N.E. to join chorus against global warming
From atop Cadillac Mountain in Maine's Acadia National Park to underwater off Key West, Fla., protesters will gather in hundreds of locations Saturday in a national grass-roots campaign to urge Congress to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050.
More than 270 actions are planned in New England, among almost 1,400 nationwide, as part of the Step It Up campaign, which organizers are billing as the largest day of citizen action on global warming in the nation's history.
In Massachusetts, more than 117 events are planned: Protesters plan to fly colorful kites in Harvard, parade strollers in Brookline, and wear three-cornered hats in Lexington.
The Web-organized movement, conceived by environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, is urging people to gather in iconic places or on sidewalks as a show of public support for action by the government to minimize the predicted effects of global warming, including rising temperatures and sea levels and more catastrophic weather.
The Bush administration has opposed placing limits on power plant and vehicle emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat when they accumulate in the atmosphere, contending that voluntary measures can be effective while having less impact on the economy.
"We feel like we hit a nerve in the country," said Phil Aroneanu, a recent Middlebury College graduate and one of six coordinators at Step It Up's headquarters in Burlington, Vt. "People really care in these communities."
Evidence of the public's interest in Step It Up, organizers said, was that the group's website had so much traffic yesterday that it was responding sluggishly. It crashed last week after the office of Al Gore, the former vice president and star of "An Inconvenient Truth," sent e-mail notifications about the day of events to a half million people. A new server was then installed, Aroneanu said.
In Boston, a rally by One Earth, One Climate will be held on Boston Common from 2 to 4 p.m. and will include a human chain across the park to illustrate where Boston's waterfront may be in the future if Congress fails to curb emissions. US Representative Edward J. Markey of Malden, chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, will speak.
Step It Up organizers have received a boost from recent events: Last week, the US Supreme Court ruled in its first global warming decision that greenhouse gases are pollutants and ordered federal environmental regulators to reexamine their refusal to regulate those emissions from vehicles. On Friday, a United Nations scientific panel on climate change released a report saying that the world is probably already experiencing the effects of manmade global warming.
The group's website -- www.stepitup2007.org -- has details about other events planned for Saturday.
Beth Daley can be reached at bdaley@globe.com. 