Younger generations worth protecting

| May 21, 2012

The young people of today are not willing to just sit back and inherit the planet older generations want to leave them. Ellen Sandell says across the globe youth-led groups are deeply committed to climate justice for everyone.

The most exciting phase of my life began five years ago, in a dodgy backpackers’ in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne.

In a big, stuffy room, thirty leaders of Australia’s national youth organisations sat in a circle, getting to know one another. While we were from incredibly different backgrounds – faith groups, indigenous, young professionals, medical students, environmental and social justice activists – we had one important thing in common: we were young people facing a very uncertain future due to the threat of climate change, and we weren’t going to let our Government and business leaders get away with doing nothing about it.

From this one meeting, a national youth organisation – the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) – was born. Since that day in November 2006, the AYCC has gone on to become a "youth-led political group that has swayed national opinion without the backing of major political parties" (according to University of Sydney academic Ariadne Vromen, quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald). I now have the incredible privilege of running this organisation.

The AYCC’s mission is simple: to create a generation-wide movement to solve the climate crisis. Our means are two-fold: by creating policy change and cultural change. We know that one of these alone is not sufficient: cultural change alone won’t change things fast enough, or leverage the immense power that the Federal Government has to change our energy systems and influence business and society. However, Government policy change alone risks leaving the community behind and is susceptible to reversal by successive Governments.

This two-fold purpose has seen AYCC grow to over 80,000 online members and branches in every State and Territory. We’ve run national media campaigns and had reached hundreds of thousands of young people with our message.

The key to AYCC’s success is that young people are deeply committed to climate justice. We don’t care about ideology: the declining rates of political party membership will tell you that. But we do care about issues, and we’re pretty bloody sick of politicians using climate change as a point-scoring exercise, where they put their political future ahead of our actual future.

People join AYCC because they have a vision for a clean energy future, and they want to see it realised. Luckily, this vision isn’t just a pipe-dream, but there are solutions on the table right now that can get us there, if only we choose to adopt them.

For example, we’re just about to start charging big businesses for pumping pollution into our atmosphere (through the carbon price), and use some of this money to build renewable energy. It’s a good start, but we could do much more.

We could stop giving tax-payer handouts to big polluters in the form of subsidies and rebates. We could make sure that people who produce renewable energy get a fair price for feeding it into the grid, with a feed-in-tarriff. We could invest more in trains and trams than we do in roads. We could build big solar thermal plants instead of coal plants.

To politicians on 3-year terms these solutions might seem pie in the sky – but to young people whose future is at risk, they are a necessity.

That’s why the AYCC was formed five years ago and why it’s still growing today:  to demand our leaders be bold enough to invest in solutions, because as a generation, surely we’re worth it.
 

As National Director of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Ellen Sandell is one of Australia’s leading commentators and campaigners on the issue of climate change. For the past five years she has also been General Manager and Victorian Director of the AYCC. Throughout that time, AYCC has grown from a handful of friends wanting to change the world, to a huge organisation with over 70,000 members, a national media profile and the ear of politicians due to it’s high-impact campaigns.Ellen has won several awards for her work, including being joint winner of Australia’s most prestigious environment award for young people – the Banksia ‘Young Environmentalist of the Year’ award in 2009, and winning the Melbourne Award for Individual Contribution to Environment in 2009. Ellen regularly speaks and writes on climate change issues, and has been published in The Age, the National Times, ABC’s Unleashed, Peppermint magazine and more.

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