Minnesota Schools Cutting Carbon

Remember Friday, June 26th, 2009. It is the day where we took a huge step to combat global warming. Late Friday afternoon, after intense debate, the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act was passed.

(Otherwise known as the Carbon Cap-and-Trade bill, ACES, or HR 2454.)

The vote was 219-212, incredibly close. 8 Republicans voted yes for the bill and they should be commended as heroes who were brave enough to cross party lines and pass this legislation. Without those 8, it would have been a long time before we had another crack at passing something as huge as this. The Republicans are: Mary Bono Mack (Calif.), Mike Castle, Mark Steven Kirk (Ill.), Leonard Lance (NJ), Frank LoBiondo (NJ), John McHugh (NY), Dave Reichert (Washington), Chris Smith (NJ). Additionally, 44 democrats voted no to the bill.

From Minnesota, Representative Walz, McCollum, Ellison, Obertstar, and Peterson voted yes (all democrats), while Kline, Paulsen, and Bachmann voted no (all Republicans).

There was originally supposed to be 3 hours of debate, but it was extended due to many interruptions and stalling. Representative Tom Price (Republican-Georgia) even asked for a moment of silence for the 2.3 million jobs that were going to be lost because of this bill, just to stall debate more. But the bill will create millions of jobs if passed by the senate, it was just a figure that was misrepresented by the opposition. John Boehner took up an additional hour (Republican-Ohio) as he read out loud an amendment and his objections with it. According to the Democrats, he could have made his point much shorter and went over his originally given 4 minutes, and they argue that he was “filibustering”.

This was a very large first step. The bill states clearly that America will have to reduce it’s carbon emission by 17% by 2020, and 83% by 2050, exactly what scientists say will allow us to avoid the most damaging effects of global warming. But we are so not done.

We all need to work together now to get this bill passed by the senate. Oil, coal, and other big corporate industries didn’t go 150% all out trying to stop the bill, but I guarantee you they will when it goes up in the senate. They will be dishing out billions to stop the bill. We may not have the money, but we have the people. Go ahead, take a couple of days to celebrate. But then we need to get going. We need to get thousands upon thousands of people to call Senator Klobuchar and reassure her this is what Minnesotans want, and hopefully we will have a second senator in a few days, and we can apply the same pressure there.

After that, we need to organize fundraisers, write letters, make calls, have rallies, use anything we can to convince senators in other states to vote yes to this bill. Oil and coal companies will be spending billions on ads in other states to mislead the public and convince them this is a bad bill, so we need to send emails to friends in other states, post on blogs, write letters to national media like Newsweek, USA Today, and the New York Times. Anything to get the word out.

If we can get this bill into law, we’ve become a ton of a lot closer to saving Earth.

So take a few days and celebrate. All the work we’ve done has meant something. But we have a lot of work ahead of us.

Let’s do this thing. :)

-Mark Rugnetta