At dusk on Sunday, November 22, Ottawa youth will gather with solar lights to form an image of the sun and call for 100% renewable energy in Canada during their lifetime. Please join my four grandkids and I on Parliament Hill to send a strong message from Canadian youth about the urgency of transitioning to clean energy.
We know that future generations – our young children and grandchildren – will be the most impacted by climate change. For decades I accepted to remain a witness of climate change. I knew it was happening but the impacts would be centuries from now. Surely our technologies would evolve to solve the problem I thought.
But that all changed with the birth of my four grandchildren. If it hadn’t been for them, and my growing knowledge of climate change and global warming, I would probably have spent my retirement enjoying the “good life” as the majority of boomers do. But that would not be my path.
I thank my grandchildren for steering me in the right direction – the path of climate activism. In his book, Storms of my Grandchildren, James Hansen explains how his grandkids changed his life:
My perception of being a “witness” [to global warming] changed, leading to a hard decision: I did not want my grandchildren, someday in the future, to look back and say, “Opa understood what was happening, but he did not make it clear.”
I’ve struggled with how to discuss climate change with my grandchildren and how I can involve them in my climate activism. I want them to face climate reality but still retain the hope of a better future, a future they fully deserve. I believe that they must be involved at a very early age in the socio-political process that will save their planet. On November 22 in Ottawa, there is such an opportunity for them to participate in a Solar Youth Power event which will send a powerful message to our new government.
Solar Youth Power on Parliament Hill
Ahead of the Paris climate talks at the UN in December, this is a unique opportunity for children and youth in the Ottawa-Gatineau region to express to the newly elected Canadian government the urgency of fighting climate change by transitioning our country rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Each child/youth will be given a solar lantern to hold and together with other lantern bearers will light up the dark to form an image of the sun. At dusk, aerial photos will be taken of this formation and shared widely with the media and on social media platforms forming part of a global effort to shine the light of hope for a sustainable future.
“The idea came from two sources,” says Julie Cook, board member for Cool it for the Kids.
The first was the Act on Climate March in Quebec City in April. In the crowd I saw a few young people with symbols on their faces: a circle with an X through it, meaning “no pipelines”. I thought it was an interesting symbol because of its simplicity.
The second was reading Naomi Klein’s book ‘This Changes Everything’, in which she outlines how the environmental movement needs to not only fight against things like pipelines and logging in sensitive areas but also to clearly articulate what it is fighting for.
Out of these two concepts came the idea to give children and youth the opportunity to form a simple image of the sun as a hopeful symbol of the transition to 100% renewable energy. I pitched this idea to Gaye Taylor, Executive Director of Cool It for the Kids, who welcomed the idea and we got to work right away.”
The activity will symbolize the importance and the urgency to take immediate action to transition our country to 100% renewable energy. This is an opportunity for you to make your voice heard. There will be 250 lanterns that need young hands to hold. Bring your child or grandchild and join us.
Please confirm their attendance and reserve a lantern for them at the links found below. We hope to see you there! Help Make This Happen!
To Join Solar Youth Power on Parliament Hill. Click Here!
Help make the event a success with your Indiegogo donation.
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Rolly Montpellier is the Founder and Managing Editor of BoomerWarrior.Org. He’s a Climate Reality leader, a Blogger and a Climate Activist. He’s a member of Climate Reality Canada, Citizens’ Climate Lobby (Ottawa) and 350.Org (Ottawa), the Ethical Team (as an influencer) and Global Population Speakout.
Rolly has been published widely in both print and online publications. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.
I have a solar powered radio, I have a crank radio & lantern, a shake flashlight, their all currently useful technologies but I think you will be very disappointed if you believe that solar panels & wind turbines can power the future.
They like the OIL that built them are TEMPORARY, they are not “renewable” if there is no more OIL to manufacture them with, they will wear out & end up in the trash heap & in the dust bin of history.
If some expert climate scientists are correct, your children will only have the grave to look forward to, not a future illuminated with solar & wind energy.
It looks as thought we can look forward to more severe weather, more killing heat waves, more crop failures, more starving children with big brown eyes staring out of your TV set with religious organizations begging for more money to feed them.
We won’t be able to feed them or many of us either.
But keep fighting the fight “Boomer Warrior” to stop the burning of fossil fuels, we cannot keep using them even though to do so will quickly collapse our high energy burning civilization, it is not sustainable, it will collapse, of that I am certain.
I have a solar powered radio, I have a crank radio & lantern, a shake flashlight, their all currently useful technologies but I think you will be very disappointed if you believe that solar panels & wind turbines can power the future.
They like the OIL that built them are TEMPORARY, they are not “renewable” if there is no more OIL to manufacture them with, they will wear out & end up in the trash heap & in the dust bin of history.
If some expert climate scientists are correct, your children will only have the grave to look forward to, not a future illuminated with solar & wind energy.
It looks as thought we can look forward to more severe weather, more killing heat waves, more crop failures, more starving children with big brown eyes staring out of your TV set with religious organizations begging for more money to feed them.
We won’t be able to feed them or many of us either.
But keep fighting the fight “Boomer Warrior” to stop the burning of fossil fuels, we cannot keep using them even though to do so will quickly collapse our high energy burning civilization, it is not sustainable, it will collapse, of that I am certain.
This is NOT a “duplicate” comment” it has not been posted yet.
Sheila – thanks for your response. I’m not sure what happened with the posting. At first it didn’t show up and then it appeared twice???
It’s hard to disagree with your morose painting of a difficult future for many of our grandchildren depending on where they live on the planet. As you know, initially there will be climate winners and climate losers. In the end, we will all be losers if we don’t act NOW, and relentlessly, following the Paris COP21 climate summit.
I will keep up the fight – thank U for the support and encouragement.
Your right, I do have a pessimistic view of the future but I also don’t believe in just giving up.
No matter what the cost to the economy, we must stop using fossil fuels, it’s just that I don’t see any way to avoid collapse if we do.
I feel collapse of this civilization is much better that losing most life on this planet & we are well down the road to extinction.
No matter what we do, collapse is a certainty.
Shurly governments with advanced technology & education must know where we are headed if we don’t make drastic changes in how we live, 7.3 billion humans & still growing is not sustainable & I see a terrible future ahead as OIL declines & we have nothing that can replace it.
Solar panels & wind turbines cannot supply the massive amount of ENERGY & raw material we now get from fossil resources, it’s medicine, fuel, fiber, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, paint, plastics, transportation, lubricants, & millions of other products we use every day.
This is what those people who are pushing solar panels & wind turbines as our “saviors” overlook, they ONLY produce electricity & that in only small, erractic & unreliable amounts even worse, they too are dependent upon these temporary fossil resources.
The only way anything can be “renewable” is if they are able to reproduce themselves, high tech “renewables” cannot do that – yet & probably never will.
Tunnel vision is a great weakness of many people & scientists, they see only through their own tunnel, unable to see how it relates to other disciplines or how what they do will affect other systems.
The fossil fuel industry knows only it’s own little part of our world, it depends for its existence upon that resource, it must keep that resource in our economy no matter what, it cannot or refuses to see how much damage our dependence upon those fossil resources is doing or it’s profits are more important than the environment that they believe is something we could do without.
They are of course very wrong.
Sheila, you and I will be long gone off this earth by the time alternative products are found to replace all the ‘oil’ products that we currently have, but progress will come. It always does. We don’t always like the process because it can be difficult. That’s what the Luddites thought. They were a group of weavers from my home town, who objected to the mechanisation of weaving looms, fearing it would bring in low paid, unskilled workers to take their jobs (where have we heard that before). This was in 1811 and the riots spread all over the country as an outcry against what they saw as ‘unsustainable technology.’ It was very intense, and the army was called in to quell the ‘outrage.’ As we know, time moved on and the mechanisation grew. Nowadays, most textiles are made in Asian countries and Britain’s textile industry is limited to a few cottage manufacturers.
Anything is possible … It only takes the will of the people. Oh, and solar panels are going to become something completely different with the incision of graphine and nanotube technologies under development. I’ve even seen the first solar glass to be used in windows. One day (not so long into the future), they will make entire houses out of solar materials…our grandchildren will be generating all their electricity needs from their own house walls. How exciting!
Power to the Solar Youth on Parliament Hill…they are the future and I think it looks very bright.
A hundred years ago the weavers weren’t fighting to stop other people from taking their jobs, they were fighting against the LARGE WEAVING MACHINES that were to take away their home spun cloth work. They lost of course, big money as usual, won.
No, everything is NOT possible, we are limited by the laws of physics & nature, there are limits to what we are capable of doing. We are hitting those limits.
We know far more about reality now than what they knew 100 years ago, just as we know far more than the ignorant writers of those ancient “holy” books knew.
It’s those laws that will prevent us from replacing fossil resources with renewables, REAL renewables not those so called high tech “renewables” that are dependent upon OIL to exist.
Our high tech renewables require enormous amounts of concentrated, constant, portable energy to produce, something that no renewable is capable of. These high tech “renewables” also require raw materials from FOSSIL RESOURCES & vast amounts of ore must be mined to produce their exotic materials, no “renewable” is capable of doing that either.
If we survive climate change, the renewables we use will not be high tech, it will be our own muscle, wood, moving water, wind mills & animal muscle if we haven’t killed them all off in the chaos after our collapse.
Much of what we have accomplished will be destroyed, our domesticated animals and plants will be killed & eaten, we will be lucky to save some to start over.
If by “lucky” you mean to still be alive to eat what ever contaminated life is still around to eat.
Have a successful event Rolly.
Thank U Colette.
wow, good to see the young leading the way!
Thank you for noticing the post. And yes it’s important to involve youth in climate action. After all, they will inherit the problems we have allowed to happen. But we still have time to solve climate change if we act now and with resolve.
This is a wonderful initiative. We’ll be there on Sunday!
Wendy – I will be there with 4 grandkids. I also have friends who are bringing their granddaughter. I’m looking forward to it.