working with a huge number of other amazing youth organisers and campaigners here, and we’re posting regular updates on the aptly named It’s Getting Hot In Here blog. Check it out, follow what’s going on, and if you are in the UK and have time to call London and try to get some key messages through to the UK government (who currently are head of the EU) then please do contact me.

We’ve also been doing creative (fluffy) actions within the UN conference, and putting out a daily youth bulletin called ‘Tip of the Iceburg’ which is online at beyondkyoto.org.

That’s all great and good, but what I really would like to do is try to mobilise some young people in the UK to push the UK government from at home. The EU’s position on this stuff is in principle OK, but they’re not taking the lead they need to and the UK is in a key position at the moment to drive the EU’s position.

Without wishing to get into too much detail, the debate that’s going on here is about what happens when the current commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol finishes in 2012. The environmental groups and youth have taken the position that we need a strong decision from Montreal that will lead to a second round of compulsory emissions cuts starting in 2012 in line with the science. The EU position at the moment is that they aren’t against that, but they won’t really promote it either, and that simply isn’t good enough.

If anyone has time over this week and could work with me to do some phoning in to the government in London, and maybe some press work to try to get the message through to the delegates here that young people are watching from back home in the UK, and demand strong action to cut emissions from the government for the sake our our future, that might *just* help turn things around here.

So give me a shout - email, msn, skype - I’m trying to be online as much as I can manage. Literally 20 phone calls from young people to key people back in London asking them to pass the message through to the UK government team here could make a big difference in giving them the courage to do the right thing. We simply can’t afford for these negotiations to fail, we are out of time on climate change.