We just sent this email out to everyone who signed our petition against the Heartland Institute. 

Dear friends,

You probably remember this billboard:

That’s the ad that the Heartland Institute put up in Chicago a couple weeks ago, comparing people who believe in climate change to psychopaths like the unabomber. As soon as we saw the billboard, we teamed up with diverse coalition to launch a campaign to fight back against the Heartland Institute’s distortion and poor taste, and petitioned Heartland’s corporate sponsors to drop their support.

Well, we’ve got some good news: the campaign to neutralize the Heartland Institute is working. Over 150,000 people have already signed on, and a number of Heartland’s corporate sponsors have already pulled out, including Pepsi, State Farm, and Eli Lilly. Now, our friends at Forecast the Facts are taking the lead in on phase two of this campaign: turning up the heat on Heartland with a series of creative tactics.

The next big push in the campaign is deploy crowd-funded, bike-powered billboards targeting Heartland's corporate sponsors, like this: 

Why are we using bike-powered billboards? Two reasons:

1) We want to be in the right place at the right time: this week, the Heartland Institute is hosting their annual conference for climate deniers. The media loves this story, so they'll be sure to be there -- and our people-powered billboards will be front and center. These highly visible moving ads that will be towed around downtown Chicago today, Tuesday, and Wednesday -- the same days that Heartland is holding their major climate change denial conference.

2) When we tried to rent the same billboards that the Heartland Institute used, Clear Channel (the media company that owns the billboards) told us that "You can't criticize corporations." It's ridiculous: Clear Channel was perfectly OK with Heartland comaring anyone who believed in climate change to a mass murderer, but they censor any ad criticizing a corporation. Rather than get distracted by this censorship, we found a clean, green way around it. 

Our friends at SumOfUs are also joining in (and are hosting the online donation page) -- we need to raise at least $4,000, so if you can chip in anything at all please click here: www.350.org/en/bikes-vs-heartland

While Forecast the Facts does the important work of further discrediting the Heartland Institute, we're going to be finding new ways to connect the dots between the impacts of climate change and the broader climate crisis, as well as getting our new campaign against fossil fuel subsidies going at full speed (in the last week alone, over 120,000 people have added their names to a new bill to end these polluter handouts -- sign on here if you haven't added your name yet!)

We hope you'll take part in all of these efforts. Stopping climate change is going to take a lot of different approaches -- good thing our movement is getting big enough and diverse enough to work on multiple fronts!

Onwards,

Phil Aroneanu for the 350.org Team

More Links and Info

Billboard Wars, Chapter 2 (or Is It 3?) - NYTimes.com go.350.org/Jj7MyJ

Remaining Heartland Institute corporate sponsors: go.350.org/Jj7Sq2

We asked our organizers in Salvador, Brazil, to tell us more about the story behind one of the most iconic images of Climate Impacts Day. Below you can read the whole story: 

The picture above is part of an action carried out by 350.org volunteers from the city of Salvador, Brazil, during Climate Impacts Day (5/5). It may even seem an exaggerated situation, but it highlights what is going to happen – in fact, already happening – in the lives of people living in coastal areas. It is estimated that over 600 million of people live in areas at risk with sea level rise.  Only in Brazil, they are 42 million – a quarter of the entire population!

During a 350.org workshop, the group came out with the idea of organizing an action that could draw people’s attention to the danger we are facing as extreme weather get more frequent and extreme. However, for one person in special, what happened in that scene was not something new. This person was Raphael Gomes, the volunteers’ coordinator of Salvador group.

Raphael and his family lived in a city in the countryside of Bahia where they struggled during the droughts season year after year. When he moved to the capital, Salvador, his family faced floods. Thus, when he stood there watching the little Naira Cerqueira, 7, in the scene in which the sea water floods her residence, Raphael was reliving his own childhood. “Those were tough times, because for a kid to wake up and witness all of his possessions being damaged by the rain is something that takes time to be overcome – although we never forget it.”, he says.

Fortunately, the life’s difficulties would not dishearten him. On the contrary, they served as an incentive for Raphael to move towards a path of solidarity and much engagement and commitment to causes related to environment protection. “I believe that everything that happened in my life brought me closer to environmental issues. Not in a passive way, but it has created in me a truly need to motivate and mobilize people to comprehend the causes and consequences of climate change. In fact, it is more than that: it is also about showing them what the solutions are and who are the responsible for making them true”, he says.

Today, it has been three years since Raphael is leading the group and, despite the young age, 21, he is sure about what he wants: “We want to build a movement in which people can be empowered to make a difference. The picture we took at the beach is a small sample of this – but we want and need to do much more. We are very pleased with the photo’s repercussion, and we want more and more to engage the media and the society”, he states.

Text and Featured Image: Diêgo Lôbo