My Prophecy Is Coming True

In the second chapter of my novel I developed a group of people, I called "alarmists", loosely based on the 19th Century Abolitionists, who take the battle for global warming to the oil industry.  This is coming true. 

Ken Ward, 61, a longtime environmental activist from New England, closed a shut-off valve on Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline near Mount Vernon, Wash. Leonard Higgins, 66, a soft-spoken Unitarian and retired state-government employee from Corvallis, Ore., closed a shut-off valve on the Enbridge Express Pipeline near Coal Banks Landing, Mont. Emily Johnston, 51, an editor and a poet, and Annette Klapstein, 65, a retired attorney for the Puyallup tribe, traveled together from Seattle to Leonard, Minn., and turned the shut-off valves on a pair of pipelines owned by Enbridge. The five men and women said little about themselves, dwelling instead on what they saw as the existential threat of climate change and the inadequacy of available legal remedies. “I’m not courageous or brave,” Johnston told the small crowd. “I’m just more afraid of climate change than I am of prison.”

[....]

The Valve Turners are, for the most part, quiet people. They wear sensible shoes, and several attend church regularly. Most are parents, and one is a grandparent. All are white, all are college-educated and none are truly poor. While all are deeply concerned about climate change, none are immediately threatened by its worst effects: no one’s home has flooded, and no one’s health has been seriously damaged by heat waves or failed harvests or northward-creeping tropical diseases. All say that it is this relative safety — and the relative advantages of age, race, education and wealth — that makes them feel they have a particular responsibility, as climate activists, to push the boundaries of civil disobedience.

It's beginning to feel like back in the 60's as the activism heated up against the war in Vietnam, and the SDS, the Weather Underground, the Jesuit Daniel Berrigan and the Catsonville Nine appeared.  I believe the Valve Turners are just the forerunners of more global warming activism. 

It's more than just activism.  Just as in the 60's people's views are coming around on global warming.  People are changing their minds.

The Rev. Richard Cizik used to believe climate change was a myth. The science had to be rigged, he thought; those who believed in it were just tree-huggers. But in 2002, a friend convinced Mr. Cizik to go to a conference about climate change, and there, he said, “the scales came off my eyes.” 

Nearly 70 percent of Americans now say that climate change is caused mainly by human activity, the highest percentage since Gallup began tracking it two decades ago. The number of Americans who say they worry “a great deal” about climate change has risen by about 20 percentage points.

 [....]

Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said Americans’ opinions about global warming have fluctuated over the years, shifting along with partisan fissures, extreme weather events and messages from political and religious figures. But the overall upward trend in opinion, he said, was strongly tied to the fact that more people are beginning to relate to climate change as a personal issue.

I believe nothing is going to stop it.  The only problem is that it might not be in enough time to prevent much of the dire consequences.