Recently, I handed about 250 letters from climate-concerned Marylanders to Senator Cardin’s staff outside a committee hearing on the clean energy bill. The staff had previously told a group of us that they need to hear more from the climate movement if we want a strong clean energy bill.

If James Hansen and other leading climate scientists are right, this may be our last chance to pass bold climate policy before we reach dangerous tipping points that throw our planet into a devastatingly unstable climate regime. We have a moment of opportunity as Marylanders to make sure our nation has solid ground to stand on going into the climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December. It is critical that we pass bold climate policy here in the U.S. so that other nations will follow. This is going to require the grassroots to press on and not let up, no matter how daunting the task ahead.

In addition to the volunteer work I do with CCAN, I also phone-bank part-time with 1Sky. One day while I was calling 1Sky members asking them to call their representatives during the lead up to the ACES vote in the House, I dialed, unbeknownst to me, a veteran paleo-climatologist. We got to talking and I was sure, after learning of his profession, that he would call his representative about voting for the ACES bill. He said he wouldn’t. He said it would be a waste of his time. He told me that he has been traveling back and forth between his home and Antarctica for the last thirty years; in his own hands, he has held the ice cores that tell the history and future of our planet’s climate. He said he’s been trying to tell the government this story for the past thirty years and they haven’t listened. If they had done something when he began telling the story, we might have prevented the worst effects of climate change. In his opinion, we’re already too late. He told me to put down the phone and go enjoy life because it won’t be the same for much longer.

This was tough to hear from a paleo-climatologist