I’ve got some big news, and I want to hear what you think about it.
I want you to join other TakeAction Minnesota members in tackling the biggest challenge we have ever taken on — dangerous climate change and the systems of injustice that drive it.
Members like you have talked to us for years about the importance of taking on climate justice and we heard you. The proposal to get to work passed with a unanimous, enthusiastic vote at the recent TakeAction Annual Meeting.
Here’s the very personal reason I hope you will raise your hand to take part in this fight:
Last summer my wife and I welcomed our third child into the world, baby Joseph.
As we were home with him and reminding ourselves of how much caring and fun a baby requires, I started reading This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. This challenging book starts with a thoroughly-documented explanation of the science of chaotic climate change: Carbon emissions from our predatory, capitalist system are right on the edge of triggering a series of catastrophes that scientists say we can neither predict or control. Unless the world moves rapidly to convert to a very different economy that leaves most known fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas) in the ground, we will go from an already-deadly increase dangerous storms, droughts and floods to a planet that doesn’t have the same conditions that supported human life to date.
Climate change is a threat to every person and family—but it doesn’t affect everyone equally. People of color, the poor, the global South, the young, and indigenous people are on the front lines of climate chaos driven by a system they did not create or benefit from.
Intellectually, I’ve always known that climate change is a serious and potentially disastrous problem. But for the first time, I realized that the life of this little baby might be very different – and far more difficult than what I know.
That’s why I’m ready to go all in. Are you with me?
What agitated me the most is that climate change is the result of the endless profiteering of major corporations and the consumption of my generation. Where once I felt fatalistic – “it’s climate change – what can I do?” I now feel fired up: we have to do something, we can do something and we can change the course of our future.
Fortunately, that’s something we’re good at TakeAction Minnesota: taking on corporate power and structural racism, two things at the heart of climate change. And if there is one thing that it will take to change the course of our future – it’s you, me, and TakeAction Minnesota joining a much, much larger movement of people.
I’m excited to hear from you.
