Invitation to the Climate Party

Dear Climate Allies,

We are creating a Climate Party to OCCUPY OUR GOVERNMENT to get solutions to the Climate Crisis. We've registered CLIMATEPARTY.ORG to host our activities on-line. As Tim DeChristopher said recently "Our challenge is not a technical one or an economic one: it's a political one."

The Climate Party's first General Assembly is this Sunday Nov. 6th, starting 10 minutes after the end of the upcoming Tar Sands Action, estimated to be 5:40pm. We're meeting to the middle-left side of Lafayette Park, if you were turning away from the White House. We'll reconvene for a 9 pm evening session over pints at Harry's Restaurant (436 11th St NW, http://www.harryssaloon.com/).

From this humble beginning, we'll create a political movement that swears eternal opposition to Tar Sands Oil. Since the Climate Crisis will be with us for the rest of our lives, we can afford to spend time building political infrastructure to help us Win Our Victories. Let us begin the discussion about creating a Political WIng of the Climate Movement.

The Climate Party will take a multi-tracked approach to pushing the political system. We will create a national third party, support candidates in other parties who are Climate Champions, create a Climate Policy data base to push doable Climate Legislation, host Climate Culture events in DC to bring the truth to the political elite, create support networks for Climate Champions, create a DC Climate Activist Hostel to bring more climate voices to the Capitol, create a Congressional Climate Caucus, fundraise and more.

First, we'll create a Climate Citizen & Politician Alliance to be a support network for Climate Champion Politicians, like Rep. Paul Pinsky of Maryland who was arrested at the Tar Sands Action in August. You may never have heard of Paul and that's part of the problem. We need to support our Climate Allies by volunteering for their campaigns, supporting them financially and amplifying their message. The young people who went to Powershift need jobs supporting the campaigns of Climate Champions. We'll create a support network that brings together Climate Politicians and Volunteers.

Second, we'll support you when you run for office. If you were willing to get arrested in front of the White House, you are brave enough to be in the US Senate. We will "storm the bastille" of our oily government and elect 10,000 Climate Champions. Please be one of them. We will encourage a new generation to run for office by DOING POLITICS DIFFERENTLY. We ONE PENNY from FOSSIL FUEL CORPORATIONS. Many people refuse to enter politics because they think it will require them to become corrupt, phony liars. We will not require you to wear a tie or wear your hair slicked back. We will create a party of authentic, down-to-earth, big-hearted humans. We will do politics in a way that doesn't sell our souls, but rather, makes our souls shine.

Third, the Climate Party will be creative to put the Climate Crisis at the forefront of the national political conversation. We must break the unholy silence on the Climate Crisis in DC. We must stop letting the Political Class get away with "shuffling the deck chairs of the Titanic" with their delusional arguments about budgets while the sky is being broken. First and foremost, DC politicians will take the Climate Crisis seriously when we start winning 50 seats in Congress. Additionally, the Climate Party aspires to host a series of awesome Climate Culture events in DC, such as Grizzly Bear rock show with Dr. James Hansen speaking at the set break. We'll give away tickets to congressional staffers until everybody on Capitol Hill understands the dire seriousness of Runaway Climate Change.

Fourth, the Climate Party will stake out advanced positions on Climate, far ahead of what is "conventional wisdom" in DC. We will push serious, realistic Climate Public Policy. We will compile a database of doable Climate Policy options to give good politicians something to work with, like "Complete Street" legislation, carbon taxes, enforcing existing EPA standards, writing new standards commensurate to the problem, signing the Kyoto Protocol, banning Tar Sands oil like the E.U., and ending fossil fuel subsidies. We will advocate for Public Policy based on Ecological Intelligence and the Precautionary Principle, and so we'll oppose "green-washing" non-solutions like the so-called "Smart-meters" based on radio-frequency pollution.

The author Terry Tempest Williams was debating war with a conservative senator. He asked her "which of your beliefs would you be willing to die for?" and the question caused her a lot of contemplation. Eventually she decided that the real question was "what would I live for?" Going to jail in protest is like a minor dying. But what can we dedicate our lives to that will make even more change? We can occupy our government with good people who know about the Climate Crisis so we can get human civilization on track to survival.

Please join us. Support this new action by donating online, helping us compile a library of articles on Climate&Politics and on Climate Policy, running for office, signing our email list and offering your service to the Climate Party. The Climate Party starts out as a shoe-string, ragtag crew, but we are right to obsessively focus on the Climate Crisis, and in ten years, our Climate-centric approach will seem prescient, and we'll be a force in national politics. We have a long row to hoe. We invite good allies to join us as we go the distance. We join together in this endeavor not knowing how it will go, but knowing that it needs to be done.

We invite the Divine Source to bless our endeavors with success, fun and victory. May we be the human species coming into Ecological Balance with Mother Earth so Humanity continues gracefully into the future.

Onward and upward!

The fierce “Storms of My Grandchildren”

James Hansen, the leading climate scientist, has an excellent new book for understanding the Climate Crisis.

The book’s poetic title “Storms of My Grandchildren” distills the crisis to it’s essence: our society’s failure to address the Climate Crisis creates a situation of “intergenerational remote tyranny” that force upon our descendents a terrible fate, while we blithely doze in a self-absorbed stupor from the intoxicating fumes of the oil age.

Hansen writes movingly about his grandchildren motivating him to make clear his ideas and step up to the fight. He has dropped his scientific autism and has drawn some agreeably radical conclusions: complete stop to burning coal, calling out greenwashing politicians, advocating for nonviolent resistance.

Hansen analyzes the Climate Crisis from the vantage point of scientist, policy advocate, Washington bureaucrat, activist, and the concerned grandfather. Hanson was the guy that Bill McKibben bugged to get the actual number (350 carbon parts per million) for humanity to shoot at, an interesting story for climate activists interested in a little bit of movement history of 350.org.

It is fascinating to follow in the wake of a great mind working at the top of their game with the motivation to save his grandchildren and life on Earth. This creates an energized tone to the writing: caring grandfather going over-the-Rubicon with a now-or-never attitude to speak truth to power.

The Climate Crisis issue is stuck mostly for politics, rather than the science, and so Hansen offers a very useful analysis of the political climate around climate change.

Hansen says that politicians pretend to be green but don’t really put out. ”Most politicians advertised themselves as being “green” but what I learned was that, invariably, it amounted to greenwash, demonstrating token environmental support while kowtowing to fossil fuel special interests.”

Hansen gives us an insider’s view of the underworld of Worshington’s Bushite climate denial. Like touring Dante’s inferno, we get to sit in at the Bush’s Climate Task Force, where he was given a whole 20 minutes and it turns out all the decisions had already been made to totally ignore the science and whore for the oil companies.

The book transmits to us a deeper understanding of the climate system mechanisms: oceans, gases, sunlight, and the carbon cycle. For example, Hansen explains that carbon stays in the air for a very long time. It doesn’t dissipate like a fart, but lingers, silent but deadly, for centuries as a near-permanent new addition to the thin, delicate sky.

Therefore, as one graph shows, though China emits more carbon annually than the US, the cumulative output is more important, because the carbon is still around, and the US is still #1 in this, at 27% of the cumulative carbon pumped into the atmosphere 1795-2008. USA! USA!

And so, energy efficiency is not really a solution, because it stands in the place of getting off fossil fuels entirely, which is what is really required. Hansen writes, “The problem is that the act of slowing down emissions, by itself, does almost no good. The reason is that the lifetime of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere-ocean system is millennia. So it doesn’t matter much whether the fossil fuel is burned this year or next year. Energy efficiency is certainly an essential part of the solution to global warming, but it must be part of a strategic approach that leaves most of the fossil fuels in the round. Yes, most of the fossil fuels must be left in the ground. That is the explicit message that the science provides.”

It is beautiful to get new ideas that allow our mind’s eye to see centuries of sky patterns, to see how clouds work, to see what our delicate sky is made of.

The sky seems tall and way up there, but it’s really the surface of an apple compared to the earth, a thin film of unusual gases that press against the planet amidst a vast airless space. It is beautiful to contemplate the tremendous complexity of this arrangement of sunlight, funny gases, and human life interacting with it all! Hansen deserves credit for making understandable the complexity of Climate science. May we have a world citizenry that arises in shared knowledge of how our sky works and how we can protect it.

Understanding the Climate Crisis is like walking into a dark room, hands in-front as we look for the light switch. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks of the wisdom of not knowing, of acceptance of the borders of our knowing and not getting uptight at our ignorance. This book is a good place to humbly not-know everything and be willing to learn, and travel behind this dedicated activist as he tries to turn on the lights for us.