Our Volt joins the Moving Planet parade

Viola (the name of our Volt) had fun Saturday, joining the 350.org parade down Market Street in San Francisco with bicyclists, marchers, and other electric cars as part of Moving Planet day.  Our little group of Volts (one other), Leafs, Teslas, and a few others were well received by marchers as well as on-lookers.  We ended up at Civic Center for a rally with several excellent speakers talking to a crowd of around 1,000 people.

• State Senator Mark Leno said we need to bring CO2 down from 392 ppm to 350, "and we've got to do it fast," referring to the droughts in Texas, hurricane in Vermont, and general climate chaos.
• Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club described how the Club and others had defeated 153 coal power plants, including 10 in Texas in one day.  He asked the crowd, "Can we do this?"  (create a clean energy future) and the crowd roared back, "Yes!"
• Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org described the world wide demonstrations going on and declared that it is a lie to characterize environmentalists as white, privileged people.  He said that the movement is composed all peoples, and the ones most affected--e.g. in Ruanda or Bangladesh--are "the people who have done almost nothing to cause the problem"  Click here for more about the worldwide demonstrations.  McKibben also talked about the arrests at the White House earlier this month to get President Obama to block the Keystone XL pipeline and said that "When Obama said, 'Let's be the generation that finally frees us from the tyranny of oil' we took him seriously. . . Now we have to put things on the line" to make him accountable. He ended by saying that we have to "beat back the power of money. . . It's only the power of money that is holding us back now."
• Other speakers included legendary environmentalist Carl Anthony, Mayor of Richmond, CA Gail McLaughlin speaking about their efforts to make Chevron accountable, and Robert Raburn of the BART board and East Bay Bicycle Coalition.

The event was very good, but I do have one quibble--none of the speakers mentioned electric vehicles as an important part of the solution.  I certainly support bicycles, controls on sprawl, public transit, and pedestrian improvements.  But even with all of these positive measures, we still need to convert all vehicles to electricity, generated by renewable energy, if we are to have any hope of cutting CO2 to 350 ppm.  For example, even if we rebuild all U.S. cities to be as dense and transit/bike/pedestrian friendly as San Francisco--which would cost trillions of dollars and take many decades--we would still need to convert all the cars to electric, since 62% of all trips in San Francisco are by auto (source:  San Francisco County Transportation Agency). 

But I don't mean to be negative.  The parade and the rally were very positive steps.  We need to continue these types of events to build awareness of what must be done.

Here are some photos of the event:

Moving Planet Rally at City Hall

Electric Vehicles on parade

State Senator Mark Leno

Carl Anthony and Bill McKibbin (2nd & 3rd from right)

Michael Brune & John Avalos (SF Board of Supervisors) holding 350 sign with Gail McLaughlin speaking