This summer, we're seeing which country can sign up the most campuses to take part in the official competition starting this September, when teams will win points for achieving climate solutions.
The race to a clean energy future is the greatest challenge of our time and young people are ready to lead the way. Together, we'll make our campuses models of sustainability and spur our nations to create whole new industries. Ready, set, GO!
We are getting mighty close to the launch of the Race! For those who were expecting an announcement today, apologies. The new website will take a few more days to complete and release. But it's not too early to start working on projects. All the info you need is here: www.greatpowerrace.org/resources
Also we need to address there is no deadline for the registration, never too late to work for your campus' sustainability, just sign up!
Some of you are already heading back to classes, and some are still enjoying the remaining weeks of summer. In either case, it’s time to start donning our racing gear -- er, ok, it’s not actually a sporting event -- it’s time to start brainstorming and developing plans for clean energy and climate solutions projects for once the Great Power Race officially starts in September.
To help with those preparations we are releasing two guides that will help get you started...
Click here for a resources page where you can download both guides and more.
The first is a guide that explains more details about how the Great Power Race works and offers a few tips for how to start preparing for projects. The second is an organizer guide from 350.org that is a helpful tool for any kind of community organizing, particularly surrounding the 10/10/10 Global Work Party. (Be sure to sign up your campus team for a work party event too! This is a great way to showcase what you are doing for the Great Power Race. www.350.org/1010).
You can access both guides and more here: www.greatpowerrace.org/resources
We’re just weeks away from the launch of the Race. Time to get ready.
Thanks all,
Fei and the Great Power Race coordinating team
P.S. 3 campuses have now taken advantage of the chance to get a headstart and earn points before the race officially opens. This opportunity will close once the Race begins on September 1st, so take advantage now: www.greatpowerrace.org/headstart
Congratulations to Nanjing Forestry University! The first team on the Great Power Race scoreboard, and the first team with a headstart of 20 points.
We have been corresponding with the students there recently, and rest assured they are ready to race. They have a clear passion and energy for climate and clean energy issues, and they are prepared to charge ahead with solutions projects. We're very excited to see where that will lead.
How did they earn 20 points already? The race doesn't officially start until September, but last week we announced the chance to get a headstart by spreading the word online or over the phone. You can learn more about that ongoing opportunity here: www.greatpowerrace.org/headstart
The Nanjing Forestry students were the first to jump ahead by exectuing not 3, but 5 of the 6 options for earning those headstart points. (1) They emailed to their friends inviting them to join the Great Power Race. (2) They joined the group on Douban and shared it with their friends. (3) After they watched the video, they posted and shared it on Renren. (4) Several of them left comments about the video on Youku. And (5) they put up a post about the Great Power Race on their blog: click here. So good!
Now it's your turn. Pick up your phone, call your friends and tell them "the race is on!"
This summer, Beijing's first energy and environmental technology platform was founded. 23 universities and research institutes are joining together in coopertation on energy, water, atmosphere, light pollution, and noise issues and more (click here for more information in Mandarin). Besides the internal collaboration, they will help more than eight hundred enterprises with experimenting, innovation and environmental certification. It is tremendously uplifting to see such sustainable coalitions of schools becoming more of a trend in Chinese society as well as India and the US. It is just this sort of collaboration that is needed for us to combat the global climate crisis.
Although the great power race is a competition, it is also an opportunity for students in China, India, and the US to work locally, and also connected and collaborating globally. We are looking forward to hearing the stories of students communicating and working for a better future across borders, once the Race begins. Great Power Race teams will be competing for the most, and most creative clean energy and climate solutions projects. But this is about more than competition. Our generation needs to show we are leading the transformation towards a green society together. Yes, we believe we can make one plus one plus one equal greater than three!
Another exciting opportunity for collaboration which is coming soon is the global work party - 10/10/10. It is a great chance for you to connect your campus efforts with community members in your city or village and take Great Power Race projects to the next level -- roughly half-way within the Race. It's not less than 2 months until 10/10/10, so be sure mark your calendars and piece it into your planning. Let's get to work together, for our common future!
Dear Friends,
I'm writing to you from the United States, where a new phase of the movement for clean energy and climate solutions is just beginning -- AND, we're announcing an opportunity for you to earn points for the Great Power Race, even before it really starts!
Some of you may know that the US Senate recently walked away from its latest attempt to deal with climate and clean energy in any sort of large-scale way. Granted, what they had been debating was already alarmingly insufficient, but at least it was forcing a national focus on climate change. Now, despite 2010 looking like it will be the hottest year on record, climate and clean energy are off the table completely. Our generation will simply not accept this, and that's why we're taking our movement to a new level with campaigns like Power Vote in the US, the Great Power Race (GPR), and the 10/10/10 Global Work Party.
And for GPR, here's an easy way for you to join in the action now. We're offering the chance to earn points for the Race a bit early, by helping launch and spread GPR through a few easy online steps...
Click here for the full instruction on how to earn these early points.
We're just one month away from the official start to the real "race" part of the Great Power Race. In September the website, www.greatpowerrace.org, will transform to have a whole set of new tools allowing campus teams to earn points for climate solutions project they register online. Today is your chance to give your team a head start, and earn a few easy points: click here.
We will be sending more information about the scoring system and project ideas soon, but until then, it's certainly never too early to start plotting some ideas for clean energy projects on your campus to initiate this September.
Thanks for starting early, everyone,
Whit and the Great Power Race coordinating team
One of the highly motivating aspects of working for the Great Power Race was the vision that we began with to witness campus teams across India, China and the US implementing various climate solutions. Hitherto confined to research papers and a few case studies, solutions that we had always lobbied to get deployed are finally taking off the ground; thanks to the commitment of young students who have recognized and are addressing global issues. Four months of brain storming, group discussions and youth outreach is finally yielding result with a few campuses in India and I could say the same with China and the US, already beginning to implement projects under GPR. Sufficed to say, many are vying for top honors in the race!
Gokaraju Rangaraju institute of engineering and technology, CVR college of engineering and Methodist college are a few examples of campuses that have begun projects in India. One of their biggest apprehensions was the consent of the management that is necessary to begin any work and it was a pleasant surprise to all of them when the authorities were delighted with the prospects of clean energy projects on campus. Managements are in fact encouraging students to sign up for the race and work on solutions. This only proves that winning the race isn't the only driving force for these colleges but it is the desire to tackle this issue locally.
Innovation and ingenuity are deeply imbibed in these students and the projects that some teams have begun working on stand testimony to that fact. From rain water harvesting & electronic waste management to green jobs & environmental education, teams are leaving no stone unturned in turning their campus green. One of the most fascinating solutions that can be implemented both in the urban and rural milieu are Briquettes. If you had ever thought of putting agricultural waste to good use as a cooking fuel, you would have discovered briquettes! It is the end product of a process of compression of saw dust followed by its extrusion and it is a good replacement for LPG and mostly firewood
On an average working month, a 5000 student campus uses 60(x 1150=Rs.69,000, $1500) LPG Cylinders. If we calculate this equation by replacing LPG with briquettes, which costs around Rs.26,000 ($565), we save a whopping Rs.43,000($935) per month!* The only pre-requisite is to set-up a briquette fueled stove in the college canteen is to buy the biomass cook stoves, which costs Rs 9000($195) per 20 kilos. A simple solution that found a lot of takers across campuses in the country and which proves to be fuel & cost efficient !
Such solutions are aplenty around us and as the race progresses, we will share more success stories of how campus teams are implementing clean energy projects and creating win-win scenarios.
* Details on briquettes and their manufacturing in Andhra Pradesh, India can be found here.
Last week, students from across China came together in Shanghai for the International Youth Summit on Climate Change. One of the topics at the summit: the Great Power Race, our growing student clean energy competition. (The photos in this post are of some of our lead GPR organizers at the US and Indian buildings for the Shanghai World Expo).
There’s been a lot of news lately about China’s investments in clean energy. Late last week, Chinese officials announced that they would institute a carbon trading program as part of its 12th five-year plan which will begin in 2011. You can read more about the announcement here. China is clearly already moving down the track towards a clean energy future.
In contrast, the US Senate seems to be walking away from the track altogether. On Thursday, Senate majority leader Harry Reid announced that he wouldn’t put forward a comprehensive climate bill this year.
There’s still a chance that Congress could take some small steps forward. Most important, would be passing a strong Renewable Energy Standard. Today, 27 senators wrote a letter in support of the measure, which would could create 274,000 jobs in the US. In their letter, they wrote: “We urge you to ensure that we give our country the opportunity to win the clean energy race by including the Renewable Energy Standard in energy legislation that is considered this summer.”
At least some people in the US government are getting the message.
India also 
made an exciting announcement today. Just a matter of weeks after we launched the PutSolarOn.It campaign, President Patil of India announced that the President's estate, Rasthrapati Bhavan, is now a certified green building, including the installation of solar power. Now that’s getting to work!
With over 500 campuses now registered for the Great Power Race, it looks like the race for clean energy is heating up around the world. Can we get to 1,000 registered campuses by September 1st? It’s going to be a challenge, but that’s what this Race is all about. Together, we can show our political leaders that you don’t walk away from tough challenges like climate change. You take a deep breath, stretch your legs, and start running towards them.
Hey Racers,
We have some serious momentum building right now.
In just the last 3 weeks, another 205 campuses have registered for the race! Let's keep that momentum going. We have just the thing that might help...
Check out this great to new video for the Great Power Race, and then let's all do our best to send it flying around to as many students as possible:
Psyched? We definitely are.
Can you help spread this video more now? First, forward on this email to as many people as you can, and then share the video with your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter.
This is already turning out to loads of fun, and we haven't even begun with the real race yet!
Keep your ideas churning for what clean energy and climate solutions projects you can work on once your back in classes -- it's way more fun than thinking about the classes themselves, no?
Thanks for joining in the race!
Dear friends,
We are young people from 3 of the largest countries on the planet—China, India, and the United States—announcing the launch of the Great Power Race.
The Great Power Race is a clean energy competition between students in China, India, and the United States. The aim is to kick-start hundreds of new climate solution projects on campuses and in communities in all three countries and to demonstrate to governments and businesses our generation's leadership in transforming our world towards a green economy.
The Great Power Race begins now. This spring, we're seeing which country can sign up the most campus teams to take part:
Not a student? Please send this message on to any students you know in China, India or the US and encourage them to sign up.
You've seen the headlines:
"Asian Nations Could Outpace U.S. in Developing Clean Energy" - The Washington Post, Jul 7, 2009
"Obama Says U.S. Must Win Clean-Energy Race" - The Los Angeles Times, Oct 24, 2009
"China surges ahead of U.S. in clean energy race" - The Hindu, Mar 26, 2010
"China leads world in clean energy investment" - The People's Daily Online, Mar 29, 2010
Ultimately, this is a race for all of humanity -- a race to solve the greatest challenge of our time and to realize the greatest opportunity for a prosperous future.
Each of us works as a coordinator for youth climate movement campaigns in our respective countries, and we're excited to be working on this international campaign together. We're also looking forward to some healthy competition!
So, which country is going to take the lead in registering the most teams for the race? Register your team for the Great Power Race -- www.greatpowerrace.org -- or send this message to any students you know in China, India, and the U.S. and encourage them to sign up.
Our parents raced for the Moon. Our generation will race for the Earth. Ready, set, GO!
–Suren, Anjali, Shane, and everyone at CYCAN, EAC, IYCN, and 350.org
P.S. We know there are a lot of college students on Facebook & Twitter. Can you rally your friends to sign up for the Great Power Race with just a few clicks? For Facebook, click here: http://j.mp/facebook_race For Twitter, click here: http://j.mp/twitter_race