The Push Europe campaign in 2012
After a really inspiring year in 2011 with the CV and 1-cent actions; at Durban in Brussels, last December’s youth climate justice convergence, young people from all over Europe decided to work on the second phase of the Push Europe campaign. Here is what we came up with.
The world is on a precipice. We are facing multiple crises at the same time, and decisions made on the highest political levels do not seem to reflect what would be required in reality to achieve transformative change in the ways we treat the planet and each other.
The climate crisis entails all the different aspects of the interlinked global problems, from assertive neoliberal economic expansion to the failure of popular education in communicating this shared global issue.
Getting increasingly worried about the ongoing climate crisis and facing the failure of the global community to act, we started to ask the questions:
- Why is there no progress on such a fundamental issue for current and future generations?
- Who is holding back politicians from tackling climate change?
By looking at how progressive proposals are getting watered down by Europe’s most carbon intensive companies, the answers started to materialise..
We are not going to see progressive decisions as long as these large corporations have greater access to the European political institutions than the citizens themselves.
The carbon intensive industry lobby use enormous amount of money and resources to block effective solutions to climate change and environmental problems. They frequently do so off the public record and whilst advertising their practices as being green and environmentally sound.
Therefore, Push Europe in 2012 will work on exposing the corporate influence over decisions about climate change and the environment.
We will use this framing throughout our messaging and capacity-building activities. We will use upcoming political hooks to mobilise youth across Europe to take action, to get our campaign into the public domain and to inspire people to get involved. We will also work on the national levels, taking action and organising capacity-building events to expand the longer-term movement of young people.
International Stop the Tar Sands day of action
We are working with many groups around Europe to tell decision makers loud and clear: we don’t want tar sands in Europe!
Instead of chasing short term profit for oil giants, politicians should consider the long term sustainability of the current and future generations.
Read more about our plans, and do your own action by using our toolkit!