It’s Getting Hot In Here

Posted on behalf of Jay O’Hara of the Leadership Campaign

Copenhagen looms like Russia over Sarah Palin’s horizon, and it is easy to get discouraged that negotiations aren’t going to accomplish what needs to be done: our federal government will not pass laws that will meet the demands of physics and chemistry, our President is making speeches full of rhetoric and bereft of policy, and the tops of new mountains are being blown off.

Now is the time for serious actions and strategies that advance our goals.

In Massachusetts, students and community leaders have joined together to lead us out of the wilderness and off the road paved with good intentions. The Leadership Campaign is demanding their state show the nation and the world that it is possible to implement sound policies based on the science of 350. And, they are putting their bodies on the line to do it, working to Repower Massachusetts with 100% Clean Electricity in the next decade. They hope to move legislation forward before international talks begin in Copenhagen December 7.

Across the state, and every Sunday on the Boston Common, students and faith leaders are sleeping out – refusing to sleep in their homes and dorms powered by dirty electricity – until there is a policy in place to change it. For two Sundays on Boston Common more than 75 students have risked arrest to demonstrate to the state legislature, the nation and the world how serious climate change is, knowing fully that when we turn a light switch on in New England a mountain is blown up in Appalachia.

Each Monday campers from around the Commonwealth ascend Beacon Hill and lobby their state legislature; asking them to be leaders in this national and global fight for a secure and prosperous future. After two weeks momentum is building. State legislators are joining the cause and the Leadership Campaign has a meeting scheduled with the Governor. This week campaigners will attempt to push their snowball down the hill, when Dr. James Hansen joins the Sleep-Out on November 8^th.

In the month preceding the Copenhagen negotiations, students are waking politicians up to the reality that the real negotiations on global warming are not between Democrats and Republicans or developed and developing nations, but, as Bill McKibben puts it, between human beings and physics and chemistry. And physics and chemistry are notoriously bad negotiators.

Now is the moment to come together and demand that our leaders catch up to where the science and the people are: propelling us quickly forward to a carbon-free economy and a world stabilized at 350ppm. You can find out more and register to sleep out by visiting the Leadership Campaign website http://www.theleadershipcampaign.org.