In honor of the 1 year anniversary of our National Day of Climate Action, here is the e-mail that we sent to Step It Up supporters:

Dear Friends,

For hard-boiled political organizers, we’re basically nostalgic sentimentalists at heart, and so this week we’re thinking back with great fondness to last April 14, and the 1,400 demonstrations and rallies and events that you organized in all 50 states for the Step It Up National Day of Climate Action It was an awfully sweet day, with powerful results–not only was an urgent call to action issued from every corner of the country, but now it’s not uncommon to hear Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama echo your call for 80% Carbon Cuts by 2050.

And yet global warming continues, so we wanted to bring you up to date with where we are and let you in on the ground floor of our new effort:

* Step It Up has, as you know, joined with lots of other grassroots organizers across the country to form 1Sky.org, which is picking up real speed as one of the centers of the American fight against climate change. Please help them with their efforts—they report that former Step It Up organizers around the country took the lead in a series of 500 visits to Congressional offices earlier this spring. We think that with their leadership we’re very much on track to see significant climate change legislation as soon as President Bush leaves office

* Meanwhile, the science around climate change has continued to darken. We all watched the Arctic melt last summer, and an ice shelf the size of Connecticut crumple in the southern ocean this winter. James Hansen, our foremost climatologist, has just issued the most important scientific assessment of global warming in many years, which you can read here. Basically, it calls for limiting carbon concentrations in the atmosphere to below 350 parts per million. In fact, Hansen says: “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

* Therefore, our organizing team is launching a new venture: 350.org. The final website won’t be ready for a few weeks, but since you’re family we’re letting you know now. In fact, we hope very much that you’ll visit the preliminary website that we’ve set up and start figuring out how to help.

Here’s our goal: We want to take this number, 350, and spread it all over the world.(more…)


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