350 Updates

A Confession

Will Bates
Posted by Will Bates - 06/18/12, 1:54am

This email just went out to the 350 email network...

Dear friends,

A confession: I like to tweet.

When I come across something particularly sweet or peculiarly depressing, I feel better once I’ve shared it on Twitter.

Twitter was designed as an outlet for individuals, but we think it can also work for social movements. And so, today, we’re launching an effort to amplify our movement’s message on Twitter, for a truly important cause.

The world’s leaders are gathered in Rio for the “Earth Summit”, and we need to tell them to end fossil fuel subsidies. It’s going to be a Twitter Storm, and we need all the help we can get.

Join in here: www.endfossilfuelsubsidies.org/twitterstorm

We know that world leaders aren't likely to achieve a comprehensive climate breakthrough in Rio -- we aren't expecting new binding rules that would slow the carbon emissions that are heating up our planet. But our governments could at least stop sending nearly a trillion dollars a year to the fossil fuel industry. If they did, it would help weaken the coal and oil and gas tycoons, and give renewable energy a fighting chance.

Ending fossil fuel subsidies would also stop wasting our money. Why on earth should taxpayers subsidize the richest industry on earth? It’s bad enough they wreck the planet, without us paying them a performance bonus for doing it.

So here’s the plan: we’re going to kick up a Twitter Storm. We need you to help create this storm by sending a message with the hashtag #EndFossilFuelSubsidies. We’ll be beaming your messages on famous landmarks in cities around the world, and a young team of climate activists will be on the ground in Rio to make sure world leaders hear us loud and clear.

If you don’t already have a twitter account, we need you to sign up for one, which is easy to do. Tips and tricks for all this can be found here: www.endfossilfuelsubsidies.org/twitterstorm

Look -- sending tweets and emails alone will not win this fight. But we can’t go to jail or hold rallies every day. This is an easy way to make a statement. A loud one, if we all work together.

Thanks,

Bill McKibben (@billmckibben on Twitter)

 
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Big #EndFossilFuelSubsidies Action at Rio+20

Jamie Henn
Posted by Jamie Henn - 06/17/12, 2:33pm

Check out these amazing photos from a big #EndFossilFuelSubsidies rally on the iconic Copacabana beach outside of the Rio+20 Earth Conference today: 

 
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Movement Building with Radiohead

Justin Haaheim
Posted by Justin Haaheim - 06/16/12, 1:20pm

UPDATE 6/17/12: Yesterday the stage collapsed before the Radiohead show in Toronto and we lost Scott Johnson, the drum technician and a friend from the tour. Miraculously the others from the crew that were injured are ok. I was working with our 350.orgvolunteers at the time away from the stage (all are uninjured), and am grateful to all of them for being attentive and supportive. Our love and support goes out to Scott's family from the 350.org team. --Justin

I am on tour with Radiohead. I still can't quite believe that.

Then I pinch myself, I look around at the dedicated and hardworking production crew rigging and lighting and setting up the venue and at the band rehearsing on stage, and I remember I've got work to do: I'm here to build the climate movement.

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I'm here because Thom Yorke, Radiohead's lead singer, happens to be a big fan of ours at 350.org and specially invited us to join him for the US+Canada leg of their tour in May and June.  And to give you a sense of what kind of fans they are, when I joined on in the end of May they made me officially part of the production crew, complete with a spot on the tour buses, a big lighting box for our gear that goes on the trucks, and credentials to get where I need to go backstage and around the venue.  Radiohead is serious about supporting 350.org.

I dig that, because I'm pretty serious about supporting 350.org and the grassroots movement we're building, too.  So when I get to meet our 20 new volunteers for each concert, and as we prepare for the hordes of 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 concertgoers, I pose this question: what can we do with our time and talents to build the climate movement today?

It's not a trivial question, and the ideas people share always inspire me.

 
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Momentum Builds for Rio+20 “Twitterstorm”

Jamie Henn
Posted by Jamie Henn - 06/15/12, 9:10am

It’s another sunny day in Rio de Janeiro, but a storm is brewing. As delegates from around the world fly into town for the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the largest environmental gathering in world history, 350.org is teaming up with over a dozen environmental groups for a major “Twitterstorm,” a 24-hour push beginning on June 18 to get as many tweets as possible for the hashtag #endfossilfuelsubsidies.

Every year, governments around the world give nearly $1 trillion in handouts and tax-breaks to the fossil fuel industry instead of using the money for sustainable development, clean energy initiatives, reducing the deficit, or any number of better initiatives. Three years ago, the G20 countries committed to ending these subsidies but there has been no action since.

The #EndFossilFuelSubsidies twitter storm is timed to coincide with this year’s G20 meeting which will begin in Los Cabos, Mexico on Monday. Two days later, over a hundred heads of state will join 50,000 people at the Rio+20 Earth Summit. The synchronicity of the meetings provides the perfect opportunity for world leaders to put their money where their mouths are and provide a clear plan to cut subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.

 
 

Engineering the twitterstorm has taken the combined efforts of over a dozen environmental groups and numerous other partners. Advocates are busy lining up a list of celebrities – from Robert Redford to Leonardo DiCaprio – to blog and tweet about the push. Over 2,500 have joined a special Facebook event to form a “Twitter Team” that will drive the push and actively target decision makers, as well as key influencers online. The homepage for the storm features graphics that supporters can use to replace their standard avatar photo.

All of these pieces may just be enough to break the world record for the most tweets of a single hashtag in a 24 hour period. Justin Bieber currently holds the world record with 322,224, over 223 tweets a minute. Organizers are confident that even if they can’t beat the Biebs they’ll be able to generate enough traffic to dominate the online airwaves during the G20 and in the lead up to Rio+20.

Since world leaders are still struggling to articulate a clear outcome from the Rio summit, ending fossil fuel subsidies could emerge as one of the key pieces of any Rio declaration. A strong commitment from world leaders would not only show a new level of seriousness towards ending these handouts, but it would also bolster badly needed confidence in the UN’s ability to manage a multilateral process.

Who knows, maybe even @JustinBieber will tweet #endfossilfuelsubsidies on June 18th?

 
 
 
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Training for trainers at the foothills of the Himalayas

Ayesha Dsouza
Posted by Ayesha Dsouza - 06/14/12, 5:47am

17 participants from around the country with various backgrounds and skills headed off to the calming foothills of the Himalayas, Rishikesh for the first training for trainers organized by 350.org in India. The happy campers pooled in their energy, enthusiasm and skills to share an experience that we’re sure many won’t forget.

We had sessions on climate science, movement and campaign building, media and the creative use of art as a medium to convey our vision to the world. But the most powerful session was storytelling, where the individuals spent some time introspecting and then shared their stories with the rest of the group and this really bonded us together.

We asked them a few questions at the end of the workshop and our new 350 intern, Vir Chowdhry, a student at FLAME put together a cool video with a few videoclips and snapshots from the training.

 
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A storm is brewing.

Will Bates
Posted by Will Bates - 06/13/12, 1:22pm

This email just went out to our global network...

 

We’re about to start a massive social media storm to pressure world leaders to #EndFossilFuelSubsidies.

We need your help to make it work -- join the 350 Social Media Team today.

Join the Social Media Teamwww.350.org/social

Dear friends,

We just crunched the numbers, and there are now over one million people around the world who are calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies!

One million. It's an incredible milestone -- and the timing couldn't be better. In exactly a week, the "Rio Earth Summit" will begin, and world leaders will converge in Brazil. The gathering is being billed as a landmark event for the planet's future, and the theme of the conference is "building the global green economy." Well, we can't think of a better way to build the green economy than ending fossil fuel subsidies and investing in renewable energy instead.

So we'll be using the Rio Summit as a way to jump-start the next phase of our campaign on fossil fuel subsidies -- and we'll be harnessing the power of the web to ramp up the pressure on world leaders in a brand new way.

On 18 June, we are going to unleash a 24-hour social media storm -- an online push united by one single message: #EndFossilFuelSubsidies.

Click here to join the 350 Social Media Team and help make our message unignorable: www.350.org/social

Joining the social media team shouldn't be intimidating -- it just means that as Rio approaches, we'll send you a few updates with messages to spread online, mainly on Twitter and Facebook. If we can get 10,000 people to join in, we'll have built up a digital army around the world who can break through the noise.

Now, before any of you who don’t use social media (especially Twitter) feel like we won’t be including you in the fun, we want you to know two things:

1) It’s totally OK if social media isn’t your thing -- there's lots of offline activism ahead for the climate movement, and 350 activists in Rio and around the world are doing incredible work offline to complement this digital push.

2) If you’ve been interested in exploring how to harness the power of social media for social change, this is your moment to dive in. We'll offer a "social media bootcamp" with guides and tools to make it super-easy for folks who are new to all this.

 
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Climate Change, the "silent motivator"

May Boeve
Posted by May Boeve - 06/13/12, 11:38am

One of our heroes, 345 Ambassador Marlene Moses of Nauru (here she is, at Right, at one of our events in South Africa), has just written a piece on Huffington Post about the Rio Summit and how little is spoken about climate change in the official documents. In it she referred to how infrequently climate change is referenced, such that it is almost a "silent motivator."

We stand with Ambassador Moses and all those converging on Rio--these global summits can be great opportunities--but only with a popular outcry accompanying them.

On Tuesday you can be part of that. For the first time we're doing an all-out push online to coincide with a global summit. In past years we have sent very large delegations of global youth (that describes the vast sum of the 350 team, after all), but this time we have a small and stalward team on the ground, and will be calling on everybody else to join us in a Twitter Storm. Our mission? Make fossil fuel subsidies a very critical aspect of the Rio negotiations, an aspect too big to be watered down or ignored. We know that the key first step to ending climate change is stopping the senseless funding of the corporations creating the problem. Join us!

 
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A climate soundtrack, from DC to Ohio!

May Boeve
Posted by May Boeve - 06/12/12, 4:22pm

As we gear up for the Don't Frack Ohio action, a lot of us are thinking about the Keystone XL actions in Washington last summer. The outpouring of committed and creative activists that I was part of in DC will be on display in Columbus this weekend. If you haven't yet called your friends in Ohio to see if they can take part in the action, now's the time. Here's all the info you need.

To help get you inspired, I highly recommend watching this video from Washington, "Make a Noise." Some of those same people will be in Ohio this weekend standing up to the expanded fracking in the Buckeye State. The recording artist who wrote the song, Katie Herzig, is part of a collaboration of artists, and our friends at 1% for the Planet, donating free downloads of their songs to climate activists. You can learn about this effort from New Song Music and check out all the songs here.

 

 


 

 
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