The Clean Energy Ministerial and the world comes to Pittsburgh today through Friday!

As former Vice President Al Gore said in yesterday’s live-streamed NY Times Climate Forward event, “this is the most critical moment” for humanity, and a time to ask ourselves, who are we? Can we actualize our care and concern for future generations with cleaner choices today? I was privileged to watch him and many others, particularly youth and women from the Global South, speak their truth about the state of climate change in our world today. As many said in addition to Gore, hope is an antidote to climate anxiety, particularly through climate activism.

Here in our small corner of the world, we are about to host the first ever Clean Energy Forum from September 21 – 22, starting today with meetings of dignitaries from around the world. The writing is sky-high on the wall and riverside cliffs of our formerly Rust Belt town, it is time for real climate action! I am even more excited that Pittsburgh’s NGO community has helped organize the Clean Energy Justice Convergence, as a wake-up call for our region and for conference attendees, as much as for our local, ongoing understanding of threats and opportunities.

Yesterday’s NY Times webcast featured two stellar climate heroes from Africa, Vanessa Nakate, a climate activist and founder of the Africa-based Rise Up Movement and Ayakha Melithafa, a climate activist from Cape Town, the founder of the Ayakha Melithafa Foundation, through which she runs programs to raise climate awareness among marginalized communities and youth. Ayakha noted that “before we speak the language of critique, we should speak the language of hope” and I was intrigued to hear that she will soon launch an effort to bring project based learning to schools in South Africa. As she pointed out, our students of today shouldn’t seek jobs in dying industries because they don’t know about green technology and green jobs.

From Pittsburgh to Paris to South Africa, we are seeing new visions and new hope for our region and our world. There is a real danger to repeat the fossil-fuel mistakes of the past, and drag dirty energy into our potentially bright new future which might be on the horizon. If we instead invest in technologies that need to die a not-so-natural death, we will condemn to death millions if not billions of generations to come.

Every moment matters in this race to preserve our wonderful world, our people, and our planet. Again, to quote Al Gore, it is (past) time to put our shoulders to the wheel, and make history.