Climate SOS Tour: Blog Post #2

Sep 7th, 2009 in Featured Articles, Newswire, Tour Blog

Climate SOS Tour, Day 2, Montana:  Seattle Team Reports from the Rails

Climate SOS Team Leader Duff Badgley left Seattle via train and on Sunday night posted this blog as his train travelled towards North Dakota where he will meet up with the Massachusetts Team members.  They will meet with North Dakota Senators Dorgan and Conrad’s staffers on Tuesday in Bismarck

Duff writes from the Montana prairie 9/6/09:  No cell reception in Montana today, after I moved from the mountains to the plains. No email, no press contacts, no website tending, no organizing…not unwelcome after the mad dash to get ready for the Tour.

So, I am a train tourist cutting through Montana’s vast ranches and rolling range.

I spy errant, pickup-truck-sized oil wells rhythmically pumping their black stuff from the unsuspecting prairie. I spy distant mountains where Nez Perce Chief Joseph finally surrendered, saying “I will fight no more, forever.” I spy hawks and deer and turkey buzzards, a coyote and elk, and cattle. In the hamlets of Cut Bank and Shelby and the more sizable Havre (pronounced “Haver”), I eavesdrop onto people’s back porches and front yards. Traveling by train is intimate.

At breakfast, I ate with the most personable climate change denier I’ve met.

It took awhile for her to finally come out and say it. “I don’t think we’ve caused this. There are natural cycles, you know.”

I declined to debate. I said, “Regardless of the cause, we’ve got a global problem. ”

I told her about the methane news from MIT.

She said, “I’m an optimist. I don’t go in for that doom-and-gloom stuff.”

I ate my pancakes. She ate her omelette.

Trains make for strange travelmates.

Then I had lunch with a couple from Williston, ND. They knew quite a bit about wind power in ND.

So  now I am primed to take digital photos of a wind farm just south of Minot, ND from my bus to Bismarck on—what day?—Monday. Yeah, that sounds right. If I’m Busing to Bismarck,  it must  be Monday. That’s Labor Day for normal people.

Maybe this will give Bill and Susan and me a good talking point for meeting with Conrad’s staff on Tuesday. Bill has been researching ‘online tariffs’ in ND and elsewhere. With online tariffs,  utility companies must  buy back for the grid power supplied by individuals and anyone generating wind power.

Hopeful? Maybe.

Gives us something to agree on with Conrad‘s staff, rather than focus on coal only. A bunch of carpetbaggers preaching the Evils of Demon Coal might not be well received. We’re going to the Heartland to make temporary, tactical allies to help KILL THE BILL. Without which, we have nothing.

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