C’mon, world! In particular: Come on, world of climate change campaigners, organisations, institutions and funding bodies who all want to see some real progress in the battle against those carbon emissions. Chip in and become stake holder in Avaaz’s new crowdfunding campaign which is a unique opportunity to see the world of campaigners for once speak with one united voice to the world’s political leaders.
350.org, Citizens Climate Lobby, Greenpeace, the Global Campaign for Climate Action, Global Power Shift, the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, Friends of the Earth, WWF, the Youth Climate Coalitions, Bill McKibben, Rob Hopkins, Al Gore, Sustainia, Ceres, Carbon War Room, The Carbon Disclosure Project, The Climate Institute, The Climate Group, Climate Solutions, The Energy Collective, Beyond Zero Emissions, 10:10, Earth Day, Global e-Sustainability Initiative, R20, Peaceful Uprising, The Energy Collective, Teens Turning Green, Echoing Green, Global Green, Take part, GoodPlanet.org, SunFunder.com, GreenBiz.com, Carbon Brief, Renewable Energy World, just to mention a few — sustainability news agencies and bloggers, and all the thousands of campaigns, lobby groups, organisations and institutions — will you please explain to me: why don’t you all now just jump on board on this one, together, drop your promoting your own individual projects, causes and campaigns for a second and show yourselves and the rest of us that we humans are able to work together and speak with one voice, after all, when it comes to something as important and serious as it is to pull this one off right with the obvious and simple goal: to save the planet from a climate catastrophe?
Read in the e-mail, attached below, what it is Avaaz wants to do. And then I can’t see you have any excuse not to either
• chip in, so that they quickly will reach that threshold of 40,000 contributors, and/or
• promote Avaaz’s crowdfunding initiative on your home page, so that your network will get know about it, and that you are supporting it.
Someone on this planet needs to speak for all of us campaigners and activists as well as all the normal, concerned citizens around the world in those months leading up to the UN summit in 2015. And you might have to just trust me on this, but I have followed Avaaz for some years, and I know that here is an organisation which has everything in place to be that ‘loudspeaker’ and counter for us, the millions who want to see change, not climate change.
Avaaz is only five years old, but — according to the British paper The Guardian — has exploded to become “the globe’s largest and most powerful online activist network”.
I’ve never done something like this before. But today I forwarded that campaign e-mail I received from the Avaaz, and asked everyone in my family and among my friends that I have an e-mail address for to step in. I wouldn’t do something like this if it wasn’t because what Avaaz offers us here is unique. We are running out of time. We can’t sit around and wait for the perfect opportunity or the perfect Messias to show up and lead the way for us. We need to take the offers we get, when we get them. And Avaaz here offers us an opportunity to speak as “people of the planet”, not just of one nation, or one organisation, or an individual. But first, they need to know that they have some genuine support from us.
So I passed on an e-mail. And I think we should all do that. High and low, popular or unknown. Pass it on. Spread the word. And if you can spare 25 dollars, this is an investment you won’t regret.
You can also choose the option where you pay just a few dollars a week.
Here is what I wrote:
Dear family and friends,
If you have ever considered whether you should support a good cause, here is an invitation from Avaaz, about which I will be saying to anyone I meet in the coming days: Just do it! – Join this one.
Because this is actually not another ‘good cause’, it is the most important case of all cases. Safety, security and welfare of our children, grandchildren and future generations of our families depend on this issue which we, the adults in our generation, must make our mind up about JUST NOW: How do we stop the pollution of the atmosphere in time before we have caused a runaway climate catastrophe?
If not we — the people, across borders — jointly make our opinion known, and our concern about this issue, we can not expect politicians should dare to take those decisions which must be taken. As Avaaz write in the letter below, the politicians are up against the world’s most powerful and wealthy business leaders.
That voice has been missing. If any, then Avaaz is the organisation we have on this planet which is the best option we’ve got, capable of delivering that ‘one voice’ the world is currently missing.
You will not receive many other requests like this one which are at such a high and serious level. I have seen what Avaaz was able to do in previous campaigns — they have proved to be able to deliver results.
So, what they are asking for your support to now is only the first phase of their work. They collect funds in order to be able to prepare and gear up for the actual climate campaign, which will kick off later — as a prelude to the global UN climate conference in 2015.
They have been waiting for an opportunity to take climate crisis up. Now they found finally saw one that they assess was powerful enough to take action.
For a start, here are a few suggestions for how you can take action:
1) Get the credit card out – it will be worth every penny. You can support the amount of $75 (DKK 75) and up, and you can pay with VISA card.
2) Send this email on to anyone you know
3) Read Avaaz’s own five-point list of suggestions.
4) When that’s done, and if you want more ideas on what you could do — here and now — to be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem, read on here: https://climatesafety.info/?page_id=14
30 months to save the world
From Ricken Patel – Avaaz.org
19 June 2013 09:39
Dear Avaaz community,
This may be the most important email I’ve ever written to you.
Scientist Igor Semiletov has sailed the Russian arctic ocean for years checking for small plumes of dangerous Methane gas. He’s mapped many of these meters-wide plumes, emitting gas 20 times more damaging to our climate than carbon dioxide. But on his last trip, as he came across the first plume, he couldn’t believe it. It was a KILOMETER wide. A vast column of gas spewing into our atmosphere. He sailed on and found another a kilometer wide, and another, and another. Hundreds of them.
Scientists are investigating, but this could be what experts warned us about. As the earth warms, it creates many “tipping points” that accelerate the warming out of control. Warming thaws the Arctic sea ice and permafrost, releasing millions of tons of Methane gas, which massively accelerates warming, which warms the Arctic more, and so on. We spin out of control. Already this year — storms, temperatures — everything is off the charts.
We CAN stop this, if we act very fast, and all together. And out of this extinction nightmare, we can pull one of the most inspiring futures for our children and grandchildren. A clean, green future in balance with the earth that gave birth to us.
We have 30 months until the Paris Summit, the meeting that world leaders have decided will determine the fate of our efforts to fight climate change. It might seem like a long time — it’s not. We have 30 months to get the right leaders in power, get them to that meeting, give them a plan, and hold them accountable. And it’s us vs. the oil companies, and fatalism. We can win, we must, but we need to blast out of the starting gate with 40,000 pledges of support — we’ll only process the donations if we hit our goal. For the world we dream of, let’s make it happen:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/30_months_k/?bhOyyab&v=26018
Fatalism on climate change is not just futile, it’s also incompetent. The hour is late, but it is still absolutely within our power to stop this catastrophe, simply by shifting our economies from oil and coal to other sources of power. And doing so will bring the world together like never before, in a deep commitment and cooperation to protect our planetary home. It’s a beautiful possibility, and the kind of future Avaaz was born to create.
Facing this challenge will take heart, and hope, and also all the smarts we have. Here’s the plan:
• 1. Go Political: Elect Climate Leaders — 5 crucial countries have elections in the next 30 months. Let’s make sure the right people win, and with the right mandate. Avaaz is one of the only major global advocacy organizations that can be political. And since this fight will be won or lost politically, it could be at some points just us vs. the oil companies to decide who our politicians listen to.
• 2. Make Hollande a Hero — French President Francois Hollande will chair the Paris summit – a powerful position. We have to try every tactic and channel — his personal friends and family, his political constituency, his policy advisors — to make him the hero we need him to be to make the summit a success.
• 3. Take it to the Next Level — The scale of this crisis demands action that goes beyond regular campaigning. It’s time for powerful, direct, non-violent action, to capture imagination, convey moral urgency, and inspire people to act. Think Occupy.
• 4. Out the Spoilers — Billionaires like the Koch brothers and their oil companies are the major spoilers in climate change – funding junk science to confuse us and spending millions on misleading PR, while buying politicians wholesale. With investigative journalism and more, we need to expose and counter their horrifically irresponsible actions.
• 5. Define the Deal — Even in the face of planetary catastrophe, 195 governments in a room can be just incompetent. We need to invest in top quality policy advice to develop ingenious strategies, mechanisms, and careful compromises so that when the summit arrives, a critical mass of leaders are already bought in to a large part of the deal, and no one can claim that good solutions don’t exist.
We need 40,000 of us to pledge small donations to blast out of the starting gate on this plan. The amount doesn’t matter as much as much as the choice – to hope, and to act:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/30_months_k/?bhOyyab&v=26018
At the last major climate summit in Copenhagen 2009, we played a pivotal role in German and Japanese ‘climate’ elections, in shifting Brazilian policy, and in helping win a major global deal on financing, with rich countries promising $100 billion per year to poor countries to help them address climate change. Back then, Avaaz was 3 million people. After Copenhagen, we reflected that we needed to be a lot bigger to meet the challenge posed by climate change. Now, we’re 22 million, and growing by 1 million per month.
Climate change is the ultimate global collective action problem, requiring cooperation from every government in the world. And Avaaz is the ultimate collective action solution, with millions of us united in common vision across every nation. This is our time, to build a world for our children that’s beauty matches our dreams. Let’s get started.
With hope and appreciation for this amazing community,
Ricken and the entire Avaaz team
MORE INFORMATION:
Scientists Close in on the Cause of Arctic Methane Leaks (Climate Central)
www.climatecentral.org/news/scientists-close-in-on-the-cause-of-arctic-methane-leaks-15090
NASA warns Arctic thaw could have huge impact on global warming (The Verge)
www.theverge.com/2013/6/12/4422078/nasa-arctic-permafrosts-carbon-emissions
Five Reasons We Need a New Global Agreement on Climate Change by 2015 (Switchboard NRDC)
switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/jschmidt/five_reasons_we_need_a_new_glo.html
The Doha climate talks were a start, but 2015 will be the moment of truth (The Guardian)
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/10/doha-climate-talks-global-warming
Vast methane ‘plumes’ seen in Arctic ocean as sea ice retreats (The Independent)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/vast-methane-plumes-seen-in-arctic-ocean-as-sea-ice-retreats-6276278.html
Note — there is a debate in the scientific community about the scale and significance of the methane plumes, as there is about a number of alarming developments in climate science, and has been in the past about issues like the loss of arctic sea ice. As it has for decades, the scientific community as a whole is moving conservatively, slowly embracing a gradually more and more alarming consensus as evidence rules out other possibilities. But the vast majority agree, with many desperately trying to the get our societies to understand, that we are facing catastrophic threats unless we act.
Avaaz.org is a 22-million-person global campaign network that works to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people shape global decision-making. (“Avaaz” means “voice” or “song” in many languages.) Avaaz members live in every nation of the world; our team is spread across 18 countries on 6 continents and operates in 17 languages. Learn about some of Avaaz’s biggest campaigns here, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
To contact Avaaz, please do not reply to this email. Instead, write to us at www.avaaz.org/en/contact or call us at +1-888-922-8229 (US).
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