I know that a number of us at It’s Getting Hot in Here have talked about a candidate debate about climate…well, here is our chance. MoveOn, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and the Campaign for America’s Future have partnered to setup a Virtual Town Hall Meeting on Climate! They are voting on which candidates to invite and are even soliciting video questions from members to ask the candidates. So if you haven’t made a No More Hot Air video yet…now is the time . I would love for there to be a youth question at the Town Hall from a member of the It’s Getting Hot in Here community. So check it out!
I am including part of their email, so you can get a sense of how serious they are about this issue. With 3.3 million members, this shows the transformative power of an engaged online community.
The climate crisis is one of the great moral issues of our time, and the clock is ticking. Science shows that even if we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the air tomorrow, we’ll still have rising sea levels, super hurricanes, and spreading disease. If we keep on polluting—well, it could look a whole lot worse.
But we have a chance to take a sharp turn towards a clean energy economy. We know how to do it—we just need the political will.
Our town hall in April helped define the candidates’ positions on the war and sending a clear signal about what we want to see. We need to send the same message on global warming by asking the tough questions and rewarding strong positions. (We’ll also hold one on health care in the Fall.)
We’re partnering with the League of Conservation Voters, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and Campaign for America’s Future to make this an amazing event—full of great information on the issue and an examination of solutions from every angle.
We know you’ve got great questions! All you need to do is video yourself asking your question and upload the video to YouTube. Then, the candidates will answer your questions directly during the Virtual Town Hall meetings. There are specific instructions to do this once you vote for which candidates you want to hear from.
You’ll get a chance to sneak preview the candidates’ positions during our special Party for the Planet house parties which will coincide with the biggest ever event on global warming—Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts on July 7th. So, mark your calendars now for the evening of July 7th and we’ll send more information soon.
There’s never been more momentum to solve our climate crisis than there is right now, but to see this challenge through, we need to have true leadership from our nation’s next leader.
No replies – no replies, to a MOVEON agenda item? No replies to what my readings confirm is not just one of the greatest moral issues of our time… it is the only great moral issue.
All the other moral criticalities will pale: genocide of a million in Sudan? Compare it to 20 million dislodged from their homes in densely built waterfront ciites around the world.
Or perhaps the horrific slaughter of six million jews in pre-war Nazi Germany is the top moral failure of humanity? Compare it to TWO HUNDRED million losing their homes, villages and worksites – their whole community – and having nowhere to go, as a gradual rising of ocean levels, made extremely harsh when a typhoon or Nor’easter blows its winds, drives the higher water levels deep inland and floods roads that had been the way goods were delivered to those lowland residents. Slowly they must back away from the waterline and seek available sleeping space – as the larger country around them suffers incalculable economic injury, its balance sheet suffering an overwhelming set of stressors: increasing governmental restrictions on atmospheric carbon release in a world carbon market, damaged and swamped import-export shipping docks, more high wind damage than insurance can cover, drought so long-lived that what water is available is muliply re-used, all trees have been harvested for food or warmth and thus the hot, dry winds blow the growing soil away…
And this pattern just continues, decade after decade, for at minimum the next hundred years or two even if we could STOP ALL CO2 and METHANE EMISSIONS RIGHT NOW!
And what if we continue to ignore it, as I am doing now, plugged into a copper wire leading straight into my light bulb and computer from a mammoth electricity generating plant, hundreds of miles away, belching CO2 and depositing mercury and coal runoff into the downstream farms, rivers and bays? Well that hellish disruption above was due to a smallish rise in sea level of a foot or two or three. What if it does get much worse? Shall we wait around, noses glued to the LCD/plasma HDTV screen? Wait around to see if it happens, or maybe it won’t? Hmmm… let’s see…
So, fighting climate change is “one of the most important moral issues”?
I think not.
But don’t fret about it, don’t stick your head in the sand,. Rather, act NOW based on precautionary assumptions, to a degree that is as much as you feel you can do, because it is ACTING, rather than ignoring.