A Call to Conscience on International 350 Day of Climate Action
Saturday, October 24, Raleigh
When and Where:
2 pm Rally with speakers at Moore Square at the corner of S. Blount and E. Hargett.
3 pm March up Wilmington St. to the parking lot across from the Governor’s Mansion on East Jones St.
3:30 to 5pm Rally with speakers. Delivering the Call to Leadership and Conscience to Governor Beverly Perdue asking her to stop Cliffside. A group of volunteers will be risking arrest to deliver the message.
Our Message:
To Governor Perdue – We need your public commitment to stop Duke Energy’s new Cliffside Coal Plant, which is now under construction, by upholding your duty to enforce the Clean Air Act.
To President Obama – We need your strong leadership for an international climate treaty that is fair, ambitious, and binding based on the science – not on the priorities of the carbon lobby.
The Rally and March will be a peaceful demonstration of our moral resistance to governmental and corporate negligence. Democracy calls for our elected officials to serve the public welfare. A voluntary group will participate in peaceful, direct-action civil disobedience to highlight the urgency and importance of stopping Cliffside. Involvement in the larger march will be separate from the civil disobedience. Organizations endorsing the march do not necessarily endorse the civil disobedience but should recognize an individual’s right of conscience to participate in peaceful resistance when they view it as necessary to prevent a major harm. If you are interested in considering participation in the civil disobedience, please contact: petemacdowell@nc.rr.com or 919-259-3140.
RSVP today at http://www.350.org/raleigh
The March and Rally are being coordinated by Greenpeace and NC WARN. The list of other endorsing organizations will be out shortly.
Why it’s vitally important:
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said, “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” And that was two years ago. Recently, scientific evidence of accelerating global warming and severe weather events such as wildfires, floods, droughts, and arctic melting led him to declare “Things are going to get substantially worse than what we had anticipated.”
300,000 people are already dying annually from climate change disasters, according to a new report by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and arguably the world’s most noted climate scientist, has warned that the world must reduce its level of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million or face the prospect of runaway climate change. We are now at 387 ppm and except for some short term reductions during the recession, emissions of CO2 have been rising faster than ever.
Coal-burning power plants are the top source of greenhouse gases. According to Dr. Hansen, the single most important thing we can do in North Carolina for the climate is to stop Cliffside. Then our job is to quickly begin phasing out all NC coal plants and replace them with energy efficiency – first by passing the NC SAVE$ ENERGY bill – and ramping up renewable energy and co-generation.
Cliffside has repeatedly been proven unnecessary to meet demand and, if completed, it will generate the CO2 equivalent of 1 million cars a year for the next 50 years. Governor Perdue has refused to meet with the Stop Cliffside Coalition in spite of repeated requests that begun last year. She received over $27,000 in campaign contributions from Duke Energy-related sources over the past four years.
Gov. Perdue has the authority and duty to shut down construction of Cliffside because her administration has allowed Duke Energy to skirt federal Clean Air Act controls for brain-damaging mercury and other toxins, and because states now have the duty to control CO2.
Duke Energy has weakened the climate bill being considered in the U.S. Congress which, as written, would do not do enough to slow global warming. Under this bill Duke’s Cliffside plant would be given exemptions to avoid emission reductions.
From December 7th to 18th the UN Climate Change Conference will meet in Copenhagen to draft a successor international agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. The U.S.’s currently weak position could cause a failure to reach a strong, enforceable international agreement – an enormous blow to our prospects for heading off runaway climate change.
Science matters, as does the compassionate call to protect life. We share the values of 350.org and join them by also urging President Obama to take stronger leadership and demand a climate policy based on science – with a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants and climate legislation to take to Copenhagen that reflects his willingness to stand up for what science demands: urgent climate protections that are also vital to restoring our economy.
Links
On the International 350 Day of Climate Action http://www.350.org/dia.php
On stopping the Cliffside coal-fired power plant www.stopcliffside.org