Step It Up 2 is coming this November—get ready to hit the streetsAsk politicians to join Step It 5

Bill McKibben is organizing Step It Up 2, a national day of climate action. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience on climate change, and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He serves on Grist's board of directors.

Tuesday, 7 Aug 2007

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

Movements need to keep on moving; once the rock starts to budge you've got to push even harder on the pry bar. It's time to Step It Up once more.

Circle Nov. 3, 2007, on your calendar -- it's the next big date in the fight to get America to finally do something about climate change. We're calling it Step It Up 2: Who's A Leader? With your help, by the time night falls on that Saturday -- almost exactly a year before election day -- we should have a better sense of who will finally muster the political will for meaningful action about the biggest threat we face.

Step It Up 1 happened on April 14 and was the first open-source political protest in U.S. history. People in 1,400 cities and towns in all 50 states staged rallies to demand strong climate action. For those actions, we concentrated on American geography: people picked places (the coral reefs off Key West, the tide lines in a dozen coastal cities, the dwindling glaciers on western mountains) that showed what was at stake from global warming.

This time we're focusing on American history instead. People are planning rallies at sites that commemorate great American leaders of the past -- not saints, necessarily, but people who rose to the occasion and actually dealt with the great questions of their day. Some are world-famous: we've already heard from people organizing events at the site of the Lincoln-Douglas debates over slavery, on top of New Hampshire's Mount Washington, and even at the church where John F. Kennedy was married. Other leaders are known in their communities: there'll be an event in Navajo country, for instance, honoring elder Roberta Blackgoat, who helped lead the fight against coal development on tribal land. With any luck, these will be occasions to remind ourselves what leadership is all about -- and also to have some fun. (In a country with tens of thousands of people who regularly dress up to reenact the great battles of American history, the possibilities should be endless.) Creativity is what we need, and fast.

There's no "group" organizing these protests -- just a few recent college graduates working from a storefront office in Manchester, N.H., to coordinate the actions of volunteers across America. They'll be making sure all of the presidential candidates know about the events, of course, but they'll also be helping local organizers invite senators, congressfolk, and candidates to their rallies. When they get there, organizers will present them with the platform drawn up over the summer by 1Sky, a new coalition of climate campaigners from around the country. It calls for a long-term goal of at least 80 percent reductions in carbon emissions by 2050, an immediate moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, and a strong green-jobs program to install all the solar panels and insulation we could ever use.

We'll make it easy for local organizers to take up this cause, even if they've never staged a rally before. It needn't be big and it needn't be slick; homemade is best, in fact. And we can connect you with all kinds of people in your community who want to take action and just don't know quite where to begin. Once they've assembled, we'll use the web to link these rallies together into something larger than the sum of their parts -- to show our politicians that this is no longer a second-tier issue, but something they simply have to address.

When we tried this in April, we found out just how eager Americans really were to start this movement going. In 11 weeks, they created the biggest day of mass environmental protest since Earth Day in 1970. And it worked. In the months since, every Democratic candidate for president has embraced the 80 percent by 2050 goal, and Congress has passed tougher energy legislation than many would have predicted. But the movement isn't strong enough yet to finish the job: President Bush is almost certain to veto any strong new law, and Congress couldn't quite bring itself to ask Detroit to increase gas mileage. And the leading Republican candidates for president have mostly ignored the issue.

That's not all that's changed since April, of course. We've seen the hottest July in history across a large swath of America, seen record flooding in the United Kingdom and Asia -- and seen powerful new science detailing both the threat of global warming and the possibilities for dealing with it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in late spring that new technologies mean it is both possible and affordable to transform our energy economy in rapid order. What we lack is political will -- what we lack is the kind of movement that inspires leadership.

But that kind of energy is a renewable resource. Join us!

Best Foot Forward

Tuesday, 25 Sep 2007

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

"Backs against the wall" is not a scientific measurement, but it's right where we are on global warming.

It's the vernacular translation for when the National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that this year the summer Arctic sea ice shrunk to the smallest area ever recorded, about 460,000 square miles less than the previous low point recorded in September 2005. It's what it means when the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells reporters, as he did last week, "Wheat production in India is already in decline, for no other reason than climate change. Everyone thought we didn't have to worry about Indian agriculture for several decades. Now we know it's being affected now." He added that a similar shift seems to be underway in China.

And when your back is against the wall, that's when you've got to fight, and fight like you mean it. That's why we're launching Step It Up 2. On Nov. 3, people all across the country are holding rallies to demand action on global warming. Find out if there's one scheduled for your vicinity; if there isn't, then sign up to start one. We can help make it easy -- you're not organizing a March on Washington, just a gathering of your neighbors.

Assuming there's an action somewhere in your neighborhood, you can use our nifty new invite tool to ask politicians to attend -- to ask them if they're ready to stop being politicians and start being leaders. Find your senators and representative on the list, and we give you all the info you need to call, email, or send a letter inviting them to an event near you. Even if they've already been invited, send them another invitation. And if they've already accepted, send them your thanks. While you're at it, you can ask the presidential candidates to come to your local rally too. The more invitations the merrier.

Our goal is to have more politicians talking to more people about a single issue on a single day than ever before. And having those people talk back, having them demand not empty rhetoric but real progress.

We've got a widget or internet tool that tracks how many politicians have been invited and how many have said yes -- watch it on this page, at right, or on the Step It Up 2 website, or add it to your own site. We don't have a $1,000 a plate to lure our politicians to come meet with us. All we have is the power to ask, and the power to see who responds.

And by "we," I mean "you."

Do the Invite Thing

Wednesday, 3 Oct 2007

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

OK, now it's starting to get a little exciting.

With a month to go, people by the thousands have begun inviting presidential candidates and members of Congress to come speak about climate change at Step It Up events on Nov. 3 -- and we've started getting some RSVPs.

Some are planning to come: Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Paul Hodes (D-N.H.), and Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) from the U.S. House of Representatives; and from the Senate, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). They have agreed to speak in Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York. (Rep. Weiner was a big hit at last spring's Sea of People rally in lower Manhattan.) Many more are checking their schedules and getting right back to us, including at least a couple of the presidential front-runners. It will be very useful to know who wants to take this issue on, to hear them speak and see if they plan on being politicians or are willing to be leaders instead.

And it will be just as useful to know who has other priorities that they think are more important. For instance, Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has "other events scheduled for the day." We'd kind of counted on him coming: he staged the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, after all. Surely he's worried by those pictures of ice melting across the planet. (It doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't care about global warming, of course -- in fact, as federal law makes clear, nonprofits like us can't read anything in to who attends a forum and who doesn't. In the words of Fox News, "We report, you decide.")

Here's the thing: you can help enormously. This is one time where you can do the inviting without even having to throw the party. Go to the invite tool, find your congressperson, and invite them. Then invite your two senators. And then invite all 17 presidential candidates. That's 20 invites, in way less than 20 minutes. With our nifty software, each one will get a customized invitation to come to the event nearest you.

And then you can sit back with us and watch the returns roll in!

They're Stepping Up

Tuesday, 16 Oct 2007

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

You can advance many great arguments against making Iowa and New Hampshire the bellwethers of our political life: they are pale, unrepresentative, rural, and obsessed with a few issues (the price of corn has doubled in the last year due to the ethanol boom, which in turn is due to the Iowa caucus). But one argument that their backers always make rings true as well: in an America so oversized that politics takes on an entirely abstract feeling, in these two states the presidential candidates actually engage with citizens. The New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucus offer the only punctures in the airless sphere that is high-level American political life -- the only chance for regular people to get inside for a moment.

What do I mean? Here's what I mean:

At noon last Saturday, a few of us were sitting around the Step It Up 2 offices along Elm St. in Manchester, N.H., eating a lunch we'd carried in from a nearby diner. We looked out the window, and there was Dennis Kucinich peering in at our signs and banners. Lindsay Franklin grabbed the Flip camera and ran out on the sidewalk where she asked him if he'd come to one of the Step It Up events on Nov. 3 and give a talk. Sure, he said -- and with that we had our first commitment from a presidential candidate.

The second came 10 or 15 seconds later, when someone's cell phone buzzed. Ian Hough and Zo Tobi were two blocks down the street, listening to John McCain speak at a forum organized by Clean Air-Cool Planet. When question time came, they stepped up to the mike and asked the senator if he'd come to a Step It Up rally, and he said yes, if he got an invitation. We didn't bother telling him he'd already received several hundred through the invite tool on our website -- ace organizer Roger Shamel simply got up from the audience and handed him a hard-copy invitation. Not only that, but McCain said he might support a moratorium on new coal-fired power as long as we could show him possible alternatives.

Before the day was out, we'd also heard from John Edwards, who promised to join our big New Orleans rally, complete with brass band, second-line march, and a front-row view of the big trouble that can be caused by global warming and bad government.

In other words, we've got real momentum starting to pick up.

And the reason it's happening is that our invite tool lets everyone, as it were, live in New Hampshire for a little while. It offers a direct and powerful way to actually connect with presidential campaigns. We know from their schedulers that presidential candidates and members of Congress are sensing the groundswell for global-warming action thanks to all the messages showing up in their inboxes. Now's the time to turn up the heat. We've got three weeks to make our point, and not long after that American politics will regrow its hard shell of commercials and stage-managed events. The 2008 election won't be decided till next November -- but our best chance to affect it comes this fall.

The Shape of Good Hope

Friday, 26 Oct 2007

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

This has been the grimmest week in a long time for those of us following the global-warming crisis -- and the best week, too, for those of us at Step It Up who are organizing to do something about it.

Bad news first: It's not just the wildfires in Southern California. It's not just the epic drought in the Southeast. It's not just the bathtub ring in Lake Mead. It's not just the eight inches of rain deluging poor old New Orleans. Those help to tell us how far global warming has proceeded to date, but they don't tell us what more is to come.

That's the job of science, and here's what science told us this week: things are unraveling. Check out the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to see what I mean. Natural carbon sinks -- the top few meters of the ocean, for instance -- are turning steadily less efficient as the planet warms. They're not performing as well as they have in the past, and so more carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere instead. The natural system is starting to break down.

Not only that, but human systems are breaking down too. Instead of growing more efficient in our use of fossil fuel, the data indicates those improvements have stopped. Economies are growing fast -- China said this week that its economy would soar 11.5 percent this year -- but only by burning cheap coal in ever-larger amounts.

Taken together, the two trends mean we're moving ever farther away from getting carbon emissions under control. As Dr. Corinne Le Quere of the British Antarctic Survey put it, "Only the most extreme climate models predicted this. We didn't think it would happen until the second half of the century."

Momentum works both ways, though, and some of the news is good. As we move into the home stretch for the big Step It Up rallies on Nov. 3, everything is beginning to click. People are issuing a thousand invitations a day through our invite tool to their senators, congresspeople, and presidential candidates. And the politicians are responding -- the number of confirmed speakers for Nov. 3 has doubled in the last 24 hours. We're on our way to having more national politicians addressing a single issue on a single day than at any time since the great national teach-ins of the Vietnam era.

We don't know, in any given hour, whether to hope or despair. The computer screen shows homes going up in flames -- but it also shows hundreds of emails from organizers who are steadily going about the last-minute tasks of inviting reporters, sending out final email invitations, and calling congressional district offices. The TV blares disaster -- but the phones keep ringing with new allies in new parts of the country seeking new ways to help out.

It feels weird -- but it feels like hope.

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