Sanders, McKibben preach the gospel of climate change

July 9, 2007

MONTPELIER — With "Live Earth" over and a Statehouse vote on a climate change bill ahead, more than 250 people packed a high school cafeteria Sunday for a town meeting on global warming, with U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and author Bill McKibben telling them the movement to curtail it is gaining ground but far from adequate.

"This has to become a movement as passionate and willing to sacrifice as the civil rights movement a generation ago," said McKibben, the Ripton writer whose 1989 book "The End of Nature" was among the first to sound the climate change alarm.

"It is the largest threat to our civilization that we've ever faced," he said.

Both were fresh in the minds of speakers at the meeting, where Vermont Public Interest Research Group passed out fliers urging people to lobby their lawmakers to vote to override Gov. Jim Douglas' veto of the bill, which would expand an existing program that helps homeowners conserve energy use and pay for it by imposing a new tax on the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

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