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Vermont Governor Shumlin: “There Is Nothing More Important You Can Do on this Planet Than Join this 350 Movement”

“We will not join the others in the denial, in the pretend, in the ‘let business happen as usual,’ because our kids and our grand kids mean more to us than our own greed. And we’re going to get off oil and move forward as quickly as we know how.”

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin got the crowd fired up at 350.org’s “Moving Planet” event at the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier last week. Shumlin spoke about the recent impacts of global climate change on Vermont, how Vermont has taken a leadership role in doing something about it, and how the state can do even more to overcome this challenge in the future:

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Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin at 350.org’s “Moving Planet” event from Ben B on Vimeo.

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Vermont was devastated by the 1-in-100 year deluge from Hurricane Irene:

Masters: Record flooding continues in the Northeast from Irene’s torrential rains. Hardest hit was Vermont, where heavy rains in the weeks prior to Irene’s arrival had left soils in the top 20% for moisture, historically. Irene dumped 5–8 inches of rain over large sections of Vermont, with a peak of 11.23″ at Mendo. The reading from Mendo was the greatest single-day rainfall in Vermont’s history…. beating the 9.92″ that fell at Mt. Mansfield on 9/17/1999 during the passage of Tropical Storm Floyd.

Here’s more of what Shumlin said:

“There is nothing more important that you can do on this planet than to join this 350 movement….”

You can join 350.org. here.

On the Tar Sands Action:

“When our brothers and sisters from this great state, whether its Bill McKibben or all the people next to him, stand in Washington and are willing to sit behind bars for our future, we stand with them.”

On Corporations polluting our politics:

“When Wall Street and the oil companies want to drill and dig and dredge for tar sands and oil all over the world. And build pipelines that ship it to places that refine it and make sure that our kids live an unlivable future on this planet. We’re gonna say NO: Not on our watch. Turn it back. Stop the plan. Go renewable. Re-build with wind and solar and biomass. We can do this right.

Governor Peter Shumlin (D-VT) spoke last month about the danger human-caused climate change poses to his state and others:

I find it extraordinary that so many political leaders won’t actually talk about the relationship between climate change, fossil fuels, our continuing irrational exuberance about burning fossil fuels, in light of these storm patterns that we’ve been experiencing.

We had storms this spring that flooded our downtowns and put us through many of the same exercises that we’re going through right now. We didn’t used to get weather patterns like this in Vermont….

We in the colder states are going to see the results of climate change first… Myself, Premier [Jean] Charest up in Quebec, Governor [Andrew] Cuomo over in New York, we understand that the flooding and the extraordinary weather patterns that we’re seeing are a result of our burnings of fossil fuel. We’ve got to get off fossil fuels as quickly as we know how, to make this planet livable for our children and our grandchildren.

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