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Related: About this forumClimate Activists Hit Hard With 'Do the Math' National Tour
http://www.thenation.com/article/171225/climate-activists-hit-hard-do-math-national-tourLos AngelesLess than a week after the presidential election, a fired-up crowd of climate activists cheered Bill McKibben and the Do the Math roadshow at their UCLA stop. Do the Math is on a three-week caravan traveling by biodiesel-powered bus, with a stop in Washington, DC, to challenge the president to take quick action on the environment.
The twenty-one-city tour promises to be a model for progressives committed to aggressively pushing Obama and Congress even before Obamas second term formally begins in January.
One hundred chanting, marching students attended the UCLA event from the Claremont Colleges, fifty miles away, to announce their campaign to seek a campus divestment from the rogue fossil fuel industry. Already this week Seattles mayor instructed his finance team to investigate how to divest city funds, and Maines Unity College announced its plan to divest.
350.org, the sponsoring organization for Do the Math, is calling on colleges, religious institutions and public pension funds to make no new investments in fossil fuels, wind down current investments in five years. Divestment would lead fossil fuel providers to begin to curtail lobbying activities in Washington, DC, and prepare to transition to a future as energy companies. The strategy is partly modeled on the global campaign of divestment from South Africa, although the analogy is incomplete. South Africans were carrying out a liberation war that could not be defeated, with powerful African-American and clergy constituencies in America. Legislators like Maxine Waters and Willie Brown carried divestment bills for seven years before being signed in California, tipping the balance against apartheid. Despite its efforts, 350 is not inclusive of black or Latino constituencies although is message is one of environmental justice. The UCLA event was overwhelmingly white on a campus where a majority of undergraduates are non-white.
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Climate Activists Hit Hard With 'Do the Math' National Tour (Original Post)
xchrom
Nov 2012
OP
xchrom
(108,903 posts)1. do the math video
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)2. This is cool I'm into this stuff.
I am going to see this road show, but really it seems maybe the climate movement needs a leader like MLK or Nelson Mandela.
CRH
(1,553 posts)3. I divested four years ago, and lost my ass on alternatives, ...
But I sleep well knowing I'm not invested making money from our own demise. Social consciousness has a price, but the alternative is not an alternative.