NEWSBYBILL MCKIBBEN

This post is authored by 350.org Board members Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, and originally appeared on Alternet.

We need to rebuild the kind of mass movement that marked 1970: bodies, passion, and creativity are the currencies we can compete in. It's not impossible.

Not for forty years has there been such a stretch of bad news for environmentalists in Washington.

Last month in the House, the newly empowered GOP majority voted down a resolution stating simply that global warming was real: they’ve apparently decided to go with their own versions of physics and chemistry.

This week in the Senate, the biggest environmental groups were reduced to a noble, bare-knuckles fight merely to keep the body from gutting the Clean Air Act, the proudest achievement of the green movement. The outcome is still unclear; even several prominent Democrats are trying to keep the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases.

And at the White House? The president who boasted that his election marked the moment when ‘the oceans begin to recede’ instead introduced an energy plan heavy on precisely the carbon fuels driving global warming. He focused on ‘energy independence,’ a theme underscored by his decision to open 750 million tons of Wyoming coal to new mining leases. That’s the equivalent of running 3,000 new power plants for a year.

Here’s what we think is going on, in the broadest terms.

Editors Note: Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, is a member of Change.org's Changemakers network. Last week, he published the following post, kicking off 350.org's newest campaign "The U.S. Chamber Doesn't Speak For Me."

Within days of launching the campaign, Glenn Beck, on national TV, called out his organization as belonging to the "communistic" conspiracy. In the view of Change.org, this can only be a good sign. Please read Bill McKibben's thoughts, re-posted here, and do your part to speak out against the U.S. Chamber. Sign the pledge, and then check out 350.org's site for more steps you can take to recruit local businesses in your neighborhood.

In Beijing, they celebrate when they have a “blue sky day,” when, that is, the haze clears long enough so that you can actually see the sun. Many days, you can’t even make out the next block.

Washington, by contrast, looks pretty clean: white marble monuments, broad, tree-lined avenues, the beautiful, green spread of the Mall. But its inhabitants -- at least those who vote in Congress -- can’t see any more clearly than the smoke-shrouded residents of Beijing.

Bill McKibben is a member of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. He is the author of a dozen books on the environment, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and founder of 350.org, a global climate campaign.

We need help from artists—we need them to help with an artwork bigger than humans have ever built before, the first global-scale group show. It’s going to be slightly wild, and very beautiful.

Details in a moment, but first the rationale:

Sometimes the work of artists is to remind us of things we’ve forgotten, things we know in our bones but that slip our minds.

In this case, it’s the fact that we live on a planet. Yes, in a house. Yes, in a town in a country. But most of all on a planet—something that’s a little too big for most of us to think about every day.

But not, as it turns out, too big for us to destroy. The pictures rolling in this summer from Pakistan, Russia, and Greenland make it abundantly clear that we’re drowning, burning, and melting this earth—all because we’re pouring vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. As best we can tell right now, global warming is how human civilization runs itself on to the rocks—but it’s not too late (maybe) to change that outcome.

So we’re building a movement to fight back. There are scientists involved in that movement (they’ve given us the banner under which we rally, by pointing out that 350 parts per million C02 is the most we can have in the atmosphere if we want a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”) We have engineers and economists taking part (they’ve explained in great detail how we can make the transition to a world that doesn’t run on fossil fuel). And we have huge numbers of us ordinary citizens—last October they put together the most widespread political rally in the planet’s history, 5200 separate demonstrations in 181 countries. (You watch a video of the day here, and sign up here for something similar this October 10: a massive Global Work Party on 10/10/10.)

But we haven’t won yet. The power of the great fossil fuel companies is unbroken. They make more money than any industry in human history, and so far that’s been enough to delay real action.

So we need to reach past people’s heads to their hearts, and that’s where ar

Bill McKibben is a member of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. He is the founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign, and has led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history.

It’s been a brutal summer, obviously, from smoke-shrouded Moscow to flood-soaked Pakistan—the summer when we really saw what global warming looks like in its early stages.

But we plan on making it a remarkable fall—the fall when we really see what people taking action can start to accomplish.

The stark failure of the U.S. Congress to even vote on climate legislation (for the 21st straight year) means that people around the world are going to have to start taking matters into their own hands. On 10-10-10, people in almost every nation will be doing practical things: putting up solar panels, digging community gardens, planting mangrove forests along rising shorelines. In Auckland, squads of bike mechanics will try to repair every cycle in the city; in Bolivia they’ll be handing out solar ovens; in Ann Arbor, Michigan they’re building raised-bed gardens in the front yards of low-income areas.

But we know we can’t actually solve climate change one bike path or farmer’s market at a time. So the day will also send a sharp political message—at day’s end, people will put down their shovels and pick up their cellphones. They’ll call their leaders and say: ‘We’re getting to work, what about you? If I can get up on a roof and hammer in a solar panel, I expect you to get up on the Senate floor and hammer out some legislation.”

Some leaders have already heard that message: in the low-lying (and entirely Muslim) nation of the Maldives, for instance, President Mohammed Nasheed has pledged to turn his official residence solar-powered on 10-10. But we need everyone to hear it, before the UN reconvenes in Mexico in December to take up where they left off at Copenhagen last year.

If the pictures from Russia and Pakistan saddened you, then 10-10-10 is the moment to make that sadness count. I urge you to sign this pledge to get involved and look for an event taking place near you here. Many thanks for joining in!

Photo credit: 350.org

Bill McKibben is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

In the few years after the first Earth Day, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. And that was with a Republican president. The question is, are we doing anything on this 40th anniversary to set ourselves up for a repeat?

And the answer, I fear, is no. True, the Senate is about to consider a global warming bill, but so weak that it's won praise for its reasonableness from Bjorn Lomborg, the most effective opponent of action on global warming. Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, who sat down with the electric utilities to write the bill, explained quite candidly that it no longer even has an environmental goal. "I'm all for saving the planet, but this is an energy independence bill." Why did it work so well then, and so badly now?