Blog.
It's Wakey Wakey time
Swansea, Brighton, Dundee, Bristol, London, Edinburgh, Truro, Cardiff, Leicester, Liverpool, Malaysia, America, Australia, Trinidad & Tobago, Norway, the list goes on and on.
Today at 1pm, across the UK and right across the world, we walk out and send a climate wake up call to our leaders. Together, we take another pioneering step to demand the 42% carbon cuts we need to change our course from climate catastrophe towards cleaner and greener opportunities.
Much of what we’re doing has never been done before and it makes clear that we can make a difference as individuals. And there’s lots you can do today to multiply the power of one.
There’s still time to tell friends and send a press release to the media about your Walk Out via the site. Don’t forget to film your Walk Out, upload the video to Youtube and then send it to TV stations via the new Amplify feature we’ve added to the site today – this is the single most powerful way we can amplify our voice.
Thank you. Good luck. And see you on the outside at 1pm.
A long way for a small movement with big ideas
Congratulations and thank you. BeThatChange is 6 months old.
On September 16th 2009 we launched with #pm2un, the world’s first Twitterstorm campaign, designed to get Gordon Brown to Copenhagen. Joined by Stephen Fry and loads of likeminded organisations, we achieved what we set out to achieve - just 5 days after it launched, Downing Street announced the Prime Minister’s attendance on Twitter using the #pm2un hashtag.
For our follow up, #Hope2Cope, we went after an even bigger fish, President Obama. Hope2Cope united organisations in the US, UK and around the world. Pretty cool given we were just a month old. Eventually, over 120 heads of state attended the summit, more than at any event in history, and we each played our part in this.
We mobilised to support The Wave last November, helping to make it the biggest climate march the UK has ever seen. And more recently, you’ve supported the people of Haiti with your donations.
Your actions have had measurable impact. But it’s also the impact that is harder to measure that we can be equally proud of. The impact of our innovation, open source campaigning and its ability to unite and amplify the actions of diverse range of people and organisations around shared goals. This is a new way to seek change.
Our pioneering approach is set to continue with The Wake Up Walk Out, a day of mass direct action, 2010 style. We’ll be in touch to give you more details in the next week or so. In the meantime, we just wanted to say thanks. Our movement is nothing without you and people like you.
Haiti Appeal
A week has passed since an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale hit Haiti. Aid is beginning to arrive… but not nearly enough. The capital, Port-au-Prince, lies devastated. And rescue efforts haven’t reached rural areas or the hardest-hit South yet. Up to 200,000 may have died already, and without your help countless more will perish.
Please give what you can via DEC, UNICEF, British Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières.
Whether you spare £2, £5 or £50, donating will be the most important thing you do today.
The wrong quote
Today, much like yesterday, a billion fellow humans remain hungry, struggling (and many thousands failing) to live on less than a dollar a day. Just a few hours away on a cheap flight, bailed out bankers are days from their billion pound Christmas bonuses. Those of us who have jobs after the global economic meltdown continue to pay our taxes to keep banks like RBS afloat while they dismantle what’s left of our future by funding Canada’s tar sand oil production. We stare into the abyss of a global ecological meltdown and what political will can it muster? None.
It is not necessary to analyse the detail of Copenhagen’s climate agreement to conclude it has failed us. All of us. As disappointment subsides, anger begins. For, as certain as its failure came to bear it seems we continue to career with equal certainty toward the irreversible climate change that awaits us all 84 months from now.
We will look back at this summit and ask why? Why could they save the banks and not our planet? When it is too late we will look to the Prime Ministers and Presidents, particularly those still grasping their Nobel statuettes, and ask what were they thinking?
On October 9th President Obama accepted the Nobel prize as “as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century." Climate change is our greatest challenge and he has not confronted it. When all climate hell breaks loose sometime around December 2016 it will become clear that the man who captured the hearts of minds of our planet also sealed its fate.
But of course, he is not alone in this mass dereliction of duty. On my TV screen yesterday I heard Ed Miliband quote one of Churchill’s famous wartime addresses when he offered that Copenhagen represented the “end of the beginning”. Perhaps he meant the beginning of the end of arctic sea ice, the end of glaciers that supply drinking water to billions of the world’s population, the end of South Asia and Africa and the end of millions of species and millions of lives. This is what the science tells us will happen. This is the future their failure has succeeded in securing.
I am tired of their rhetoric. I am sick of their posturing. I am scared by their inability to act. 6 billion of us put our future in the hands of 100 heads of state and asked that they deliver. They did not, and never was so little owed by so many to so few.
Hope to Cope
It’s official - President Obama will attend the Copenhagen Climate Summit - the first US President ever to do so.
What we achieved together with the #Hope2Cope twitterstorm was impressive, pioneering and something we can feel proud of. And it’s certainly convention on occasions like this to claim a victory. Yet, rather than feeling victorious, I feel troubled.
Not just because of the ‘green photo op on the way to the Nobel photo op’ nature of Obama’s visit to the talks. But because in this instance I feel it is hard to be certain about how much our actions effected Obama’s decision. And while I remain troubled by this, I have come to a conclusion.
If truth be told, there is very rarely certainty in our action.
But there is perilous certainty in our inaction.
So, whether we can take the credit for his attendance or not, we can take credit for what we did. We did something, and that really is something. We raised our voice. We did not watch passively as history and our future passed us by.
Nothing gets nothing but we had the heart, brains and balls to do something. And something gets something. Whether it will always get what we want or need, comes with no guarantee - but it does come with hope. So we may never know whether we got Obama to the talks. But I know this much – we got Hope to Cope.
And, whilst writing this I may have little faith in what President Obama will achieve while at Copenhagen, I also know this. I have faith in us. So on behalf of everyone at BeThatChange, thank you.
From the four corners of the world came one voice. Yours.
With the #pm2un twitterstorm, we took our first steps, rising up to call for Gordon Brown’s attendance at Copenhagen. And it worked.
With #Hope2Cope we increased the scale of our ambition – the leader of the free world. And alone, without the celebrity backing we enjoyed on #pm2un, we created something that was bigger, more diverse and more united than we could have imagined.
We built a greater momentum. And we built a greater movement. On a new platform upon which all our voices were amplified, the call for Obama to attend Copenhagen came from all over the world.
From Greenpeace International and its outposts in India and the UK. From Oxfam internationally and here in Great Britain. From the likes of Tweetdeck and Creative Review. From Grist, 1sky and the Huffington Post. From Avaaz Copenhagen, the Guardian, Stop Climate Chaos, the UK Youth Climate Coalition, many other organisations from the four corners of the globe, and most importantly, from you.
You could have waited, and hoped for change. But you chose to act and Be That Change. Thank you. Because, in the early hours of this morning Reuters reported that Obama will now travel to Copenhagen to attend the talks if it will help clinch a deal. We played our part yet again and we may have got #Hope2Cope, where it's badly needed.
But ultimately, whether the President attends the talks or not, it cannot detract from what we achieved with the #Hope2Cope twitterstorm.
There are no precedents for the pioneering steps we take together to find new responses to the new challenges we face. We hope you’ll continue to join us as we campaign on issues that matter to each and every one of us. For now, you can view our kaleidoscopic mobilisation on the #Hope2Cope twitterstorm page, which still continues to grow with #hope2cope tweets.
As for what’s next? Well, with the most important meeting in the history of our planet on the brink of failing our planet, failing the world’s poorest people and failing our future, the big question is how do we respond?
With a quiet, clever, revolution – a day of mass direct action. Watch this space.
No show? No way.
“Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”
President Elect Obama on confronting the challenge of climate change, November 18th 2008.
Just imagine for a second.
Cast your mind back to April of this year when G20 leaders met in London to solve the global financial crisis. The idea of President Obama saying, ‘nah, don’t fancy it’ would have been unfathomable. Unthinkable.
So why, 86 months from a climate tipping point of no return and less than 60 days from the most important meeting in the history of humankind, does Obama feel that he does not need to make a commitment to attend Copenhagen and deal with the global climate crisis?
Laying awake in bed the other night it came to me in those terms, and when it did it seemed so far beyond stubbornness, political manoeuvring, or frankly, belief. It feels like dereliction of duty on a potentially catastrophic scale.
It’s pretty straightforward, really. By making a commitment to go, Obama joins Gordon Brown in throwing down a gauntlet to other leaders. There’s too much at stake to play games. And as someone who resides on this planet and rejoiced at Obama’s existence and election, it’s beyond disappointing. The science is clear. In prevaricating, the President seems to be playing a strange political game with our future. And our lives.
This is his chance, more than any other I believe, not just to inspire us, but every other leader at Copenhagen, to ensure the fair, ambition and binding agreement the planet needs if we are to continue living on it.
For once, it would be nice if our leaders, rather than giving in to our pressure, actually led and gave us greater faith in their leadership.
Until then, I have faith in us. So, on October we launch the #Hope2Cope twitterstorm to get the leader of the free world to the most important meeting in the world.
We will continue, in the absence of leadership, to take the lead. We’ll rise up together and demand what should already exist. A commitment to do the right thing - the only thing - given the time we have to solve the problems we face.
From the start, Obama had written on his campaign homepage that he asked not just to believe in his abilities but in ours. So, on the 28th October let’s believe in our ability to write our own history.
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. We are that idea.
A short story about what you did.
On September 16th BeThatChange went live. And, on that sunny Wednesday morning from a flat in Bristol we launched the world’s first Twitterstorm campaign - #pm2un – to get Gordon Brown to the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen.
At 9am #pm2un meant nothing. By 9pm the same day, it returned 51,000 Google search results. A few tweets became a few hundred tweets. Then, mid-morning, Guardian ECO, the UK Youth Climate Coalition and Stop Climate Chaos added their voice to the call. A few hundred tweets became a several thousand tweets.
At lunchtime Stephen Fry joined the Twitterstorm, and in doing so brought the issue to the attention of his 760,000 or so followers. Then came Greenpeace, Oxfam, 1010, People & Planet until, 6 hours into the life of our new movement, at 3pm, we received a direct message from Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for the Environment and Climate Change asking what our priorities were.
We told him.
On Ed Miliband’s pledge page, just one day after the launch of our #pm2un ‘the Prime Minister attending Copenhagen to help deliver a deal’ had received 93% of the votes.
In one day the BeThatChange Twitter following went from zero to more than one thousand. And it’s still growing. In just one day you built our movement, made it stronger and increased our ability to end poverty and secure a future for our planet.
Then, late on the evening of Sunday 20th September, just 5 days after our campaign started, the Prime Minister announced he will attend the summit in Copenhagen and urged other leaders to do the same.
Of course, we were not alone in this success. But we were part of it. Our Twitterstorm took the work that had gone before and created a tipping point.
What we did made a difference and may well change the course of history. Of course, it’s just the start. But what a start.
About the blog.
The BeThatChange blog is a log of the environment and anti-poverty movement. The site is operated by BeThatChange staff, with frequent contributions from volunteers, members and partner organisations.