Must-Read: "Yes, They Could. So They Did."

Thomas Friedman had a great op-ed this weekend in the New York Times: “Yes, They Could. So They Did.” In it, he recounts his experience meeting two young American women in New Delhi that are working to create solutions to the global warming crisis through tenacity and innovation.

Friedman encountered Caroline Howe and Alexis Ringwald when they offered to drive him around New Dehli in a plug-in electric car that was also powered by rooftop solar panels:

“India is full of climate innovators, so spread out across this huge country that many people don’t get to see that these solutions are working right now,” said Howe. “We wanted to find a way to bring people together around existing solutions to inspire more action and more innovation. There’s no time left to just talk about the problem.”

Howe and Ringwald thought the best way to do that might be a climate solutions road tour, using modified electric cars from India’s Reva Electric Car Company, whose C.E.O. Ringwald knew. They persuaded him to donate three of his cars and to retrofit them with longer-life batteries that could travel 90 miles on a single six-hour charge — and to lay on a solar roof that would extend them farther.

Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 5, they drove the cars on a 2,100-mile trip from Chennai to New Delhi, stopping in 15 cities and dozens of villages, training Indian students to start their own climate action programs and filming 20 videos of India’s top home-grown energy innovations. They also brought along a solar-powered band, plus a luggage truck that ran on plant oil extracted from jatropha and pongamia, plants locally grown on wasteland. A Bollywood dance group joined at different stops and a Czech who learned about their trip on YouTube hopped on with his truck that ran on vegetable-oil waste.

Friedman, describing his encounter with the women, then wrote:

After a year of watching adults engage in devastating recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in the global climate talks, it’s refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation.

It’s great to see Friedman acknowledging the creative solutions young people are dreaming up and implementing to address some of the biggest problems facing our world today. Read the entire article and let us know what you think!

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Rock the Vote Bio: Rock the Vote was founded in 1990 to organize artists and fight against censorship of musicians. Since then we've evolved to focus on empowering young people to get involved in the political process. We use pop culture, peer-to-peer organizing, and the latest technology to raise visibility of politics and demystify the process of registering to vote. @rockthevote Email the author at: blog(at)rockthevote.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 12:52 pm and is filed under climate change, young activists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.