Why Act, Why Now?
It’s time to take a stand on global warming. For more than 30 years, scientists, environmentalists, and Americans from all walks of life have urged leaders to take action to prevent a climate catastrophe. Yet even with the impacts of global warming mounting—droughts and
wildfires in the West and Southeast; hurricanes in the Gulf; record floods year after year in the Heartland; deadly heat waves in the Northeast; and the spiraling cost of it all—our leaders have failed to take the action so urgently needed. Now we are running out of time to avert the most catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis.
While the Obama administration is a welcome change from the past 8 years, we also recognize that powerful interests are working hard to ensure that their profits continue to come before climate solutions. Even in the hopes that a new administration and Congress will prioritize climate concerns—without a powerful grassroots movement, we can expect compromises and half-measures that our communities and climate cannot afford.
We aim to help build upon the grassroots movement for climate justice and push the scales of power back towards community and ecological sustainability.
What is Civil Disobedience? And why are we doing it?
Civil disobedience is a time-honored tactic and strategy of peaceful social movements. It has been used throughout history as an effective way to demonstrate the seriousness of an issue, the morality of a situation, and the commitment people have to bring about change.
There are occasions when outdated laws and policies are unable to ensure justice and the common good. We have reached such a moment in the struggle to stop global warming. As with Gandhi’s walk for independence and Martin Luther King’s march for equal rights, history now calls on people of conscience to peacefully take a principled stand on global warming. Today scientists and policy experts, like NASA’s James Hansen and Nobel Prize laureate Al Gore, are calling on Americans to engage in civil disobedience against coal-fired power plants, the country’s dirtiest energy source and biggest source of global warming pollution.
