Tonight, California's U.S. senator Barbara Boxer will join 27 other senators, including Coons, Franken, Heinrich, Markey, Murray, Schatz, Udall, Whitehouse, and Wyden to talk all night, for at least 14 hours, about the urgency of taking meaningful action to fight climate change.
Thinkprogress gives a great overview of 28 reasons why these 28 senators have finally sounded the wake up call. From one of the worst droughts in California's recorded history to $621 million in taxpayer dollars spent cleaning up record flooding in Colorado, you and I are literally paying to clean up the damage being done by an oil industry that continues to make record profits. And where do those profits go while we pay for cleanup? To buy elections and create vast disinformation campaigns to convince people the science isn't settled. Campaigns run by the exact same people that tried to convince us that smoking wasn't dangerous and tobacco wasn't addictive.
It's well past time to wake up and smell the lies. Things have finally gotten bad enough that all the disinformation in the world is no longer convincing most people not to believe their own eyes. In response, our elected officials are finally making some noise. Join them.
Why is it so easy for some people to believe the lies? I think for some, the truth is too terrible to face and so they look for any vague opinion piece written by oil-industry shills that will just tell them that everything is actually fine. Telling them that all those thousands of scientists frantically trying to warn us are actually the liars, alarmists, part of some vast conspiracy to get government research grants, or whatever other crackpot distortion they can come up with.
To anyone afraid to face the terrible truth because they see no solution to the problem, I say there are already solutions. Cleantechnica discusses solutions every day. In the last five years, 30% of new energy generation in the US has come from new wind farms. 91 Illinois communities are already 100% powered by green electricity. That's a renewable transition on a scale not seen anywhere else in the USA, and it was all done by individual communities voting for where they wanted to get their electricity from. MASSIVE CHANGE DRIVEN QUIETLY BY 1.7 MILLION LOCAL RESIDENTS.
In Germany, RWE has lost €2.8 billion - it's first loss in 60 years - because it kept pushing fossil fuel energy plans over renewable ones. As with most revolutions, from PCs to smart phones, truly-good ideas spread exponentially faster than any industry analyst ever predicts they will.
So we don't need fossil fuels. Clean tech is already here. Climate change solutions are already here. Even all the gas-guzzlers that currently dominate the roads and the skies can be run on biofuel created with technologies that are already here and within a few years of commercial implementation if only they can be adopted against the wishes of our fossil-fuel overlords.
Solar has gone down in price so fast in the last few years that it jumped from 10% of new electricity in 2012 to 29% in 2013, almost a 300% increase IN A SINGLE YEAR. If you live in a house, right now, you can get FREE solar panels on your roof, installed for FREE, and only pay a monthly bill that's LESS THAN WHAT YOU ALREADY PAY TO THE ELECTRIC COMPANY. That's through SolarCity, a company founded by cousins of Elon Musk, the guy who created Tesla motors. That's here now. That's revolutionary.
The only thing slowing down the revolution... THE ONLY THING... is oil companies and their disinformation campaigns. And the only thing that will stop them... THE ONLY THING... is us.
* Join 350.org's campaign to pull investment dollars away from these greedy, lying oil companies that force us to pay for their product and pay to clean up their mess.
* Join 28 senators to demand our government take meaningful action.
* Put solar on your roof for free and pay a lower monthly bill. Or coax your friends or even parents to do it.
Wake up. The catastrophic effects of climate change are already here, and so are the solutions.