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February 10, 2020
Thanks for visiting our website. If you’re here, you’ve either crossed paths with us at a community climate event or found us through a search for climate action happening in our city. We are an all-volunteer group trying to help move the needle of climate justice in our city of Long Beach.
What does climate justice mean exactly? It means we are concerned about what climate change is doing to our environment, but more importantly, that we care about what it is doing to the people of our community. Of course, we care about the environment, but justice for folks like you or me who will see our lives change due to climate change is what our work is about. Especially if one of us is part of a community more susceptible to the inequitable impacts of climate change, whether it be health-, job-, or home-related. Those who typically contribute the least to climate change are usually the ones hit the hardest.
If you don’t know what the 350 in our name is about, we encourage you to poke around our website and read about our group in the pull down menu tabs. If you don’t have much time, we recommend going straight to the “Videos” section and watching “350 in 90 seconds.” Probably the most scary part of that video is that it was made in 2008. Yes, a lot has changed since then, and not really for the better. Spoiler alert, 350 has to do with what’s called the Keeling Curve and the concentration of parts per million of CO2 in our atmosphere. Our climate is comfortable and livable at 350 PPM, but right now, we are around 412 PPM of CO2. So you could probably do the math about what our future will look like if we do nothing about our emissions (or spend about 6 minutes watching the video “Do the Math: The Science” in our pull down menu). Because if you think the climate is getting weirder now, just wait until we climb above 450 PPM.
So, what now? If you would like to get involved, we invite you to sign up and come to one of our General Monthly meetings on the third Sunday of the month from 3-5PM at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Long Beach. We know our website and social media presence isn’t always updated, but we assure you, we’re an active group. We haven’t missed a meeting since our first one back in December 2015! We think most activists would understand when we say, we are just too busy doing the work to take time to post about it on social media. But we do understand the importance those platforms have in the growth and outreach of our group, so if you’re at all tech savvy and want to help, please let us know! Really. And know that if you’ve come to this site and it’s still here, even though it may not have been updated for a while, we are still very much active! If ever we’re not, trust us, this site won’t be here. So if you’re reading this post, consider joining us in our work toward climate justice.
