Big news out of Germany--last week, 200,000 of us succeeded in shifting the position of Europe's biggest polluter, and helped salvage the climate talks!

It's far from a total victory--the European Union's climate package is still riddled with loopholes, and the UN negotiators put off the biggest decisions to next year. But because of a massive wave of global people power, things are much better than they would have been.

Here's what happened. After years of climate leadership, German chancellor Angela Merkel sharply reversed course in recent weeks--threatening to derail the entire European climate plan if German coal plants and heavy industries weren't granted free pollution permits. If Germany, Europe's biggest climate polluter, had had its way, the EU agreement would have been toothless--and European leadership in the global talks would have collapsed.

Avaaz learned about the threat--and swung into action. Look at what we did in ten days:

Photo credits: Robert VanWaarden, David Wargert

• More than 175,000 of us from over 192 countries signed a climate petition to Merkel and other European leaders that was hand-delivered to German and EU diplomats in Brussels, to key Members of the European Parliament in Poznan--and to an Avaaz member in a Merkel costume in front of a sea of German TV cameras in Warsaw as Merkel was discussing climate change behind closed doors a few metres away!
  

• Small donations by more than 450 Avaaz members paid for independent opinion polls in Germany, Italy, and Poland--and uncovered that huge majorities in each country believed their governments should take strong climate action despite the economic downturn. Moreover, far more citizens in each country believed that fighting climate would help the economy than thought it would hurt. The polls were circulated publicly--and privately, in meetings with key German ministers.
  

• Avaaz co-hosted ten daily "Fossil of the Day Award" ceremonies during the UN climate talks, presenting a mock prize to the countries who did the most to obstruct progress. Awarded based on a vote of international green groups--and made possible by a team of local Avaaz volunteers in Poznan, Poland and the international youth delegation--the prize sparked bursts of press coverage in Germany, Italy, and Poland when each country won... not to mention outrage and perhaps some soul-searching from those countries' negotiators.
  

• In the closing days of the EU talks, more than 40,000 Avaaz members sent personal messages about climate change through the public-comment page on Chancellor Merkel's own website, a flood of impassioned appeals from citizens across the planet.
  

• Last Friday, Avaaz took out a four-page advertisement in the Polish newspaper distributed at the UN talks. Facilitated by local Avaaz volunteers and paid for by member donations, the ad used a parody of Star Wars to ask if "Angie Skywalker" was being tempted by the Dark Side to become a climate "Darth Merkel"--and delivered our petition and poll results in a spectacular fashion that was covered on multiple German television networks and around the world.
  
  

We learned that the Darth Merkel ad was waved at the German delegation's morning meeting at the UN talks--and when an Avaaz staffer tried to hand a copy of it to Germany's environment minister, he said he already had one.

The German campaign was an Avaaz-style surge of people-powered political pressure: rapid, targeted, global, and, we now know, effective. Sources close to the Chancellor's office tell us that the German leadership were stunned by the intensity of global reaction to their attempt to backtrack on climate policy. They hadn't anticipated anything close to it. Throughout, Avaaz worked closely with partner groups in Germany, who organized protests and launched ad campaigns throughout Germany--creating a "pressure sandwich" of international and domestic outcry. When the final EU deal was struck, Germany backed down on one of its most damaging demands--the free pollution permits and subsidies for new coal plants.

It wouldn't have happened without us--all of us around the world, whether we waved signs in freezing Warsaw or clicked an online petition from home.

In one sense, it's a small victory in a huge fight. The EU climate package is deeply flawed, and will have to be radically strengthened if Europe is to do its part. And Europe is just one component of the global agreement that will have to be struck in Copenhagen next year--at the end of a process full of pitfalls and obstacles.

But in another sense--as with our climate victories a year ago with Canada and Japan--it's a reminder to all of us that these enormous global problems aren't really so far out of our reach. That political leaders need to be led by regular people. That when enough of us join together, we can change the world.