PHEVs Help Launch Bill McKibben-Sponsored "Step It Up" Campaign on Global Warming
Jan 11, 2007 (From the CalCars-News archive)

We now have four PHEVs in the San Francisco Bay Area
(Davis/Sacramento are close, but not SFBA). Two weeks ago, for the
first time, they came together in one place. The occasion? A photo
opportunity organized on less than two days' notice! We parked at
Crissy Field, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, joined
by three electric vehicles and two dozen people, with a sign: "Step
It Up Congress: Cut Carbon 80% by 2050." See the photos at
<http://www.calcars.org/photos-volunteers.html>. What was this all about?

We wanted to give a boost to the nascent Step It Up Campaign. Bill
McKibben, former New Yorker staff writer, author of many articles and
of books including "The End of Nature," "Hope, Human and Wild," and
the forthcoming "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the
Durable Future," explains it campaign below in an article in Grist.

Bill is one of my favorite authors, so when I heard about the
campaign he's inspired, I offered our help. His delightful response
included, "If I had a dollar for everyone who's asked me about
plug-in hybrids in the last six months, I could buy myself a nice big
Ford Excursion. You guys are clearly doing your job!"

We've added a more concise comment to our Endorsements page
<http://www.calcars.org/endorsements.html>:
"There are no silver bullets in the fight against global warming --
but the prospect of a plug-in hybrid is pretty darn shiny."

After you read his article, go to <http://www.stepitup2007.org> to
read McKibben's even more persuasive explanation, see how we show up
-- and start thinking about where you want to be April14.

Step It Up
Introducing a brand-new, mass-protest climate movement for 2007
Monday, 08 Jan 2007 MIDDLEBURY, Vt.
http://www.grist.org/comments/dispatches/2007/01/08/mckibben/index.html
The most important question about global warming right now is: what
do I do once I've changed the damned lightbulbs?

And one small answer is StepItUp2007.

Step it up.
This is the first of 12 dispatches I'll write, one a week through
mid-April, that will chronicle the first nationwide do-it-yourself
mass protest, and by far the biggest demonstration yet against global warming.

If all goes well -- and by "all going well," I mean "if you help" --
then on Saturday, April 14, we'll kick off the approach to Earth Day
with hundreds upon hundreds of simultaneous rallies all across
America, designed to start pressuring Congress to take decisive
action on climate change.

Americans will gather in iconic places across the country. Some will
be familiar at a glance: the top of the Grand Teton, underwater off
Hawaii's coral reefs, on the levees above the Ninth Ward, along a
blue line on Canal Street in Manhattan that marks the city's possible
new beachfront. Others will be less famous: the steps of your church,
the picnic grove in your city park, the biggest barn in your county.
But everywhere people will be saying, loud and clear, that it's
finally time for serious action from Washington, D.C., on the
mightiest problem the world has ever faced.

All you need to take part is a crowd -- small in small places, bigger
in big places -- and a digital camera. By nightfall we'll have a
cascade of images for everyone, including local and national media,
to look at. We'll have proof that Americans care deeply enough to
act. It should be lovely in every sense of the word.

We're not an organization. There are seven of us: six recent college
graduates earning the sum of $100 a week for their labors, and me,
earning only the chance to exorcise some of the ghosts that have been
haunting me since I wrote The End of Nature in 1989. For almost two
decades, the few of us working on climate change felt like we were
trapped in a bad dream, unable to get anyone else to see the monster
looming behind them. In the last couple of years, that's begun to
change. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Gore, public
opinion has turned. Polling shows people know there's a problem, that
they want action. And we have the scientists to tell us exactly
what's wrong, the engineers and the economists to offer useful
solutions. There have been dozens of good books in the last two
years, and fine documentaries. Every Rotary Club in America has seen
An Inconvenient Truth.

We have, in other words, all the parts of a movement except the
movement itself.

Earlier this year, a few of us led a march across Vermont for
global-warming action. By the end of five days and 50 miles, we had a
thousand people marching. That was sweet -- it was enough to insure
that all our state's candidates for Congress pledged to support 80
percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050. But it was also sad.
Because that thousand people was the largest global-warming
demonstration yet held in this country.

We could change that with a march on Washington. But traveling to
Washington spews an immense amount of carbon. And anyway, for the
first time in history, we have the tools to do this a different way:
to assemble in the places that mean the most to us, the very places
that will be wrecked as the planet warms, and make our point there.
With digital video cameras and YouTube; with cell-phone pictures and
Flickr. With the tools to let our political leaders know that people
back in their districts care, that this isn't a second-tier issue --
something to deal with far in the future -- or with penny-ante compromises.

Anyone can play. Some of the day's actions are being organized by
Sierra Club chapters and NRDC offices; many more will come from local
groups who know that the cove or wetland or inner city or community
garden that they've worked to protect and nourish is threatened by
drought and sea level rise. Many more still will be organized by
people who aren't official activists at all, just so concerned about
climate change that they're ready to do something. We're using that
same goal we used in Vermont: 80 percent cuts by 2050. But the
numbers are less important than the intent -- it's time to finally
start doing something, and something on the same scale as the problem we face.

We have most of the tools you need to make a rally work: banners,
pointers on working with reporters, and more. And you have the most
important tool: your list of friends and their email addresses. All
you're asking is that they assemble for an hour on a Saturday to
hoist a banner and take a picture. And each of them has a list of
email addresses, and ...

The key first steps are to forward this small essay to as many people
as you think might act on it, and then go to our website --
StepItUp2007.org -- and sign up to host a rally. It's not a perfect
website yet, but it will get better quickly. And already it shows
what really matters: a kind of desperate creativity from across the
country. Desperate but joyful. And ready to get started.

Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College. His
next book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable
Future, will be published in March.

Spend Your $.02 Discuss this story in our blog, Gristmill.