An impassioned guest post from Max Gottlieb about the pace and nature of public discussion, and how serious money and serious distortion are helping prevent movement toward a more sensible, more prosperous, more sustainable future.
Impassioned screaming, even from ill-formed anti-science syndrome sufferers can have an impact …
We have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb… Changes needed to preserve creation, the planet on which civilization developed, are… barely, still possible. It requires a transformative change of direction in Washington in the next year.
I have heard from multiple sources that many U.S. Senators are now getting 100 to 200 calls a day opposing a climate and clean energy bill — and bupkes in favor.
Not to mention the town halls…
The Global Warming and health care Deniers are winning as they deserve to. We are losing.
What does victory for Deniers mean?
I’ll tell you.
It means the summer arctic ice cap will disappear faster than modern science recently thought possible.
Plot courtesy of RealClimate
It means
Nearly 2 billion people in Asia, from coastal city dwellers to yak-herding nomads, will begin suffering water shortages in coming decades as global warming shrinks glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau.
It means
a large fraction of the species on Earth, as many as 50 percent or more, may become extinct.
It means millions more Americans will go without needed care as health insurance costs rise and coverage falls.
The Deniers deserve to win
The deniers deserve this. They are the one shouting down our elected congressmen, burning them in effigy and threatening the President of the United States with death.
The deniers are using every tool at their disposal to bring about an America where millions more lose their health coverage, and a world where billions find their lives at risk due to water shortages and other causes.
They are working very hard.
They deserve to win.
Do we deserve it?
The lessons of Iran
Sometimes, you have to stand up in public for what you believe. Sometimes you have to involve your friends. And sometimes organization matters.
Tell your friends
Most of my friends are non-political. But, each election, I’ve generally managed to drag at least a few to campaign in my local swing state.
Now, I’m trying to get them to call their local member of congress– to fight back against the Deniers.
Its working. Of course, it does take chutzpah to ask a political favor of someone I haven’t spoken to in months, or may never have discussed politics with– but not nearly as much courage as it does to face down Ahmadinejad’s goon squad.
I do this using a web tool, FriendRoots, I created for this purpose.
If you’re on Facebook
- Go here, and you will get a list of all of your Facebook friends who live in states whose Senators are key for the fight against Global Warming. It will draft an email (from you to your friend) asking the friend to call her Rep as a favor to you. With talking points.
- You can do the same for the Public Option for the Houseand Senate.
- Go here, and you can set up your own campaign. You can choose which Reps or Senators to target, and draft the email that your users will send to their friends. You’ll get a link (like the two above) which you can share or post in a diary.
- Creating your own campaign takes just a few minutes. You can do this for any action diary.
I hope people will use this to tell our Reps that, yes, Americans do in fact believe in preserving our climate.
I hope that action diaries targeting an individual lawmaker or group of them will include an action link generated by this tool. So instead of making out-of-district calls, readers can have their constituent friends make in-district calls.
I hope we can organize to defeat the Deniers.
This is it. We have used up all our slack, on both health care and preserving our climate.
If we delay and longer, we will all get what the Deniers deserve.