Marchons! 48 Hour People's Climate March Recruitment Storm:
Thursday August 21st at 12 Noon through Saturday the 223rd at 12 Noon
Climate Change is the most powerful weapon to fight for equality and social justice. That's why I want to help to recruit YOU to make Uncle Sam do the right thing and YOU should too.
Is there anything more to say ?
Climate change ... increases risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil wars.
Enough said
Before I jump over to the main section. let me get some dry, bureaucratic stuff out of the way. I start with the most obvious. Know where you actually have to be in NYC to join the march.
The March - 11:30 am, Sunday, September 21st
Assembly location: The area north of Columbus Circle - Contingents will assemble at 11:30 am.
March Route:
•leave Columbus Circle and go east on 59th Street
•turn onto 6th Ave. and go south to 42nd Street
•turn right onto 42nd Street and go west to 11th Ave
•turn left on 11th Ave. and go south to 34th Street
End Location: 11th Ave. in the streets between 34th Street and 38th Street
If you are looking for information about transportation to and housing in NYC for the march, click here.
For my fellow MD/VA/DC kossacks I add this specific information directly to you:
Leaving from Greenbelt, Maryland:
Richard Reis, Maryland Sierra Club
Sunday, September 21, 2014 from 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM (EDT)
Get on board for the People's Climate March in NYC
Attend the People's Climate March with the Maryland Sierra Club
Get on board a bus from the Greenbelt Metro Station chartered by the Maryland Sierra Club. We will leave at 7 AM sharp and return about 8 PM. The cost of the round trip will be $34.
Leaving from Baltimore, West Falls Church, VA:
The Interfaith Power and Light organizes buses from various locations in VA and MD to bring you to NYC to participate in several events surrounding the Climate March and Summit. Please click here and here for transport and lodging.
Now, that this is out of the way, I should write about the tough part and convince you to participate in the People's Climate March. I let others speak. They are so much more persuasive and knowledgeable. Just follow me, watch and listen. I liked the video "CARBON" as is a good wrap-up. If you disagree, let me know. Thanks.
The Premiere of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Documentary “Carbon”
(This video is narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, presented by Thom Hartmann, first film of the "Green World Rising" Series, released yesterday. Directed by Leila Conners. Executive Producers are George DiCaprio, Earl Katz and Roee Sharon Peled. Produced by Mathew Schmid, written by Thom Hartmann, Sam Sacks, Leila Conners and Mathew Schmid. Music is composed and performed by Jean-Pascal Beintus and intro drone by Francesco Lupica. Carbon is produced by Tree Media with the support of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.
I tried a rough transcript of the video. All errors, misunderstanding and mistakes are mine:
DiCaprio (Actor and Narrator):
Ancient life on earth. Over millions of years plants and animals lived and died.
That decomposed life sank deep into the ground and as a result an ancient menace was created. Fossil fuels, black oil, coal and gas have created modern society as we know it. This ancient sunlight unleashed global industrial power on a scale never before witnessed in the history of the planet.
But when burnt into the athmosphere carbon causes climate change. 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is happening now and is caused by human activities.
The fossil fuel industry continues to pull that carbon out of the ground, they drill, they extract, making trillions of dollars. They frack, they mine, earning astronomical profits. We need to keep this carbon in the ground.
In order to prevent a catastrophic warming of the planet by two degree Celsius, we can not burn more than 500 giga tons of carbon into the atmosphere. But the fossil fuel industry has access to five times more than that.
Almost 2800 giga tons of carbon pollution is ready be pulled out of the ground, sold and burnt. We must fight to keep that carbon in the ground and it is possible.
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Maggie Fox (with Climate Reality Project):
People are ready for conversation. They are ready to understand that carbon pollution is causing this challenge and that there is a simple solution: Put a price on carbon pollution. In the US we spent 110 billion federal dollars on climate change events. That is about 300 dollars a person in tax dollars.
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Joseph Romm (Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress):
We certainly need a price on carbon pollution, right now it is a free good and we are using the atmosphere as a sewer and that has a real cost and that cost should be reflected in the cost of carbon pollution.
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Unknown:
In the fifties in London based on the industrial revolution there was so much pollution as you see in Bejing and around China today, that you actually couldn't see six straight feet in front of you. ....They put a price on pollution and it changed.
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Thomas Stoner (former CEO and Chairman of Evergreen Energy Inc and Founder of Project "Butterfly" in Boulder, CO):
You have to put a price on carbon, as carbon and that can happen either by carbon trading or through a carbon tax. There is a moral imperative there, but there is also a business imperative ...
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Sen. Bernie Sanders:
Sen. Boxer and I have introduced legislation to do just that. We are going to do it, in a way that it impacts fewer than 3000 of the most significant fossil fuel polluters in the country. And the reason you do it is people should not have the "freedom" to destroy the planet. They can not continue to be able do that with impunity.
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Thomas Stoner (former CEO and Chairman of Evergreen Energy Inc and Founder of Project "Butterfly" in Boulder, CO):
The government can subsidize the energy for decades for the tune now of a trillion dollars a year. We need to redirect these subsidies and encourage innovation. That's what we need in the world.
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William Becker (Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP) and a Senior Associate at Natural Capitalism Solutions in Colorado):
But the biggest barrier is money from the fossil energy industries that want to defend their market shares, which I consider "Dead Industries Walking". But they got tremendous assets underground that they want to be able to mine. Those are trillions of dollars in assets that the fossil energy companies use to evaluate their worth in the stock market.
The fact that we need to strand them ......the legal underground is not going over really well with those industries ... but in fact, if we want to head off the worst uncontrollable damages from climate change, that is what we have to.
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Thom Hartmann (Host and Author):
Finland and the Netherlands implemented a carbon tax, back in 1990. Both put in a price tag on each ton of CO2 poison.
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Anne Lammla (Ambassador from Finland),:
In the beginning of the nineties there was a deep understanding that we should do something. We think that the Finish economy should be based on sustainable energy in order to make our society competitive and in order to save our planet, which is of course the main target.
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Thom Hartmann (Host and Author):
Since then several other nations have created their own versions: including Norway, Costa Rica and the UK. Ireland has passed carbon tax in 2010.
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Eamon Ryan (Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and Leader of the Irish Green Party):
It is very simple to introduce. If you see a carbon tax in place, people know they can vest in alternatives that actually cut out the use of fossil fuel. It starts to have that effect, improving efficiency in your home or improving industries' energy efficiency. What we have seen in the last five years is we doubled our ... renewable energies. surprise, so the benefit to the consumer is, if through this signals, you can cut out the wasteful use of energy, then everyone is saving money and it more than covers the cost of carbon tax in the first place.
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Thom Hartmann (Host and Author):
In Australia renewables like wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels like coal. Recently China put a price on carbon in over seven regions and will add more. Now it's up to the US. Where there is good news on a local level. In 2007, Boulder, CO, passed a carbon tax, charging 13 dollars for every metric ton of CO2.
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Jonathan Koeln:
The carbon tax was generated and voted into place by Boulder voters. So it is a surcharge on electricity consumption and it is applied to residential, commercial and industrial customers here in Boulder. The effect has been really tremendous. So once the carbon tax went into place, it has generated about 1.8 million dollars a year. What's been extraordinary is that we have been able really turn the curve so to speak on our emissions just on demand side alone.
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Mark Reynolds (Executive Director of Citizens Climate Lobby):
We actually proposed that every single dollar goes back to the American households. Carbon tax is the right way to go and is actually the conservative answer to global warming.
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Joseph Romm (Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress):
Finally we are at the point, where wind power and solar coming down in price, in the quarter of the United States solar photovoltaic ?? intakes are already are cost effective.
Last year more wind power was added than natural gas power. And this is true around the world. We have the technology at hand. We are ready now to really ramp up deployment.
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Eamon Ryan (Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and Leader of the Irish Green Party)::
.. figures show an example that you can actually start cursing out the carb and the economy still holds up and the world didn't come to the end. I think it's a lesson for the rest of the world.
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William Becker (Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project):
We have been disappointed by the national policymakers who haven't been able to resolve their differences about this and time is very, very short. President Obama is the last President with a chance to confront this problem in a way that may head off the worst of the damage.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders;
But given the severity of the problem right now we are not moving fast enough. We are looking at a fight t o save this planet. We gotta be bold and we gotta be aggressive.
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Jonathan Koeln:
If it's not going to happen at the federal level or the state level, we in the community where the innovation occurs, where we are going to be on the front line of the impacts of the climate change and we need to take it in our own hands and make the changes we need to see.
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DiCaprio): (Actor and Narrator):>If national governments won't take actions, your community can. We no longer need the dead economy of the fossil fuel industry. We can move our economy town by town, state by state to renewable energy and a sustainable future...
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Do these guys talk nonsense? Or what?
What kind of meaningful actions can you take?
Some suggestions from Green World Rising:
1. VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET
2. LIGHTEN YOUR CARBON LOAD
3. FUND THE SOLUTIONS
You can help by contributing to solar projects in the developing world through organizations like Renewable World, SELF, Empowered by Light, and SunFunder.
You can also donate to important forest conservation efforts like WWF or support wetlands restoration projects that help protect coastal communities from increasing climate impacts.
4. ENACT LOCAL CARBON REDUCTION LEGISLATION
If national governments won't take action, you can. Bring a piece of legislation to your city, county or state asking for a carbon tax: the proceeds of which can pay for climate-related preparedness, mitigation from storms, floods or droughts; or the tax earnings can go back to local households in the form of a check.
5. PRESSURE YOUR POLITICIANS
Look up if your representative is a Climate Change denier The Anti-Science Climate Denier Caucus: 113th Congress Edition and look up what kind of National Environmental Scoreboard your Congressmen had in 2013. Nice charts in there.
6. SPREAD THE WORD
Are You Marching ?
Marchons! 48 Hour People's Climate March Recruitment Storm
Thursday August 21st at 12 Noon through Saturday the 223rd at 12 Noon
We are one month out from the historic People's Climate March. The September 21 March is being held two days before the UN Climate Summit, where government and corporate leaders will convene to discuss taking action to address climate change.
Tens of thousands are expected to march in New York City.
Join in the 48 hour Recruitment Storm by registering and inviting friends to participate. Our goal is to add 10,000 new marchers by the end of the day Friday. Let's make September a game-changer for the climate movement.
Sign up here!!! --> People's Climate March