Mar 02 | US Coal demo
Civil disobedience action in Washington demands "coal-free future"
Bill McKibben's 350.org organises what it calls "the first big protest of the Obama era" today, Monday March 2.
"Myself and people of every stripe will be risking arrest today, and I'm asking you to stand with me as it unfolds," writes McKibben in an email sent today to 350.org supporters. "Please stand with the thousands gathering today in DC, and show the world that people everywhere are uniting behind a future free of coal - a future safe from the ravages of climate change."
A decade into the 21st century, Capitol Hill - the Senate, Congress and the house of Representatives and other government buildings - still receive their energy from a 99-year-old Washington coal-buring plant owned and operated by government.
McKibben, who has taken his cue to act against coal from James Hansen, have chosen it as a symbolic target.
"This may seem like an odd time to take to the streets - after all, the new administration has done more in a month to fight global warming than all the presidents of the past 20 years. But in fact, it's the perfect moment. For one thing, our leaders may actually listen - in the anti-science years of the Bush administration, global warming activists concentrated their work on state capitols, knowing that the federal government would never budge. Now, if we demonstrate that there's real public pressure, we may give the Democratic Congress and the White House some room to act.
"More to the point, the time not to act is running out. Climate science has grown steadily darker in the past 18 months, ever since the rapid melt of Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2007 showed scientists that change was coming faster than they'd reckoned. That message was underlined recently at the Washington meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, when Stanford researcher Christopher Field said: 'We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations.' Our foremost climatologist, NASA's James Hansen, has given that future a number - any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere beyond 350 parts per million, his team has demonstrated, is 'incompatible with the planet on which civilization developed.'
"Since we're already past that number - the carbon dioxide level is at 387 parts per million - the fight is on."
McKibben urges those not able to attend the demonstration to regisiter their views online with his petition for a coal-free future.
Read the RSA Arts & Ecology interview with Bill McKibben here.
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