Change just one light bulb, and you may get stuck changing them all
You want to do your part to stop global warming, but you don't have a lot of time. You can bike more, eat locally grown food, and switch to energy-efficient light bulbs. These are all good things to do - but if your time is limited, your single most-effective contribution to stopping global warming - is grassroots organizing.
Why?
Every single Yodeler reader can dramatically reduce our personal CO2 footprint - yet we can still be hit with global warming. Change has to be worldwide and systematic. How do we achieve that?
I read once about a woman who wanted to be sure that when she had a baby, her breast milk would contain the fewest toxins. This woman lived a truly organic lifestyle - with vegan eating, water filters on her tap, and all-natural products for her home. Yet it turned out that even after 10 years of veganism and healthy lifestyle, she still carried toxins in her body. So many levels of our society are toxic that there was no way for her to shield her body against air pollution, water pollution, and endocrine-disrupting hormones. Scientists recently found that unborn fetuses already test positive for many common chemicals. And so this woman turned to political action, and within a few years, organizing other folks like her, helped get the federal government to ban toxins linked to breast cancer. With the same amount of hard work and energy, she was able to use her life to create change for all women nationally.
That's the level of change needed to avert climate meltdown.
Focusing only on your personal compact fluorescent lights and individual carbon footprint is exactly what the big energy companies would like you to do. Remember the early 1990s, when the ozone layer was depleting, and much like today, there was a buzz around environmentalism. Remember books like 365 Things You Can Do to Save the Planet, that suggested things like placing a brick in your toilet as ways to fix our planetary meltdown? It turns out that some of these were paid for by big polluting companies. These companies would like nothing more than for you to focus on the brick in your toilet rather than the power plant that's spewing pollution down the street.
I've even heard rumors that PG&E is paying for the "Low Carbon Diet Footprint". Whether these are true or not, PG&E would surely prefer to focus attention on the individual consumer rather than to have people pushing it to increase its solar and wind power from 2% up to (say) 50%, as they'd like us to believe they're doing. Energy companies are paying billions for ad campaigns and investing just a fraction of that in actual clean energy. We call this greenwashing.
The most long-lasting systematic change this country has seen is through organizing. When people have realized their own collective power and organized to change the balance of power in society - by running strategic campaigns - they have made incredible change possible in this country. We have minimum-wage and child-labor laws today because of incredible labor-union organizing. Women have the right to vote because of the suffrage movement. It will take comparable organizing to bring the true clean-energy revolution our country needs.
PG&E could dramatically increase its use of wind, solar, tidal, microhydro, biomass, and geothermal energy - if there were intense, well-organized, and focused political pressure to do so. It's done a cost-benefit analysis, however, and believes that it's cheaper to run its "Let's Green This City" ad campaign until this whole "global warming" scare blows over.
Our brightest minds, our most-innovative, truly environmental companies, our government (at all levels) could slash CO2 usage. Companies and our government could incentivize hybrids, electric cars, clean buses, and light rail instead of building more roads. Our government could dramatically subsidize wind and solar instead of coal, offshore oil drilling, and nukes. The technology is there; it's only the organized political will that's lacking.
What we can do
So where do we start? Here at home, of course?
The Sierra Club Bay Chapter is focusing on sustainable energy all over the area. In San Francisco we are campaigning for Prop H, the San Francisco Clean Energy Act. In Marin and in the East Bay, we are working to help local governments to adopt strong Community Choice Energy programs.
These are the equivalent of changing a lot of light bulbs.
We are working to establish the Bay Area as a model for the rest of the nation and the world. That's changing even more light bulbs.
One of our most significant tools for creating change is to elect public officials with the commitment and skills to bring it about. That's why much of this issue of the Yodeler is focused on election volunteering. Join us in these efforts - this election season and year-round.
Change one light bulb, and you can relight your room. Change the system, change our elected leaders, and you can help light up the world. To get involved, call Chapter legislative coordinator or call (510) 848-0800, ext. 316