Your Weapon: 350. Your Mission: Save Civilization from Global Warming
Vermont author, scholar and activist Bill McKibben sees the climate change challenge like this: we have 18 months — just 18 months — to pound a single number into the world’s collective head.
350.
350. That’s the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in parts per million, we need to achieve if we hope to avoid catastrophic changes to our climate and our civilization. The challenge here is that CO2 concentrations have already climbed to 387 parts per million and rose by 2.14 ppm, the highest rate of increase yet, in 2007.
And why 18 months? Because that’s how long we have before world leaders meet in Copenhagen to draft a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Unless we convince those leaders that achieving 350 ppm of CO2 is critical to our survival, McKibben believes, we could push our planet — and humanity’s future — past the point of no return.
“We (the U.S.) are going to have to provide an awful lot of leadership,” McKibben said this week in a conference call with eco-bloggers. He described the action necessary as “the carbon equivalent of the Marshall Plan.”
McKibben, author of “The End of Nature” and “Deep Economy,” hopes to prevent that outcome by mobilizing a global education campaign: Brighter Planet’s 350 Challenge for bloggers and for activists in general. The campaign aims to build upon the success of McKibben’s last activist effort: StepItUp. But where StepItUp was focused on action in the U.S., the 350 Challenge is gunning for action on a global scale.
By creating a forum in which people around the globe can show what they are doing to educate the public and world leaders about the life-or-death importance of 350, McKibben hopes we can finally reach a point where the next step taken on climate change is a truly meaningful one. While 350.org doesn’t kick off officially until June 9, the Website has already been translated into more than a dozen languages and the Challenge itself has launched lots of action around the globe, from 350 cyclists taking to the streets in Utah to 350 surfers gathering on the beaches.
“Like StepItUp, it’s going to serve as us issuing an invitation to a public dinner,” McKibben said. “Everyone will have to figure out (for themselves) how to make the dinner work.”
OK, now. You’ve all received the invitation. Now’s the time to start making this global feast of activism work.
