On Tuesday, President Barack Obama earned the opportunity to lead our country for another four years. And that means that our movement must fight harder for climate action than we ever have before. The candidate that the fossil fuel lobby spent millions trying to get into the White House lost last. But if clean energy is going to win, our movement must be ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work right away. There isn’t a moment to lose.
Big Oil, Big Coal and the 1% pledged to spend record amounts -- over $1 billion -- trying to rollback the progress we’ve made on building a clean energy economy, but once again we showed that people power can overcome. And it almost worked.
For the first time in many of our lives, climate wasn’t even mentioned in the Presidential debates. Instead, we saw a race to the bottom as the candidates competed over who had the plan to burn the planet the fastest.
But time and time again, our movement rose to the occasion; we organized people power to stand up to all the dirty money, and misleading TV ads that led to a near silence on climate change. We organized with people in the grassroots to demand climate action, and demand the candidates break their silence.
And on Tuesday, thanks to many of you, our generation proved it’s power and it’s passion when we mobilized like never before: in 2012, Millennials were any even greater share of the electorate than we were in 2008. Nobody expected this. With all the challenges and growing cynicism, people expected that youth vote would stay home; but we didn’t, we showed them that no matter how great the challenge, we’re determined to meet it.
