Below is a part of a letter by US environmentalist, author, and educator Bill McKibben, slightly adjusted to a non-American audience.

Under McKibben’s initiative, the Step It Up! team is soon starting a new campaign: 350. Whereas Step It Up! was focused on the US, 350 will be a global campaign to push for effective global climate action. For background in German on the reasons why we need to decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from 385 ppm to 350 ppm, please see my earlier contribution here.

“Meanwhile, the science around climate change has continued to darken. We all watched the Arctic melt last summer, and an ice shelf six times the size of Manhattan crumble in the southern ocean this winter. James Hansen, our foremost climatologist, has just issued the most important scientific assessment of global warming in many years, which you can read here: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf. Basically, it calls for limiting carbon concentrations in the atmosphere to below 350 parts per million. In fact, Hansen says: “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

Therefore, our organizing team is launching a new venture: 350.org. The final website won’t be ready for a few weeks, but we hope very much that you’ll visit the preliminary website that we’ve set up and start figuring out how to help.

Here’s our goal: We want to take this number, 350, and spread it all over the world. We want every human, if they know nothing else about global warming, to know that 350 represents safety. We want to use protest and music and art and video and the’net to make that number inescapable, ubiquitous. Everywhere. Our target is the international community, which is spending the next 18 months negotiating a follow-up to Kyoto. It may be our last real bite at the apple, so those 18 months need to be well-spent.

If it’s going to happen, we’ll need your help spreading 350 to your friends and contacts in every corner of the planet. But what we need most right now are your actions and ideas that take the number 350 and drive it home: in art, in music, in political demonstrations, in any other way you can imagine.”

Please send your ideas to the 350.org team. Please start organizing your friends, family, neighbours, students, colleagues, business partners, politicians, and others for an action around the theme 350. Use your creativity, imagination, your love for music, for art, and nature, your knowledge, and your business spirit to help spread 350 around the globe.

Thank you!

The 350.org team: Bill McKibben, Jon Warnow, Kelly Blynn, May Boeve, Will Bates, Jeremy Osborn, Jamie Henn, Phil Aroneanu

P.S.-Some people have asked us if they can help financially in this new effort. The answer, of course, is yes-we could really use the money to hire organizers all around the globe. Some people, in fact, are committing to sending us $350 from the
‘economic stimulus’ checks the government is mailing out. You can donate online at http://www.350.org/donate but if you’d rather mail a check the address to use is:
350.org
c/o Sustainable Markets Foundation
Attn. Jay R. Halfon
80 Broad St, Suite 1600
New York, NY 10004

But in truth, if you need to choose, we’d much rather have you organize an action!

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