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On the road with the Climate Reality Tour: Cancún or bust

Congrats to James Ploeser and Jamie Trowbridge for wrapping up the first week of the Climate Reality Tour, a cross-country bike ride to raise awareness about the climate change crisis. The pair left Washington, D.C. on Oct. 8 and plan to arrive in Cancún, Mexico in time for the United Nations climate negotiations starting Nov. 29 . They spent their first week riding through Appalachian coal country, talking to residents and activists, ending their first week with a talk on the University of Louisville campus in Kentucky.

Ploeser, who is taking leave as an organizer for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, and Trowbridge are documenting the trip on their blog at www.ClimateRealityTour.org and on Facebook. Ploeser explained the motivation behind the ride:

We’re calling our ride the Climate Reality Tour – because the U.S. needs a reality check, not just about global warming, but about the economic model that creates it, one that we’ve helped export over the whole world. We believe that to solve the climate crisis we must undo the root causes of global warming – namely our unfair global economy that pits working people against one another, and against our shared environment.

It was devastating to see already-compromised climate legislation die in the U.S. Congress a few weeks back. As concerned global citizens, we clearly need a new approach. We believe that a holistic campaign for a sustainable global economy could be a winning recipe. It’s going to take a unified, diverse, massive movement to win that sort of change. We hope that by facilitating discussions on root causes and highlighting the connections between our many movements, we’ll help sew, fertilize, and cross-pollinate the seeds of change.