The Most Important Thing You Can Do To Stop Global Warming

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted February 1, 2007.

It has been a winter for the record books in the Northeast and Midwest. People are golfing in Michigan instead of ice fishing, sap is running in Vermont, and cherry blossoms are blooming in Washington, D.C.

People are waking up to spring in January and the stark reality of climate change.

"Hurricane Katrina blew the door open and Al Gore walked through it with his movie," environmental writer Bill McKibben said. "Now we have to take that education and turn it into action."

Americans finally understand that climate change is real -- and it is a problem. So, now what?

"People are ready to do something -- to do something more than change their light bulbs," said McKibben, "they understand the need for quick and dramatic political action."

McKibben is spearheading what will be the largest public demonstration against global warming our country has ever seen. "On April 14, instead of doing a march on Washington -- which would burn a fair amount of carbon," said McKibben, "we will have a nationwide rally, occurring more or less simultaneously, in all the places that people love around the country."

The goal of the action, Step It Up 2007, is to demand that Congress enact immediate cuts in carbon emissions and pledge an 80 percent reduction by 2050.

This is not your typical protest.

"A big group of scuba divers have signed up to hold a rally underwater off the coral reefs in Key West and in Maui," said McKibben. "Another group just signed up to ski down the huge, but dwindling, glacier above Jackson Hole; there will be people on Mt. Hood; on the levies in New Orleans' Ninth Ward; and on Canal St. in Manhattan, which will be the new tide line if the seas go up a few feet."

There will also be people gathered at parks, at city halls, on the steps of their churches and schools, and the list just keeps growing. So far there are over 500 events planned in almost every state and the project is only just beginning.

"We wanted these to be in the sort of iconic places that would remind everyone of what's at stake," said McKibben.

If anyone knows what's at stake it's McKibben. He wrote the first book on global warming, The End of Nature, published in 1989. Since then, he has been writing and speaking on the subject, but most people have been unwilling to listen. Until recently.

"Some time last year I finally reached a point of despair about how little was being done," he said. "With a few friends we decided to organize this march across Vermont where I live. After five days of walking across the state we had about 1,000 people, which was good. It turned all our candidates for federal office into tremendous advocates for doing strong things about global warming."

In Vermont they advocated for the same plan -- an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. "Our experience was that we didn't need that many people to begin changing a lot of minds," McKibben said.

"The Republican candidate for Congress in her announcement speech in June said she wasn't sure global warming was real and that more research was needed," he continued. "Well, it turned out that the research that needed to be done was how many potential voters were willing to walk for five days across her state to demand action on this. After our march democracy worked the way it was suppose to -- she was terrific. She was the second coming of John Muir on global warming."

Despite the success of the event, McKibben and his friends realized that their 1,000 supporters were the largest demonstration against climate change in the U.S. -- a pretty paltry number in comparison to the great activist movements in our country's history.

"One of the things that I realized as I started thinking about this was that we have all the parts of a movement -- the scientists, the engineers, the economists, the policy people -- the only part we have been lacking is the movement part," said McKibben. "We are just trying to provide an easy way for people to step into that role."

See more stories tagged with: global warming, stepitup2007, bill mckibben, climate change

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

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