"The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850."


From the Introduction to "Fight Global Warming Now":

"It’s easy to join the global warming movement. We know it’s easy because we all just joined ourselves. None of us has spent long years as organizers. One of us has spent long years mostly as a writer with a little activism on the side; the rest of us haven’t spent long years doing anything except school, because we just got out of college.

But in 2007 we came together to see if we could kick up a fuss about climate change. That January 10, we launched a Web site, StepItUp2007.org. We asked people across the country to start organizing rallies for April 14, to demand that Congress cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. We had no money, and we had no organization, so we had no expectations. Our secret hope, which seemed a little grandiose, was that we might organize a hundred demonstrations for that Saturday, only three months away.

Instead, our idea took off. The e-mails we sent ended up spreading virally, in the way that certain ideas sometimes do on the Internet. People we’d never heard of started signing up on the Web site to host rallies in places we’d never heard of. The electronic pins stuck on our online map got thicker by the week—200, 500, 900. By the time the big day rolled around, there were 1,400 demonstrations in all fifty states, ranging from tiny to enormous. It was one of the biggest days of grassroots environmental protest since the first Earth Day in 1970, covered extensively in the national media and in thousands of local stories across the country.

Along the way we learned a few lessons and we want to share them in this book, which is designed to help you plan and carry out your own ongoing local rallies and campaigns, the way the thousands of organizers we worked with did on April 14, 2007. We agreed to write it because, one, we haven’t quite managed to solve global warming yet and, two, we gained a few hard-earned ideas for how to make the most of two things: local communities and the Internet."