This week my 2 million closest friends and I froze half to death on the Washington Mall to say goodbye to President Bush and scream a breathless, extended cheering, crying, dancing, hugging, being nice to strangers, delirious from lack of sleep hello to Barack Obama.
While were were there, we were greeted by the Reality Coalition’s most recent Ain’t No Clean Coal ad in the metros, which about a million people rode on Tuesday. Bigfoot, Mermaids, and Aliens were touting clean coal, ha ha ha!
Despite how fun these ads are, recently leaked Coal Sleaze memos reveal a serious battle is coming. Our work for clean energy is gaining amazing momentum–and they are scared. We’re going to need more than funny ads on our side. Coal Sleaze power got new Energy Secretary Stephen Chu to go from “Coal is my worst night mare” to being “…hopeful and optimistic that we can figure out how to use coal in a clean way…”
As we move forward, it’s going to take serious work, we need to band together with new efforts from Power Past Coal to Powershift–to show the power and cacophony of our thriving grassroots movement that values health and real prosperity over money. Viewing the 2 million people standing around me at the inauguration, it seemed so easy. Here’s what our new President had to say about it, in some of my favorite parts of his first big speech as president.
Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America…
We will restore science to its rightful place …We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.
All this we can do. All this we will do…What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply…
The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart – not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good…
With old friends and former foes, we’ll work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat and roll back the specter of a warming planet…
And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
