For Joe Misiewicz, climate change isn’t just a global problem. It’s a generational responsibility.

‘We are the leaders of tomorrow, we are the ones who will enjoy whatever’s left of the world,’ said Misiewicz, president of The NewHouse, a student-run advertising agency at Syracuse University. ‘It’s important for us to get involved.’

Misiewicz, a senior advertising major, is helping to run the Hopenhagen campaign at SU. Hopenhagen is a citizen movement created to stimulate global awareness about the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen known as COP15. The conference, which began Monday and will be held until Dec. 18, will include 192 leaders from around the world discussing their domestic commitments to reducing carbon emissions.

As there’s no international bureaucracy to demand environmental regulations, these organized social movements hope to prompt many countries, including the United States, to adopt them.

Part of Hopenhagen’s mission statement is ‘to create a grassroots movement that’s powerful enough to influence change,’ according to its Web site.

While the message of Hopenhagen has been spread through Facebook messages, campus events and class presentations to collect signatures, there’s only so much change that the social movement can enact. Having the social movement supporting this dialogue helps show the leaders just how important this issue is to citizens from all over the world.

At SU, Misiewicz’s team has been collecting signatures to add to the global petition. The NewHouse was approached by the main advertising agency of Hopenhagen, which wanted to get the movement started on a college campus, he said.

The Hopenhagen Web site, as well as its print and television commercials, is highly stylized and attractive to capture the attention, Misiewicz said. Coupled with social media campaigns and cryptic messaging known as ‘blitz marketing’ to advertise its events, The NewHouse knows it’s reaching out to an audience that’s often hard to capture, he said.

‘I think our generation is very jaded, and we need something pretty to wake us up and think about,’ Misiewicz said. ‘There are a lot of causes out there and we could say, ‘Oh, I don’t have time for this. I have other things going on.’ You shock them if you grab their attention in a certain way.’

Helen Liang, the new business director for The NewHouse and a junior advertising and communications and rhetorical studies major, said she is hopeful that the college generation can make a big difference in the grassroots movements to address climate change.

‘I think college students and people in our generation just are so open-minded and have so much in them to actually implement change. We’re taking in so much information,’ Liang said. ‘So many movements sprung from people who are in their early 20s.’

David Driesen, an SU law professor, said some climate change is unavoidable. There would need to be about a 50 percent cut in global emissions by 2050 to avoid its worst effects, he said. Such a requirement is a tall order for a country like the United States, he added, because its economy and production is very reliant on fossil fuels – a main source of damaging carbon emissions. The United States in particular has been so resistant to climate regulations because of the ideology behind a free market, he said.

‘For the countries making the reductions, there are two concerns,’ he said. ‘They want to reduce emissions, but they’re also worried about the effects on the economy. And no country is more worried about this than the United States.’

Eban Goodstein, an environmental educator and economist, runs the Bard Center for Environmental Policy at Bard College. As an environmental activist, he organized the Focus the Nation initiative that created the National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions. He emphasized the importance of citizen activism for climate change.

Having citizens take part in grassroots initiatives is a main way to see policy changes, he said. While people hoped for change in electing President Barack Obama, Goodstein said they need to continue organizing in order to see any effects.

‘That’s the way we’ve always overcome that kind of challenge – through organized grassroots social movements where people rise up and demand change in Washington,’ he said. ‘That happened with the Obama election. But I think people have become complacent and now they feel like it’s just one man’s job to get the work done. Absolutely not true. People need to continue to organize and weigh in if they expect to see change happen. And it will, if people do.’

mdanie01@syr.edu

Published on December 7, 2009 at 12:00 pm