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“We the undersigned call upon the United States Senate, House of Representatives, and President Obama to work together to introduce, promote, and pass legislation that puts a price on carbon pollution and returns revenues to the American people, either directly or by reducing taxes.”

From http://act.pricingcarbon.org/petition

There are many things which need to be done if we are to break the hold of the oil, gas and coal industries over government so that we can make a rapid transition to a jobs-creating, just and much-less-polluting renewable energy-based economy. We need:

-local and state-based campaigns fighting specific dirty energy projects: tar sands, fracking and the pipelines, compressors and export terminals the oil and gas industry needs to keep it going, offshore oil/gas drilling in new areas like the Atlantic coast, drilling for oil in the Arctic and mountaintop removal;

-mass demonstrations in the streets, with next Sunday’s huge People’s Climate March in NYC a particular priority right now;

-an escalated campaign of nonviolent direct action. Two of the major actions coming up are the Flood Wall Street action the day after the People’s Climate March and a week of day-after-day actions in DC November 1-7 organized by Beyond Extreme Energy. The urgency of the climate crisis, combined with the Obama Administration’s continued following of an “all of the above” energy plan, as distinct from “renewables first,” makes this a strategic necessity.

-work to pass pro-renewables and efficiency legislation at local, state and federal levels and to fight the efforts by the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry to roll back and weaken already-passed laws, such as mandates that states get a certain percentage of their energy from renewables;

-efforts internationally to bring massive grassroots pressure to expose and put on the defensive the international slackers on climate action-the United States, Canada and Australia being three of the biggest. This is to increase the chances, limited as they appear right now, that a binding and just treaty might be agreed upon at the end of next year at the 2015 United Nations Climate Conference. (Though it is a good thing that the EPA is moving to regulate existing power plants, there are lots of problems with how they’re projecting that it happen, including the explicit support of shifting from coal to methane-leaking natural gas, mainly fracked gas.)

And then there is what might be the most important objective of all: putting a price on carbon in a way that actually increases the incomes of low-income and middle-class families. This is not about to happen soon, given the reality of our big money-dominated political system that so frustrates efforts to enact for-the-people legislation. But there are some developments which could make this happen sooner rather than later.