Photo credit: Julien Harneis

Lord David Puttnam, ambassador for Unicef UK, asks on BBC’s Green Room what kind of price our children and future generations will have to pay for “the three or four carbon-happy generations that have lived before them?”

“Climate change is not just an environmental problem, it is a human rights issue. In fact it’s the biggest child rights problem of our time.

With the potential rise of up to 160,000 child deaths a year in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia directly resulting from climate change, it is children, the most vulnerable children, who will be caught at the centre of the storm.

They will unquestionably carry the greatest burden – both as children and as future adults – and yet they are the least culpable for its damage.”

Puttnam demands that the world “must stop borrowing from the future and act now” on man-made climate change, and that the rights of children should be put as “the core of the climate change policy framework”.

In the aftermath of Van Jones’ abrupt Labor Day weekend resignation as the Obama administration’s special advisor for environmental jobs, human rights and environmental organizations are expressing outrage at the barrage of attacks against the green jobs leader by Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck and other extreme right Republicans.

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide,” Jones said in his resignation letter, issued in the wee hours Sept. 6. “I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for our future.”

The attacks, reminiscent of the far right’s “tea party” efforts to savage late-summer health-care town halls, centered on allegations about actions before Jones accepted the administration post last March. Among the accusations were characterizing Republicans with an expletive (for which Jones has since apologized), signing a petition to investigate whether the Bush administration allowed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks (Jones has repeatedly said the petition didn’t reflect his views) and early-90s involvement in a small Marxist-oriented group.

But critics of the far-right drive saw a broader agenda.

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On October 15th the second Blog Action Day will occur. Last year bloggers united for the environment. This year’s topic will be poverty. The new campaign was launched last Friday but already now over 2000 blogs with an audience of over 3500000 people has registered as participators to this year’s event.

“It’s been almost a year since, with your help, we held the smashingly successful Blog Action Day 2007, and as of a few hours ago, our 2008 campaign has officially begun. This year our theme is “Poverty” and we’ll be encouraging bloggers around the world to once again explore this issue on your blogs on October 15th.”

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