On 7.7.07 more than two billion people will come together during Live Earth. That number is unfathomable - more than one-fourth of the world’s population will participate in a single event and demand a solution to the climate crisis. This unique moment presents us with a unique choice.
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Live Earth will not just be a 24-hour concert – but the launch of a massive campaign to demonstrate that the political will exists to solve the climate crisis.
What could be more important than dealing with the threat of global warming? Exposing the companies and groups that continue to try and distort the issue for financial gain and holding the media accountable for their role and complicity in the continuing distortion of the truth.
Let's be perfectly clear. Global warming is a scientific fact - it is not a political issue. But a few corporations are bringing in incredibly high profit margins from the status quo. These profits depend on Americans and people worldwide burning more and more oil instead of working to put less carbon into the air. So they pollute the "marketplace of ideas," deceiving people by spreading the lie of doubt that global warming is a real problem.
Just as Big Tobacco was willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars denying for decades that cigarettes caused cancer while hundreds of thousands died from their product each year -- spreading the same lie that the science was not clear -- so too is Big Oil willing to invest heavily in the global warming deniers.
Over at Smoking Politics, we tell and re-tell and constantly point out that the right wing strategy of lie big, ignore the facts and shoot the messenger wasn't created out of thin air, it was started with great success by the tobacco companies almost a century ago.
The clearest current example of the attempts to muddy the water on whether cigarettes actually cause cancer, oh wait, that was the last example, now they're muddying the waters with Global Warming.
The awareness phase of the campaign to stop global warming has reached a crescendo, which may also be a plateau. With the exception of front groups sponsored by oil companies, it is becoming more and more accepted that we, in fact, are the cause of global warming.
The action phase, however, trails the awareness phase significantly and most troubling of all is the growing belief that someone else is going to be the somebody to actually do something about global warming. Even worse, and most naively of all, that our federal government is going to solve the problem.
Hello, and welcome to the headquarters of Step It Up 2007!
This is our organizing hub for a National Day of Climate Action--April 14th, 2007. On this one spring day, there will be hundreds and hundreds of rallies all across the country. We hope to have gatherings in every state, and in many of America's most iconic places: on the levees in New Orleans, on top of the melting glaciers on Mt. Rainier, even underwater on the endangered coral reefs off Key West.
We also need rallies outside churches, along the tide lines in our coastal cities, in cornfields and forests and on statehouse steps. Every group will be saying the same thing: "Step it up, Congress! Cut Carbon 80% by 2050." As people gather, we'll link pictures of the protests together electronically via the web--before the weekend is out, we'll have the largest protest the country has ever seen, not in numbers but in extent. From every corner of the nation we'll start to shake things up.
Please feel free to contact us with questions, concerns or comments:
On March 21st, I will testify before Congress on the immediate action that needs to be taken to end the climate crisis. At the hearing, I will deliver the 294,374 messages you signed, demonstrating that hundreds of thousands of people share my sense of urgency.
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The reason Congress has so far failed to act is not because there are no solutions to the problem. Nor is it because the majority doesn't believe that the climate crisis is real. They have failed to act, because they have not yet faced a sufficient expression of political will on the part of the American people demanding they confront our climate crisis head on. You and I know that political will is a renewable resource, and enough already exists to start solving this crisis. We just have to communicate that forcefully to the political leaders of our country.
Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth" at the Academy Awards Show with Oscar Nominations for Best Documentary and Best Song
Live Sunday, February 25, 2007.
Good luck, Al Gore. And thanks for already being more effective than anyone currently in office and working so hard to save all of our families from Thelma Bush and his Louise GOP's extinction-level job performance.
(There are more levee problems than just New Orleans. Seems to be an epidemic! - promoted by John McClelland)
El Paso's daily newspaper, The El Paso Times, and a weekly business publication, El Paso, Inc. have each had cover stories in the past week about the Rio Grande levee system in El Paso County being in such bad shape, it would no longer be included in newly proposed FEMA flood plain maps of our area.
The prospect that many of the close to half-million residents of Texas' fifth largest city...a city located in the Northern Chihuahua DESERT...a city that only gets 13 inches annual rainfall per year (and half of that in August), may soon have to purchase federal flood insurance is, to say the least, huge.
