350 is the message
Toolbox
By Bill McKibben - Published: May 4, 2008
It's been a year and a half since Vermonters helped kick off the activist phase of the climate change movement, 18 months that have seen fairly remarkable progress in jump-starting an issue that had been politically dead in this country for many years. Now, again with Vermont in the vanguard, a new attempt at winning meaningful international progress is under way.
A five-day march from the spine of the Green Mountains down to Burlington's Lake Champlain waterfront over Labor Day weekend of 2006 was, at the time, the largest activist rally against global warming the country had seen. As we organized it, we agonized over what to ask for. The scientists were saying that we needed at least 80 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050, but that was far beyond what most of Washington was even considering.
So we were happily surprised when the thousand demonstrators were enough to win enthusiastic support for the goal – not just from Sen. Bernard Sanders and Congressman Peter Welch, but from Martha Rainville, former candidate for House of Representatives, and Rich Tarrant, former candidate for U.S. Senate, as well. That convinced us to give the same goal a national try – and last spring, operating out of a small office in Burlington's North End, we organized 1,400 simultaneous demonstrations across the country. Before the week was out, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had endorsed the goal of 80 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050. The Washington battle isn't over yet, but both Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection and the 1sky.org grass-roots activist campaign are now leading the fight in the capitol.
Now the seven of us who organized those StepItUp demonstrations last spring – myself and six recent graduates of Middlebury College – are putting together a new campaign, this one aimed at the even more difficult goal of winning a strong international treaty in the years ahead. It's a job made complex by many factors, among them the sheer number of actors involved. How do you lobby 180 countries? Then there's the wildly diverse play of interests. Phasing out the use of coal, for instance, looks very different to countries where affordable alternatives are available.
But our drive has been bolstered by recent science. When Arctic sea ice melted with such terrifying speed last summer, a number of scientists found new audiences for their analyses of both the scale and speed of global warming. Most prominently, last December NASA's Jim Hansen, the planet's premier climatologist, warned that we are already beyond the safe level: 350, as in parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a figure that may well turn out to be the most important number on Earth.
Before the industrial revolution, the Earth's air contained about 275 parts per million CO2 – that's "normal" in human terms. But two centuries of burning coal and gas and oil have upped that number to 385. As a result the ice caps are melting fast, weather is turning freakish, drought spreading, mosquitoes flourishing. What Hansen said – for the first time, really – is that we've already gone too far. This is not a problem for our children, requiring "eventual" cutbacks, but the biggest here-and-now challenge that we face, one that demands immediate global action.
And so we've taken Hansen's number and used it to launch a new, ambitious, and unlikely campaign, 350.org. We have a single goal: to take that number and spread it around the country and around the world, to make everyone on Earth realize that 350 ppm represents the safe zone for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We hope that spreading that number far and wide enough will exert some kind of magnetic pull on the international negotiations now beginning to take place. It will set the bar.
We don't know how to spread the number everywhere – it's a fairly unprecedented task. Sure, McDonald's has succeeded in making the world recognize a yellow arch. But they had lots of money. What we have are the brains and the creativity of people everywhere, which we can link together via the Web. We need people to make statements, to demonstrate in the streets. Earlier this month 350 bicyclists gathered in Salt Lake City for a big rally, Vermont college students spelled out our number with their bodies, surfers in Maui did the same with their boards. A group in Kentucky has gone to work on a big 350 quilt, the kind of project that could well happen here in Vermont.
It all starts by signing on at the 350.org Web site. We need musicians and artists and videographers and preachers and business people. We need every e-mail address you can send, especially for people in other countries. We need somehow to build a movement out of nothing. And, of course, we need to do it fast.
But we have great advantages too, many of them right here in Vermont. Middlebury College, for instance, is the country's premier language school; already our Web site is translated into a dozen languages. We have the example of local entrepreneurs at places like NRG Systems and Native Energy, not to mention the world-leading strategists at Efficiency Vermont; they all demonstrate to doubtful people in other nations how much can be accomplished. And we have the inspiration from that original march in the fall of 2006, when a thousand people trooped up Route 7 on a long, hot weekend.
Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org.
ON THE NET
The safe zone is 350 ppm CO2:
www.350.org
Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? James Hansen et al.
www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2 20080407.pdf
Join the climate change community:
www.1sky.org
Alliance for Climate Protection:
www.wecansolveit.org/
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