#usclimateplan

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If we’re going to win...

Last week I was on the floor of congress, where I was invited by the Democratic minority to testify on the Obama Administration’s “Social Cost of Carbon,” a measurement that allows the federal government to account for future climate damages when doing cost-benefit analyses for federal rulemaking. It’s a simple, common sense rule, and I was there to speak on its importance, why it needs to be kept accurate, and why it could be much higher.

Sensible people might debate how such a cost—the cost of climate damages that we are already experiencing—might be calculated, but in that hearing room I was surrounded by very few sensible people. 

The other witnesses—representatives for fossil fuel front group think-tanks like The Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute—had been brought there to question whether the federal government should be even thinking about climate change...and whether climate change is even real. Sadly, many members of the committee were not only entertaining this, but encouraging it with leading questions.

It’s 2015, and our Congress is so far behind the times and out of touch with the American people that it is still debating the reality of climate change with the help of fossil-fuel funded climate deniers. To be sure, the national climate movement has made significant breakthroughs — diversifying its ranks and shuttering the 200th coal fired power plant. Yet, emissions are still climbing and we’re still not on the path towards climate justice for all.

To get there, we’ll ultimately need action from Congress. And to get that, we’ll need to build a movement with enough people power to — once and for all — stop  fossil fuel interests that are polluting our communities, our atmosphere, and our democracy. 

If we're going to win, it's going to take all of us who care getting involved.

So let’s grow this movement. If you, like us, believe that building a movement for bold national climate policy is the most important thing we can be doing to take on the climate crisis, we want you to help us grow our list of supporters. We’ve got big things coming in the next few weeks, and we've set a short-term goal to add 300 more people to our email list. Share this with your friends, family, parents, and fellow future fighters and tell them to sign up to join our movement.

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We’re all in this together, we can’t do this without you, and we need to get bigger.

In solidarity,

Dr. Michael K. Dorsey

Co-founder and Vice President of Strategy and Operations, U.S. Climate Plan

P.S. Not convinced? Read our Policy Director Matt Lichtash's recent article on why it's imperative that the U.S. lead.

[usclimateplan]

It always seems impossible until it is done.

The other day when I told someone what I do, they asked:

“Do you ever feel like your work is completely impossible?”

One might be taken aback to receive a question like that about their job from someone they just met, but people working on climate change get questions like this all the time.

“Isn’t your work depressing?” “How do you hold out hope?”

The more you learn about the implications of the way we're changing our atmosphere, the more daunting the challenge seems. It's emotionally heart-wrenching. Every time another superstorm that hits is just a taste of what’s to come for future generations if we don’t act.

Then there’s the fact that many top psychologists believe that our brains simply aren't wired to deal with a problem of this magnitude with the worst impacts so far into the future. 

And then there’s the politics of the whole situation. Our congress is more politically polarized than ever and, somewhere along the way, the science of climate change got caught up in it all.

Oh yeah. And the main contributor to climate change? Burning fossil fuels? That just happens to be the source of revenue for the most powerful industry in the history of the world.

Depressing, dismal, hopeless, overwhelming. I get it.

But most people who get involved in this work know all of this from the get-go, and still dive in head first. Why?

Because when you’re faced with an injustice, you have two options. You can either turn your cheek and decide that it’s someone else’s problem or you can act.

We’ve chosen to act, and you can, too. Support us with a donation today.

Our worst moments as a nation have been when we’ve decided that an injustice was someone else’s problem and chosen to turn a blind-eye. It’s hard for someone of my generation to imagine a world where people sat in different sections of the bus based on their skin color — but half a century ago that was the status quo.

Our country's best moments have been those times when we’ve taken on impossible tasks, with the odds stacked completely against us, because we believed, our nation and our world, would be better off for it. When President Kennedy gave his famous 1961 speech that the United States would land a rocket on the moon within a decade, many of the materials needed to get us there hadn’t even been invented yet.

We have the technological and policy solutions that we need to tackle climate change. What we need is more people who choose to act. Support our work and together, we can make the impossible, inevitable.

[usclimateplan]

Our biggest campaign yet.

One week ago, Congress sent a bill to build the dirty, climate polluting Keystone XL pipeline to the President’s desk. Next week the President will veto that bill, and because of the efforts of thousands of people like us, it seems like he’s poised to reject the project outright once and for all.

When TransCanada first applied for a permit to build this pipeline to bring Canadian oil through the U.S. to the Gulf of Mexico to export, the State Department and Obama administration seemed all but certain to rubber-stamp the project. Six years later, the climate movement has grown strong enough to stop it in its tracks.

But with the future of our planet at stake, stopping a single pipeline isn’t enough. More fossil fuel infrastructure projects are being proposed every day, and though renewable energy is on the rise, we are not transitioning our energy system fast enough to match the scale of the challenge we face.

That’s why U.S. Climate Plan is launching its biggest campaign yet. We’re calling it the Future Power Plan, and it’s a plan to build the power needed to win ambitious national climate policy and a clean energy future. 

You can join our first training call on March 2nd at 7pm to learn more about our vision, grand strategy, and how you can start building power in your community.

The good news it that the public is on our side. A recent poll showed that 78% of Americans (including 60% of Republicans) support government action on climate change. The bad news is that folks tend to rank this low on their list of their priorities.

Right now, we have a unique chance to shift the public narrative around the necessity for bold climate action. The EPA is putting forth a rule called the “Clean Power Plan” to put the first ever limits on power sector emissions in each state. The rule doesn’t go nearly far enough, but what it does do is create an opportunity where every state in the country is now having a conversation about climate policy.

Nothing short of a livable future is acceptable, so we’ve created the Future Power Plan to take advantage of this opportunity. Working with students and others, we’ll put forth visions for policy solutions that are just, inspirational, and actually transition our economies to provide clean and safe energy for all. We’ll train and empower organizers to develop strategies specific to their communities for how to shift the debate. And we’ll escalate our tactics until we’ve built a strong enough movement to win.

This campaign is about generating a new kind of power. Not just renewable energy to power our future, but also people power to create truly transformative change. Even if we don’t win these state-level fights, we’ll be shifting the public narrative in key states necessary to win climate legislation nationally.

This Future Power Plan is only possible with you. If you’re in, sign up for our first on-boarding call on March 2nd at 7PM ET to learn more about the campaign and how you can get involved. 

The technologies and policies to create the conditions that can drive us towards a safe, just, and equitable future already exist. What we lack is political will.

Together, we can change that, and we hope you’ll join us. 

P.S. We'll be posting more about the campaign soon, (including a re-cap of the first workshop we did with students last weekend in Virginia) but we wanted to give you all taste of what we're up to. Also, if you can help us out by donating to the campaign!