Bestselling author Bill McKibben turns activist in the first hands-on guidebook to stopping climate change, the world's greatest threat Hurricane Katrina. A rapidly disappearing Arctic. The warmest winter on the East Coast in recorded history. The leading scientist at NASA warns that we have only ten years to reverse climate change; the British government's report on global warming estimates that the financial impact will be greater than the Great Depression and both world wars―combined. Bill McKibben, the author of the first major book on global warming, The End of Nature , warns that it's no longer time to debate global warming, it's time to fight it. Drawing on the experience of Step It Up, a national day of rallies held on April 14, McKibben and the Step It Up team of organizers provide the facts of what must change to save the climate and show how to build the fight in your community, church, or college. They describe how to launch online grassroots campaigns, generate persuasive political pressure, plan high-profile events that will draw media attention, and other effective actions. Fight Global Warming Now offers an essential blueprint for a mighty new movement against the most urgent challenge facing us today. Bill McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including the best sellers Falter , Deep Economy , and The End of Nature , which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and the winner of the Gandhi Prize, the Thomas Merton Prize, and the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called “the alternate Nobel.” He lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org; his new project, organizing people over sixty for progressive change, is called Third Act. Fight Global Warming Now The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community By McKibben, Bill Holt Paperbacks Copyright © 2007 McKibben, Bill All right reserved. ISBN: 9780805087048 Introduction It’s easy to join the global warming movement. We know it’s easy because we all just joined ourselves. None of us has spent long years as organizers. One of us has spent long years mostly as a writer with a little activism on the side; the rest of us haven’t spent long years doing anything except school, because we just got out of college. But in 2007 we came together to see if we could kick up a fuss about climate change. That January 10, we launched a Web site, StepItUp2007.org. We asked people across the country to start organizing rallies for April 14, to demand that Congress cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. We had no money, and we had no organization, so we had no expectations. Our secret hope, which seemed a little grandiose, was that we might organize a hundred demonstrations for that Saturday, only three months away. Instead, our idea took off. The e-mails we sent ended up spreading virally, in the way that certain ideas sometimes do on the Internet. People we’d never heard of started signing up on the Web site to host rallies in places we’d never heard of. The electronic pins stuck on our online map got thicker by the week—200, 500, 900. By the time the big day rolled around, there were 1,400 demonstrations in all fifty states, ranging from tiny to enormous. It was one of the biggest days of grassroots environmental protest since the first Earth Day in 1970, covered extensively in the national media and in thousands of local stories across the country. Along the way we learned a few lessons and we want to share them in this book, which is designed to help you plan and carry out your own ongoing local rallies and campaigns, the way the thousands of organizers we worked with did on April 14, 2007. We agreed to write it because, one, we haven’t quite managed to solve global warming yet and, two, we gained a few hard-earned ideas for how to make the most of two things: local communities and the Internet. There is no shortage of fine books on activism, from Saul Alinsky’s classic Rules for Radicals through much more recent accounts. Many of them have centered on the very difficult, long-term, and noble task of community organizing—convincing people with too little power to stand up for their rights. We’re mostly talking about something a little simpler here: getting Americans who already care about an issue such as global warming to actually take effective political action. And we think certain things about contemporary America offer both opportunities and pitfalls for organizers. This isn’t the 1960s anymore; an awful lot has changed, even in the last few years. We had an excellent database to draw on: all the people who organized events for Step It Up and then sent us pictures and reports. We interviewed and surveyed a great many of these organizers to learn what worked and what didn’t, and this book is as much their work as ours.