Many of us are still catching up from the energy and excitement from the massive 12,000+ person PowerShift in Washington D.C. last weekend. One element of the conference that we hadn't yet highlighted was the remarkable international youth participation both in D.C. and abroad. There was an extraordinary international youth presence at the conference itself. On the Monday lobby day alone youth from over 30 countries held a meeting with the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Monday lobby day -- not a normal day in the office for their staff. Additionally, around the world youth staged actions in solidarity with PowerShift. The video below, produced by Christine Irvine, depicts just a sliver of the international youth action from around the world (and rest assured youth are up to far more than is shown here)...

Here at 350.org headquarters, we're pretty excited about the next couple of days.

We're about to officially launch "Phase 2" of our campaign. For those of you who have been following our developments, this won't come as a huge surprise. We've made "strategic leaks" of our plans for a global day of action on the 24th of October for some time now--but we're about to make it official.

What does this mean? Well, in the most practical and immediate terms it means that we'll be freezing our website for the next 36 hours. If you're reading this, know that you might have some trouble adding comments, signing up, registering actions, etc. And, if you manage to do these things, it's quite possible that the data you submitted will be lost--so hold back your enthusiasm for just another day, and then let your mouse and keyboard go wild.

Besides that minor data-hiccup, everything else about Phase 2 of 350.org is 100% positive. It's not just a website change-over either. Entering phase 2 means that our campaign's focus will shift: we'll be doing less "general global networking" and more "targetted local organizing." For just about everything we do from here on out, we'll be thinking: "how does this feed into making the day of action bigger, more effective, and more inspiring."

It also means we'll have a new website. What does 350.org Phase 2 look like? Well, it will be focused on providing organizers with the tools and resources they need to build powerful local climate groups, educate their communities, and increase their capacity as we all look towards 24 October--and a crucial year for our planet. The new 350.org will make it easier for you to navigate to the content you want, and you can bet that over the next year we'll be constantly building on, adding to, and improving upon 350.org.

It wiill look a little different too--I'll leave you with a sneak peak and sign off until Phase 2! See you all on the other side!

Many people have been asking about how things went at the Capitol Climate Action in Washington DC yesterday.  In a word, AMAZING.  Here's a piece Bill McKibben wrote, originally published on Grist.org.

The day's scorecard:

1) Largest anti-coal action yet in the United States: Thousands and thousands of people flooding the streets around the Capitol Hill power plant.

2) Largest demonstration in many years where everyone was wearing dress clothes: The point was to stress that there's nothing radical about shutting down coal-fired power. In fact, there's everything radical about continuing to pour carbon into the air just to see what happens.

3) Smallest counter-protest in world's history: By my count, the Competitive Enterprise Institute managed to muster four demonstrators for its "celebration of coal" rally, which is about the right size. (But they were kind of sweet; they had signs that said: "Al Gore, Not Evil, Just Wrong.")

4) Number of arrests: None, zip, zilch, nada. The police said so many demonstrators showed up that they had no hope of jailing them all. So we merrily violated the law all afternoon, blocking roads and incommoding sidewalks and other desperate stuff, all without a permit or a say so. We shut down the power plant for the day. And we'd pre-won our main victory anyhow, when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid preemptively cried uncle last week and announced they were'nt going to burn coal in their plant any more.

5) Quantity of broad smiles afterwards: Almost unlimited. And in the air, there was the strong sense that we can do this. Really. What fun.