Step It Up

Demonstrations in Washington, New York and all over the country today organized by "Step It Up" focus on taking action to address the Climate Crisis. Some 1300 events in all 50 states, and maybe the best part is that it's all been organized by young people, recent college grads in Vermont. From the photos of their hq, it looks a lot like 60s antiwar organizing. This is their future, and they know it.

Meanwhile Cheryl Crow and Laurie David (producer of An Inconvenient Truth) began a national performance tour to the same end. Together these attempts signal the political shift to an action phase. Their call for an 80% reduction is in line with the best science.

Crow and David began in Texas, the CO2 capital of the country, where a major storm terrorized Dallas and nearby places, with tornadoes and winds high enough to overturn a tractor trailer. This same storm is moving into the deep South today and will become a major storm for New York and New Jersey coastal areas, and is already pouring rain and snow into the Ohio Valley.

We've already seen unusual quantities of lake effect snow in the midwest and mid-Atlantic, and parts of Colorado are knee deep in snow today. Though it may still seem paradoxical to some, these are all predictable effects of global heating, having to do with the temperature effects on bodies of war and their effects on precipitation and the weather in general.

I saw a short clip of Crow and David yesterday. They said more in 30 seconds than most experts manage in hours. Basically: the earth is heating, humans are causing it, we need to do something about it now.