Get Down with Climate Change
At the rate that new national and world campaigns to stop global warming are popping up, I’m going to need a bigger calendar just to keep track of them all.
Famed environmental writer Bill McKibben has thrown his weight behind Step It Up 2007, a Burlington, VT based organization working to coordinate the production of as many climate change events as possible on April 14, 2007, “National Climate Change Action Day.”
In a letter on the Step It Up website, McKibben writes that time is running out:
If we're going to make the kind of change we need in the short time left us, we need something that looks like the civil rights movement, and we need it now. Changing light bulbs just isn't enough.
So on April 14, 2007, McKibben and Step It Up are calling for hundreds of climate change-related events across the country:
IWe 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.
These events are aimed at getting the U.S. Congress to take substantive action on climate change, McKibben writes:
Every group will be saying the same thing: Step it up, Congress! Enact immediate cuts in carbon emissions, and pledge an 80% reduction by 2050. No half measures, no easy compromises-the time has come to take the real actions that can stabilize our climate.
The newest item on the Step It Up blog this morning was a YouTube video featuring Baby Beluga kindergarten idol Raffi, rocking out with “Cool It.” If Raffi was your guy, don’t miss it. As of today, there were already 674 events in 48 states planned. If you want to put on an event in your community, you can sign up on the website.
Stop Global Warming Virtual March
It won’t take much time to sign up for the Stop Global Warming Virtual March, where Sheryl Crow and Laurie David (a producer of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth) are leading a two-week bus tour across the country starting on April 9th, ending up in Washington DC. More than 633,532 people have already signed up for the virtual march. Go to Stop Global Warming’s website for more info and to sign up.
Al Gore Turns Concert Promoter
And last but not least, the person who has arguably done more than any other single person on the planet to force climate change into the political arena, Al Gore. On Thursday, Gore—along with Kevin Wall, Pharrell Williams, and Cameron Diaz—announced Live Earth: The Concert for A Climate in Crisis, a 24-hour concert on 07/07/07 on all 7 continents with at least 100 of the world’s top musical acts.
The goals of these world-wide concerts are modest enough:
SOS is designed to trigger a global movement to combat our climate crisis. It will reach people in every corner of the planet through television, film, radio, the Internet and Live Earth, a 24-hour concert on 7/7/07 across all 7 continents that will bring together more than 100 of the world’s top musical acts. Live Earth alone will engage an audience of more than 2 billion people through concert attendance and broadcasts. MSN has partnered with SOS to use its reach to make the Live Earth concerts available across the globe. The Live Earth audience, and the proceeds from the concerts, will create the foundation for a new, multi-year global effort to combat the climate crisis led by The Alliance for Climate Protection and its Chair, Vice President Al Gore. SOS was founded by Kevin Wall, who won an Emmy as Worldwide Executive Producer of Live 8.
The acronym SOS is the universal Morse code for distress: dot dot dot—dash dash dash—dot dot dot. (As a connoisseur of Google Search, I must note the Save Our Selves first brings up Secular Organizations for Sobriety, an alternative to the AA-12-step method for drug, alcohol, eating, and other addictions. As George Bush noted in his State of the Union address in 2006, "America is addicted to oil" Google also brings up “Saving Our Selves (from Katrina),” a site for helping the victims of Katrina. Again, another strangely apposite site, given that climate scientists are predicting that more intense hurricanes are one of the expected consequences of global warming.)
Live 8 producer Kevin Wall made it clear that the organizers were focused on getting the climate change message out through every possible form of electronic media:
"SOS is creating an unmatched communications platform to take on an unparalleled crisis," Wall said. "Our message must saturate the globe if we're to succeed, and we will. In the US, we're partnering with NBC-Universal and its networks. On satellite radio, we have SIRIUS and XM. In the UK, we're partnering with the BBC. In Japan, we have a historic partnership with two broadcast partners. We have already secured television, Internet and wireless coverage in 120 countries, and the rest are soon to come."
And for those of you who might be wondering what the climate impact of such a world-scale event might be, the organizers say they are going to take carbon neutral concerts to a new level:
Live Earth will implement a new Green Event Standard that will become the model for carbon neutral concerts and other live events in the future. The Green Event Standard is being developed in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Commission [sic--should be USGB Council] to create a way for venues to be LEED-approved.
For more information, go to the Live Earth website.
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