{"id":3512951,"date":"2025-05-19T14:16:21","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T14:16:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3512951"},"modified":"2025-05-19T14:16:21","modified_gmt":"2025-05-19T14:16:21","slug":"and-were-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-05-19\/and-were-off\/","title":{"rendered":"And We\u2019re Off"},"content":{"rendered":"

That slightly out-of-focus picture shows the gritty, common-sense (and also\u00a0transcendent<\/a>) mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, with her 3-month old daughter Mira. A few minutes earlier, from the pulpit of Old North Church in Boston, she\u2019d flipped a switch to light the green lantern you can see glowing in the steeple behind her. At the same time green lights\u2014all sustainably powered\u2014came on top of many of the city\u2019s buildings and bridges, all to mark the official launch of organizing for September\u2019s big\u00a0SunDay<\/a>\u00a0celebrations\/protests\/teach-ins. At the same time, a gorgeous new\u00a0website<\/a>\u00a0went live, so people could start registering actions and getting involved.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to update you regularly on SunDay in these pages as the day approaches, because I think that our job is not just to understand the climate catastrophe\u00a0but to prevent as much of it as we still can.<\/strong>\u00a0And I think that there\u2019s really one main, scalable, timely path to doing that: the rapid deployment of sun, wind, and batteries. It\u2019s happening (in China, the\u00a0use of coal<\/a>\u00a0for electricity generation\u00a0fell five percent in the first quarter<\/strong>\u00a0largely because of surging deployment of rooftop solar) but it\u2019s not happening fast enough\u2014and especially not here, where the Trump administration is doing all it can to slow the energy transition. (Last week\u00a0it set tariffs<\/a>\u00a0on solar panels from\u00a0Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia<\/a>\u00a0at 3,521 percent).<\/p>\n

So we have to make the case for sun and wind and batteries, and we have to do it now\u2014seizing the opportunity to change both local laws and the national zeitgeist. That\u2019s what SunDay is all about: in September it will feature rallies and concerts, e-bike and EV parades, teach-ins about heat pumps in the homes of owners. You name it\u2014indeed, you think it up! This will be a largely DIY day of action, in every corner of the country, and if it works then when we\u2019re done no one will ever talk about \u2018alternative energy\u2019 again. Everyone will know this is the normal, obvious, beautiful way forward.<\/p>\n

SunDay will have not just a technical heart, but an emotional one\u2014lots of art and music, and if you\u2019re into that sort of thing a certain amount of divine inspiration. The latter was on display in Boston, when the mayor\u2019s lantern-lighting was proceeded by a multi-faith service at Old North, still a working Episcopal church, presided over by Boston\u2019s bishop Julia Whitworth and the church\u2019s gracious Vicar Rev. Matthew Cadwell. Thanks to Fletcher Harper, the indefatigable head of GreenFaith, and Revs. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas and Jim Antal, the service featured voices from Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Protestant traditions\u2014and there was Grammy-nominated Antonique Smith, the head of Climate Revival which works to spread the message in black churches, singing her indelible\u00a0version<\/a>\u00a0of Here Comes the Sun.<\/p>\n

Lots of big-time partners are already engaged in this work\u2014I had the pleasure of meeting with all the Sierra Club\u2019s leaders on Friday in Tennessee, and they seemed excited to go to work. (Shoutout to Emily Gorman who is heading up the SunDay work for the club.) My colleagues at Third Act are hard at it, led by Anna Goldstein and Deborah Moore. Solar United Neighbors, which has put panels on countless rooftops, is playing a big role; Rev Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus was on hand for the Boston launch, as was Kelsey Wirth, founder of Mothers Out Front. Local groups, like the Better Future Project in Massachusetts, are playing key roles already. But our hope is that it will, like the sun, blaze up into something larger and more beautiful than we can imagine. That won\u2019t happen automatically\u2014there\u2019s a small but talented central staff hard at work, led by veteran organizers Deirdre Shelly and Jamie Henn. Henn, especially, has been deeply engaged in most of the important and successful battles of the climate era, but always behind the scenes: it was fun to hear him talk at the Boston ceremony, and fun to hope this will be a chance for others to appreciate just how talented he and his colleagues are.<\/p>\n

At any rate: we\u2019re going to play defense against Trump and his insane cuts for all we\u2019re worth. But we\u2019re going to play offense too. As we\u2019ve all known, at least since Nosferatu, vampires can\u2019t flourish in the sunlight. So that\u2019s what we\u2019re going to bring. Help us!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m going to update you regularly on SunDay in these pages as the day approaches, because I think that our job is not just to understand the climate catastrophe\u00a0but to prevent as much of it as we still can.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3512954,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79716,213529,79718],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3512951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","category-energy-featured","category-environment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3512951"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3512953,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512951\/revisions\/3512953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3512954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3512951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3512951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3512951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}